Artificial Assistance

Posted on by J.M. Cullen

Imagine a simple exchange between two writers. I hand a scene to a friend and ask him to read it with one question in mind.
“Tell me if I stay consistent in two areas,” I say. “First, tense. Do I remain in past tense throughout the scene? Second, perspective. Do I remain inside the same character’s point of view?”

He reads it carefully.

What I am asking him to check has specific grammatical names. The first is tense consistency. The second is point-of-view discipline, sometimes described as avoiding head-hopping. These are not matters of taste or interpretation. They are structural features of narrative grammar. A sentence either shifts from past to present or it does not. A paragraph either moves from one character’s internal thoughts to another’s or it does not

So my friend reads the scene with those two constraints in mind. He is simply watching for violations of two narrative rules.

Now imagine repeating this process with several friends.

One reads only for pacing. Another watches for character consistency. A third listens for tonal continuity. Someone else follows the shape of the mystery—whether the reader receives information at the right moment. None of them write the story. In fact, while each contributes insight, no one claims authorship.

Consider taking the experiment one step further. Instead of merely observing the rules they were assigned to watch, my friends begin contributing within those domains. The pacing reader proposes a sharper transition between two moments of action. The character reader suggests a line that better reflects a personality already established. The tone reader adjusts a phrase that breaks the atmosphere of the scene. Each suggestion arises from a narrow lens of attention, and the author remains free to accept or ignore it, but the scene gradually improves through the accumulation of these small, specialized contributions.

And still, no questions were raised about human creativity.

Before chatbots appeared, my research routine consisted of web searches and patient reading. I sifted through articles and technical papers on biological systems, electromagnetic devices, weapons, and the machinery of war, looking for the kinds of concrete details that lend weight and credibility to fiction. I spent just as much time studying the craft itself—essays on narrative technique, discussions of tropes, analyses of pacing, tone, and point of view. And eventually the search narrowed even further, into the quiet territory of market awareness: what had been written lately, which ideas had already saturated the field, what resonated with readers, and what had quietly failed to find an audience.

Although the intellectual roots of artificial intelligence stretch back to the 1940s, the same period that produced early computing machines and wartime codebreaking systems, no one begrudged a writer for doing this sort of research.

As the World Wide Web developed and machines grew ever more complex, few in creative circles objected to the artificial tools writers used to gather information. For over half a century, artificial intelligence existed mostly in research labs and niche creative experiments. Some artists even explored AI creatively as early as the 1970s, but it remained obscure and experimental. [2602.19754] Deep Else: A Critical Framework for AI Art

Suddenly, everyone is complaining about the artificial. What, exactly, drives concern about artificial intelligence?

No one objects to the use of spell checkers, grammar software, or tools that outline existing text. Because the author, the human, drives the process. Where is the boundary between creativity and assistance?

Spell checkers and research tools respond to a writer’s decisions; they help refine choices already made. They do not decide what a character wants, why a moment matters, or what truth a story should uncover. Generative systems can suggest such possibilities, offering lines of dialogue or alternative directions for a scene. Generative systems can suggest answers to those questions, but suggestion is not commitment. The decision occurs when the author selects one path and carries it forward into the manuscript.

Even if statistical analysis of word choice and pattern might indicate artificial generation, the determining act remains human: what the author chose to include. That act of selection is what establishes authorship—and ultimately what determines copyrightability.

“Artificial Assistance” is, therefore, irrelevant.

An AI Experiment

Posted on by J.M. Cullen

I ran an experiment. The results were far more interesting than I could have imagined. I’ve been working with Artificial Intelligence for a number of years, among the early adopters of ChatGPT, and then others as they came around. I used them for all sorts of things, from dinner recipes to inquiries about quantum consciousness. I asked questions, exquisite and complex prompts to work out pieces of .Net code, including JavaScript, Python, design patterns, architecture theory, and even user experience.

At times, the results were intricate in ways I didn’t anticipate; other times, it required a great deal of refactoring to make it compile.

As an author, I used it for research, character development, and plot tactics. I wondered about reader expectations, what techniques were working in the markets, what was overdone, and conversely, underappreciated.

I look at it this way: Artificial Intelligence was present in my workspace. It did not hold the pen.

In the decade since I began authoring in earnest, I’ve written and self-published eight novels. A short story found its way into an anthology published by the Utah chapter of the Horror Writers Association. I created a recording studio in a corner of a spare bedroom where I practiced the art of voice acting. Hundreds of hours were spent reading manuscripts, editing the wave forms, and publishing the audio versions of a number of novels.

In other words, I was a one-person creation studio. I penned the words, I gave them a voice, I edited, perfected, and produced creative artifacts. I marketed them. I stood in the wind, rain, cold, and heat to peddle these wares to fiction and fantasy enthusiasts with all the polish of a professional.

I am aware of how the advancements of technology can affect every aspect of the creative industries. Human innovations exceed earlier predictions in unprecedented ways, and I continue to marvel at the ingenuity, the level of sophistication, and the incredible speed at which progress advances.

Mind-boggling as it appears, platforms can receive a prompt, research the topic, plan, compose, and produce an audio-visual report of their findings. All that labor, hundreds of hours of human labor, reduced to a handful of minutes of automation. I am deeply concerned for the financial future of fellow creatives.

