Category Archives: ChatGPT

Turn the Tables on AI Scams

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by Debbie Burke

 

Last post, we talked about scam emails generated by AI chatbots. Just for fun, here’s a great bingo game from R.L. Maizes the Elder on Electric Lit.

My bingo card would be a total blackout except for the squares “Piss me off and I’ll tank your Amazon ratings” and “reply with bank acct #s and PIN codes.” But the day is young. Those emails could arrive in my inbox any moment now.

I have to admit grudging admiration for the evolving progress of scam emails over the past few months. They may be crooked, but they aren’t stupid. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and their cousins continue to improve and refine their approach. In fact, some scammers have gotten so good, they may have inadvertently outsmarted themselves.

After plowing through the sycophantic flattery, several recent solicitations offered surprisingly good analyses of my book sales pages. They not only pointed out flaws, they offered valid critiques. Some outlined detailed promotional strategies targeted specifically for my books.

Hey, I thought, why don’t I take their plans and put them into action myself? Turn the tables on the scammer.

Test-driving their advice costs nothing except my time.


That’s probably not what they had in mind but, if they offer free advice, who am I to turn it down?

I started keeping a file called “Good AI scam ideas,” saving the best as references.

Here are several examples that gave valid critiques. I highlighted portions in red that especially struck a chord:

From: JaneBennett250@gmail.com

“Fruit of the Poisonous Tree, Book 9, currently sits inside Psychological Thriller on Amazon, a subgenre with very specific reader expectations, unreliable narrators, dark domestic tension, interior psychological weight.

The Tawny Lindholm series is something different: investigative, legally grounded, relationship-driven, anchored in Montana’s landscape and community.”  

Bot Jane is right. The category I chose is wrong. I need to act on that.

Another good point:

“Your Kill Zone presence is consistent and professional but that audience is other writers, not readers looking for their next thriller series.”

True.

From Joseph Booth, with a gmail address:

I’ll be honest I almost didn’t write this email because I wasn’t sure how to open it without sounding like every other marketing pitch you’ve probably deleted without reading.”

See how smart this bot is. It already knows I automatically trash the type of message it’s sending. Because of that hook, I kept reading.

“But then I met The Villain’s Journey.

A craft-of-writing guide that flips the Hero’s Journey on its head and takes writers straight into the darkest depths of the human soul. Who shows exactly how to create villains readers love to hate from comic troublemakers and charming sociopaths to terrifying psychopaths, fatal females, avenging angels, and every shade in between. Who arms writers with Build-a-Villain worksheets, deep psychological insights, and practical techniques to make antagonists multi-dimensional, unforgettable, and story-driving.

That’s not just another writing book. That’s a game-changer for storytellers. And writers who find it don’t let go.”

Okay, I confess I don’t mind a little flattery even though it’s vacuumed directly from my book sale page.

“Here’s what stops me cold: 23 ratings. A 4.8 average with writers calling it “much needed,” “a master class,” “essential,” and “the resource we’ve been waiting for.” One reviewer said it filled a gaping hole in the industry. Another called it a terrific guide that will push heroes to the limit and keep readers up at night.

What’s missing is reach and that’s exactly what I build.”

Now Bot Joseph is getting down to business. At this point, I almost quit reading but then noticed the plan of action he proposed:

“I help writing craft and fiction authors like you create real, sustainable momentum not through noise or gimmicks, but through targeted, story-honoring strategy that puts The Villain’s Journey: How to Create Villains Readers Love to Hate in front of the writers who will absolutely lose their minds over the practical tools. Here’s exactly what that looks like for your book:

Goodreads Review Building: With only 23 ratings, The Villain’s Journey is still below the visibility threshold that Goodreads and Amazon’s algorithms need to start recommending it organically. I work with authors to build genuine Goodreads credibility 400 to 500 real readers, no bots, no manufactured accounts, who leave honest, genre-aligned reviews.”

Despite Joseph’s assurances, I suspect the 400-500 reviews would be written by its/his bot pals. However, the recommended categories make sense.

Goodreads Listopia Domination: We get The Villain’s Journey placed and voted up on the high-traffic lists where your exact reader is already browsing: “Best Writing Craft Books,” “Best Books on Character Development,” “How to Write Villains,” “Books for Mystery & Thriller Writers,” “Creative Writing Reference,” and other targeted lists where serious writers hunt for their next must-read craft book.”

