Omachuck asked a question about literary AIs about six months ago. I answered in a private message.
Eddie Davidson's blog about filtering prompts me to share my thoughts.
First...
To all the authors out there, if you are not attributing content that was not written by you then that is - *PLAGERISM* plain & simple!
Doesn't matter who wrote it, what matters is that you didn't & you don't acknowledge that fact.
BTW/FYI 'free use' does not mean unattributed use!
Someone invested a lot of $$$$$ to make the AI, they are letting you use their product free with the understanding that they will get marketing traction from word of mouth advertisement. Most contracts for free use say for private and/or personal use only.
Publishing works that include samples of their product is usually a no-no even if you don't make a profit from it. They will let it pass if you do free marketing and/or promotion for them...
but if you don't even attribute then that's not only a violation of the terms of use but it actually can be pursued as theft of services!
Don't think that just because a machine produced it there's no human involved. Like every other machine made product out there there is a long line of people waiting to get paid for their efforts.
Second...
The literary world is undergoing the same revolution that pop music has gone through with the advent of rap.
Now that we can 'sample' literary passages created by a machine, can a composition that's primarily of samples be considered original work?
The answer is yes!
When a (visual) artist creates a collage out of pieces of other pictures then, if the composing of those image fragments brings something to light that the individual pieces alone could not then creation has happened in the composition.
Same is true with rap music. If at the end of the composition - the musical piece evokes a different feeling than any of the samples then the producer has created something new. BTW - sampling is an old tradition in music: God Bless America and God Save the Queen are different lyrics over the same melody.
In all of the above cases the 'sample' was attributed or the work would be considered fraudulent.
Third...
Now to the heart of the matter - Why is it so easy to spot AI content? and Why is AI content so 'flat' and/or disconnected.
The answer is simple - AIs don't emote!
From a language processing perspective:
A computer program can parse better than most humans (they recognize words in a string of letters, punctuations, & whitespace).
The can do syntactical analysis really well (they do grammar checking well - making sure you follow all the rules for proper sentence structure in the language of your choice - do you remember ALL of the rules?? they do!).
They've gotten better at semantical analysis (to ascribe meaning to a phrase - which is necessary for translation from one language to another; or even between dialects in the same language).
What they are barely adequate at is - pragmatical analysis (figuring out which phrase to say to get the best outcome in the communication).
In narrow domains such as legal and/or business communication - where the inclusion (or ommission) of facts are paramount - AIs have done alright (not brilliantly) enough to be cost efficient when compared to the cost of training and compensating a human worker.
But when it comes to a wide open domain such as fictional prose - where the communication is not only supposed to pass information but it is required to evoke feelings if it is to be judged as worthwhile! - the works of a processed algorithm fall flat almost all of the time.
This will continue to be the case until someone can stuff emotion into an algorithm!
In conclusion...
I am not saying that using AI samples is of no use to an author - what I am saying is creating a genuine work of art using AI samples takes a different kind of authorship (more of a curating editor) and it will need different kinds of readers (those who relish the uneven word play and are stirred by the discovery of things hidden in the composition - those who delight in puzzles wherever they are found).
One day a major literary award will be given to an author who manages to create a great work from these mediocre pieces!
Why? because it will truly be miraculous!
Why bother? because we are human!
~Ciao
-David S