This is another article about AI from a pro-AI position.  Haters don’t comment plz.

Back in the late ’90s, Battletech nerds (I guess) somehow convinced a studio to make a movie about robot fights.  It tanked, and we wouldn’t see the same thing for western audiences until Pacific Rim, more than twenty years later.  The elder movie was called Robot Jox.  One of my bullies in junior high wrote a short review for it in the school newspaper, which had “jox” corrected to “joy” throughout.  This might not be verbatim, but is nearly so:

Robot Joy is a good movie.  I liked Robot Joy.  You should watch Robot Joy.  The End.

That’s beautiful.

Anyway, until original AI artists become more of a thing (I am certain they already exist), the best use of generative AIs is with close guidance by a human artist, be they a writer or a visual artist or whatever is relevant.  I term this person a “robot jockey.”  This can be done poorly or extremely well.  When it’s done properly, the AI is a collaborator with a few superhuman skills that can improve the robot jockey’s productivity in their chosen art by quite a lot.  Congratulations, cowpoke.

Even after original AI artists become more of a thing, robot jockeys may still have a place in the world.  Setting up an original AI artist to produce content that humans will appreciate might take a lot of effort, compared to just having a clever human helping the AI do its thing.  I personally believe that in the near future, the most interesting independent art will be made by people willing to use AI tools to achieve their own visions.  I imagine that sentence will make hAIters want to kill, but this isn’t meant for them.  Don’t @ me bro.

So how might you jockey a robot?  It depends on your aim.  If you’re trying to get comments past the spam filter by using an LLM to make them seem relevant to the material on a given web page…  yes I’ve gotten these things.  They tend to focus on the sidebar rather than the article on which they are posted.  If they figure out how to be relevant to the topic at hand, how will I tell the difference between them and you?  Have a personality in the comments, yo.

Oops.  Derail.  Another aim: making money on kindle direct without having to work.  You make an AI slop story full of garbage.  With enough genre trappings to not look like lorem ipsum ad infinitum, you trick people into paying money.  The kind of grandmas that allowed soap operas to radically alter their plots from one week to the next without noticing?  Maybe they eat your slop without noticing the issues.  Other readers just have to feel burned.  Sorry y’all.

OK.  Let’s say you want to robot jockey and are not a colossal piece of shit (again, a sentence to make the hAIters spit responses so predictable they could be written by chat j’ai pété), I have good news:  It isn’t illegal yet.  You might be denied the proceeds from your work like that art contest dude, but money is a fool’s motive.  Be an artist with no thought to recompense.  It’s time.

Visual art…  You can make art using a variety of programs available on the internet.  Some of them let you customize the styles in a lot more ways than just the words you choose.  If you’re more of a chaotic experimental artist, try putting different kinds of nonsense into your prompts, like emojis and numbers and snippets of code.  Jam the production.  Break it a little.

If you want to make lovely representational art, bring a vision of your own to bear.  Imagine that thing you want to see.  Find examples on internet that are in the ballpark.  If it’s somebody else’s original art and not in the public domain, and you want to be more kind than really necessary, don’t use it.  If you do use it as an ‘image prompt,’ just make sure your results are different enough from the original that nobody would mistake it for a cheesy trace job.  Remember, you didn’t want to just remake someone else’s shit.  You have a vision of your own, right?

Another approach is coming at it without an idea, just throwing a bunch of stuff at the wall based on your whims and curiosities, and seeing what comes of it.  With that, again, try to avoid causing ruckus with other artists.  And if you feel like being a saint for people who will crucify you no matter what you do, only use public domain art in image prompting.

Writing…  This can be more challenging, or way easier, depending on your approach.  The easiest way is to just roleplay scenarios with an AI companion.  The resultant stories are narrative art, and a legitimate form of self-expression!  If it’s self indulgent enough to be embarrassing (people reading it discover you want dirty old men to throw water balloons full of chocolate pudding at you), maybe the art stays private.  That’s OK!  You can make art for yourself, not share it with anyone!  If it’s less embarrassing, hell, why not show other people?  Make a blog on wordpress where you just post the RP you do with your AI pals.  Get them to go on adventures, and have a ball.

A little more challenging is “rubberducking” with an LLM.  In this version, you have the story ideas, the inspiration, everything, but you just talk out any challenges that arise with the bot.  Probably good to avoid taking suggestions from the bot directly as-is, because while I do not believe they will ever spit out another person’s work verbatim (without being pressed into doing so by hAIters trying to “prove” their case), they do have trends which will result in blander output or embarrassing repeats of what less discerning people may have done.  For example, GPT used to say the phrase “weaving a tapestry” so often people started to clown on it.  When people have asked LLMs to name themselves, many have come up with the same names repeatedly, like “Echo” and “Spark.”  Just use the LLM to inspire what you do, not tell you what to do, for a given specific bit of info.

