The Ultimate Beginner's Guide to Writing with AI in 2024

welcome to this ultimate beginner's guide to using AI for writing your fiction non-fiction or whatever it is you need to write my name is Jason Hamilton I'm the nerdy novelist and I have been writing books for years now and for the last three years or so I've been working at kindlepreneur one of the largest websites about writing books and self-publishing them so I have a good idea of the publishing process and then ever since AI came into the story I've been diving headlong into that and now as a this recording this is the largest Channel about AI specifically for fiction authors so in this video I'm going to take you from start to finish my process on how to write a book with AI but we're going to go kind of high level here if you are new to this channel this is the perfect place to start if you are not new then I would still watch this video anyway because we're going to be going into a really good overview of just everything you need to know and I know a lot of people kind of forget about a few things there's a lot that we need to cover so we'll be doing that in this video first let's start off by answering what is ai ai is in this context what we call generative AI generative is the key word there where it means that we are looking at a tool that is essentially Auto predicting what the next word should be based on the prompt that you give it with AI you give it a prompt it gives you an output and the process of getting to the results you want and getting the best results you want is the process that we call Prompt Engineering in the world of book writing our main goal is to be able to write a book using AI whether that means writing the entire book with AI is another matter entirely and at the end of this video I will actually be answering the question should you even write an entire book with AI so stick around to the end for that but the reality is that people use AI in very different ways because the writing process is a very long process right it is a multi-step process it isn't just like you sit down you write words and you're done it's a process that involves brainstorming ideas assembling all of your pieces together creating outlines creating characters assembling sources if you're writing non-fiction doing World building crafting your setting all of these things are all different pieces of the process and in my experience I found that most of the authors who are using AI usually zero in on a few of these but not all of these processes for instance I really enjoy outlining and so I do most of the outlining myself but I don't really like the actual text writing part of the first draft so getting that first draft down is always difficult for me so I turn to AI to help me with that first draft and then I flesh it out from there for other people they love writing the first draft and so they do that all themselves but coming up with the ideas figuring out what happens is is a little bit more work and so basically I just recommend that people find an area where AI can help you because it can help in every stage of the process and let it do that for you or help you do that step and then you take it from there on the steps that you really appreciate in fact one of the most common misconceptions about AI is that all it is is you push a Buton and it does all the work for you and that's it when that is not the case I like to think of AI as a productivity partner it is an assistant to help you do things a little bit faster but contrary to popular belief it doesn't take the humanity out of things you are still the human author you still do everything it's just able to lend a hand in certain areas in much the same way as an assistant might do leaving you with more time to focus on the more important bits usually the more creative and imaginative bits of the writing process but all this does beg the question I get this question a lot from a lot of different people and it was a question that I had early on am I going to get in trouble for using AI is Amazon going to ban me is Google going to unlist my article is you know all kinds of things am I going to get booted from this platform or another and the answer is no all of these major tech companies whether it's Google or Amazon all of them are investing heavily in AI because they know that that is the feature and while some of these platforms are requiring you to disclose if you use AI in certain ways that is usually only for the cases where the entire book or large portions of the book were generated with AI even with a hefty amount of revision they will often require you to disclose this Amazon currently requires you to disclose this but it does nothing they they don't label it at least for now there may be some laws in the future that require them to label it and so if that happens well that's the government's fault for enacting those laws but Amazon is taking the steps to have that information so they could display that information if possible but so far they are not labeling any AI generated books they are not penalizing authors for uploading any a AI generated books Amazon is very Pro Ai and so you do not have to worry about anything happening there what you do need to worry about however is the quality of your book you are still responsible for the quality of your book if you just spit out books left and right using AI but don't do the work of actually validating everything to make sure it's good to make sure it lines up with your vision and that you even have a vision you need a vision all of that will lead to a poor quality book and you don't want that the more poor quality books that you have the bigger the the chance that Amazon might actually take preventative action against you but that is due to lowquality content not due to the fact that you used AI to create it again this is a productivity tool all right so now that we got that out of the way I want to talk a little bit about the difference between models and AI writing tools because they are not the same thing a model is a specific large language model or llm which is usually trained on a massive amount of data usually written data in this case and they are usually created by these big companies like open AI or anthropic or Google and these are the Heavy Hitters the these are what most people are talking about when they talk about Ai and AI writing tool however is different an AI writing tool utilizes a model but formats it in a specific way that might be specific to a certain audience for instance later in this video I will will give you a couple of different AI writing tools that I have used that are specific to fiction authors but those tools are not new models those tools are using the existing models out there in order to generate words and there are different pros and cons of each different model the most famous models are the ones that you will find in chat gbt for instance let's look here when you are in Chachi BT you will notice that there are actually two different models that you can look at at if you come up here to this little drop down you have the option for GPT 3. 5 and GPT 4 these are two separate models the GPT 4 is more advanced than the GPT 3. 5 but the 3.

5 does have some advantages like it's quite faster and can do some tasks a little bit better if we're being honest such as summarization but most of the time you would want to use the more advanced one like GPT 4 however there are other models as well for instance if we look at Claud Pro here over here on the side you can see there are three different models that you can select within the clad Pro platform the most recent is Claude 2. 1 but there's also clae 2. 0 and Claude instant which was before 2.

0 right now as of this recording Claude 2. 0 is the best one for creative writing because it is very Creative Cloud 2. 1 while it is more advanced in some areas the methods that they took to become more advanced in those areas and to be more accurate and so on has actually made it worse as a creative writing partner so Claude 2.

