A few thoughts on using AI well

MJ v4 Location concept design working off a pencil sketch.

Just a thought from something I was working on today. I did a little experiment of getting GPT4 to help me turn a (literally) 120 page beat-by-beat record of the first Fallen Cycle RPG chronicle we did in 2020 into a much more manageable 30ish page chapter (or episode) length synopsis + protagonist concepts, without losing critical elements.

Similarly, a lot of important pieces were hidden away in various linked "Pre-session" documents we did, which were very handy in terms of RP, having a week or two to plan or ruminate together in a document between sessions, and for me to pass along intel from their various contacts and etc. But in terms of making a workable story out of it, not so much...

Anyway, point is. ChatGPT4 writes shitty prose, please don't use it for the final draft of your book, unless it's about tax codes. (Stylistically. Practically, that mostly seems like a good way to get the IRS' audit rate up).

But GPT4 is quite good at the task of distilling the micro- scale view of lengthy beat-by-beat into "here's what happened." Just give it a scene at a time and tell it to write a detailed synopsis

that's, say, approximately 75% the length of this: "[3000 word max]".

I find coaxing it stylistically doesn't work like it does with MidJourney. But… with a little direction and iteration... It's not pretty, but it doesn't need to be.

This is my message about the very "Left brain" GPT: if you're going to use it at all, use it for tedious tasks that get in the way of you getting to the good parts.

Of course, I won't really know until I've played with it a bit, and talked to the players more, if there's an actual story there. A chapter synopsis isn't even a first draft, and I'm not really a fan of the idea that a story is simply one event put before another, even if it's a droll sort of joke.

(If it becomes a story, it'd kind of be my first single genre jam. It's pretty unabashedly cyberpunk.)