I recently did an experiment with ChatGPT. I gave it a short outline that my brother wrote for a fanfic, gave it one of my books, and explained my writing method to it. I asked it to write the Mario outline in my style.

The problem with ChatGPT is that it imitates and doesn’t understand what it’s imitating. It becomes like a try-hard, wanting to please but missing the mark completely.

The story it gave me, I could have substituted Mario and it could have been some derivative story about an emotionally tortured hero going into a danger zone.

As a further experiment, I gave it a 30k excerpt of a story I’m trying to revive, and all of my notes. Then, I asked ChatGPT to finish/fix the story. I read through the first page and instantly noticed ChatGPT’s bad imitation. Unless you’re gonna go through, line by line, and rewrite everything, generative writing, at least in ChatGPT’s case, isn’t serviceable. I had it remove all the AI prose and instead, arrange my plot notes into the draft in a way that will make my rewrite a lot easier and less intimidating without me having to go back and forth from plot notes to draft.

If you want an instant critique, a super advanced spell and grammar checker, and a computer programme that can look up things like fiction writing and psychology relating to fictional characters and evaluate your writing accordingly, AI can be a good tool to use in editing with one caveat: you can’t always rely on it. If you feel AI is giving bad advice, you have to push back and tell it why its advice is stupid. Otherwise, AI will keep blathering on about ‘smooth this’, ‘over explain that’. Following AI too strictly will drown your author’s voice.

If anyone wants to read the overly dramatic Mario story, I’ve posted it below. It’s not a sample I particularly want critiqued, more an example/cautionary tale of AI being try-hard. Also, if you’re using ChatGPT in any story creation capacity, turn off the ‘Improve the model for everyone’ feature.

ChatGPT didn’t give me a title, so I’m calling this piece:

MARIO EDGELORD AND SOY BOY LUIGI

PROLOGUE

The first thing Mario thought when he saw the other kingdom was that it looked kinder than his.

That was the first wrong thought.

Not the last, not the worst, but the first thought he should’ve caught and crushed before it had time to mean anything. Kindness had shape, after all. Kindness had colour.

Rounded hills and bright grass and houses like soft, fat mushrooms grown for sleeping under. Blue sky without the bruised stain of storm-clouds cooked over battlements.

Roads that curved instead of marched. Doors that looked made to be opened by hands that had never held shields.

His kingdom had towers like spears.

This one had roofs like bread.

Mario stood in the chamber beneath Peach’s castle and stared through the wormhole no wider than a dinner table, watching another version of home breathe on the other side.

Not his home.

That mattered.

He told himself it mattered.

The little hole shimmered in the air between two gold clamps, the edges puckering and folding like the world had been wounded and refused to bleed properly. Through it came a smell that didn’t belong in the castle cellar: wet grass, warm soil, sugar from some bakery stall maybe, life carrying on without listening for footsteps in armour.

Behind him, Peach did not speak for a while.

That was worse than when she did.

Mario kept his hands loose at his sides. Old habit. His gloves hid how tight his fingers wanted to curl. Luigi stood close enough that Mario could hear his breath hitching, though his brother kept pretending he wasn’t scared by letting his mouth hang open in that soft, stupid way of his.

Soft. Stupid.

Alive.

Mario hated himself a little for thinking the first two before the third.

“It’s real,” Luigi whispered.

Of course it was real. Peach would not have brought them beneath the castle to stare at a trick. She did not waste darkness. If she led them down, past guards who looked away too quickly, past Toad servants who bowed so low their caps almost brushed the tiles, then there was a use for what waited here.

There was always a use.

Peach stepped beside Mario, close enough that the perfume on her dress cut through the cellar damp.

“Our Mushroom Kingdom,” she said.

Mario looked at her.

Her face was calm, which meant whatever she had decided had already been decided long before she brought them here. Her crown caught the wormhole-light and broke it into pieces across her cheeks. For a second, it made her look cracked.

Mario wished he hadn’t noticed.

“It ain’t ours,” he said.

Peach smiled, but only with the part of her mouth that knew other people expected mouths to do that.

“Not yet.”

