A question was raised at the last Devon HNS meeting concerning AI and its effect on novelists, which made me think about how one might use AI in writing historical fiction.

You can use a prompt to make the AI write a whole piece of fiction for you.

I can see two major issues in doing this.

Firstly, I would not be interested in writing in this way. I write because I enjoy the process of creating a story and putting it down on paper and putting it out with my name on it; my creation. I can’t see any point in getting a computer to do that for me. What would be the point in ‘solving’ a crossword by simply looking up the answers and filling them in: or ‘doing’ a jigsaw by getting a computer to tell you where each piece goes?

But the bigger issue seems to me to be the quality of what comes out. What makes historical fiction good (as opposed to what makes other fiction good, which you need to do anyway) is the level of historical detail, evoking for the reader that particular time and place. This is precisely what AI is worst at. Not only that, but when there is detail, existing AIs are likely to make it up or transpose it from another place or time. So, if you want to avoid horrendous errors, you need to find them and correct them. If you are going to do the work and research that allows you to do that, you might as well have written the work yourself in the first place.

More on this another time.