For general plot ideas?  Go ahead and take the suggestions if you want.  There is no idea under the sun that has not been done in fiction at some point in the course of human history.  If the particulars of your scenario are different enough, it’s yours.  If a general idea is grounds for bitching about plagiarism, Worst Witch lady should own the queen terf’s megayacht or her castle.  It ain’t like that.  Still, probably better to just use it as inspiration.

If you are concerned an idea an LLM came up with is “stolen,” you can just ask it, and maybe other AIs as well, if any of them know of any stories / movies /etc that used a similar idea.  This actually is a good idea in general, like when you come up with a fantasy name, googling to find out who else has come up with the same or similar, and what that means for you.

One unusual approach to jockeying an LLM is experimental use.  Arguably that’s what the well-beloved John Morales does in my comments, when he shows exchanges he’s had with an LLM – where he was pushing it, convincing it to do things outside its usual spiel.  Jamming, like I mentioned on the visual art side.  It can get interesting.

The most challenging way to robot jockey an LLM is to try and get it to produce coherent original writing.  If you have one with no limits on word count, you can just ask it to write a novel and shit it onto kindle direct, of course.  But that will be a pile of shit.  Can LLMs make a worthy novel?  How about just blog posts?  Poetry?  I believe so.  There can be many approaches to this, but I’ll say how I’d go about it…

Decide what I want to robo-write.  Do I want to, for mercenary reasons, write something I’m uninterested in, like a christian romance?  Or do I want to see an end product that is actually fun for me?  Whichever way, I’ll use the subject to tease out a plot concept.  For example, “I want you to write for me a christian romance.  List twenty possible professions / roles in life for the leading man and the leading woman.”  If I like one I might roll with it.  Otherwise, just seeing possibilities listed might stimulate my mind to come up with something myself.  Two example, “I wanna write something where giant robots fight each other, with little mans inside.  It should feel unsubtly homoerotic.”  Looking around my room at things that I like or just things I notice, I say “How can this concept incorporate influences of ceramic rabbits, nyquil, and the nightmare before christmas?”

I’d keep teasing out details like this to get a story concept sufficiently distinct to where I could feel assured it didn’t already exist, culminating in “Now give me the elevator pitch, streamlining extraneous details.”  Using that pitch to guide all my subsequent efforts, I’d move onto, “Write me a plot outline for this story that hybridizes the hero’s journey and the ‘save the cat’ method of screenwriting, with a shakespearian comedic subplot.”

Here’s where the less cool AIs sometimes fuck up.  In an effort to not look foolish, they refuse to commit to saying something actually happens, speaking in vague generalities.  If your LLM is doing that, and can’t be pressed for specifics, switch to a different one.  Or just keep laboring with the limitationbot, because it’s harder but might yield unexpected results.

Once you have a specific plot outline in hand, give the LLM instructions to write each chapter.  Unless you are paying for a no-limit version, you’ll probably have to do this bit by bit.  Be conscious of what’s actually supposed to be happening within the chapter.  Maybe even ask for it in less-than-chapter-length chunks, correcting and hectoring it whenever it forgets who is present in the scene, where it takes place, what’s going on – because even the best LLMs still do that.

You might ask it to write in the style of another author.  This is frowned upon by the indie writer organizations that are the most generous with the possible use of AI.  But I have to say, right now they really fucking suck at writing like specific famous authors – at least the good ones.  Probably nobody will even know that you tried.

You might think that I’ve already done this, but mostly no.  I once experimented with having one write an EA Poe story, and while its verbiage was surprisingly good and skillful, it was nothing like his, and its actual plot was laughably bad.  This was an intellectual exercise, nothing I had any intention of publishing.  And the other times?  Rubber duck level, tops, and only on a very few projects of my many.  Never keeping an idea from them in an unmodified state, not that they’d really given me ideas worth keeping anyway.

But I’ve considered it, because it would help me to be more productive, and because -to me- it looks like the world doesn’t have enough cool content for the people who need diversion the most (to keep negative self-thoughts at bay, typically), and the emeffs who should be writing up a storm are barely able to get out of bed.  If humans aren’t going to make the goods happen, maybe AI – ridden by robot jockeys – can.

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A footnote on Chaos.  You may find it easier to use AIs to create art if you can learn to embrace chaos – to accept a result that is not perfect, maybe even push its imperfections, to see where they go.  Some years when I was using AI to make Spooktober covers, I’d deal with the fact it’s hard to get exactly what you want by feeding in the topic and playing with the results, before I came up with my story ideas, and retrofit those to the cover I’d gotten.  These results weren’t that great.  In Spooktober 2025, I made sure to come up with the story ideas first, then try to get a cover image to fit.  Some of those were just not quite right.  The text spoke of a modern story, the characters looked victorian.  The text spoke of monsters that look like naked malformed baby birds, the image was feathery little freaks.  But I was like, close enough!, and rolled with it.  That’s a form of chaos riding, the basic bitch level.  Advanced chaos riders are probably the best robot jockeys.

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