0 is the best one to go with here however there are a lot more models what we have here is a tool called open router. a this is one example of just a third-party tool that allow allows you to access pretty much all of the important models out there so we can select this to select our model and then here is a giant list of all of the different models that they have available for instance here are all the cloud models and yes there are more than three Cloud models here because there are actually more than three in Claud Pro they only showed three because those were the three prominent ones but here we have version 2. 1 version 2.

0 clot instant and then a few even older models there Additionally you can see all of the different open AI models so here you have ious versions of GPT 3. 5 because there are minor improvements to these and differences we have various versions of GPT 4 same reason but you'll notice there are others here as well for instance we have mistol 7B instruct we have hugging face zeper 7B open chat mytho uh Cinema dolphin we mistol we've got all kinds of different things here and most of these extra models besid besides the ones created by open Ai and anthropic these are most of them open-source models and while these models tend to not be as advanced as the ones coming out of open AI or anthropic they do have two major advantages and one of those is that it is much cheaper to run because when you're using a service like open router like we are using here it costs a certain amount of money for every word that you generate and for the open source models that number is very very small compared to the larger beefier models the other major advantage that they give you is that they are uncensored which means you can write not safe for work content you can write excessive violence or you know whatever it is you need to write and it won't run into any problems with you a lot of people use Claude for their creative writing because the natural sounding language is really really good but there's some issues with Claude and probably the biggest one that most people run into is the fact that it it doesn't like to write even remotely not safe for workk Content I know a lot of people who write cozy Mysteries and even the Cozy mystery if there's a mention of of like a murder or anything like that for the mystery to solve it it won't like to write stuff like that and so having the ability to switch seamlessly between these different models is a useful skill to have so which of these models should you use well the reality is you should use whichever model is necessary for the task that you are trying to do as I mentioned Claude 2. 0 seems to be right now the best model for natural sounding language but the gp4 models tend to be more accurate even though the natural sounding language is not so good in the GPT 4 models and then of course if you want to write not safe for work content or anything like that you should go to the open source models and additionally you can work with with the open source models if you want to save a lot of money depending on how you are using these models but what about some AI writing tools I'm going to speak mostly to fiction writing tools because actually I believe for non-fiction it's a very it's a slightly different situation because it depends on what kind of non-fiction you're writing and all of that but with fiction writing it's pretty simple which tools are the best ones to look at the first one that I have here is called PSE sudoite PSE sudoite is probably the most userfriendly of all of the these different options it's great for beginners but it has some limitations in terms of what it can do but what PSE sudoite allows you to do is it allows you to come here and put in a brain dump of things you want to know about your story and from there you can add information about the genre and about the style of your generation that you want to to create and then you can generate from all of that information you can generate a synopsis you can generate characters you can generate an outline and from that outline you can start actually generate the pros of the chapters and yes pseudor right allows you to do it in one click per chapter however usually it doesn't end up very good unless you heavily guide it along the way Additionally you can take text here within pite and do various things to it like ask it to describe it in more detail so using the different senses you can ask it to rewrite it by expanding it shortening it making it show more than tell Etc and then one of the nice things about pite is that you have these list of plugins which are Community created prompting engines essentially they allow communities to create specific prompts that you can then take that same prompt and use it in different ways within PSE sudoite so that's a very useful thing about PSE sudoite the second and possibly my favorite at the moment these things change all the time with AI but it's a service called novel crafter novel crafter is a little a little bit cheaper than PSE sudoite but you what you do is with novel crafter you have to hook it up to open router so with open router you're you have access to use all of these different models here but it does cost a certain amount per Generation Now thankfully the amount of cost that you usually generate even if you're writing a full book is like a full book might cost you a couple of dollars it's really not a whole lot and so you actually save a lot by going with novel crafter unless you're generating massive massive amounts of of Words which by the way in PSE sudoite the the amount of words you get is a fixed amount and then you can run out of words in the month and you have to like top up whereas with novel crafter you just write as much as you want because you're hooked up to open router it just means that the it's pay as you go right so that's something to keep in mind the third option is is called future fiction Academy and they have this thing called Rexy within future fiction Academy it is a lot more expensive than the other two options but they are kind of billing themselves as the Adobe Photoshop of AI fiction writing it is really Advanced you can get really really good output using uh the Rexy plus when you pay the the monthly fee you also get access to all of their training data which is an extensive like it started out as a training platform not as a AI writing platform and so really that's what you're paying for and then Rexy is just an add-on to the training platform where you'll learn lots of cool things about Ai and it's really in- depth it's really for those people who are very serious about writing with AI and I will do a video in the future talking about which AI fiction tool I believe is best for most people obviously it's there is no one best option because it depends on who you are and what your needs are but I I do have a favorite the other options for creating your books is to use chat GPT or CLA anthropics Claud Pro directly this is for both of them it's a flat $2 rate for each one and it uses a chat interface like this which is seems to be the chat interface seems to be the most useful interface to interact with an AI for most people the reason I recommend a tool like pseudo right or novel crafter or Rexy is because those are geared specifically for fiction authors so it makes the process a little bit better a little bit more seamless for fiction however usually even if you are using one of those three tools I still recommend either having chat GPT or Claude because it is good to have that sort of extra chat interface to bounce ideas off of it gives you a lot more flexibility in what you can do and my current favorite right now is Claude Pro however chat gbt does have a few advantages probably the biggest of which is access to Dolly 3 which is the image gen generator found inside of chat gbt but as a general rule of thumb anything you find in chat gbt tends to be more accurate to what your prompt is but not as good quality of Pros it requires a lot more revision on the back end by contrast Claude tends to be more creative it tends to give you better creative ideas and creative output as well as better Pros overall but it is harder to get it to actually follow your prompt you have to really Wrangle it to get there and as I've mentioned the newer model Claude 2.

1 is not really as usable for fiction authors and so really I only recommend using Claude 2.