As many of you may know, fiction is a form of writing where the writer creates the plot and characters. Some types of fiction writing include novels and short stories with content made up entirely of the writer's ideas. Fiction writing is a more lenient method than other types of writing like nonfiction writing because there is no pressure to be 100% accurate within the story you create. ChatGPT can then become a method of creating fictional stories since there is no demand to be accurate like you would need to be if you were writing something more informative. For example, you probably wouldn't want ChatGPT to entirely write your essay on "The effects of air pollution in the U.S. within the last 50 years" because there would be a lot more room for inconsistency and error. On the other hand, you could utilize ChatGPT to write a short story about a king ruling over a kingdom. With a topic like this, it would be a lot easier to formulate your short story entirely from ChatGPT.
The article "How to use ChatGPT to write a book: Pros & Cons of using AI to create" by Ashley Simpson discusses how ChatGPT has the ability to write a fictional book for you. Given a prompt, it can create your characters, character features, settings, etc. For example, you can have the AI give you a story about a princess who is captured in battle and has to fight for her freedom. ChatGPT would be able to describe the princess, her captor, where she lives, the world name, and creatures. and so on. It can also create chapter summaries for your story and outline each chapter. It would also be able to write in a style of a specific author such as Stephen King. Overall, it has a lot of capabilities and would be able to provide a fictional book for you which can be a conflicting issue.
In her article, Ashley Simpson also mentions how there has been an influx of authors using ChatGPT to create fictional books to publish. She mentions Brett Schickler and how he used ChatGPT "to write a children's book on the benefits of saving and investing. In a matter of hours, he had an entire 30-page book that he could upload to the KDP platform. To date, Brett Schickler has earned hundreds of dollars from this one title" (2023). This goes to show how ChatGPT can be abused for one's own benefit. It's important that students in an academic setting do not just plagiarize to benefit themselves because this takes away valuable writing and thinking skills necessary for succeeding in college.
This utilization of ChatGPT to create fiction writing then becomes a potential issue within an academic setting. It takes away a student's ability to create their own fictional stories since they can easily have this AI just do it for them. It would be difficult to determine the plagiarism since in fiction writing it's assumed the writing comes from the writer themselves and therefore it can be easily assumed there is no plagiarism taking place. On the other hand, using ChatGPT to create fiction writing does not necessarily have to be a bad thing if used honestly and not for the sake of simply plagiarizing.
Using ChatGPT as a source of inspiration can be a helpful tool if not taken advantage of. It's not acceptable to have it write everything for you, but you can have it write something for you to reference as you write your own work. Maybe you're not the greatest at coming up with titles for your stories. You could have ChatGPT create titles for you and you can then get ideas for what you would want to title your story now that you have a general idea of how it should look like. Using this as a way to research and find inspiration can be very beneficial keeping in mind that you are not attempting to plagiarize the content.
ChatGPT can give you some ideas to get you started on coming up with your own content. For example, let's imagine you want to create an image of your story's princess character but you don't know what a princess typically wears. You could ask ChatGPT to give you a description of a typical princess to give you a reference and give you a general direction of the image you could now create. The point is not to copy and paste the AI's information but rather use it as a method of inspiration to spark your own ideas! Overall, ChatGPT has a lot of potential to do both good and bad. It wields immense power in the realm of fiction writing and it's important as students to not allow ourselves to depend on ChatGPT and depend on ourselves and our skills instead!
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