Our Position on Artificial Intelligence

AI can be the subject of strong opinions in the writing community, with good reason. The artificial intelligence landscape has shifted fast over the last couple of years, and we realize many authors checking out Fablehenge for the first time will have questions about the implications of our AI features for their work. We wanted to clarify our position and help you understand how AI works in Fablehenge.

First and foremost, we believe that an author should write every word of their published story themselves. We do not, and will not, support generative AI to create your actual story content. There are other tools that support that kind of workflow and we respect them, but the people who use them are not our target audience.

Our main reason for this stance is philosophical: Generating text with AI teaches you how to generate text with AI. It does not teach you how to write or improve in the craft of writing. By now we’ve all encountered the waves-upon-waves of AI generated “nontent” appearing more and more on the Internet. We want to support authors who are invested in crafting their own unique work and cultivating their own voice.

Another reason is purely legal: Our target audience is professional and aspiring novelists who intend to publish or self-publish their work. The tech industry is noncommittal towards what they call the “legal grey area” around AI, which we find shortsighted. To us, it’s perfectly clear: AI generated content is not your own work, and is not copyrightable. It is kinda fun to generate a story with AI for your own amusement (I’ve done it myself), but work that contains generated content is not saleable. An author using Fablehenge would not need to cite AI as a reference for a published work.

That said, we have looked for ways that using AI can support authors without trying to do their work for them. An excellent example of this is our auto-tagging feature. Fablehenge tags are strictly for your own reference. The more accurately you attach tags to your Fablehenge scenes, the better the tools that rely on these tags will work. Having the AI suggest these tags when you miss adding one helps you stay organized, even though it doesn’t change the content of your work in a meaningful way.

Similarly, our reference image generation tool is meant as a fun way to see how your characters look. If you feed your character sheet into this tool and the AI is able to generate an image of your character that matches the one you have in your head, then you’ve probably written a good character sheet! These images are meant for your reference as you work. You would not, however, be able to use them as the cover artwork for your published book.

The “generate outline” feature is intended to take your detailed written summary and turn it into a set of scenes to populate the outline. Our prompt for this feature is designed to prevent the AI from “taking liberties” like inserting extra scenes into the story that did not come from your description. We do expect that the outline will not completely match your intended story and you’ll have to tweak it, but it can save a bit of time in generating the major plot points for you.

Finally, our “AI Feedback” prompt is designed to provide comments that will point out areas that you can improve the story, much like an alpha- or beta-reader would. And much like an alpha- or beta-reader’s feedback, those comments may or may not be helpful, and you should make your own decisions about how to incorporate that feedback. The prompts we use are designed to not generate large sections of replacement test to copy-paste into your manuscript, but to give you ideas for how to modify it on your own.

As one counter-example, we decided not to add a “brainstorm ideas” feature to the product. We know some writers have trouble coming up with ideas, and wondered if brainstorming would be a good task for an AI. However, after experimenting for a while, we determined that this was too close to doing the writer’s work for them. Coming up with ideas is a core part of what it means to be an author, and we are not currently comfortable outsourcing that task to an AI.

In general, if the AI can perform a task that would otherwise distract you from actually writing, we will consider it, but if it is a skill that is integral to the act of writing, we feel our authors will want to master that skill, rather than outsourcing it.

In its current forms, artificial intelligence cannot compete with the best human writers, artists, graphics designers, or programmers. However, it can help people who do not have those skills to do things at a basic level, which they would otherwise not be able to do at all without a great deal of training and practice.

For example, I was recently talking to a graphics designer who has been using AI to generate a mock website from his designs. I think that’s a fine use of AI; he can interact with the designs a little before handing it to a web developer to implement the production website.

As another example, I was chatting with my editor about how we both use AI last year. She tends to use AI to generate the first draft of (for example) an e-mail, and then she edits it into what she actually intended it to say. Editing is her core competency. In contrast, as a writer, I always write the first draft of the message myself. Then I ask the AI to give me feedback on what I’ve written. In the end, the AI has helped either of us to create a better e-mail message than we would have without it, but we take totally different approaches.

While those are reasonable ways to use AI, our mission is to enable authors to focus on doing what they do best. It is NOT to enable non-authors to do a mediocre version of what authors do. We make all our decisions about incorporating AI features into the product with a focus on how we can best help and support authors.

We hope this information has helped clarify how Fablehenge’s Pro features can work for you. And just by the way, AI features are exclusive to the Pro tier. If you’re curious about them, great! If not, the Free and Hobby tiers do not include any AI functionality, and are still a great way to keep your story organized. Feel free to give it a try, and as always, reach out with any questions or comments.