UDPATE: It is with tremendous sadness that I must say that this is no longer true. I have changed the first sentence now, but I'm still leaving this page up as part of a larger discussion of how AI helped in the editing/refining process of the novel.

The first sentence of this novel was generated by AI.

I didn't set out to write a novel at all.

Originally, I was just playing around with ChatGPT and proposed a theme (prohibition-era vampire story), named some characters, and described a scene (the speakeasy) and asked ChatGPT to begin to write something based on this prompt.

I thought it did a half-decent job and described a second scene for it to produce: Rosalind's awakening, which was also passably interesting

"Ah ha!" I thought, "I should see if it can generate a full story! It'll be revolutionary!"

This failed spectacularly.

It was a fun experiment, but ultimately it was obvious that in its current state AI is utterly incapable of generating anything more than stand-alone, disconnected scenes -- and relatively bare-boned* ones at that. Beyond this, even when well within the context limit, it constantly "loses the plot", as it were, and fails to generate anything cohesive -- even with substantial guidance and prompting.

Still, it had been a fun way to spend a few hours, and I expected it to end there.

But... I had fallen in love with Rosalind's story.

I first tried to write a book when I was about 10 years old. We had an old, purely mechanical, ribbon-fed typewriter at home and I loved choose-your-own-adventure books, so I wrote a short one. I think it was about a ninja.

Throughout high school, I tried a few more times to write something, but other than one poem about a cat — which I still love today — I never managed to do anything of substance. In university I worked for a while on a double-major with Computer Science and English, and managed to get a middling grade with a short story about a computer hacker. Time and time again, I tried to start a real novel, but never managed to stick with it.

Even my internet username, "Quill", is a testament to a dream of being a writer that never came. Not until now.

The scene in the Midnight Mirage and the unease of Rosalind's awakening lingered in my brain. I wanted to know more about this world of vampires and speakeasies. Suddenly I had ideas that wouldn't stop coming — a full arc that I wanted to see through, from start to finish.

Many days, I would wake up in the morning at seven or eight and begin to write non-stop until it was time to cook dinner, at which point my wife and my mother-in-law became the sounding boards for my draft chapters. After dinner, I'd sit cross-legged in bed with my laptop and write until two in the morning. Luckily, my wife is even more of a night-owl than I am, and quite tolerant. (Apologies to my YouTube/Twitch viewers for the reduction in video content during this period.)

When I ran errands, I used ChatGPT's voice-chat feature just so I'd have "someone" to talk to. In computer programming circles, we call this "rubber duck debugging". It's the idea that just by talking through a problem, even with an inanimate object, you can suddenly be inspired with solutions. Those conversations were all available in text form when I got home and back to my computer, perfect notes from my stream of consciousness.

But, to return to the title of this piece, I've left the first sentence of the novel untouched from its first, AI-generated instance for two reasons:

First, so that I couldn't hide or deny it.

Yes, I wrote the novel myself, but I don't want to pretend that AI tools weren't used during the production. They proved to be incredibly useful during the editing and refining of the text. In particular, while it fails to be able to produce a fully coherent story, generative AI excels at being a context-aware thesaurus.

So many times I've searched dictionary and thesaurus websites, wading through dozens of synonyms but failing to find a word I want. Usually, the problem is that I don't want a literal synonym, but rather something more metaphorical. There's a strong sense in my mind that there's a specific word or phrase I'm hunting for, but I can't quite grasp it. What I was able to do with AI is paste in the relevant section and then describe — sometimes using a full paragraph to do it — the "feel" of the word or phrase that I was looking for and, remarkably, the AI was usually able to call up exactly what had been on the tip of my fleshy brain.

Therefore, the second reason that I've left the original, AI-generated opening sentence of the book is as a "thank you" to the likes of ChatGPT and Claude.AI and the brilliant people responsible for advancing this area of science. One day, probably sooner than we hope or fear (depending on your perspective), generative AI will be able to write something surprisingly good. Right now, it's mostly bad -- but in that badness there is still value. It can still provide a scaffold for a project. Something unpolished. A raw block of stone that people can carve something wonderful from, simply by virtue of having something to start with.

* For context, the text that was generated for the speakeasy scene was ~400 words long and my current Chapter One stands at ~3,700. The general structure is still the same: Rosalind enters, she speaks to Lily, she is introduced to Vincent and Erik -- though they had different names and originally I had this set in the World of Darkness / Vampire: The Masquerade, so a significant part of the original text made references to this. Traces of that influence remain, though I quickly found that I preferred something quite a bit more grounded, so, when I started to write on my own version of this story, I chose to go with a blank slate and drew inspiration from a broader set of media and books.