That One Situation Where it Seems an LLM Might Help
- Uncategorized
- June 25, 2026
Right now, I’m writing a story, and I have got to a scene that is, frankly, the exact hypothetical scenario that AI fans think LLMs are useful for. It’s a bit of incidental dialogue that I need to establish worldbuilding and character, but which does not really do any lifting for the larger plot.
Frankly, one of the reasons I’m bouncing off it and writing this instead is that it’s an exchange that I find a little bit boring.
So, the LLM argument goes, it’s easier to edit existing copy than to write from scratch (a controversial view on an issue where there are many passionately held and contradictory opinions, often from the same writer). Why not simply tell an LLM “Write me a scene of dialogue where (for example) a chef argues with his delivery guy about the quality of the pomegranates he’s been getting, 200-500 words.”
Will the output be what you want in the finished manuscript? No! Even the LLM enthusiast would say that the point here is to have something down so you can tweak and rewrite and identify problems until you get something good.
Let’s pretend, for a moment, that AI isn’t driving data centres to suck up entire (often Black) communities’ drinking water, that it hasn’t snuck into our libraries and piracy websites and personal emails and document folders and stolen our work to remix and repackage and sell as something new. Let’s pretend that this technology is not being pushed by, and I’m using no hyperbole here, Bond villains.
After all, we do this with soft drinks and videogame consoles and political candidates all the time, why not AI as well?
Let’s also, while we’re at, get away from the deep moral offense I feel at the very idea of getting a machine to do creative work. Let’s pretend that realising a text or image is AI doesn’t make me feel like I’ve seen a person accidentally cut themselves, revealing not blood, but insides that are hollow as an Easter egg.
So, if we ignore all that, doesn’t this seem like a pretty good use case for an LLM?
Crappy Little Elves
Put it another way. A lot of writers, good writers, when faced with the situation I currently face, will write “the shit version.”
John Swartzwelder explains it best in this interview with The New Yorker that is behind a paywall so you’ll just have to trust me on that.
“Since writing is very hard and rewriting is comparatively easy and rather fun, I always write my scripts all the way through as fast as I can, the first day, if possible, putting in crap jokes and pattern dialogue—“Homer, I don’t want you to do that.” “Then I won’t do it.” Then the next day, when I get up, the script’s been written. It’s lousy, but it’s a script. The hard part is done. It’s like a crappy little elf has snuck into my office and badly done all my work for me, and then left with a tip of his crappy hat. All I have to do from that point on is fix it. So I’ve taken a very hard job, writing, and turned it into an easy one, rewriting, overnight. I advise all writers to do their scripts and other writing this way. And be sure to send me a small royalty every time you do it.”
Why not use the LLM as the crappy elf?
Well first, writing is a long series of choices, conscious and unconscious, but still essentially yours. Now, those choices continue in the editing process, but choosing to write this or write that, is qualitatively different from choosing to accept or change the output of a text scrambling machine. I don’t want to give those choices up. That’s true of LLMs, it is true of the idea of paying someone in a copy farm to churn out the shit first draft for me to edit, it is true of literal crappy elves. My book. My story. You can’t have it.
The LLM Can't Learn For You
But this is about more than possessiveness and ego (although it is about those as well).
Writing a story, especially at this very early stage of the story, is a learning process. I don’t know who this (let’s say) chef is yet. I’m still figuring out what she cares about, how she copes with problems, how she presents herself to the world and why that’s a lie. I don’t know about the world she lives in – how the pomegranate supply chain works, or the everyday worries and concerns of the delivery drivers who work within it. An LLM just cannot give that to me.
What might give it to me is more research, reading some more articles on pomegranate horticulture. Maybe I need to track down someone who works in catering and buy them the precisely two pints necessary to get them to tell me all the gruesome details people don’t know about kitchen procurement.
LLMs gather data from everywhere, but they understand none of it, they are the definition of the old “Chinese Room” thought experiment. For that data to be useful, someone needs to not only understand it, but imagine how those understandings might look from the perspective of a person that currently only exists inside my head.
Maybe I need to do the dishes, go for a walk, or, if I get really desperate, go through the edits on another book that I actually ought to be working on today, and maybe that will dislodge the thought I need.
Of course, there is another solution, and it is one that the LLM would never be capable of coming up with.
Maybe the reason I find this scene difficult is because it’s boring, so I don’t want to write it. If I keep coming at this scene from different angles and keep coming out with that result, it might be that I need to junk the whole scenario and think of something to go here that I actually am excited to write, which means the reader is more likely to feel that way too.
No LLM is capable of knowing that.
So, the only crappy elf who can write this draft is me.
Chris Farnell is the writer of Fermi’s Progress and Fermi’s Wake, two collections of stories about a spaceship whose FTL engine blows up every single planet they encounter.
To read Fermi’s Progress, buy the season pass from Scarlet Ferret (which includes all four Fermi’s Progress novellas in one volume), or the paperback from Amazon.
To read Fermi’s Wake, buy the Fermi’s Wake season pass at Scarlet Ferret, buy the complete e-book at Amazon, or get all the individual novellas in the series from Amazon here.
