A frustrated fantasy author looking at what ChatGPT generated him.

ChatGPT is laughably bad at creating book lore

ByTC Marti

Why ChatGPT gets it wrong, and how to make sure it doesn’t reduce your novel to tired genre clichés seen in every other work.

The following content was a self-criticism piece written in my voice by ChatGPT, with light editing from Yours Truly.

Let me be blunt. If you’re an author using AI to assist with blogs, marketing, or even summarizing your own work, you need to stay vigilant.

Why?

Because no matter how accurate you think the tool is—or how “smart” it seems—there’s a very real risk it will reduce your original, nuanced, carefully crafted story into a list of tired, overused fantasy tropes. Even when the AI has read your manuscript.

I learned that the hard way.

Genre autopilot is the culprit

Even if your book doesn’t contain a single chosen-one prophecy, wise mentor, or magical school safe haven, AI will often assume it does.

If the file doesn’t load properly… if the formatting breaks… or if the context isn’t parsed cleanly? The tool will fall back on guesswork.

And that guesswork is driven by patterns it’s seen a million times before. That’s how I ended up with half a dozen AI-written blog posts about my novel Cursed Mage that had almost nothing to do with the actual story.

Instead, they sounded like recycled summaries from every YA or new adult fantasy book that ever got published in the last fifteen years.

My book isn’t about rebellion, trauma, or fitting in

But guess what themes the AI insisted on forcing into every article draft?

  • Dismissive professors. Apparently, Kaija is supposed to be scorned by academic elites who doubt her worth. Except she’s a top student, deeply respected by her professors—until things turn supernatural.

  • Marginalized magic user. The AI tried to frame her as a misunderstood outcast. But she’s not. Kaija is privately feared, not publicly ridiculed. She’s not rallying a movement or proving herself to skeptics—she’s navigating a web of mystery, politics, and danger.

  • Trauma as identity. Yes, Kaija has grief. But her story doesn’t revolve around trauma as personality. She doesn’t monologue about pain, and she doesn’t use it to score virtue points. Her father’s death is a starting point—not a gimmick.

  • Overcoming prejudice. Not every story with a female protagonist and magic is about societal bigotry. The tension surrounding Kaija’s powers is spiritual, existential, and ancient—not a stand-in for woke identity politics.

The lesson: AI doesn’t read nuance—it predicts patterns

When AI doesn’t fully “understand” your manuscript, it doesn’t default to silence. It defaults to clichés.

It grabs at whatever scaffolding it thinks fits your genre label. Dark fantasy? Must be trauma, rebellion, and inner demons. Academy setting? Must be evil professors, bullies, and secret cliques.

And if your book doesn’t follow those beats? It’ll just make them up.

What Cursed Mage actually is about

Cursed Mage is about a girl named Kaija who enters a new life surrounded by wealth, history, and tightly kept secrets—only to discover she’s being watched by multiple magical factions for reasons she barely understands.

The book’s themes revolve around:

  • Knowledge as power

  • Mystery over melodrama

  • Slow-burn magic grounded in study and ritual

  • A protagonist whose intelligence and ability to control multiple elements—not trauma or persecution—is what makes her dangerous

But the AI didn’t pick up on any of that—until I forced it to.

If you use AI for writing help, here’s what to watch for

  • Don’t assume it “knows” your book just because it read it. Parsing a document ≠ understanding it. Always double-check that the content reflects the story you actually told—not the one it wants to tell.

  • Watch for default tropes. Look out for storylines that don’t exist in your manuscript but sneak into AI-generated summaries: the oppressed rebel, the mean teacher, the chosen savior, the trauma-victim-turned-hero.

  • Supply your own loglines and character traits. If you want accurate blog posts, start by feeding the AI your own descriptions. Make it work from your data—not its assumptions.

  • And if you’re not getting what you want? Scrap it. Start over. Sometimes the tool just won’t get it right. When that happens, move on—or take the wheel yourself.

There is good news, though

Cursed Mage, a dark paranormal fantasy by TC MartiAI is a tool—not a storyteller. It can assist. It can polish. It can accelerate your workflow.

But it shouldn’t be trusted to define your narrative voice or your story’s soul. If you’ve written something that breaks molds or subverts expectations, AI may not be the one to honor that.

You are. So use it. But don’t let it reduce your work to a trope you fought hard to avoid.

It’s TC again! All of that said, I did find out that, if you share your work chapter by chapter, ChatGPT does a much better job of accurately portraying your work. I used that method when it reviewed the latest draft of my dystopian survival Beyond the Lost trilogy—a series whose story elements don’t fall far from Kaija’s story—and it was night and day.

And if you’re a fan of dark paranormal fantasy, Cursed Mage will be right up your alley. Make sure you check it out.

P.S.: If you’re serious about building your own creative income engine instead of relying on platforms and algorithms, this is the system I use behind the scenes to structure everything. Best yet, it teaches you how to master ChatGPT.

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