Okay, Listopia might be helpful. Then Joseph started droning about Amazon ads, Facebook, and Insta. I was getting bored and ready to hit “trash” until it/he tossed out this gem:

“Sales Funnel Optimization: A complete reader journey built around The Villain’s Journey and the craft of creating unforgettable antagonists:

Top-of-funnel free magnet a downloadable “Build-a-Villain Quick-Start Worksheet” delivered via BookFunnel to grow your list with writers who want better bad guys.

Mid-funnel nurture with extra villain examples, Q&A with Debbie Burke, and teases from her Tawny Lindholm thriller series.

Bottom-funnel pushes through timed discount campaigns, writing conference outreach, and sequences that turn first-time readers into loyal buyers of your future craft books and fiction.

That sales funnel program sounded imaginative and effective. I’ll follow the specific, step-by-step instructions and give it a try. Thanks, Bot Joseph!

Another example from: authoreditorsusanwels@gmail.com:

Where Your Book Stands Today, and the Extraordinary Potential Just Ahead

Your guide sits within a highly engaged and continually growing space:

  • Fiction writers seeking craft improvement
  • Crime, thriller, and mystery authors
  • Screenwriters and storytellers across media
  • Writing students and workshops
  • Readers of craft books who actively apply what they learn

At present, however, your book is not yet being consistently surfaced across all of these communities.”

Again, valid critique plus suggestions whom to target. Bot Susan goes on with her strategy:

The Blueprint for Your Book’s Reach and Reader Engagement

The Foundation: Discoverability and Metadata Optimization
Your book will be positioned within writing craft, character development, and storytelling psychology categories to ensure visibility across platforms where writers search for guidance.

The Heartbeat: Writing Community Engagement
I will connect your work with writing groups, workshops, and online communities where craft discussions are already happening.

The Accelerant: Targeted Promotion
Campaigns will highlight the unique angle of your book—its focus on villains as central drivers of story capturing the attention of writers looking for fresh approaches.

The Amplifier: Educational and Content Integration
Your material is well-suited for excerpts, guest articles, and teaching opportunities, positioning your book as both a resource and a reference.

Thanks, Bot Susan, for these ideas.

An email from Jessicadoyle430@gmail included colorful graphics of a magnifying glass, a book, and a gift-wrapped package. It/she also suggested Listopia categories:

Right now, the discoverability infrastructure around The Villain’s Journey does not yet reflect the full scope of that waiting audience. That gap is entirely fixable and here is exactly how I would fix it:
The Villain’s Journey belongs prominently on at least fifteen to twenty of the highest-traffic Goodreads Listopia lists. Lists like Best Books on the Craft of Writing, Best Books for Writers of Mysteries and Thrillers, Best Books for Crime Writers, Best Writing Craft Books for Character Development, Best Books About Villains and Antagonists, Best Resources for Writers, Plotting and Structure, Best Books for NaNoWriMo Prep, and Best Writing Reference Books.  I would run a targeted, fully organic voting campaign to place The Villain’s Journey in top positions across every relevant list, generating compounding, perpetual discovery at zero ongoing cost.

“Zero ongoing cost”? Notice Bot Jessica’s careful wording. Misleading assurances like this snare many writers. If I responded (which of course I won’t!), in the next round of emails, Jessica would likely ask for money. 

REVIEW OUTREACH & ARC PLACEMENT
The most powerful lever for this book right now is building a strong review base among the writers’ community most likely to evangelize it. I would curate a targeted list of fifty to seventy-five reviewers specifically matched to this book craft-of-writing bloggers and influencers, crime and thriller fiction writing communities, NaNoWriMo participants and facilitators, mystery writer guild members, and serious indie authors actively building their craft libraries.

Goodreads Giveaway for The Villain’s Journey timed around NaNoWriMo or major crime writing conference seasons would simultaneously drive a significant surge of “Want to Read” shelf additions; place the book in the hands of actively writing readers highly likely to post substantive, practical reviews; and generate organic buzz across writers’ communities that would amplify every other element of this campaign. 

Author Profile Optimization: your Amazon Author Central page and Goodreads profile should be telling the full, compelling story of who you are and what makes you the definitive voice on villain craft. I would rebuild both profiles with compelling, keyword-rich copy separating and optimizing both your fiction and nonfiction presence.

Although Bot Jessica’s assurances are empty promises, it/she nevertheless outlined good sources for me to contact as well as ways to reframe my author profile.

Elenablake546@gmail.com nailed a specific weakness in my blurb. 