Luigi made a small noise. Not quite protest. Not quite fear. The sort of noise he made when he’d already realised the answer but wanted someone else to say it first, so he wouldn’t be guilty of knowing.

Mario kept staring at Peach.

She didn’t look through the wormhole like someone seeing another country. She looked through it like someone seeing a room in her own house that had been locked by mistake.

“They have a castle,” Peach said. “They have Toads. They have us, in some form. They have roads, resources, settlements. And if they have all of that, then they have enemies too. Fear too. Weakness too.”

Mario swallowed.

On the other side, a Toad child ran past the hole, laughing at something outside the frame of the world.

Luigi flinched as if the sound had struck him.

Peach watched the child vanish. Her smile did not change.

“They won’t understand what we are until we’re already inside.”

There it was.

Not said as invade, because Peach rarely used ugly words when clean ones could make the same thing sound inevitable. Inside. Secure. Protect. Unify. Save. Words that marched in white gloves.

Mario thought of the west wall after Bowser’s last assault. Toads crushed into powder under stone. Fires in the gardens. Luigi digging with both hands until his nails split because he’d heard someone crying under a fallen beam, and by the time they lifted it, there’d been no face left to match the voice.

He thought of Peach standing in the ash with soot on her dress, looking younger than any princess had the right to look and older than any person should.

He thought of all the times mercy had waited until after they’d survived.

“What do you need us to do?” he asked.

Luigi turned to him too fast.

“Mario.”

Just his name. Plea, warning, accusation, all packed into three syllables by a brother who still believed there was a kind of goodness that happened before orders.

Mario didn’t look at him.

Peach did.

And that was worse.

“Go through,” she said softly. “Find the castle. Find their Peach. Learn how well defended it is.”

“And if they stop us?”

“They will.”

Mario’s chest tightened.

Peach’s eyes stayed on Luigi now, not him. She always knew where a thing was weakest. A bridge. A wall. A brother.

“They will because they’ll be afraid,” she said. “And because afraid people are easily led by whoever reaches them first.”

Luigi shook his head once, barely.

The wormhole pulsed. Grass-scent. Bakery-sugar. A kingdom that had not asked for them.

Mario told himself again that it was not home.

Then the first scream came from upstairs.

Not through the wormhole.

From their castle.

A Toad scream, thin and torn open, followed by boots battering across the floor above.

The chamber doors flew wide before Mario could reach for the hammer on his belt.

A Toad guard stumbled in.

No. Not stumbled.

Fell while still trying to run.

His spear clattered first. Then his knees. One side of his mushroom cap was split, red soaking through white spots and turning one of them pink, almost pretty in a way that made Mario’s stomach turn. The guard looked at Peach and seemed to forget titles, forgot bows, forgot fear of royalty because something bigger had eaten it.

“Princess,” he gasped. “The castle…”

Peach’s face hardened.

Mario was already moving.

The Toad reached for him with shaking fingers. Blood wet the cuff of Mario’s glove.

“M-Mario. It… It is you, right?”

That stopped him more surely than a blade.

Luigi whispered, “What?”

The Toad’s eyes flicked to the wormhole, then back to Mario, and in that flicker Mario understood too much without understanding anything. The injury. The terror. The castle above. The other kingdom through the wound in the world.

Someone had come first.

Or something wearing enough of him to make the question matter.

“The princess,” the Toad said. “The Castle…”

His voice broke there. Not dramatically. Not cleanly. It just gave up, like the rest of him was still trying to deliver the message and his throat had decided it had done enough.

Mario caught him before his face hit the floor.

He was lighter than he should’ve been. Everyone was lighter when carried in panic. The body stopped being a person and became a problem hands could solve.

Luigi dropped beside them, pale under his moustache.

“Hey. Hey, stay with us.”

The Toad’s eyes rolled.

Peach stepped over the fallen spear and looked toward the stairs.

No shock.

Mario hated that too.

“Mario,” she said.

He laid the guard down carefully. Too carefully, maybe. As if gentleness now could make up for whatever his hands were about to do next.

Upstairs, another crash shook dust from the ceiling.

Mario stood.

Luigi stood with him because he always did, even when every line of his body begged not to.

They ran.

