My Weekend Fling with Google Gemini
Or how I humored a naked emperor for five days.
It all started with me looking over a PDF in Google Drive. It was a chapter of the EGORAVEN: HEIR OF THE FIRST UNICORN novelization (which you can read here), and I noticed something out of my periphery. Within seconds, a summary of the PDF I had opened popped up.
I am not against artificial tech as a whole. You will never see me disparage medical AI that finds cancer five years before it develops. I will sing the praises of the Samsung AI that translates my live-speaking English into actual functional Japanese. I pay a subscription service to Grammarly to make sure my writing is written and spelled correctly. I am sure many services utilize AI tech in the background to make my life easier without me knowing.
What I have railed against is tech that is built on the backs of hundreds of thousands of creators without permission or compensation. Tech that is being wielded as a bludgeon to gut industries in an attempt to separate valuable skills from the people who spent decades learning and honing them, all for the intention not to pay professionals for their work and pass the savings to shareholders. Tech that is promised to be a beacon of the future but instead are faked, over-hyped models that offer mediocrity at best. The poster child for Enshittification, if you will.
I have rebuked Adobe AI, shutting off all attempts to force me to use this “option” that not only do I not have interest in but renders my computer unusable as thanks just by being available. But little did I know, another company was waiting in the wings.
Gemini is Google’s answer to Chat-GPT, another program I have never used and intend to keep that way. As far as I know, this “option” was available for Google Workspace users for a while, but I managed to avoid it until now. No longer satisfied with running ignored in the background, Gemini decided to attract my attention once and for all.
It took me a bit to realize what was happening. No matter what file I opened, almost immediately, a summary would pop up. Granted, the summaries were clunky at best, but they were enough to pique my curiosity. I have to admit, I was intrigued.
The first thing I did was ask Gemini marketing questions. What’s the age range for EGORAVEN? What’s the reading level? Who is the audience? Create an audience avatar, etc. How do I promote EGORAVEN? Where do I find the audience for EGORAVEN, etc… Gemini didn’t give me any new information, but it did confirm what I already knew about my work. There was some relief in knowing that I was on the right track. But just as quickly, I began to see cracks. I asked it to give me a pitch for EGORAVEN at comic conventions. It gave me the cringiest script you will NEVER hear come out of my mouth. Okay, it's time for a different angle.
I asked Gemini to analyze EGORAVEN and give me a list of story themes, tropes, and character relationships to each other. This is where I have to admit it got fun. It’s not that I didn’t know all this already, but it was cool to get everything compiled in one place with summaries and bullet points. Again, the writing style was clunky, but it wouldn’t take much to edit and make useable.
However, the cracks began to show pretty quickly. Anything longer than a short summary began to “tire” Gemini, and the quality of the answers would fall apart. I asked it to make a back cover blurb for the novel and it popped out a word salad that would be easier for me to rewrite from scratch than edit.
I still pushed on. I asked it to tell me about the characters and stories, and I had a good time having a “conversation” with Gemini about EGORAVEN, which I craved to have with actual people but have been unable to do so. I spent hours enjoying watching Gemini interpret themes and scenes and talk about my characters. I gave it access to my archive on Google Workspace, and for a little while, I felt like I was geeking out with a very dedicated fan.
This actually might be indicative of a completely separate personal/creative issue that has nothing to do with tech, but that’s navel-gazing for another time.
But like before, it didn’t take long before Gemini began to make up facts and relationships that didn’t exist in my narrative. Gemini was doing the infamous hallucinating that tech bros were begrudgingly admitting the AI was prone to do. But it didn’t bother me too much since, by this point, I was only playing and trying to figure out how useful this was.
Although I have to admit, I was a little surprised I had yet to experience anything that made me go, "I NEED THIS." So far, Gemini was just a souped-up Grammarly or Google, regurgitating my own info and trying to pretend it’s telling me something new while making up bits and bobs in between.
After tiring of fangirling over my own work, I went back to testing its editing chops. Could Gemini help me write?
I threw some plot holes at it, and all I got were incredibly generic suggestions that could have come from a basic How-To-Write book. It could tell me that I needed work on some stilted dialog and pacing, but the suggestions it gave were absolute cringe with no context to the story or characters while insisting this is how the characters would speak. It wanted to trade atmosphere for “correctness”, killing the vibes of scenes. Some replacement sentences sounded like Gemini was having a stroke—the same issue I have with Grammarly, which is why I utilize it primarily for spelling and basic grammar.
The real test was whether it could convert a short script into prose. After a few attempts, the results were not promising. It used basic he said, she said transitions and simple rewording of my descriptions, which was not helpful. I’m better off writing it myself.
Then I told it to write in my style using the EGORAVEN novelization as a reference.
