Tap Into Your Creative Potential: What Chat GPT and Dall-E Mean for Writers and Artists

I had spent a whole day drawing, writing, marketing, and all the other fun stuff artists do. I was feeling fulfilled but also exhausted. All of my creative energy was fully drained by the end of the day. On our way home, my husband, who is a computer engineer, very excitedly told me about ChatGPT and Dall-E, tools that can create stories and illustrations at the click of a button.

He explained that ChatGPT is a language model that can generate human-like text responses to prompts given to it and that DALL-E is an image-generation AI that can create original images from textual descriptions.

I was skeptical and also a bit annoyed. There was no way a computer could replicate human creativity.

Later that night…

As I checked my phone before putting it to charge, curiosity got the better of me. I fed Dall E some prompts. It absolutely does not draw better than me LOL but the way we view art is subjective. I had put my heart and soul into illustrating the prompts I was feeding Dall-E so of course, I liked my own work more.

Feeling satisfied, I moved on to ChatGPT. I fed it the story in my upcoming book, The Little Fairy Finds Her Glow. I had tried to write this story in rhyme and just failed… miserably. So I wrote it in prose instead and it’s so much better for it.

But as an experiment, I fed the story to ChatGPT and asked it to rhyme it for me. And it did. Quite fabulously. And I was completely freaked out. In seconds, a computer had rhymed a story I had been working on for months.

Feeling threatened…

I showed it to my friends and of course, they told me that my writing was better. It had a human element to it that the new version did not. But friends are supposed to say things like that. I halfway believed them but I needed more validation.

Later that week, I had a session booked with an art director to have him look at some of my new illustrations. During the session, I asked him to read both versions of the story without telling him that the rhyming version was AI-generated.

Within seconds, he confirmed that the version I wrote was much much better. When I told him that the other version was a work of ChatGPT, he was amused but also concerned about how ChatGPT would change things for writers.

Since then…

I have read and heard a lot of discourse about AI-generated content, and here are my two cents: These tools cannot replace human creativity BUT they can be used to enhance our creations, and save us time and energy which we can put into creating better work.

The stories I write come from my own life experiences. They’re rich because I’ve lived with them. It’s the same with my illustrations. Every creation of mine is a bit of myself. I could never replace them with something mechanical. Why would I?

I’ve heard of writers selling novels every other week by using these tools. I don’t know how great those novels are or what value those artists are getting but I can’t imagine leaving my own stories trapped inside myself in order to generate quick revenue.

However, when it comes to proofreading or idea generation, both of these tools are fantastic. I never want to go back to re-reading something a million times instead of entering it into a program and asking it to highlight errors or summarize paragraphs. I truly believe tasks like these are a waste of time.

For example…

• I asked ChatGPT to give me feedback on my last blog post and it recommended I add images so readers understand what I’m referring to. I’ve done some research on blogging but I’m still new to it. This was a great tip that was very specific to that blog post and it helped me improve the post greatly within minutes.
• I asked Dall-E to create a child artist in watercolors for this post’s featured image. It did a great job and I didn’t have to browse the internet for 30 minutes trying to find a royalty-free image.
• I asked ChatGPT to recommend hashtags for my recent Instagram posts because it’s annoying to think of these things and I simply did not want to do it. This gave me time to create better social media content which is way more rewarding than browsing hashtags.
• I asked Dall-E to illustrate a mystical onion reading a fortune because I was tired and needed a laugh. The images it generated were hilarious. I mean, why not use these tools for fun? The way we use these tools can be harmful, but the tools themselves are pretty fantastic.

In conclusion…

I don’t think creators need to feel threatened or wary of these tools. They are not here to replace us. They are here to make our lives easier so we have even more to time to invest in our creations.

Now that I’ve shared my own experiences, I really want to know your thoughts on how you see these tools affecting us. Let me know what you think in the comments below!