Now AIs Are Writing Novels
You've probably heard by now about the fantasy book that had an AI prompt in the middle
The author had the AI, according to the prompt, rewrite the book in the style of another popular writer. It is not clear from the prompt whether the original was written by the author or by the AI.
The result was that the readers got angry and left one star reviews complaining about the use of AI to write a book.
Before this discovery, however, the book had been doing rather well.
[Brief note: since I wrote this, about 15 minutes ago, two more authors have been caught with AI prompts in their books. The mind boggles.]
The first thing that comes to mind is the shoddy editing involved in publishing a book that has notes in the middle of it. One feels that this should have been discovered.
The second issue is AIs writing books... I don't know how I feel about it, honestly.
If an AI produces a book that people like to read, I don't see anything wrong with that. I suspect they'll be more successful in genre that tends to encourage a repetitive model, such as category romance. There are types of books where people would really enjoy reading “a dozen more just like that one.” And maybe AI can fill that need.
I spoke to a farmer once who was raising cows naturally, not force feeding them, letting them graze. He was producing better meat that was desired by restaurants. But he said he couldn't compete with the big commercial farms because they could produce a fully grown cow in quite a few less months. (I think it was 20 months vs 29 months, but I might be misremembering.)
His product was better, but it was a hard business because he couldn't do it as quickly.
I think a lot of us writers are now in a similar position. We may produce something that has qualities that the AI books do not have, but we certainly cannot do as quickly. Even the two fastest authors I know take a few weeks to write a novel.
If somebody producing AI books can put them out one a day, one a week, I'm not sure where that leaves the rest of us.
For many of us the process of writing is what we want to do. We're not in this to sell books, we’re in this to write books—but we do want to sell them. Both because we want to make a living and because we want to share them with readers.
Theoretically, there may be readers who want non-AI books who would be happy to spend a little more for them. But how they're going to know for sure that AIs were not used, I have no idea. So many authors seem to be using them now.
Some use AIs for writing prompts. Some use them to check the grammar. Some use them to help design characters and plot. Some use them to go over their style after they've written. And some are having them do the actual writing.
I must admit, I have no idea what to think about any of this.
I guess, like the Bible verses below, I just hope that the things I write will go out there and not “return unto me void”:
So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it. (Isaiah 55:11)
So what are your thoughts? Does it bother you if an AI writes a book?
Would it bother you if an AI wrote a book and you liked it?
"Julia was twenty-six years old... and she worked, as he had guessed, on the novel-writing machines in the Fiction Department. She enjoyed her work, which consisted chiefly in running and servicing a powerful but tricky electric motor... She could describe the whole process of composing a novel, from the general directive issued by the Planning Committee down to the final touching-up by the Rewrite Squad. But she was not interested in the final product. She "didn't much care for reading," she said. Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces." - George Orwell, 1984
To answer your question, yes. It would bother me if I liked it, because that would mean I had been deceived into reading it in the first place. I would not willingly read a book generated by AI because I have no interest in the kind of stories an AI would tell. For me, stories are deeply human, and come from within us. AI cannot live a story, it can only imitate, and therefore the only stories it could tell would be imitation and selection based on its analysis of others' stories. That is both uninteresting and offensive to me.