Tag Archive: LLMs


When I was 22, I logged into a Forgotten Realms forum called Candlekeep to find that no less a personage than Ed Greenwood — the prolific creator of the setting that WotC murdered — had read the backstory I posted about a character I was going to play in a then-upcoming game and declared it publishable (if only it were in an original setting). He described it as a good, fun read, then added “More, please!”

That was my first compliment from a “real” author. Still stunned, I told my mother about it and she was a little hurt. “I’ve been telling you your writing was good for years!”

“Well, yeah,” I said, “but you’re my mom.”

Your mom is supposed to like your stuff. She doted on your colorful scribbles when you were five, too. Even if she’s a successful writer who’s known for critical taste, she’s still biased where you’re concerned. And that’s fine. She should be.

Well, AI doesn’t love you, but it’s almost like it’s programmed to act like it. You have to actively work at it to make it critical of your work in the right way. I recently went on The Novel Marketing Podcast to talk about why — and how to fix it.

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Four Rules of Using AI

I am a big proponent of using AI to help speed up the grunt work of, well, any task; but this blog is about writing, so we’re going to talk about AI in writing. Specifically, I want to talk about four guiding principles that will help you use AI as an author with more effectiveness and without losing your voice.

But, since I am also a big proponent of establishing definitions, let’s look at what we’re actually talking about. What is AI, and what is an LLM?


Defining AI

This is an issue because there’s what’s actually AI, and there’s what’s marketed as AI. When AI began to be perceived as a magic button for customer involvement and investment, a lot of things we’ve already accepted as normal technology got redefined as “AI” so it could sound new and amazing. That includes simple things like Photoshop tools or Word’s grammar check.

That’s led to confusion with the way the Butlarian Jihad hunts down AI-using heretics. (If you don’t recognize the term, it’s from the Dune setting and references a movement to ban AI. It’s becoming the standard way to refer to the rabidly anti-AI crowd today.) When everything is AI, it’s really easy to justify cancelling someone for using it in a way that the Butlerians don’t like, or when they just don’t like the user. But that also means that it’s incredibly hard to escape AI, because these days everything is AI — or at least marketed as such.

So defining AI in a way that matters to normal people is important. Of course, most normal people would fall asleep just listening to a real definition of AI and LLMs. Allow me to demonstrate.

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