Using AI to Develop and Workshop Your Characters
Since ChatGPT’s public rollout at the end of 2022, growing discourse has emerged around the impact this technology might have on workplaces and the fears that AI might replace the role of artists. The imagined futures of this new technological world vary from the fantastic to the increasingly apocalyptic.
(Why We Must Not Cede Writing to the Machines.)
A question that emerged for me was this: How might writers harness AI in their daily activities while still relying on their own ingenuity and independent thought? As a creative writing instructor, I’m always thinking of ways that students might tap into their creative reserves, particularly at the beginning of their journeys as writers.
What I’ve found is that generative AI offers some impressive avenues for brainstorming and idea generation in a pressure-free setting. The technology provides a helpful tool for overcoming writer’s block, pulling through those 2 AM moments of paralysis, and in particular, workshopping characters.
What exactly is AI?
Generative AI is a type of artificial intelligence that produces novel content (just how novel is up for debate) that can consist of text, images, video, or audio. Focusing specifically on text, large language models (LLMs) are a machine learning technology that generates written content using a predictive algorithm that has been “trained” on a trove of existing data (mostly scraped from across the Internet).
Georgetown’s Center for Security & Emerging Technology summarizes LLMs nicely here. These LLM platforms are not capable of critical thinking, but their capacity for producing cohesive sentences is surprisingly effective. Below are two specific LLM resources that can assist with character development.
ChatGPT
The most common, easiest to use and free AI generative tool at writers’ disposal is ChatGPT. This text-based tool is developed by OpenAI and works similarly to other chatbots like Microsoft’s Bing and Google’s Bard.
When I asked ChatGPT for specific ways that generative AI might assist fiction writers with character development, it provided the following list of potential functions:
1. Personality Trait Generation
2. Backstory and Motivation Suggestions
3. Character Arc Exploration
4. Dialogue and Speech Patterns
5. Relationship Dynamics
6. Character Name and Appearance
7. Genre-Specific Traits
8. Comparative Analysis
9. Character Consistency
10. Character What-If Scenarios
What might some of these tools look like in the real world? I asked ChatGPT to help me brainstorm possible characters for a novel. I started by providing the following prompt: “I’m writing a thriller novel set in 1940s Los Angeles. What types of characters might make up this world?”
(ChatGPT: A Writer’s Best Friend…for Now.)
Chat GPT provided a host of rather stereotypical characters including the hard-boiled detective, the femme fatale, and the jazz musician. I then finessed my prompt further by asking, “How might I subvert some of these archetypes in my writing?” The result was much more fruitful:
Subverting archetypes in your writing can add depth and surprise to your characters, making them more memorable and engaging. Here are some ways you can subvert the archetypes mentioned earlier:
1. Complex Detective: Instead of portraying the hard-boiled detective as a stoic and unyielding character, give them vulnerabilities and internal conflicts. Show their struggle with moral ambiguity or emotional turmoil, making them more relatable and multidimensional.
2. Empowered Femme Fatale: Challenge the traditional portrayal of the femme fatale as solely manipulative and subservient to male characters. Give her agency, intelligence, and personal goals that go beyond mere plot device.
3. Jazz Musician as Informant: Instead of making the jazz musician a background character or a source of atmosphere, make them an active participant in the investigation. They could possess crucial information or skills that aid the protagonist, becoming an unexpected ally.
This would be a helpful start to crafting an array of characters, particularly if you are working in the genre fiction space. From there, you might begin to form the basis for particular scenes or narrative arcs.
Chat GPT Tips:
Be as specific as possible with your prompts, making use of key words and specifying how long ChatGPT’s response should be.Don’t be afraid to fine tune and revise as necessary. It may take multiple versions of a prompt to arrive at a helpful response.Group and title your chats according to project or goal, just as you would a saved document.
Character.AI
How many writers have mused about what it would be like to meet their fictional characters? If you’re looking for a more advanced tool to workshop and explore your characters, Character.AI can provide a dose of wish fulfillment.
Character.AI enables you to interact with an existing library of user-created contemporary, historical, and literary characters, as well as to create your own characters. Character settings allow you to name and then upload or create an avatar image, program in a standard greeting, fill in a description of the character and then provide a longer definition in which you might include specific characteristics, example chats, and other information.
