The augmented author: explore more possibilities without losing your voice

Assisted creativity is not automatically more diverse

An essayist can request three mutually incompatible objections, then investigate how to assess them. A novelist can ask what each character stands to lose in a scene. The tool opens up possibilities; the author chooses which deserve a place in the book.

Doshi and Hauser's experiment involved eight-sentence stories in English and participants who were not recruited as professional writers. Access to ideas generated by GPT-4 improved some assessments of the stories, while the resulting stories became more similar to one another. Its scope matters: the experiment does not establish what will happen to a whole novel or determine a work's value. It gives us a reason to preserve our own material and not let the first suggestion define the entire range of possibilities. Source: Science Advances, 2024 [1].

Two different workshops

For an essay, open Research Atlas [2] before drafting a factual claim. Identify the kind of source required: statistics, a scientific publication, an archive or a legal text. Keep a record separating what the source establishes, what you infer and what you propose. A bibliography supplied by an assistant is a list to check, not evidence already secured.

For a novel, first write the core of the scene: desire, obstacle, consequence. A specialist tool such as Sudowrite [3] can be evaluated for exploring variations in fiction; the features its provider advertises do not prove that it preserves your voice in French. Test it on a non-confidential scene and keep an unassisted version for comparison. For a documented essay, Zotero meets a different need: making references retrievable and reusable.

Return to Research Atlas [2] when a historical or scientific detail carries the credibility of your narrative. Verification should enrich the scene, not turn it into a lecture. The freedom of fiction does not require us to confuse deliberate invention with documented fact.