The castle corridors had never felt so long. The red carpets buckled under Mario’s boots. Toad servants crouched behind pillars, under tables, inside alcoves too small to hide anything except the hope that being unseen counted as being safe. Mario saw them and did not stop. Each face pressed into his head and stayed there.

At the entrance hall, the doors hung open.

Beyond them, Toad Town was wrong.

Not destroyed. Worse.

Changed just enough that his mind had to keep comparing it to memory.

A cart overturned outside the bakery. The fountain spilling water red-brown from mud or blood or both. Smoke rising in three thin ropes from houses whose round windows stared blindly at the street. Toads peered from behind curtains, from cracked doors, from under market stalls, their mushroom caps trembling like flowers in bad weather.

Some looked at Mario with relief.

Some with fear.

One child screamed when he saw him.

That did more damage than the smoke.

Luigi heard it too. Mario knew because his brother’s step faltered.

“Don’t,” Mario said.

“I didn’t say anything.”

“Don’t.”

Because if Luigi asked why that child was scared of him, Mario might have to answer.

They moved through Toad Town while whispers followed them, flinching from one house to the next.

The Bros.

Mario and Luigi.

It’s them.

No, it’s not.

It is.

They headed for the castle, and Mario felt the shape of Peach’s order behind his ribs.

Find their castle.

Find their Peach.

Learn how well defended it is.

Except now the castle had found them first.

At the bridge, three Toad guards blocked the way.

Their armour was brighter than his kingdom’s. Less dented. Ceremonial maybe, made

for parades and festival duty, made for a world where guards still believed guarding meant standing in front of danger and telling it no.

The centre guard raised his spear.

“Stay back.”

Mario stopped.

Luigi nearly walked into him.

“We’re here to help,” Luigi said quickly. Too quickly. His voice did that thing where it climbed, trying to sound harmless and sounding guilty instead.

The guard’s spear shook.

Mario looked at the shaking point, then at the guard’s face.

Young.

Too young to have learned that shaking didn’t matter if you stabbed hard enough.

“You don’t know who came through here,” Mario said.

The guard swallowed.

“You did.”

Mario felt Luigi go still beside him.

There it was again. The wrong mirror. The accusation with his face inside it.

“I didn’t,” Mario said.

Even as he said it, he knew how useless truth became once fear had already chosen its shape.

Behind the guards, Peach’s Castle rose white and red against the sky, beautiful in a way his own castle had forgotten how to be. Flags snapped in the wind. Windows flashed.

Somewhere inside, another Peach was trapped or commanding or dead or waiting.

Somewhere inside was the answer.

The guard lowered his spear another inch.

Mario’s hand moved toward his hammer.

Luigi saw.

“Mario.”

Small word. Huge one.

The guard saw too.

And then everything became what it always became when frightened people ran out of words.

The first spear thrust went wide because the boy holding it did not want to kill him. Mario knocked it aside with his forearm, stepped in, and drove his shoulder into the guard’s chest hard enough to throw him back but not hard enough to break him.

He hoped.

He did not have time to check.

The second guard lunged for Luigi, and Luigi jumped too high, panic carrying him like a spring. His boot came down on the spear shaft, snapping it. The guard cried out. Luigi apologised mid-kick, which would have been funny in another world and unbearable in this one.

The third ran for the alarm bell.

Mario threw his hammer.

It struck the wall beside the Toad’s head with enough force to crack stone.

The Toad froze.

So did everyone else.

Mario breathed through his nose. Once. Twice.

The hammer dropped from the wall and hit the bridge.

No one moved.

He could feel Toad Town watching him. The curtains. The cracks. The children who would remember this version of him first.

Luigi’s voice came thin.

“Mario…”

Mario picked up the hammer.

He wanted to say, I missed on purpose.

He wanted that to matter.

Instead, he looked at the guard blocking the castle doors and said, “Move.”

The Toad did.

Not because he believed them.

Because he was scared.

Mario stepped past him into Peach’s Castle, and the smell of this kinder kingdom followed him in, grass and sugar and smoke, until it sat in his throat like something he might choke on later.

But not yet.

Not while the castle still had answers.

Not while his princess’s order still burned behind him.

Not while another Mario, or something close enough, had already taught this world to fear his face.