Written by: Sky Cummings
Imagine you’re the CEO of a small company and you just hired a new assistant. They’re certainly hard working – they get you coffee, organize your files, and draft emails all without being asked. However, they get your Starbucks order wrong, insisting you said you wanted sugar instead of milk; the files are mislabeled and have takeout menus dispersed between them; and the emails were mixed up and sent to the wrong addresses. Nevertheless, you give this assistant some time and training, and before you know it, you’re both making progress. This is what it felt like to cowrite a personal essay with AI.
I’m currently taking a course here in Storrs, Writing With and About AI, in which my professor asked the class to use AI to assist in writing an essay on a topic we’ve previously struggled to address. Vauhini Vara’s (2021) essay, “Ghosts,” served as our model. Each student submitted three rounds of iterative drafts, culminating in a final essay composed of at least 80% of our own writing. I chose the AI tool Gemini as my writing partner. For each round of prompts, I provided a few sentences and asked it to finish the story. Together we wrote about my struggle to write creatively since starting university.
I was apprehensive, at first, to begin this process. I found using platforms like ChatGPT sometimes created more work, as I needed to constantly fact-check and proofread. However, writing this story was downright frustrating. I only submitted three drafts for round one, but I wrote close to six because Gemini kept repeating the same pattern no matter how much I tried to change the prompt. It relentlessly sought out a bad guy and fixated on creating a narrative – a reason – instead of sitting with the ideas I attempted to convey. I felt like I was working with an angsty teenager (always trying to find someone or something else to blame). In these first few drafts, Gemini blundered and stumbled through my feelings about the subject worse than I did. However, looking back, this was probably my own fault. I asked it to help me finish a story, and so a story it created.
For the second and third round of drafts, I took my professor’s advice and switched from “story” to “essay” in my prompting; I immediately noticed an improvement. These drafts still brought airs of resentment that were inaccurate to my experience, but Gemini certainly spent more time trying to understand the emotion behind the prompt. It was around this time that the “Ghostwriter” podcast from This American Life came to mind. In it, Tobin Low and Vauhini Vara discuss how the more GPT-3 got Vara’s story wrong, the more she knew how to do it right. With each outlandish ending (in the very first draft, I received a PhD in astrophysics two years ago) or harsh villainization (apparently my mother is stifling my creativity!), I knew better how to goad the AI into providing an output I could work with. It was largely a trial-and-error process. As Gemini and I trialed and errored together, I got closer to figuring out what I wanted to say.
I must admit, though, that even some of the most erroneous drafts held some hidden gems – pockets of scary truths within the AI’s writing. I struggled to put these feelings into words before starting this project, and I didn’t (and don’t) think I could do better, so I decided to include them in the final draft of the essay. Credit where credit is due.
Going prompt by prompt, output by output, and iteration by iteration re-established my understanding that drafting is a crucial part of the writing process. This approach forced me to pay attention to how I influence AI and how it influences my work. I got to see in real time how making rhetorical or stylistic choices makes monumental differences in the final product. A huge part of writing is considering how certain audiences will interpret the text, and in this case, Gemini acted like an audience of my own with which I could practice.
With this concept in mind, I struggle to see how this kind of process could be circumventive or inauthentic. I’ve always been told that to be a good writer, I have to be a good reader; the more I read, the more I’ll develop my own style. So, how different are the procedures of this assignment from simply picking up Suzanne Collins or Stephen King and finding inspiration in their rhetorical choices? How different are they from having a mentor or editor and using their feedback to edit drafts? In the case of this project, does AI not also act in those roles?
Despite my initial misgivings, I cannot argue against the fact that the project turned out better than it might have without AI because of one simple truth: the essay exists. For years now I have not been able to put how I feel about this topic into words. Not only was I able to do that, but using Gemini helped me even work through the problem itself! The mere idea that this piece of writing came to life – let alone the fact that the majority of it is in my own words – means something must have worked.