They say that in great novels, the plot takes over control from the writer, and characters make their ‘own’ decisions. Recently, this saying has become a fact rather than a metaphor. Tech is starting to showcase exactly those kinds of capabilities, so we choose to test this in the 21st-century context and let AI drive a story to somehow ‘test’ its and our limits.
While it might sound like an easy task because you just let the AI do the writing, our goal was to see how much human input is needed, when it’s needed, and how well we would handle the idea of getting replaced or challenged by machines.
The sentence above could be the prompt for a dystopian romantic story itself, yet, for this one, we choose to go the arts – set in the London of the 70s, the story we decided to write about was a fiction on a musician from the 22nd century, a time when AI had took over all the creative work, who went back in time to become a real rockstar like in the history books.
Why do you say? First, personal taste, something AI doesn’t have. Second, it was intriguing to see the AI bounce between real-life names and locations with fiction and how well it could make it seamless, make sense, and be a fun read.
It’s What You Ask, Not How You Ask It
Thoughtful prompting dictates results.
As such, before even getting into the story, we asked ChatGPT the simple question:
“What are the basics of writing a story?”
The prompting gave us these six components:
- Character
- Setting
- Conflict
- Plot
- Theme
- Resolution
After giving it enough human thought, we figured we had an idea about the first and second, barely had the theme going, desperately lacked an actual plot, and the resolution seemed far off.
A few more questions later about what all these points meant and feeding the AI the short brief you read in the article’s introduction, we got the edgy Vian Echo as the main character and his band, appropriately named from a 70s guitar geek teenage Surf Rock fan, Vian Echo & The Reverbs, driving the story of a futurist rebel time traveler who came to become a music legend, ultimately fell in love, and decided fame and glory were not his goals in life, living a humble life in the 20th century.
Deus Ex Machina & Self-Criticism
From the start, we noticed that the AI can set an intriguing theme and draw readers in with the setting. All those stories it fed itself upon clearly showed themselves useful, judging by the sentences below:
“The air smelled of vinyl, sweat, and revolution. Guitars screamed from Camden basements, and poets shouted lyrics through broken amps. But one voice didn’t belong—not really,” followed by ‘Back home, music was algorithmic perfection. The machines hadn’t stolen creativity; they’d simply done it better. Too perfectly. Too predictably. Until human noise was irrelevant.”
While the setting was there, the actual plot seemed too ‘made up’ even for fiction, and too idealistic with love conquering all in the end. We wanted a story good enough for classic rock fans to enjoy and for most readers to get a kick out of. Prompting for other alternatives without proper studying resulted in some random ‘Deus Ex Machina’ moments where the unexpected just happened without much allure to it.
What worked to unstuck the plot was simple: We took up the wheel, not just randomly prompting until we got a better storyline, using the AI as an assistant to notice all the story’s shortcomings and tackle them one by one.
We simply asked it to criticise its work as both a critic and a reader and It spit out what the common thing still is about AI, which, in the context of the story, translated into a proper tone of voice, good ideas, but a lack of depth in characters and missed chances for plot development with an elegant concept yet no real stakes.
That same principle applies far beyond writing. AI tools are now being used to explore all kinds of creative and emotional landscapes,some of them more playful than profound. During one detour in our experiment, we explored character scripting tools in the adult storytelling space.
One test idea? A mischievous college student named Riley, navigating her blurred line between performative confidence and actual self-discovery, built entirely through prompts and backstory inside Candy AI Nude.
We weren’t trying to write erotica, but we were curious, could AI balance nuance with naughtiness? Could it build tension, charm, even humor, without collapsing into cliché? Surprisingly, it could. The tool let us shape Riley’s personality: curious but skeptical, expressive but grounded. She wasn’t just a fantasy template. With enough prompting, she became a character we could bounce dialogue off of and eventually fold into a screenplay draft.
Working through Riley’s story helped us see AI character design in a new light, not just as a tool for adult content, but for exploring taboos, identity, and emotional conflict in a controlled space. It was another reminder: when AI works best, it’s not replacing imagination. It’s inviting it to go a little further than we might have dared alone.
So, Who’s Steering?
AI can be your assistant, lead writer, editor, or all three at once. In our short creative experiment, we used it for all the above roles, so you can say we traded places, riding shotgun.
Funny enough, the final version of the story, when it was generated, was titled ‘The Last Riff’ by Us ( the prompter’s name) and AI; fair, we would say, and hinting towards the possible future where most creative work will have a similar subheading.
What the creator perceives during the creative process often differs from what the readers assume the process was – yes, AI helped us write, yes, it did the actual writing, but it never felt as if it was in charge of the process, almost like a partner with a degree in good grammar and unlimited inspiration.
It’s All About Finding the Right Balance
First, there’s a learning curve to anything, and while AI can shorten the time to complete a process, give you ideas, and compensate for some skills, it’s not a shortcut, and it can’t replicate taste or experience.
It’s just like in music and the story of Vai Echo: the future went wrong and lost the human elements of art, taste, and imperfection, forcing the character to go back in time to prove you can’t replace human experience of accidentally landing on the ‘wrong’ note and someone at the edge of the rehearsal room goes, ‘hmm, interesting, that’s a song there.’
The second lesson, which could be a significant takeoff, is that there’s a learning curve attached even to ‘quick’ solutions. Unlike other technologies of the past, you don’t need hard skills such as coding or even learning how to use a WordPress dashboard to create something; you need prior knowledge of the craft to understand ‘context’ and tell the good from the bad.
The AI could judge its writing and find the weaknesses. Still, ultimately, we can’t say that what it brought as a fix, while objectively better, was any more original or inspiring than what we were able to judge as such from our own experience.
AI won’t make you a writer; you and time alone will make you a good writer or great at any craft – yet, while you hone your craft at writing, investing time in your partnership with AI will take you to places you wouldn’t likely go alone, or with such little hassle.