Now, I was beginning to get worried. It got REALLY close to imitating my style. My mind whirled with the implications. Could I feed my scripts and edit the results? How much work could I get done this way? But alas, Gemini’s stamina proved to be limited. When I asked it to finish the complete script, it didn’t even reach the second page, with the “quality” of the results tapering off dramatically. Not only that, it did something REALLY strange:
It changed my story to avoid the scenes featuring violence and sexually charged dialogue.
No matter how much I reworded my prompts, it would not do what I asked. I got it to acknowledge the scenes were there, but under no circumstances would it do anything with them. It literally REWROTE those scenes into something completely different, rewriting character motivations, interactions, and personalities to create a different scenario that I never intended or wanted. I tried it with other shorts that included those themes with the same results. Sex scenes would be skipped or reduced to references to intimate encounters with no other detail. It would admit that these “intimate encounters” were essential to characterization and the story, but it would still do nothing more. My more erotic stories would be ignored completely. I was fascinated and pissed at the same time.
Playtime was over.
I had spent about five days on and off with Gemini, trying to figure out what was going on. I had grown tired of people accusing me of dismissing generative tech for the sake of it, so this was my chance to prove I was willing to give it a shot. So without further ado, I present to you a skeptic’s assessment:
Pros:
Quickly consolidates data from multiple sources, in this case, my Google Drive, creating basic summaries, lists, and bullet points that can be edited and used without opening up one document looking for info.
It's useful for creating promotional and marketing material like Tweets with hashtags, but you still have to heavily edit the results to make them sound like they’re NOT coming from a machine. Only the hackiest of hacks use the results as-is.
Souped-up Grammarly/Google Search—able to retrieve info without having to leave Google Drive
Cons:
Regurgitates your own info back to you as if it’s making up something new.
It does not “create” anything. Whatever info it offers is based on what’s out there already. If you already know the basics, Gemini is not offering anything new.
It requires a database to work from. Gemini did not know how to write prose unless I gave it a data set from which to work. I had to provide it with my name for it to even remotely work in my style. I understood exactly why people call it a plagiarism machine.
Gemini tires out quickly and hallucinates often. The results disintegrate as you go along, reducing robust summaries and analysis to single sentences in a very short time span.
Google wants $20 a month for the full version.
Tin Foil Hat:
The real purpose of Google Gemini is to train people to stop using outside websites and consolidate consumer attention to easily controlled corporate sites. The prediction is that once enough of the user base is dependent on it, service will be minimized and accompanied by direct advertising to force people to pay more for a “premium” version, which was just the regular version they lured us with originally.
My final assessment:
The amount of work I would need to massage the tech to really be useful for me is not worth the ROI. Photoshop I knew immediately would be worth my effort. Same with Clip Studio Paint. I even paid for Grammarly within a day of using the trial version. But nothing “wowed” me about Gemini, either to use it for free or paid. If tech is supposed to “replace” me, it has to be BETTER than me. And Gemini did not prove that at all.
It’s mediocre tech at worst and masturbatory at best. Overall, it was just a toy I grew tired of quickly and don’t see myself incorporating into my workflow in any regular capacity.
So there it is. Use it, don’t use it, I don’t care. But I think this puts the nail in the generative AI conversation for me. Call me again in ten years.
CLOSES FRIDAY ON KICKSTARTER
Production Schedule
EGORAVEN: HEIR OF THE FIRST UNICORN #9-16: Penciling/Lettering complete
TALL TAILS: TEARS OF THE MOTHER #7 (out of 8): In queue
TALL TAILS: TEARS OF THE MOTHER Vol 1: Launches October 28, 2024
EGORAVEN: HEIR OF THE FIRST UNICORN - The Novelization: Chapters 1-9 (out of 16) complete
EGORAVEN: HEIR OF THE FIRST UNICORN - The Novelization: Chapter 10 (out of 16) in progress
EGORAVEN: CULT OF THE WOLF WITCH (novel sequel): In Progress. First Draft Complete
EGORAVEN: WHISPERS TO EROS (erotic short story collection): In Progress. First Draft Complete.
Really interesting breakdown!
If we had AI programs that were only closed data sets or used royalty free data to give you rough ideas or starting points, I think that could be a really helpful tool! For example, I fed one of my comic images to a text generator and asked it to spit back out the script for me and it did a pretty good job (helpful for getting transcripts for my website), though I needed to edit a couple things and add descriptions. Like you mentioned, it's good for getting out rough ideas based on what you already have, but it's not an end solution.
On the upside, I think a lot of people are getting tired of the AI tools, and they are going the way of NFTs where some are going to swear by them, others may use them for various assisting applications in the background, and the rest of the world is going to move on to the next thing. Especially as the generators get more and more corrupted as they cannibalize themselves.