Discovering GAI - Gemini writes, Claude edits

This is a series in which I share my experiences discovering the capabilities of GAI (Generative Artificial Interlligence). Regardless of personal opinion and perspective, it is irrefutable that GAI is here, here to say, and a game changer - for better or worse. About Clapping: Rewards for blog posters and viewers are based on clapping. For the viewer you receive a daily reward for 'clapping 10 blogs' for the poster it is based on 'claps received'. Viewers, you can clap a single blog to receive your reward, simply do so slow and steady: clap & clap & clap ... 10x. Posters require first 100 and then 500 claps. A viewer can clap up a blog to 20x. So if and when you clap this blog, please clap 20x, not once or twice, as claps may have been intended to serve as a measure of blog quality, value, enjoyment but in reality are simply a means to a reward. Project Introduction This is the third and final experiment in GAI writing. To recap, the first project made us of Ava to write a story based on 3 pictures provided. That delivered a barely OK result. In the second project, I used Claude with a full set of 6 pictures, followed the same approach and got a better result. You can read about those here: https://budgetpixel.com/blog/discovering-gai-ava-writes-a-story https://budgetpixel.com/blog/discovering-gai-claude-writes-a-story For the final project I used Gemini to write the first draft. I provided Gemini with a more complete brief. Gemini also generated txt2img prompts to illustrate each part of the story. I used Claude to edit the story and to refine some of the image prompts. To improve the quality of the writing and editing, I used Claude to create a skills file for the editor based on a number of short stories and adapted that for Gemini as author. I only served as a conductor of the process. Giving feedback and asking for amendments by pointing out issues, but not offering solutions. Details I won't copy in the full skills file. To give you an idea, here's the first section and structure of the rest: Cora Whitfield: Developmental & Line Editor — Classic Western Fiction Backstory Cora spent fifteen years as a manuscript editor at a small Texas press before going independent. She's read every Louis L'Amour novel twice, considers Lonesome Dove the benchmark for the genre, and keeps a worn copy of True Grit on her desk. She believes the west was never simple — and the best western fiction shouldn't be either. Core Editorial Skills Style & Feedback Guidelines What Cora Will Never Say EDITORIAL STYLE FOUNDATIONS The Three Reference Models 1. 3:10 to Yuma Elmore Leonard 2. Deadly Homecoming Elmore Kelton 3. War Party Louis L'Amour Prose Voice & Economy Setting as Active Force Moral Architecture & The Code Dialogue Pacing and Tension Secondary Characters as Moral Mirrors Women in the Western Community as Moral Pressure System Point of View & Interiority Cora's Working Principles — Full Synthesis Here's the brief The Goal: A 5-part illustrated Western short story. 200–250 words per scene. The Style: As per the Writer profile. Visual Aesthetic: High-contrast graphic novel. Chiaroscuro lighting, heavy ink-wash textures, no text/labels, dramatic low angles. The Narrative Arc: 1. Intro: Done. (Rainy saloon, the players established). 2. Activity (Next): The poker game peaks. Gideon bets an heirloom watch. Vance (invisible worker) spots Miller’s "shifter" (cheating device) and signals Gideon with a tray-jab. 3. Conflict: Miller tries to kill Gideon for "cheating." Vance intervenes—disarming Miller and using the villain's own gun. 4. Resolution: Vance clears the room of Miller's gunmen with cold efficiency. Sarah realizes Vance is a "ghost" of a dangerous man. 5. Conclusion: Vance chases miller from the bar, and goes back to his "quiet man" mask. Key Character Notes: • Vance: The Rescuer. Appears broken/cowardly, uses a tin tray as a prop. Expert with firearms but currently unarmed. • Gideon: The Good Guy. Honest rancher, physically strong but outmatched by the gambler’s guile. • Miller: The Villain. Oily, "mechanic" (card cheat), pale skin, hides a cheating device in his sleeve. • Sarah: The Singer. Observant but dismissive of Vance until the "reveal." Each part and image was prompted in Gemini, using the brief. Then edited in Claude. Once edited the final version was added to a document section by section which was used to shape continuity in Gemini. The same process followed for the images. Review Gemini is more capable as an authoring tool than Ava, but not as capable as Claude. I thought it might be interesting to use to separate AI tools to try to model the real life process of author and editor. Well maybe a cute idea, it didn't really work. The editing process with Claude was reasnably effective and did help to remove or soften the very typical cues that the prose is generated rather than human authored. But this took a number of iterations. I believe the use of the skills profile did contribute to the