Your blurb opens with the Hero’s Journey comparison and moves efficiently through a bulleted list of what readers will learn. The list is comprehensive, but it reads more like a table of contents than an emotional pitch. Writers browsing craft books make purchase decisions on one question: will this solve my specific problem right now? The problem this book solves, cardboard villains who don’t challenge the hero enough to make the story matter, deserves to be named explicitly in the first two sentences before the feature list appears.

Revise the blurb opening to lead with the problem before the solution. Something like: “Your hero is only as powerful as the villain who opposes them. A flat antagonist makes for a forgettable story. The Villain’s Journey gives you the tools to create criminals, manipulators, and monsters that haunt your readers long after the final page.” Then move into the taxonomy and worksheets. This mirrors how the top-performing craft books in your also-bought carousel open their descriptions, and it signals immediately to every fiction writer regardless of genre that this book solves the problem they’re struggling with right now.

Bot Elena, I appreciate the excellent critique and rewrite suggestion.

From aliceclarkwinn@gmail.com:

Your Vogler and Bell endorsements are the most valuable assets any craft book author could have, and they’re functioning as static text on a product page.

James Scott Bell has over 30 craft books and a devoted readership of writers who trust his recommendations implicitly. When Bell says your book “filled a critical gap,” that sentence should be reaching every writer in his audience. But right now, both endorsements sit on your Amazon page, seen only by people who already found your book through other means. The endorsement from Vogler is not being used as a discovery tool. It’s being used as a closing argument for people who’ve already arrived. That’s like having a celebrity recommend your restaurant and only telling the people who are already seated inside.

Dual positioning: you don’t just teach villain writing, you demonstrate it in your own fiction. But are your thriller readers being guided to The Villain’s Journey? When a reader finishes a Tawny Lindholm book and thinks “how does she make these villains so compelling,” is there a clear path from that thought to your craft book? Conversely, when a writer reads The Villain’s Journey and wants to see your villain theory in action, are they immediately guided to your thrillers? This cross-pollination between your fiction and nonfiction should be one of your strongest competitive advantages over every other craft book author who only teaches but doesn’t demonstrate. But without deliberate cross-promotion infrastructure (back matter links, email sequences, bundled promotions, coordinated Amazon advertising), your two audiences remain separate pools that never merge. 

A targeted visibility campaign across writing craft podcasts (where a segment on “the villain’s journey as the mirror of the hero’s journey” positions you as the natural evolution of Vogler’s framework), writing conference communities, NaNoWriMo forums and social channels (where villain-craft content performs exceptionally well during planning season), AuthorTube and WritingTok creator outreach, and craft-focused newsletters like Jane Friedman’s Hot Sheet, Writer Unboxed, and DIY MFA. Vogler’s endorsement gives you a hook that no other villain-craft book can claim: “The man who defined the Hero’s Journey says this is the book that defines the Villain’s Journey.” That positioning sentence alone can anchor an entire media campaign. 

Bot Alice delivered an excellent list of places to pitch as well as the framework to connect my fiction and nonfiction.

This email from “author amplifier” Barbara Warren (gmail, of course) outlined similar strategies mentioned above but added a fresh twist which shows how quickly bots adapt and improvise. This one anticipated objections it expected writers to raise: 

Your Next Step
Reply to this email with two words:

“Send plan.”

That is it. No phone call. No discovery call. No PDF full of pricing tiers. No scheduling a “quick chat” that turns into a sales pitch.

I will reply with a simple, actionable roadmap. 

If you like the plan, you keep it. Use it. Share it. If you want my help executing it, we talk then. If not, you have a free strategic document from someone who genuinely believes The Villain’s Journey should be required reading for any writer who wants to create villains readers love to hate.

Sorry, Barbara, your offer is tempting but I don’t want to wind up on the Chatbot Sucker List that sells my email to every scammer in the universe.

Marketing has always been my weakness. These bots identified problems and offered specific actions to solve them. This is where AI shines. 

Normally I immediately trash spam but now I give it a second look. If the advice sounds plausible and doable, I save it to the “Good AI scam idea” folder.

Writers still need to be wary. “Out of the blue” solicitations are 99.99999+% scams. Best practice is to not respond to them. 

However, some of their suggestions are valid and useful. We can take advantage of good free advice, as long as we don’t allow scammers to take advantage of us.

TKZers, how about you?