For that matter, there isn’t an occupation that won’t be affected by artificial advancements. These technologies are here, and whether or not we’re prepared for the future, they will not disappear simply because we fear for the future.

So, I conducted an experiment. I downloaded an open-source Text-to-Speech AI model that I discovered, ironically enough, through one of my chat investigations.

It required a small amount of programming to take an entire full-length novel, break it down into chapters, paragraphs, and sentence fragments short enough to work with the model. Then, in a loop, the program I built started at the beginning, fed a bit of text along with a six-second sample of my voice, compiled a data stream, and produced every chapter of my novel as an audio wave file.

Because I am a nerd, I kept track of everything I did to produce an audiobook from the completion of the print version to the distribution platform. All told, roughly speaking, for every minute of listening to one of my stories, I spent just over twenty minutes recording, editing, and producing the audio.

What would take me months of labor, fitting in recording sessions between work, family, and other obligations, I accomplished with a couple of hours spent writing software. In a single night, while I slept, my voice was used by Artificial Intelligence to produce an entire full-length audiobook.

In all honesty, I am unlikely to distribute these files. While undecided, I find myself leaning in this direction because it feels like I’ve lost the artistry, that human-only factor that makes listening an experience. What AI gave me was narration.

Don’t get me wrong, the model included intakes of air at appropriate spots. It inserted nuanced pitch rises and falls that made the narration less artificial. It breathed in all the right places. It felt nothing. The output lacked what great narrators give to their performances. It’s why, when I produce an audiobook, I include the phrase, “written and performed by” along with the title.

In the end, my experiment produced fascinating results. It taught me a ton about what Artificial Intelligence can do. Perhaps, somewhere down the road, I’ll have to repeat and reanalyze. But for now, I think I’ll stick to the performances, as daunting as that sounds. Because narration might fill the silence, but performance earns it.

The Voice of AI

Posted on by J.M. Cullen

Let me be perfectly clear for a moment. As an author, I need your stories. I need you to show me your world, your perspectives, your likes and dislikes. Through your characters, their hopes and dreams bleed into mine. They show me courage beyond what I can muster. I grieve when they are beaten down, my soul stirs when they rise, and I believe in humankind’s goodness when they triumph over evil.

What makes this possible?

Voice.

We’ve heard the term, but do we know what it is? Can it be learned?

I’ve told people countless times that, as authors, we must read as much as we write or we’re doing it all wrong. But why must we read? What do we hope to gain from it? Put differently, if “Voice” cannot be learned, why study masterful writing at all?

Deep reading activates parts of the brain that short-form content never reaches. It builds the capacity for sustained attention, complex inference, and perspective-taking. These are not just reading skills. They are the cognitive foundations of empathy.
Short-form platforms are engineered to exploit dopamine pathways. The swipe, the scroll, and the notification are not passive features. They are deliberate mechanisms designed to disable the reflective mind and activate the compulsive one. We are not distracted; we are being neurologically reshaped away from the capacity for deep, sustained, reflective thinking.

When you sit down to compose, you do not start with a blank page. Before the first sentence is written, a lifetime of experience has been silently organizing itself. What you learn today accumulates into what you write tomorrow.

We are connected, not by stories, but through shared experience expressed through stories. With every word you write, the specific texture of grief you have known enters into my experience. I am enlightened by the particular quality of light in the places you grew up, the arguments you couldn’t win, and the ones you couldn’t forget.

The books you read, loved, and hated, layer by layer, like sediment, created the writer only you can be.

Voice is what happens when that accumulated self meets language under the pressure of meaning something. When you write from that deep place, from that most personal, intimate place in your soul, you are not just expressing yourself. You are contributing to something greater.

Humanity.

Voice requires interiority. It requires a mind and heart capable of going inward, sitting with complexity, tolerating ambiguity long enough to find the precise true thing to say. Fragmented digital consumption actively destroys that capacity. A writer who doesn’t read deeply is not just missing technique. They are losing the neurological equipment that voice runs on.

To write with genuine voice is to be seen, to face unresolved grief, moral ambiguity, and the dusty skeletons hiding in dark recesses of our mind in unguarded moments.

Writers learn early that the safest prose is the most defensible prose. We read the critiques and take them personally. Review stars, or the lack thereof, demoralize us into writing the stories we think will be received well. In short, we homogenize our own writing. Who needs AI when we do that to ourselves in the first place?

But here is the truth the scoffers cannot touch: the reader always knows. They may not be able to articulate it, but they feel the difference between prose that was written from a safe distance and prose that cost the writer something. That cost is what creates the connection. That vulnerability is the mechanism of the shared experience we’ve been describing all along.

Voice is not just what happens when your accumulated self meets language under pressure. It’s what happens when you stop protecting yourself from that pressure.

Artificial intelligence cannot participate in the cosmic exchange. Not because it lacks technique, but because it has no stake in it. It produces language without sending anything into the shared consciousness, because it has nothing to send. AI can lend its strengths. It can help us identify technique, the mechanics of effective prose—how a sentence builds tension, where a paragraph breaks, how diction creates intimacy or distance. It can show us the bones of what masterful writers do. But understanding the bones of a living thing is not the same as being alive.

I say, learn to use AI. Use what it does well. But when you sit down to write, go deeper than technique. Go to that place where your grief lives, where the light of your particular life falls across the page. Write from there. The world is waiting for what only you can contribute.