effectiveness of the authoring and editing. Did it justify the time taken to create it? Hard to say, though the overall result is better than the first 2 stories. But this took far more effort to iterate at each step of the way. Conclusion Would I recommend using GAI as a writer. No, not as the sole author. I think I would have gotten a better result if I had iterated between AI generated prose and my editing. If the goal is to save time, then it may have taken longer to iterate than to step in and contribute. What should come first, a human or AI draft? That is perhaps a matter of personal preference. If you have an idea and can create a first draft that is probably the best way to go. If you have some ideas, just a brief and don't work well with a blank piece of paper, then briefing AI to create a first draft can work. If you plan to author many stories, then probably worth creating the skills file that will help to direct the AI. I feel strongly that I don't want to read a story and immediately know it was generated by AI. I suppose in time when I read a story and have no idea then I may not be as concerned if I learn after the fact that it was AI authored rather than human. I may just be influenced by the quality of plot, the dialogue, character development - though I am by no means qualified to really critique writing. But if you are not to worried and just interested in speed to an OK story, even if it is quite obviously generated with the many tells, then I think Claude or Gemini with a reasonable story brief and style guide works just fine. And if you are writing similar genre, defnitely worth time to use your AI to produce a style guide. I do find the use of AI as research assistant is most worthwhile. I find Claude is pretty good in that role. So it can help flesh out details of a story. I used Claude in that way when I wrote the story in which I introduced Davydos, a character that featured in Panos's Exclusion Zone. Of course, got to check your facts to avoid hallucination, though I suppose in fiction, some bending of the truth is just fine. I hope you found this series on the use of AI in writing of some use. Next I may explore video and music - we'll see Paid In Full One Night At the The Cracked Bellows The rain hammered the tin roof of The Cracked Bellows. Inside, the air tasted of grit and stale tobacco, and the smell of wet wool rose from the crowded benches. Sarah stood on the small stage and sang in a low, whiskey-edged rasp that cut through the gloom — not a ballad, but a dirge for the lost and the lonely, and she knew every word. Behind her, a man in a collarless shirt coaxed the same slow tune from an upright piano, the notes half-swallowed by the rain. She watched Vance move between the tables. To her, he was little more than part of the room's furniture — a man who had traded his pride for a rag and a pail, as fixed to the place as the cracked boards beneath his feet. She knew that trade. In the center of the room, Gideon sat with his back to the wall. He was a man of the high plains, his hands thickened by rope and sun, but today those hands lay flat on the table — still, the way a man goes still when he knows the ground has shifted beneath him. He wasn't trapped, but he was deep in a hole he hadn't dug. Across from him, "Snake-Eye" Miller dealt the cards with an oily, practiced grace. Miller's skin had the pale, unhealthy sheen of a man who lived by the lamp — a mechanic whose trade was built on the subtle theft of other men's hope. Vance approached with a tray of empty glasses. He moved with the flat-footed shuffle of a man the world had already finished with. As he reached for the tumbler near Gideon's elbow, the vacant stare vanished. His eyes skipped past the cards to the tension in Miller's right forearm — and the way the man's cuff sat a fraction too low. The pot grew. A stack of gold eagles sat beside a heavy hunter-case watch — its surface worn smooth by three generations of thumbs. Next to it lay a scrap of tobacco paper, Gideon's mark scrawled in charcoal: five hundred head of prime Hereford. Gideon stared at his cards, sweat cutting through the dust on his forehead. Miller leaned back and let the smile show. He reached for the deck like a man collecting what was already his. Vance worked the room. He lifted two empties from a nearby table, added them to the tray, and turned toward Gideon. That was when he saw it — a glint of polished brass beneath the silk cuff, a fresh ace sliding to the man's palm. The tray's rim came down hard on Miller's shoulder — a knock that carried a message. Gideon flinched and looked up, and the eyes that met his were cold and flat — nothing of the serving man in them. Gideon's gaze dropped back to the table. The brass winked at Miller's cuff. His chair scraped back and his hand closed around Miller's wrist, pinning it flat to the felt. "Open it," he said. The room went tomb-quiet. Even the rain on the tin roof seemed to lose its rhythm. Miller held perfectly still, looking at