Unpredictable Patterns: Writing at the Intersection of Human and Machine
Meredith Sweet Silberstein is a librarian, certified business coach, and writer who bridges technology, creativity, and strategic thinking to help people organize information, workflows, and ideas for real-world impact. You can find her on LinkedIn.
"Oh, please." Hardly the response I imagine an Open AI engineer wanting from someone's early interactions with ChatGPT, but those were the words that escaped my lips upon reading the 100-word short story I challenged the chatbot to write in December 2022.
I prompted it with "Write a 100-word fanfiction featuring Seto Kaiba and Anzu Mazaki from the Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters anime, with romance as a genre," in my style. I wanted to see if the large language model had ingested my fanfiction writing and could reproduce it accurately. It turned out: no. With a prompt like that, what was I expecting? I'd spent years honing my craft, learning language nuances, and developing a distinct voice. I tried to distill it down into a prompt small enough to fit on a Trivial Pursuit card.
The AI produced a technically correct output. It recognized Seto Kaiba as a teenage CEO, but that was it. The writing felt emotionally inert: Shakespeare read in Ferris Bueller's teacher's deadpan monotone. Fanfiction is about prompting: fans asking "What if…?" and playing with existing characters, settings, and situations—data—and running in new directions.
I thought, at least I wouldn't be replaced, as I read the short story's opening: "Seto Kaiba stood atop his skyscraper, staring out at the city below. As always, his thoughts drifted to Anzu Mazaki. He couldn't shake the feeling that she was the one person who understood him. As he gazed out at the setting sun, he made a decision. He would finally tell Anzu how he felt."
I couldn’t help but laugh. I could have stopped there, validated by my unique creativity. But I opted to keep experimenting, to take that output and use it to improve my prompts and writing. But who was I trying to prove something to? The machine? Myself?
I never thought AI would become a fundamental part of my creative process. Two years, four months, and dozens of AI conversations later, my skepticism and condescension morphed into an ongoing dialogue to expand and refine my writing. It's not about outsourcing creativity or seeking a shortcut—it's about pushing my limits, interrogating my assumptions, and discovering new ways to articulate my thoughts.
I asked ChatGPT to write in "my style" without specifying what that meant. Unsurprisingly, it knew little about the two characters, their interactions, and their romance. It hurt to realize how little I mattered—how little my writing contributed to the vast data the model had consumed. It wouldn't replicate my style; it had no idea who I was. But did it have to stay that way?
No, I thought. I could make it know me. As with my earliest fanfiction attempts, frustration gave way to defiance: if what I wanted didn’t exist, I would create it myself. If that meant the chatbots didn’t know my style, I would teach them.
In choosing to rewrite that output and try again with ChatGPT (and later, Claude and other AI models), the AI's limitations revealed my strengths. It became less of a generator and more of a provocateur, prompting me to rethink my words. One tool suggested, "Be ruthless with beautiful but non-essential sentences." Another offered visceral suggestions for how to show instead of tell, helping rewrite bland word choices into experiences, transforming sand into fine golden powder; cold wind gusting from an opening into a salty blast accompanied by the steady thrum of rainfall. Instead of seeing it as a tool that writes for me, I started using it as a tool that helps me write with more depth, intention, and insight.
Creative Dialogue with AI
What does it mean to be a writer in the age of AI? I see this question as a Rubik's Cube, solved in one way, but not another, until you keep manipulating the pieces into a greater whole. The more I engage with AI tools, the more my definition evolves. If AI can generate text, suggest ideas, and reorganize my thoughts, does that make it a co-writer? Or is it another instrument—like a word processor, thesaurus, or beta reader—enhancing rather than replacing human creativity? These are questions I've been exploring, navigating what it means to create at this intersection of human intention and machine capability.
AI's greatest strength is its ability to extract and challenge my patterns. Every writer, no matter how seasoned, has habits—default words or phrases (mine is "somehow"), structures they rely on, and comfort zones. With the right prompting, AI won't share those habits. It introduces unpredictability. AI can make suggestions I'd never consider. Claude suggested transforming my original character for a Pathfinder campaign into a cursed monk, a creative angle I hadn't explored. AI's suggestions can range from brilliant to bewildering. Sudowrite tried to solve a 'show, don't tell' problem in a scene by suggesting I delve into the minds of two antagonistic characters "with sexy results," recommending they become aware of each other's muscles in a tension-filled scene that I envisioned as comedic, not lustful. But whether insightful or absurd, these prompts force me to react, refine, and reconsider.
