Echo Breaker.
Imagination and
AI Storytelling.
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ECHO BREAKER
A Journey into AI Storytelling
ECHO BREAKER.
Echo Breaker started out as an idea. Could I use Tesla’s AI, Grok, to write a novella and publish it on Amazon. Spoiler. Yes…and no. As it turns out, not all AI is created equal.
The Journey
I was curious if I could use Grok, an AI with deep integration in to the Twitter platform to write a short story. I began with some basic questions such as:
How many words are in an average short story?
Can you give me a list of science fiction authors whose writing styles you can imitate?
And finally I decided to dive in with my initial prompt:
Write a 7,500 word science fiction story in the style of N.K. Jemisin about a newly hired administrative assistant who works starts at a commercial real estate company on an advanced alien planet. The planet has a mix of different races, religions and political factions. The intern should be a beautiful 22 year old woman who hopes left earth to start a new adventure. The story should start just as she lands on the new planet. The story should have a clear beginning, middle and end using a traditional three story act, with rising tension. The story should be about facing risk and over coming fear in the face of challenges. Before starting the story, create a brief outline first so I can review to see if I want to make any changes.
It took less than a minute for Grok to write out exactly what I asked for, but it didn’t make for a good short story. It was easy to ask Grok to make edits and changes. At this point, I was more interested in the workflow, the content was just the clay to sculpt with and understand the tools. After working with Grok for some time and better understanding it’s limits and capabilities, I dived in with the creation of a novella. Grok is a great AI for real time data analytics, document analysis, providing real time insights, document analysis, and a number of other great things. However, writing long form documents is not its strong suit. This has to do with the business model xAI uses to charge for Grok. I was still curious how far I could push Grok.
Building on the 7,500 word short story, I had Grok expand it into an outline for a 30,000 word novella .
After looking over the outline and making a few edits, I had Grok write each chapter. Through out the entire process I kept refining the prompting process, until finally the entire 30,000 word novella was finished. I found that while making changes was easy, it important to break the task in to small, very specific tasks. It was very much more of collaborative effort and understanding how Grok approached tasks.
Grok, like any AI, is a very powerful tool. However, in a very real way, it is a tool that is limited by the user. It is easy to make assumptions about one’s own ability to explain, direct, and be clear with a request. It’s a humbling process of refining the submitted prompts. Prompt Engineering. More importantly, it is understanding how to solve problems by prompting the right responses.
Critical Key Conclusions
Research The Problem: It can be tempting to jump in and start using AI to create things and solve problems. However, it is usually worth it to stop and think through the problem and the process needed to solve it. So often we use AI to leap, when it’s better to use AI to crawl and take small baby steps. With the novel, used Grok to research the writing process, segmenting the problem into small blocks that could easily be review and changes, author writing styles, how others had used Grok to write novels and other forms of long communication, etc.
Explore The Problem: Another point that can speed the solution of a problem is to create a small playground with parameters to better understand the problem and solutions on a small scale. While use AI can quickly produce results, it is precisely because it can produce so many results that can cause another issue. Being overwhelmed with so many solutions that all look the same. The playground I created in this case, was the 7,500 word short story. I kept playing around with moving things around and experimenting until I was confident with the direction and path.
Refine The Problem And The Scope: AI has few limits, by refining the problem and its scope, a better solution is produced. AI can be used in this process, but it requires patience and skill. The skill can be developed during the research and exploration of the problem. Otherwise, you can arrive at a solution for a problem that was understood. This is more like developing a clear strategy and developing a plan than anything else.
Iteration Is The key: AI rarely produces exactly what you are looking for the first time. It’s an iterative process. AI can write the outline of a story and draft paragraph after paragraph. However, it is up to the prompt engineer to KNOW what is good and what is bad, what to keep and what to throw away. A mediocre writer will use AI and create mediocre writing. The craft is in using AI and the iterative process to produce something of higher quality more quickly.
No Substitute For Mastery: During the process of creating the novella, Echo Breaker, it became clear the the deeper my mastery of literature, literary devices, and editing…the more robust and unique I could make the story. Writing is a weaving and creative process. The greater the mastery and understanding of that, the more successful the final result.
AI Hallucinations: I found that Grok (All AI do this to various degrees), would create false information about certain key subjects or issues that I directly asked it to include. For example, I specifically asked that the main protagonist be “…a newly hired administrative assistant who works starts at a commercial real estate company…”. This point was completely ignored when it created the story. A critical review is needed when using AI to generate content.
Lastly, I also used Grok to help me turn Echo Breaker into digital format suitable for publishing and distribution on Amazon’s Kindle bookstore as well as the creation of a basic marketing plan to boost sales. I also used Grok to create images for a book cover. All the images on this page were created using Grok.
