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?