The most unexpected pattern AI disrupted wasn't in my writing but in my process. Years ago, I thrived in vibrant online fan communities where we spent hours on AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), bouncing ideas, workshopping storylines, and providing feedback. That energy fueled my creativity. But as platforms evolved—AIM gave way to MySpace and Facebook and LiveJournal communities disbanded—those spaces of co-creation disappeared. Comments became rarer, beta readers scarcer, and fellow fans scattered to different corners of the internet, occupied with careers and personal responsibilities. Without that feedback loop, my creative writing slowed to a trickle, lacking the motivation those communities once provided.
When I began regular conversations with AI chatbots, I recognized something familiar yet different. It was not a re-creation of lost communities, but a substitute for the missing back-and-forth dynamic. Unlike a blank document, AI responds, questions, and suggests—creating the illusion of audience before a human reader sees my work. It broke me out of a years-long creative rut by providing an echo of that collaborative process, a way to workshop ideas in real-time. The machine became a stand-in for the fellow fans who once energized my creative process. It was not a replacement for human connection, but a way back to an interactive writing process that made creativity flow more easily.
My interactions with AI improved my questioning skills. They prompted me to consider facets of writing I hadn't considered since picking up writing reference books as a teen: "How would you describe the tone of this piece?" and "What does this description say about the author's style?" It reminded me of when I first dabbled in fic writing, generating ideas with "What if?" Instead of demanding a single answer from an AI chatbot, I use it to stretch my thinking: What if this character took a different action? What if I framed this scene from another character's perspective? What am I assuming about the writing? The act of questioning, iterating, and shaping raw material into something meaningful remains a distinctly human endeavor.
The Role of Emotion and Meaning in Writing
AI's biggest limitation is that it doesn't understand the significance of the next word in a sentence, even though it can predict it. Science fiction writer Ted Chiang's comparison of ChatGPT to a JPEG is fitting. In a 2023 New Yorker article, he wrote, "Think of ChatGPT as a blurry JPEG of all the text on the Web. It retains much of the information on the Web... but if you're looking for an exact sequence of bits, you won't find it; all you will ever get is an approximation."
Just as a JPEG fails to capture the detail in a RAW photo, AI-generated writing may be coherent, but is a compressed, prediction-based reflection of human writing. AI lacks the lived experience that gives writing depth. AI can mimic sentiment, but it doesn't feel. It can replicate structure, but doesn't understand subtext. The weight of a sentence—its importance to the paragraph, and the paragraph's role in the overall structure—comes from the writer, not the machine.
AI can serve as both mirror and kaleidoscope. It reflects a writer's intentions but can also refract it into new possibilities, patterns, and structures, suggesting metaphor or dialogue; visceral sensations or conceptual frameworks. Emotional truth comes from the author alone. The question is not Can AI replace writers? but How can writers use AI without losing their voice?
Voice can't be lost when used intentionally. If writers intend to create something in their voice and style, the output isn't regurgitated, banal writing. AI can be a tool for expansion rather than substitution. It can push writers toward bolder ideas, help refine phrasing, and offer unexpected angles—but it cannot decide what matters. That's the writer's job.
Writing as Inquiry, Not Certainty
I have no illusions this dynamic with AI as my "writing partner" will stay unchanged. Technology progresses, and my relationship with writing evolves as I read and write. Authors worry about AI devaluing their craft, copyright infringement, and these systems' environmental footprint. These concerns are valid.
I'm drawn to emerging creative possibilities instead of fixating on potential losses. Maybe I'm naïve in thinking writers should worry less about replacement and more about provocation—about the unexpected questions AI might ask us about our thinking and writing. Writing is an act of discovery—I write to figure out what I think, to make sense of the nebulous. AI, used thoughtfully, aids this process not by providing easy answers, but by pushing me to ask better questions.
I grew up writing creative fiction, but I switched to nonfiction—journalism, essays, blog posts—to improve my craft and learn to ask "the tough questions." Nowadays, the question for writers is, "What does it mean to write with AI?" For me, it means engaging in a creative dialogue, less about automation and more about artistry. It means recognizing that technology can be a catalyst, but not a replacement. It means embracing the unpredictable, imperfect, and unfinished.
Most importantly, it means acknowledging that the relationship between human and machine creativity isn't binary or oppositional. It's collaborative and complementary. The machine offers patterns and possibilities; the human supplies meaning and purpose. Together, they create something neither could produce alone.