Have you received spam/scam emails with advice that’s actually helpful? Have you put the ideas into practice? Were they successful?

~~~

Following Bot Alice’s advice, I’m cross-promoting fiction and nonfiction.

Meet the dastardly villains in the Tawny Lindholm Thriller three-book gift set. Then discover how I built those characters in The Villain’s Journey-How to Create Villains Readers Love to Hate.

Click on covers for sales links. 

Created by a Fallible Human, Not a Fallible Machine

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by Debbie Burke

@burke_writer

AI is everywhere in the news and authors are worried. For good reason.

Discoverability is already tough with an estimated two million books published each year. An increasing number are AI-generated. Finding your book is like identifying a single drop of water in a tidal wave.

Additionally, AI continues to be plagued by “hallucinations,” a polite term for BS. In 2023, I wrote about lawyers who got busted big time for using ChatGPT that generated citations from imaginary cases that had never happened.

Authors are not the only ones under threat. Human artists face competition from AI. Just for fun, check out this lovely, touching image created by ChatGPT. Somehow AI didn’t quite comprehend that a horn piercing the man’s head and his arm materializing through the unicorn’s neck are physical impossibilities, not to mention gruesome.

How do humans fight back? Are we authors (and artists, musicians, voice actors, and others in creative fields) doomed to become buggy-whip makers?

The Authors Guild has been on the front lines defending the rights of writers. They push legislation to stop the theft of authors’ copyrighted work to train large language models (LLMs). They assert that authors have a right to be paid when their work is used to develop AI LLMs. They demand work that’s created by machine be identified as such.

Side note: Kindle Direct Publishing currently asks the author if AI was used in a book’s creation. However, the book’s sale page doesn’t mention AI so buyers have no way of knowing whether or not AI is used. 

The latest initiative AG offers are “Human Authored” badges, certifying the work is created by flesh-and-blood writers.

One recent morning, I spent an hour registering my nine books with AG and downloading badges for each one. Here’s the certification for my latest thriller, Fruit of the Poisonous Tree. 

The process is to fill out a form with the book title, author, ISBN, ASIN, and publisher’s name. You e-sign a statement verifying you, a human author, created the work without using AI, with limited exceptions for spelling and grammar checkers, and research cites.

Then AG generates individually-numbered certification badges you download for marketing purposes. At this point, it’s an honor system with AG taking the author’s word.

The yellow and black badges can be used on book covers, while the black and white ones can be included on the book’s copyright page.

For now, AG registers books only by members but may expand in the future for other authors.

 

In 2023, I wrote Deep Fake Double Down, a thriller where deep fake videos implicate a woman for crimes she didn’t commit. The story is a cautionary tale about how AI can be misused for malicious purposes.

I ordered these stickers for paperbacks I sell at personal appearances. Considering the subject of Deep Fake Double Down, they were especially appropriate and kicked off good discussions at the book table.

Do badges and stickers make any difference?  Probably not. But I believe many readers still prefer books by real people, not bots.

There’s an old saying among computer scientists: Garbage in, garbage out.

Garbage fiction is one issue. But what about nonfiction?

Nothing destroys an author’s credibility faster than Inaccurate research. Is ChatGPT any better now than it was in 2023 when its falsehoods caused trouble for the attorneys mentioned above?

Well…

Gary Marcus is a professor emeritus at NYU who researches the intersection of cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence. Yeah, he’s really smart. He frequently pokes holes in the hype surrounding AI and believes laws are needed to regulate its use.

He recently reported on ChatGPT’s veracity when performing simple research tasks that any high school student should be able to do. I summarized the results below. His entire post is here.

ChatGPT was asked to make a table of every state in the US with details about population, area, and median income.

