This is number 138 in the blog series, “My Writing Life.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
AI IS HERE TO STAY. The time to have stopped it was with autocorrect. Remember how funny it was when the great new feature either changed your obscenity to ‘duck,’ or surprised your boss with ‘I’m running a big behind’? That was when we needed to end AI. Like so many things in our world, it’s too late now.
That doesn’t mean it will run the world in the future or even make our lives miserable—most of the time. It does mean we will either be aware of it, or we will let it take control of things we don’t mean it to control.
That includes our own creative process. As authors and readers, how will our art be influenced?
I received an intriguing email offer to help me market my Nathan Everett (Wayzgoose) novel, The Staircase of Dragon Jerico. It was really well-written and convincing. It took me more than half an hour to track down that the mail had arrived from a non-existent company and a non-existent person. But it was so good that I have seldom seen a college-level book review better composed—either by myself or others.
Then I loaded the manuscript into Adobe Acrobat (as a PDF) and asked it to draft a review. Wow! I include an unedited excerpt below:
Nathan Everett’s The Staircase of Dragon Jerico is a captivating blend of romance, family legacy, and corporate intrigue. The novel masterfully intertwines the personal and professional lives of its protagonists, Erin Scott and Preston Carver, as they navigate the complexities of love, ambition, and the weight of family history….
The novel’s exploration of themes such as trust, redemption, and the pursuit of happiness is both heartfelt and thought-provoking. Erin and Preston’s journey from colleagues to lovers to life partners is beautifully depicted, making their eventual union on the iconic Staircase of Dragon Jerico a poignant and satisfying conclusion.
Overall, The Staircase of Dragon Jerico is a well-crafted tale that balances romance, drama, and corporate intrigue. Nathan Everett’s storytelling is engaging, and his characters are relatable and multidimensional. This book is a delightful read for anyone who enjoys stories about love, ambition, and the enduring power of family legacy.
In the interest of conserving space in this blog, I left out a couple of paragraphs that summarize the action. The point is, as an author, I crave this kind of review! I want to use it in promoting my book. But I’m conflicted over the very idea of presenting this kind of AI-generated material. I would certainly never do so without clearly identifying it as being a non-human created summary!
The Staircase of Dragon Jerico, which I labored to write without the aid of AI, is available as an eBook on ZBookstore or as a paperback at Ingram Spark. It can be read free on SOL (author Wayzgoose).
I really have just two major concerns regarding AI and its use by writers. First of all, there is the longstanding and almost lost cause of how generative artificial intelligence is trained and the power consumption that is draining the world’s energy. It is not only a strain on the power grid, but also on natural resources, like water, and its contribution to environmental crises like global warming.
Artistically, I’m concerned about the way generative AI is trained. It uses, without consent, the work of other authors to build a training wall from which it can ‘create’ the work it generates. In other words, our work is copied by the AI so it can learn from our content, often using large chunks of it and passing it off as its own. It frankly plagiarizes real authors (and artists and musicians).
This has become such a common method for learning that there are even ‘training programs’ for human authors based on the concept of copying portions of famous novels!
The fundamental idea of education for humans includes things like reading and viewing artwork and listening to music. Many artists have made copying masterpieces a part of their learning process. Let me remind you, however, that if they become good enough to pass that work off as the work of the original artist, or their own original artwork, they are referred to as forgers and plagiarists!
I don’t know that there is anything we can do about this. We can complain to manufacturers of the software when portions of our works are used and passed off as the work of the AI. The AI chatbot Claude was recently sued for over a billion dollars for copyright infringement and lost the suit. But it makes the problem of plagiarism ten times more complex. Many of us have had our works retitled and labeled with a different author name, then sold as someone else’s work. And that was without AI in the mix. I worry the problem will be far more prevalent in the future.
Finally, I will say there is a moral and ethical issue regarding authors using AI in creating their books. SOL author Cly Anders had a great blog post on this on December 14. She compares AI to fire. She uses the fire to cook with while some other asshole uses it to burn down a building. Fair enough.
But there are, sadly, people who are blindly following the path of prompting an AI chatbot to write their novels or even technical manuals. It’s easy to be seduced by these offers that I receive half a dozen times a day. They offer ‘ghost writer quality’ writing of your book. I consider that to be fraudulent. You can’t just have someone or something write your work for you and slap your own name on it.
I’m not fond of any ghost writing for that matter. If a ghost writer writes a famous person’s memoir, for example, it should clearly state “The Memoir of XYZ as told to and written by ABC.” There are famous authors who became so wealthy and popular that they basically quit writing. Instead, they develop a storyline and concept, then hand it off to a staff of writers who generate one or two dozen books a year—all under that author’s name or one of his pen names.
Periodically, I receive an email from a fan that starts out “I have a great idea for a novel you should write. I can’t write it myself, but you’re free to use this idea.” In my book, that turns me into an AI that is working based on someone else’s prompts.
It has been suggested that people who use AI to write their books be referred to as ‘prompters’ rather than authors. That makes sense. In much the same way as my ‘ghost written memoir’ sample above, the book would say clearly, “Written by ABC ChatBot, as prompted by this person who couldn’t be bothered to write it himself.”
AI is here to stay, no matter how much we yearn for the day when we could blame running a big behind on autocorrect. Like Cly, some authors will cook with AI. Others will torch the industry. It will become harder and harder to tell when a novel is written by a chatbot and when it is written by a moderately talented author. The grammar and spelling will be perfect. The thing is the chatbot can generate a hundred times more of those moderately good novels (like mine, for example) than real authors will ever be able to.
That is where the danger lies.
Next, if all goes well, I’m going to comment a bit about what we see and read that is AI generated or that uses AI in its production. I call it “Short Dramas.”