Can you really write stories with AI? Yes, but getting good quality takes some work. Utsudo tested using AI to generate a story, images and music, producing a roughly 40-second video in under two hours. The AI-written story had a beginning and end but lacked creativity; images required precise prompts and struggled to keep the same character consistent; and the music often produced discordant combinations. She believes using these tools well can greatly boost efficiency.

Translated from Utsudo’s original Chinese column.

Recently I tried using AI to create a coherent story, added AI-generated images, and finally made a short video of about forty-some seconds.

AI-written stories: complete, but not quite coherent

On the text side, I was quite impressed—it’s more capable than I imagined. The story it wrote did have a beginning and an end, but it was very by-the-book with nothing special. Simply put, it lacked “creativity” and surprising developments.

AI images: prompts and character consistency

For images, to control them well I’d need to get better at chanting the prompt “spells”; otherwise the results are a mess. To get suitable images, you have to pull like a gacha, and unfortunately my luck is bad—I just couldn’t pull what I wanted. I also hadn’t studied prompts much, so I made lots of laughable things XD

I think those skilled prompt masters can easily create images matching what they have in mind, but untrained ordinary people like us can only pull randomly.

And the characters I pulled all looked different, so it was hard to carry one character through the whole piece—it felt like the character changed several times. I think there’ll be a solution in the future, or maybe there already is and I just don’t know it.

AI music combinations

Finally, music. I heard AI-“created” music is assembled from combinations. I’m not sure about other AIs, but the one I played with that day worked that way. Since it’s assembled, whether it produces something pleasant is, again, a gacha.

As I expected, I pulled several and got rather discordant music, and only at the end got a few things that were listenable. Finally I added subtitles and voice-over and exported the video.

Is writing stories with AI feasible?

From idea to actual production, it took under two hours. But the video was only about forty seconds long, so a longer story would take more time.

Overall, I think making things with AI is feasible. But if you want better quality, it takes effort—for example, quickly generating text and images with AI, then revising them by hand into more interesting images that fit the story’s flow.

More convenient AI tools will probably appear in the future, so keep an eye out.

If you can make good use of these tools, you may become one of the next generation’s success stories.

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Further reading

• Previous: Hey! I Heard You’re a Writer on Ghost Island #182: Are Novelists Well-Read?
• Start from the beginning: Hey! I Heard You’re a Writer on Ghost Island #01: Utsudo’s Debut — A Road to the Dream Covered in Frost
• Utsudo’s books

About the author

Utsudo is a Taiwanese light novelist and novelist VTuber with more than ten years in the industry and 40 commercially published print books. Her novel 《遺失的情書》 received a 2022 Ministry of Culture youth creative award. The 《嘿！聽說妳在鬼島當作家》 series records her experiences as a novelist in Taiwan.