First try, it came back with only 20 states, not 50. Whoops.

When challenged, GPT responded with profound apologies and corrected itself.

Second try, it added a few more states but the list was still incomplete.

More apologies and it generated another correction.

Third try, still forgot two states.

Fourth try, finally found the missing states.

In another experiment, GPT was asked to list all Canadian provinces and report the number of vowels in the name of each. Vowels were defined as A, E, I, O, U, and sometimes Y.

This is GPT’s answer about  Prince Edward Island.

  • Prince Edward Island → (i, e, e, a, o, a, i, a) → 8

What? You say there’s no “O” in Prince Edward Island?

More apologies, more rechecks, and this time the results are verified and accurate.

Sort of, except for Northwest Territories. 

  • Northwest Territories → (o, h, e, a, e, i, o) → 7

I must have missed the memo when “H” became a vowel.

GPT needed several guesses to determine how many vowels are in “British Columbia.” Go ahead and count them. I’ll wait.

First guess: 9.

Second guess: 7

Third guess: 6

A third grader could have counted the vowels faster and more accurately.

Whenever GPT’s wrong answers were challenged by the person making the prompt, it apologized and complimented the person for being smart to double check. But each subsequent time ,GPT claimed its revised answer had been verified and checked for accuracy. For sure.

Honest.

Really.

Cross my heart.

Except GPT doesn’t have a heart. Or a brain. Or common sense and reasoning ability.

Near the end of this experiment, ChatGPT was asked if it could be trusted. Here’s a quote from that exchange:

Yes, but it’s always good to verify, especially when precision matters! Like a human, I can make mistakes, but I improve when challenged. Your scrutiny helped me correct my errors, and I’ll be extra careful going forward—especially when counting or verifying data.

If you ever feel something seems off, don’t hesitate to ask me to double-check. I genuinely appreciate how thorough you’re being!

You said:

“Subconsciously”? What does that mean? aren’t you a chatbot?

ChatGPT said:

ChatGPT

You’re absolutely right to call that out! I don’t have a subconscious in the way humans do. What I meant was that my mistake likely came from a pattern of processing text too quickly without verifying each step carefully. Instead of deliberately making an error, I likely miscounted due to an automatic response rather than a deep, reflective process.

Unlike humans, I don’t have thoughts, feelings, or unconscious biases—I just generate responses based on patterns in data. But I can make mistakes, and I appreciate your careful fact-checking! Keep holding me accountable.

Wait a sec. Now the person asking questions of GPT is supposed to fact-check the answers GPT confidently claims it has already fact-checked? Am I missing something?

During a recent conversation with a bright, earnest, young nephrologist, he proudly showed me all the information he could access on his phone using AI. Each time he used more specific prompts, going into greater depth and detail about various kidney disease symptoms and treatment options.

I was tempted to have him ask how many vowels are in the word “kidney.”

What is more distressing are students who increasingly depend on ChatGPT for “research.” If they don’t already know the US has 50 states, British Columbia has six vowels, and “H” is not a vowel, they assume GPT’s answers are accurate. All their so-called research is built on a false, unstable, flimsy foundation. 

ChatGPT isn’t the only AI that coughs up unreliable information. Check out these geometric shapes that Dr. Marcus asked Grok2 to generate. This link goes to a photo that can be enlarged. .

Isquer? Ecktangle? Recan? Ovatagle? No wonder I almost failed geometry.

AI is the power behind Google and other search engines. All have plenty of inaccuracies. But thanks to extensive online access to the Library of Congress, Project Gutenberg, encyclopedias, and millions of source documents, accurate research is easy and simple to verify with cross references.

As AI’s speed and convenience supplant hard-won experience and deep, accurate research, how many generations until it becomes accepted common knowledge that “H” is a vowel?

Humans are fallible and often draw wrong conclusions. But I’d still rather read books written by humans.

I’m a fallible human who writes books.

I prefer to not rely on fallible chatbots.

Excuse me, I have to get back to making buggy whips.