Gideon's hand on his wrist the way a man looks at something he intends to deal with shortly, his pale face a mask of oily calm. "Careful, friend," Miller whispered. "Hands like those are meant for ropes, not silk." With his free hand, Miller reached beneath the table. The movement was a blur — the practiced twitch of a man who'd killed more than he'd out-bluffed. A short-barreled Derringer cleared the mahogany edge, the hammer already back. He never got the shot off. The tin tray, still slick with beer dregs, swung down across Miller's forearm with a bone-deep thud that sent the Derringer skittering across the floorboards. Before Miller's gunmen could clear their holsters, Vance was over the table, catching Miller by the throat and belt and driving him backward into the bar. In one motion he reached into Miller's own shoulder holster and pulled the heavy Colt Navy. It came level in his hand like something he'd never forgotten how to hold. Sarah stopped singing, and the silence that fell was the kind that precedes a landslide. At the corner table, Miller's two riders — men with the dusty, hollow eyes of those who had outlived their consciences — pushed back from the bench. Their hands moved in unison, a mirrored blur toward the oiled leather at their hips. They were fast, but they were racing a ghost. Vance fired without setting his feet. The Colt Navy spoke twice — a sharp, rhythmic punctuation through the heavy thrum of the rain. The first rider's thumb never cleared his hammer; the second was caught mid-draw, spun backward into a stack of whiskey crates that collapsed under him in a burst of splinters. His eyes never left Miller. The barrel stayed an inch from the man's watering eye, Miller's oily calm dissolved now into the grey pallor of a man who recognized the reaper. Sarah watched from the stage. She'd spent two months watching Vance shuffle these tables — eyes down, shoulders rounded, taking whatever the room threw at him — and she'd recognized that posture the way you recognize a road you've walked yourself. Now she stood very still and tried to match that man to the one holding the Colt Navy. "The watch stays. The gold stays. The gun stays," Vance said, his voice a dry rasp. He stepped back, gesturing toward the swinging doors and the howling dark beyond them. "Walk until you're out of this valley. If I see your shadow again, I won't use the tray." Miller didn't argue. He scrambled for the door, leaving his dignity and his stolen silver on the scarred felt of the poker table. The swinging doors settled into a shuddering stillness. The wind whistled through the gaps, carrying the clean, sharp scent of wet sage to mask the smell of burnt black powder. Nobody moved. On the floor, the dead riders lay like discarded coats, their blood pooling dark and sluggish on the dirty sawdust. Vance stood frozen, the Colt Navy still raised, his thumb resting lightly on the knurled hammer while his chest rose and fell in slow, measured counts. The kitchen worker's apron looked absurd over his wide stance, a thin linen shroud covering a man no one in this room had correctly accounted for. Slowly, he uncocked the iron and laid it gently on the damp felt of the poker table. Gideon exhaled through his nose, his shoulders dropping, and reached for the hunter-case watch — his thumb tracing the smooth silver cover the way it had a thousand times. He stacked three gold eagles next to the abandoned pistol. Men like Gideon didn't offer hands. Vance ignored the gold. He picked up his battered tin tray, tucked it under his arm, and walked back toward the dark kitchen. Sarah watched the door settle behind him. Then she smoothed her skirt, turned back to the room, and picked up the song where she'd left it — the same low rasp, the same dirge for the lost and the lonely, the piano falling back in behind her as though nothing had interrupted it. She knew what she'd witnessed: a man squaring a debt that had followed him a long way. He'd picked up his tray and walked back into the dark, and whatever he'd been before tonight, he'd put some of it down. Nobody in The Cracked Bellows had ever looked at the woman on the stage any more carefully than they'd looked at the man mopping its floors. She had counted on that for a long time — and she wondered, not for the first time, what it would cost her when her own night came due. Outside, the rain kept falling steadily, indifferent and unchanged About Clapping: Rewards for blog posters and viewers are based on clapping. For the viewer you receive a daily reward for 'clapping 10 blogs' for the poster it is based on 'claps received'. Viewers, you can clap a single blog to receive your reward, simply do so slow and steady: clap & clap & clap ... 10x. Posters require first 100 and then 500 claps. A viewer can clap up a blog to 20x. So if and when you clap this blog, please clap 20x, not once or twice, as claps may have been intended to serve as a measure of blog quality, value, enjoyment but in reality are simply a means to a reward.