I recently saw a meme on a social media platform that has stuck with me. It said, “AI won’t replace humans, it will replace humans who don’t use AI.” Whether this is true or not, only time will tell. But I’m reminded of all new technology from early phones to computers. There’s an innate fear and resistance to such change, at least for many of us. But no way would I want any of those other tools removed from my life! So I thought, what the heck, let me open my opinions–just a bit.

As an author uninterested in generative AI, including brainstorming

As an author uninterested in generative AI, including brainstorming, I am a user of spell-check and the editing tools such as ProWritingAid. My early use of the later taught me discretion, as its easy to let the suggestions scrub your writing clean of originality and “voice”. I did a little searching and decided to pay a one time fee of 45.00 for a full analysis by the AuthorsAI tool called Marlowe.

What does Marlowe promise? This is from the AuthorAI website: “Marlowe can critique character traits, plot arcs, narrative arcs, pacing, punctuation, sentence structure, reading level and more. And it can show you how they compare with bestselling novels in the same genre.” That sounds like exactly the kind of thing that would be super helpful! I didn’t expect it to replace a human editor, but to give me a good idea of where the structure and pacing of my story might need help.

I decided to use a manuscript draft that happened to be midway through changing one characters POV from first to third. After selecting genre, POV, and such other metadata (is that the right word? Just hoping to sound with-it), I ran the report. In less than ten minutes I got this cool PDF with some awesome graphs and suggestions as to what they mean. But… but, when I started reading the examples from in my manuscript, they didn’t make sense. I can’t share the report with you (it’s something you agree to when you sign up) but here’s an example of what didn’t work for me.

Narrative beats: This section assesses positive and negative moments that in page-turning novels are regularly space across the book–drawing readers forward. According to Marlowe, my novel (above image) looks great, BUT the examples that Marlowe pointed to inside my manuscript appeared to be out of context from the emotions I know exist around them. It seemed as if the AI zeroed in on some key words rather than context.

Don’t let AI comb through your work, rewrite it, and scrub it clean of voice and originality.

Other sections made sense, but were less than helpful, like a breakdown of explicit language, possible cliche’s, and lots of the info you can already get with something like ProWritingAid (such as repeated phrases, possible misspellings, and use of adjectives). The Comps section didn’t ring true for me either, although I would love it if were, as the closest book to mine in subject matter (according to Marlowe) was American Gods by Neil Gaiman.

All that being said, I think this type of AI is going to grow quickly and become quite useful, but with all of these tools, it is up to YOU to make sure you agree with the feedback, or, if you’re unsure, get a trained human’s opinion. Don’t let some AI tool comb through your work, rewrite it, and scrub it clean of voice and originality.

And, as Baby Colin Robinson from What We Do in the Shadows says, “Yeah, but guess what?” Marlowe did not point out my messed up POV’s in the manuscript. Guess I’ll need to take responsibility for that too.

TopiImage by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay. Thanks!