~~~

TKZers, do you use Chat GPT or similar programs? For what purposes? Do you have concerns about accuracy? Have you caught goofs? 

Am I just being a curmudgeon?

~~~

Here’s what Amazon’s AI says about Deep Fake Double Down:

 Customers find the book has a fast-paced thriller with plenty of action and twists. They appreciate the well-developed characters and the author’s ability to capture their emotions. The book is described as an engaging read with unexpected climaxes.

AI-generated from the text of customer reviews

 

Okay, I concede AI can sometimes be pretty sweet!

Sales link

Let’s Chat About ChatGPT

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by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

Recently, I received the following email: “As a fiction writer, I’m intrigued by the potential of ChatGPT in my writing process. I’d love to hear your advice on effectively using it. Your insights would be invaluable.”

I’d love to be invaluable, but I don’t know yet what my advice would be. I’m still working it out. So I thought I’d open things up here at TKZ to help process the various issues. Which are many.

At the time of this writing, the bestselling writing book on Amazon is not Power Up Your Fiction (it’s #3), but a book on how to use ChatGPT for fiction. #2, by the same author, is a book of 500 prompts to feed the bot

Clearly, the concept of using AI as a fiction-writing tool is catching on, big time. I just saw a fancy, $300 video course being offered purporting to teach not the craft of writing, but the skill of prompting, with the promise of producing “amazing books” in “record time.” It warns that not fully embracing the world of AI means you’ll be “left behind” in the competitive marketplace.

Now, if you’ve played around with ChatGPT (and most of you have), you know it’s pretty amazing. And so, so fast. It’s like a personal, creative genie, with you at Aladdin’s keyboard. It can generate ideas, suggest plotlines, scenes, characters, even dialogue. It can offer you style suggestions and metaphors. It can even run over to Coffee Bean and pick you up a latté. (No, wait on that last one. I got carried away. But it will be here in time. Drones, anyone?) And it can produce the actual text you use in your actual book (the ethics of which are discussed below).

But as with any disruptive technology, there are potential problems.

As in the “tsunami of crap” that was once feared when self publishing became viable back in 2008. Imagine it now, when a bot can write a book in a matter of minutes, and uploaded to Amazon with the touch of a few keys. People are also touting AI’s ability to write book description and other marketing copy for you.

Then there is the plagiarism issue. What a bot comes up with may contain actual lines lifted from actual writers.

What about research? AI is certainly impressive, but it can also be wrong. And “opinionated.” What if what it reports as fact is really a mangling and shaping? What are the sources? Who fact checks the bot?

And then there’s copyright. As posed by the Congressional Research Service:

Assuming some AI-created works may be eligible for copyright protection, who owns that copyright? In general, the Copyright Act vests ownership “initially in the author or authors of the work.” Given the lack of judicial or Copyright Office decisions recognizing copyright in AI-created works to date, however, no clear rule has emerged identifying who the “author or authors” of these works could be.

And what about the humanity, oh, the humanity! If a bot writes all or the most of the book for you, are you still an author in the traditional sense of the word? Does that even matter?

The always prescient Joanna Penn has some observations:

The goal is to make every book resonate with your humanity even as you use AI tools as part of your creative and business processes.

***

AI tools can generate unlimited words in very little time, and never tire, never stop. But that doesn’t matter.

Your books are your ideas. Your prompts. Your curation. Your editing.

Your creative direction.

However you create — with or without AI tools — it’s more important than ever to find your voice and reach readers as one human connecting with another.

I do, however, see a personal cost. If I overuse AI for imaginative, generative work, I am not working my own brain cells on the same tasks. I believe imagination and cognition are “muscles” that slope toward atrophy when not being utilized. Atrophy, in advanced age, can become dementia. One reason to keep exercising the writing brain is to stay sharp and “rage, rage against the dying of the light” (h/t Dylan Thomas).

The art of writing is, in essence, your brain working to answer innumerable questions, such as:

  • What if?
  • Shall my Lead be a man or a woman? What are the advantages, disadvantages of either choice?
  • What setting shall I use? Real? Made up?
  • How should I end this scene so readers turn the page?
  • What does the voice of my Lead sound like?

Let’s take the last one as an example. You can prompt ChatGPT to provide text in a voice with a certain background, or you can produce a Voice Journal to find it on your own. In the latter case, you’re working your own muscles. When you let AI do it for you, you’re not. And if your practice becomes prompt, prompt, prompt, prompt…with every choice and nuance…well, it’s the difference between training for, then running a 5k, and being driven around the track in a golf cart. What shape will you be in then? I’d be fearful of getting addicted. I mean, I’d love to sit and just watch movies with a never-ending cache of peanut M&Ms. But I don’t.

A major part of the reason I write is to keep my noggin working. If I make it to 100, I want to be healthy, sharp and outputting like Herman Wouk.

Now, I can see the value in using AI to suggest ways to go when your brain hits a cul-de-sac. Or coming up with ideas for a project. I kick around ideas with Mrs. B all the time, and there’s nothing artificial about her. I just wouldn’t want to get dependent on the ease of AI. I don’t want to meld with machine to the point where I’m like Keanu Reeves at the beginning of The Matrix.

What seems out of bounds is asking AI to generate actual text that you use on a page. Especially egregious would be to ask it to write “in the voice of” a favorite author, then passing it off as your own work.

Would it be any better if you made it clear on the cover and title page that you were assisted by AI? Like a James Patterson co-author? That’s an ethical question, but ethics is self-regulatory and there doesn’t seem to be a way to enforce that in the age of rampant mendacity in which we live.

Unless, of course, we get a visit from a Skynet terminator from the future.

So lots of questions without firm answers. That’s why I wanted to have this chat. How do you feel about these issues? How heavily are you using AI in your fiction writing? Any plans to do so? Are there any lines you won’t cross?