In case you haven’t been following along (or don’t even know who the fuck I am, lol!), back in October 2025, and on a whim (story of my life!), I starting working on a manuscript for my first self-published book. It was just supposed to contain my 53 unpublished writings from the early 2000’s (poems, song lyrics, the beginnings of a short story or two, etc.), and then include a somewhat autobiographical preface. That’s it! It should’ve been published by now!

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Then, as usual with me, I started to get experimental and have fun with it. The preface turned into something… more. And then once I came up with a title for the book, and an overarching theme so to speak, that’s when the most horrific thing of all happened: I started to get creative!

Prior to October 2025, I haven’t sat down to intentionally and seriously write since back around 2005-2010, whenever the last time I actually invested serious time into writing a creative short-form piece. Now, I’m spending at least 3-4 hours each day (with 1 day unintentionally skipped, Friday after Thanksgiving 2025) working on this middle part of the manuscript, which has gone from “oh i’ll just add a few pages of this creative idea here” to almost 25 pages! My manuscript went from like 15,000 words to over 30,000! LOL!

So I started to get back into creative writing with this middle section. I began to get back into the good habit of using a thesaurus so as not to repeat words and such. I was simply using Google search at the time. Then occasionally Google would pop up it’s “AI Mode” and I started using that to help with grammar structure, synonyms, etc. Again, not to help me write, not at all, but because I’m not a seasoned writer, I needed help with structure, punctuation, etc. For instance: some of my paragraphs were like 12 sentences long! LOL. Half the page! Although I did have some basic knowledge of when to split a paragraph.

Then I started using Google Gemini a little more frequently, but again, not to help with ideas, but to help with sentence structure, “how does this sound?” things like that. I didn’t even know about Em Dashes! LOL!

And keep in mind: this book is just a fun little endeavor. It’s not 1 giant story from start to finish with all kinds of characters and a bit plot, etc. It’s primarily a collection of my unpublished writings, but with this creative piece that was added in between the preface and writings. And this creative piece is a fun thing just like the entire book. So even if I wanted to have AI write paragraph after paragraph and just copy and paste into the book, I could! I’m not, and I don’t plan to, but I’m making the point that this book is somewhat serious in regards to “hey these are all my writings from like 25 year ago” but also “let’s get crazy and have fun with it!”. But after all, it’s all about creative writing and having fun! And plus I want the reader to have fun reading it too. It’s gonna be wild, that’s all I can tell you!

Anyway, then I switched from Google Gemini to ChatGPT the week of December 3rd, just to test things out, see if ChatGPT was any better. And it is, for creative writing at least.

So yeah, I use AI! But not to create art or come up with ideas, I don’t need help there. I don’t sit and think “Dam, I’m stuck. I’m at a roadblock. AI: come up with something after this paragraph”. No. I use it as a tool. No different than a word processor’s spell check. Primarily as a thesaurus, but also as an editor or another “voice” to run things by to see if the grammar or structure of a sentence is good. “Does this need to be 2 paragraphs?” I’ll ask, or “how can I say this better?” if I know my sentence sounds clunky. And whatever its responses are, again: I don’t copy and paste and call it a day, I’ll see what it comes up with, and then pick what I like, and work it into my book, or not use it all!

AI is basically doing the research for me. Instead of me wasting time and fossil fuels driving to the library to look for who knows what book to help me write a particular type of dialect, instead of “googling it”, AI can do all that for me. Is it lazy? I mean, do we want to open up that can of worms? Cars, computers, mobile phones, I mean modern society is the epitome of lazy. So yeah, I’m not any more lazy than anyone else. Actually, quite the contrary!

AI has even taught me things about writing! Like, when to break a paragraph when there’s dialogue, when to use punctuation, the EM Dash! LOL. I love those! Although I am trying not to go overboard with them. If AI or computers didn’t exist, I might not even be here! LOL.

So for me, it’s part thesaurus, part editor, part… I dunno… english teacher LOL when it comes to punctuation, paragraph structure, etc. Though I’m starting to get the hang of things!

However, my main problem, like with my other creative geniuses out there, is that I find myself adding, revising, deleting, revising, adding, revising, revising, deleting, revising, adding, revising, etc., and being caught up in that endless artistic cycle.

At some point I need to say to myself “ok, that’s it! no more!” and just get this middle creative part (what was supposed to a simple 3 page thing but has now become an almost 30 page monstrosity) done, and work on getting this thing self-published.

And as far as the video above goes, I just had an idea pop into my head that instead of doing my every 3rd day manuscript update on my channel (i don’t go over spoilers, I just talk about random things), I decided to have fun with the AI.

And as for whether I am for or against AI, I might go into that a little deeper in a video on my channel one day.