By Hans Park
Published: 05/02/2024
As an MFA student in fiction, I find AI to be a valuable tool in ways that continue to surprise me to this day. AI systems can help writers like me find new ideas, perspectives, or inspiration for their texts by analyzing and summarizing.
ChatGPT is a program that uses artificial intelligence to have conversations with people. It works by looking at the words that you type and trying to figure out what you might be asking or talking about. It fosters creativity in my writing process by offering new stimuli whenever I feel stuck and in dire need of bouncing some narrative ideas off someone. The suggestions help me to explore different and unforeseen avenues in the narrative so that my characters might end up in more dramatic or convincing situations than I would think of otherwise. Also, the feedback I received in different stages of my story was very helpful because it served as a new set of eyes detecting things I would not have noticed otherwise.
ChatGPT is the AI system I use most often. It is a large language model that can respond to different inputs in language. ChatGPT can help writers like me get an overview of a topic or provide new stimuli by filtering and sorting whatever information and narrative we put in. This software is now essential to my writing process, as I can experiment with different versions of my characters’ actions and words.
AI systems can also help writers to formulate their texts by suggesting suitable words, sentences, or paragraphs. For example, Wordcraft is a text editor that allows users to write stories with a large language model. While I have not personally used this software program myself, I have heard it can be useful for many writers to formulate and structure their sentences in ways that are refreshing, original and inventive.
AI systems can also help writers to improve their texts by providing feedback on the quality, relevance, or emotional impact of their stories and essays. For example, Microsoft Bing is an online software that not only helps users to check and optimize their texts for spelling, grammar, and style. This is the software I would often recommend to my own students to help them improve the grammatical and stylistic errors I notice as their instructor.
In my own experience as an adjunct instructor at a community college, Grammarly can help many undergraduate writers to improve their texts by detecting and correcting errors, suggesting ways to make their expression and their arguments clearer, more concise, or more persuasive. There are many colleges and universities that offer Grammarly as a free software program so that many undergraduate students can take advantage of it without paying for it on their own. I found it to be an effective tool for them and highly I encourage instructors to use some of the class time to introduce it.