I know AI has been hashed and rehashed to death, but it seems the subject just won’t go away. On February 8, the NYT published an interview with Coral Hart (not her real name but a retired pseudonym and the name she uses to teach AI-assisted writing). Before she became an AI enthusiast, Hart published 10 – 12 books a year using 5 different pen names.
Last year with AI’s help and 21 different pen names, she self-published more than 200 books, ranging from sweet to hot to sizzling hot. She didn’t used AI just to research, but created the plot, characters, setting–the whole ball of wax with AI. According to the article that you can read here, none were blockbusters but collectively sold 50,000 copies earning her a nice piece of change.
The article doesn’t say how long the books are, and it didn’t reveal her pen names which prevented me from hopping over to Amazon to read some of the sample chapters. It did say that she never revealed the books had been AI-generated because she didn’t want a bias against them.
It’s a free country so I don’t care that she created all the books using AI, but I do care that she didn’t reveal that fact to her readers. It was cheating. But even more disturbing, at least to me, is the article and others similar to it seem to treat her like she’s some guru who should be followed.
Of course not all responded favorably. Many romance authors responded that romance is all about emotions so how can a machine that has no heart or feelings write about such things?
It can’t. AI has no soul. It doesn’t sweat blood to get just the right emotion of someone who is dying inside because it doesn’t know what that emotion is. Hart even agrees that she has to diligently work on her prompts to get close to what she wants. I wonder what kind of writing she might do if she put that much effort into writing the emotion herself?
What scares me about this article is that there is already a glut of books out there and AI makes it so easy to put more out. But I have faith in readers and unlike Hart and many others, I believe readers will be able to tell the difference between an AI generated story and one that a flesh and blood author creates from the heart–a least at the present time. I’m not sure about the future.
What say you, TKZers?
Hmm . . .
A marignally talented writer hires a very talented editor who makes the book come to life. When the author publishes the book as his own work, without cover credit to th editor, has the author cheated?
There’s a thriving industry for ghost writers. Is each of those publications a non-criminal conspiracy to defraud readers?
A high-end pipe organ has horns that sound like brass instruments. Have real trumpet players been been betrayed by the church because their parts were given away to a machine?
It’s 1985 and you’re a journeyman novelist who has just finished your fourth back-to-back rewrite of your manuscript on your once-high tech IBM Selectric typewriter–the rewrites necessary because of your agonizing scouring of the ms in search of typos and story weaknesses. When the novelist down the block has used his word processor to do electronic cutting and pasting, thus saving himself countless hours of time, do you feel cheated? Do you swear to stick with your typewriter because that’s what REAL writing is?
Technology’s a bitch. And it’s unstoppable. Do you use spell check? That’s AI. That tech is a spectrum, and I’m not comfortable with it’s implications, either, but it seems shortsighted to submit misspellings simply because changes came from a robot.
If you turn in a manuscript written the old fashioned way, and the editor says it’s 10,000 words too long, do you reject the notion of feeding the ms into an AI program and asking if to suggest where to change? Is that fundamentally, morally different than taking advice from your bestselling nextdoor neighbor?
From what I can tell, AI doesn’t actually DO anything; it responds to prompts, returnning results that may or may not be any good. It’s up to the prompter (authors in this case) to decide if the results are good or bad, and tweak it as they see fit. When it’s all done, the author owns the result and readers will judge accordingly.
With regard to the subject romance writer, I think the ineffectiveness of AI as a substitute author is showing itself. Total sales of 50,000 copies from TWO HUNDRED books is a pretty sucky number. Perhaps that’s why she hides behind so many pseudonymns.
Finally, I apologize for not respoknding to the many engaging responses to my post about AI yesterday. I’ve been traveling to promote my very traditionally written next Jonathan Grave book, SCORCHED EARTH. That explains why I am writing this at 5:10 am from an airport departure lounge . . .
Readers with moral backbones lose trust in writers who use AI but don’t disclose.
Genuine creativity is incongruent with plagiarized work, entire editor rewrites, and ghostwritten novels.
Using AI as a tool and not disclosing dupes readers and deceives writers.
The many lawsuits (e.g., copyright infringement, suicides, fake news, identity theft, fraud, and more) showcase the issues and harm.
It’s self-deceiving for a writer to ignore the spiritual, emotional, mental, and physical harm caused by AI’s many models. Ignoring the harm, shouts so loud that a growing number of readers can’t hear a word those authors are saying.