I know what this community thinks about AI. I know what Lemmy in general thinks about AI. It’s bad, obviously. Writers like me don’t like to get their job, their dream snatched by lifeless imitation. So why am I using it? Simply put, I do not think of AI as artists but I do think of them as “assistants”. They’ll help you kickstart but they won’t drive for you. If you try to let them drive, there’ll be accidents, mistakes. I myself am not too good at naming things. Hell, most writers don’t put too much thought into the names. I simply use AI as though it’s a somewhat coherent name generator. I’ll probably be downvoted but still wanted to express my little opinion.
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you get funnier names if you just open a history textbook or old census and flip to a random page
I like this, I also like the idea of using actors names and terrible impressions. It’s a specific style of play for sure, so it doesn’t work for everyone. But I do enjoy the silliness.
probably wouldn’t work well in a worthwhile story where names have meanings or characters possess multiple names (which they should)
see: genshin ars goetia/commedia dell’arte naming and the linked meanings, aether/lumine meaning, etc.
probably wouldn’t work well in a worthwhile story
Coulda just stopped there.
I will always hand-pick names for important characters, but I will admit to occasionally opening up a name generator when I need something to call the background character that’s gonna show up in a total of two scenes.
I’ve seen similar comments from users in the ttrpg/world building comm say that they use LLMs for similar purposes, so it’s not going to get you eviscerated.
I’ll probably be downvoted but still wanted to express my little opinion.
No downvotes on our instance. We have this bear instead
I do think AI is good for what I’d term ‘ideation’, ask it for suggestions and it can bring up a lot of disparate and or related concepts in one space for you to think through and consider as options. Names would be an obvious example, so I dig it.
Here are some engaging and enigmatic names for your characters:
Ann, Bob, Dan, Fran, Gene, Helen, Jim, Kim, Lou, Mary, Nina, Paul, Ron, Steve, Tina, Will.
Would you like me to assist you with doing all the other parts of writing?
This isn’t something I’d do myself, not necessarily because I think it’s a “bad” use of AI, more just because I kinda enjoy coming up with names. Not to mention that it is in a sense easier to come up with names if you’re working with a fictional world with its own conlang(s): for one, you can take your conlang’s roots and make compounds or adjust them slightly, and by coining these names expand on the fictional culture by showing what sorts of things the people value… But also, you can, for instance, name a character a respelling of “Psych-Killer Qu’est-ce que c’est” and pass it off as a perfectly normal and totally not on the nose name for a serial killer.
I mean, it’s like a painter saying they’re not good at picking colors, so they have a computer program that picks the right colors for each part, but they do the rest of the work.
Like yeah, you’re still in there doing a lot of it, and at that level no one would even be able to tell just by reading it, but knowing about it definitely dampens any interest I’d have in reading it.
I think the adage that’s been adopted for other AI use gets some work here - If you can’t be bothered to spend the effort writing it, others won’t be bothered to spend the effort reading it.
Like yeah it’s not the end of the world, but names are part of the fiction. I’d have the same criticism if you were rolling dice on a random name table for similar reasons (except the table also chops down a tree every time you roll).