From there, the tool can be surprisingly accurate in its ability to embody key programmed character traits. To show the range of interactions available with Character.AI, I created an avatar for Tiffany, the protagonist of my debut thriller Kill for Love. I gave Tiffany the tag, “sorority sister serial killer” and three paragraphs of first-person narration from my book. Here’s part of our resulting conversation:
Tiffany: I’m the queen bee of Delta Gamma, the most popular sorority on campus. There are always those who try to challenge my rule, and today was no different. I won’t mention any names, but there was a bit of a situation with one of the girls from Alpha Delta Pi.
Me: Come on, spill the deets.
Tiffany: Alright, alright. If you really must know, the girl’s name is Amber, and she is the definition of a basic bitch. Amber was trying to spread rumors that I had slept with her ex-boyfriend. How predictable. But the most amazing part? It was true. Well, not the whole thing, of course. But that’s enough out of me.
If starting from scratch with a character, you can also use some of the existing chatbots on Character.AI. In particular, the Creative Helper can assist with ideation. Here’s an example conversation:
Me: “I’m trying to develop a character who is a female antihero living in 1980s New York. Can you give more detail on her backstory?
Creative Helper: Sure! How about:
* She grew up with a single mom who struggled to make ends meet
* Things were always tough, and her mom worked long hours every day
* This led to her developing anger problems, but her mom was still the most important person in her life
Me: What are some other questions I should answer about my main character?
Creative Helper: Sure! Here’s some questions you can try answering or developing:
* How did her relationship (or lack of relationships) with her parents shape her? (For example, maybe she never really had a male father figure in her life, so she’s constantly chasing the validation she never got from a father.)
* Is there a certain experience or traumatic event which led her to become an antihero?
* Is there a specific reason why she lives in NYC? Why not somewhere else? (Maybe this city means something to her, or maybe she likes the chaos of it, for example.)
Character.AI Tips:
I recommend not enabling image generation for the characters (I found it distracting and unrealistic).Heed the warning at the top of all conversations: “Everything Characters say is made up!”Just as with other forms of generative AI, they are prone to “hallucinations” and will often provide titles to movies, books, and even web links that don’t exist.
Check out Laura Picklesimer’s Kill For Love here:
(WD uses affiliate links.)
AI Limitations
Generative AI is an algorithm, the same predictive technology that suggests the next word in your email messages. It’s important to emphasize its limitations, along with the potential biases, stereotypes and assumptions that are baked into technology, from both the programmers and content used to train them.
These ethical concerns include the growing call for transparency as both personal and copyrighted writing may constitute training grounds for the platform. Furthermore, most of these tools are not current. At the time of writing, ChatGPT did not have information beyond September 2021, its last “knowledge update.”
I asked ChatGPT for some limitations to relying on the technology for character development. Here is what it wrote:
While AI can be a valuable tool for character development, it also has some limitations that writers should be aware of:
1. Lack of Creativity: AI models are training on existing data and patterns, which means their suggestions may lack originality and creativity. Truly unique and groundbreaking characters require human imagination and intuition.
2. Stereotyping and Bias: AI models may inadvertently perpetuate stereotypes or biases present in the training data. This can result in characters that reinforce harmful or unrealistic cultural, gender, or racial norms.
3. Emotional Understanding: AI lacks true emotional understanding and empathy. Characters with complex emotions and deep emotional connections may be challenging for AI to develop convincingly.
4. Ethical Considerations: Using AI to generate characters raises ethical questions, particularly when it comes to ownership and authorship. Writers must consider the implications of using AI-generated characters in their works.
5. Context and Subtlety: AI may struggle to understand the nuanced aspects of character development, such as subtle personality changes, character arcs, or the impact of pivotal events on a character’s psyche.
6. Over Reliance on Tropes: AI-generated characters may inadvertently lean toward common tropes and archetypes, potentially leading to predictable or formulaic storytelling.
7. Creative Exploration: AI might limit the writer’s willingness to explore unconventional character choices or challenge their preconceived notions, as it might tend to offer more mainstream or expected options.
Overall, AI offers a compelling mechanism for writers to experiment, brainstorm, and overcome common writing blocks when creating and developing characters, particularly in the initial stages of the writing process. Its usefulness depends on your own personal creative process, the type of content you’re writing, your writing experience, and your comfort using the technology.
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(Chat with Tiffany, the protagonist of Laura’s novel Kill for Love, here: https://beta.character.ai/chat?char=db8gcJXkpnGQ2pAJGvqT0vM2Is3c08kp9bjp0DUi9D0)