Are you a writer who feels like you’re missing out on the current breakthroughs in Artificial Intelligence (AI)? Maybe you don’t have access to GPT-3, or you’re not computer-savvy, or you don’t have access to good AI training sets.
The truth is, AI is still in its infancy and you’re really not missing out on much (yet). In fact, you can create your own “artificial intelligence” for free using readily available information and processing power. You don’t even need to be tech-savvy to Do-It-Yourself (DIY) your own AI.
What exactly is AI?
AI has two main components: the rules, and the data.
The rules are the code that makes the AI run. It’s the raw processing power. It’s the artificial brain itself. AI rules use various mathematical, statistical, and logical techniques to make informed decisions based on the data, but at the heart of it all is the neural network. The neural network is the part of AI that attempts to imitate the workings of the human brain.
The data are the information that the AI uses to make its informed decisions. For AI writing tools like GPT-3, the data consists of billions of bits of writing drawn from public web pages and books.
When you give AI a problem—or in the use-case for writers, when you give it a piece of writing to work with—it runs its data through its rules in the context of the writing sample with which you seed it, then it produces some writing that fits in with the data and rules. There is an element of probability and randomness to it all, in order to simulate some level of creativity.
Creating Your Own AI
Why program an artificial brain from scratch when you have a perfectly functional natural one in your head? To create our own AI, we need to set a few rules and we’ll apply them manually (with pen and paper). The rules we use depend largely on the types of random data we use. We will get our data from the internet or other sources of randomized data.
Think of it like Mad Libs, you know, that game where you have a template of words and you have to fill in the blanks. That’s sort of like what AI does. The template is the rules, and the data fills in the blanks. We’re going to do something similar.
Here area few ways we can create and use our “DIY AI”:
Story prompts based on Wikipedia articles. Whenever you need an idea for where to take a story, go to Wikipedia, select your language, and click “Random article” on the sidebar. You can also press ALT+SHIFT+X to load a random article. Keep clicking until an article sparks an idea. You can also decide if you need a person, place, or thing, and click “Random article” until you get the random person, place, or thing you need.
Use tarot cards to decide what happens to your main character. There are many websites with free online tarot decks you can use. Tarot cards are vague, but can nudge your imagination just enough so that you get fresh ideas for what to write.
Generate a random plot twist to work into your story. There are also many random plot twist generators out there. Generate a random plot twist and use it as a cliffhanger at the end of each chapter.
Find a list of something and randomly choose one to add to your story. This is the both the most powerful idea here, and also the hardest one to use. Find something that is numbered. Anything. It could be pages in The Bible, a numbered list of possible plot devices, or chapters from a book on writing. Use RANDOM.ORG to randomly choose a topic to inspire the next few paragraphs of your writing.
Conclusion
You don’t need AI to benefit from AI concepts. All you need is a set of rules and a collection of data that you can randomly draw upon.
- Rules: Have a writing structure or methodology. Some people like using story beats. Others just need to gather a few ingredients, like setting, characters, and genre, before they start writing (as they say in cooking, mise en place). Still others can just take an idea as a prompt and have their imaginations run with it.
- Data: Have a large amount of information to randomly draw upon. The internet and books are natural places you can draw information from, but there are others (like the tarot cards suggested above). Have a place where you can randomly draw inspiration whenever you hit writer’s block or need to fill in some blanks from your rules.
Remember: Your brain will always be smarter than GPT-3 or any artificial brain a large corporation can come up with. You may not have access to as much data as an AI, but your rules will always be better. In essence, use your natural intelligence where you can, and fill in the blanks with random bits of inspiration.
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