These days AI is the elephant in every writer’s room. On June 27th, Jacqueline Winspear (author most famously of the Maisie Dobbs series) weighed in on the topic on her Facebook page. She gave me permission to repost it in full here, which I do because if AI isn’t part of #thiswritinglife these days nothing is.
Hello again. Given that a number of readers have asked about my next book, before I say more, today my post is about the threats of AI to authors who write their own stories, whether fiction or non-fiction, and some of the implications authors feared might be a threat even before publishers had grasped the true extent of AI’s incursion into the future of reading.
Next week I will be able to tell you a little more – just a little – about my upcoming new novel. And here’s why nowadays pre-publication information has to be very carefully crafted, and why AI is at the heart of the need to hold back on certain details:
I am an algorithm.
You may wonder, how the heck does that work? Well, I’m certainly not the only author impacted, because anyone who publishes anything you might read is at risk.
In short, there are spurious tech companies, absolutely no names mentioned, who have used the work of hundreds of thousands of authors to train their AI systems to write books, articles, essays etc. Yes – you know this, because you’ve probably read about it. But do you know how it works?
The AI “system” absorbs/inhales/sweeps the work of an author – and I mean all work, not simply books, but perhaps essays, articles, online posts and op-ed pieces. When that job is done the system has effectively gathered the author’s background, interests, focus for their work and, most important, the author’s “voice” – which means they know how the author crafts a scene, the rhythm of their writing and how they use language. In short AI is in the head of the author and knows how they write a story and what they are likely to write about. With all that information absorbed, the application is good to go!
Moving on, a person who has a yearning to publish a book very similar to the work of a given author but doesn’t want to put in the hard labor, only has to check out salient plot points revealed in advance information released by the publisher and enter those points into the app with the instruction to (for example) “write 100,000 words in the style of (author) with characters named (select common names from a given year). In short order, that “book” created by AI, in the voice of an already published author – one with a track record of followers – can be sold via various online outlets by the user, who chooses a suitable pseudonym and deploys the promotional tag, “If you liked books by (name of author copied) then you’ll love this new novel by (pseudonym of thief).”
A writer recently published a piece – I think it was in The Atlantic – describing how AI has crippled their career. Having completed a new novel – and never having used AI – the author submitted the work to the publisher, only to receive a reply stating the work was unacceptable because the author had used AI to craft the novel. The author was shocked – no AI was used, so how could the work have failed the tests publishers now employ to weed out AI-generated manuscript submissions? Further investigation by the author revealed that their previous work – which means their “voice” and their way of crafting a story – had been sucked up by an AI app for use by subscribers to a certain program. This meant that any work the author subsequently submitted to the publisher would fail tests because their way seeing and experiencing the world and therefore crafting a story had become a tool in an AI system. They were already an algorithm.
Everyone has their personal thoughts about this incursion, but creativity does not come easy – writing a novel is not a walk in the park. Admittedly, I don’t go down a mine when I’m writing a novel, but it takes hours of research, of planning and yes, sitting down and writing every day, crafting every single word to create a story I hope will be worth reading. Then there’s the road to publication and all the “jobs” that go with it. It’s why someone like me takes the first copy of any book published and cherishes it – because every time you finish a book you think you will never be able to do it again, and then you work hard and shock yourself because, by golly, you actually managed to write the story that had been in your head for a good long while. Then you go through your personal revisions, followed by the editorial process, followed by copyedits, followed by checking proofs, and when the book is finally published you just hope some error in the printing process hasn’t swapped around two paragraphs anywhere or something you deleted appears where it shouldn’t. I’d rather have that fear than AI getting involved in the production of my books. As Anne Lamott once said to me, you take that first copy off the press and “Buckle up” because you don’t know what you might find that you didn’t want to find.
One good point so far is that AI does not possess the qualities of empathy and compassion, and if you write from the heart then those qualities hopefully shine through.
All the above is why, after I let you in on a few details at some point next week (when I have the go-ahead from my publisher) I will not be writing much more about the new book until I begin my pre-publication newsletters in December. Publishers are required to release information on new books far in advance these days – more so than when my first novel was published – which increases the risk of creative theft by AI.
However, in my first pre-publication newsletter later in the year, I will be telling you more about the inspiration for my new novel – very exciting for me, not least because the character walked into my imagination some twenty years ago, and in the same way Maisie Dobbs first made her appearance – completely unexpected and out of the blue. This time I was not stuck in traffic – as I was with Maisie Dobbs – but instead I owe inspiration for the character to a horse named Serendipity. As the saying goes, “You can’t make this stuff up.”
Until later next week ….
Dana again–
Click through to her original FB post here to read the ongoing discussion in the comments and weigh in yourself. It’s something we should all be talking about.I do myself have a dog in this fight, as thirty-two (yes, that’s 32) of my titles were scraped up by Anthropic. I am, in theory at least, receiving a settlement later this year, but as Jacqui rightly says in response to a comment on her piece, “…the theft of one’s creative energy and ability does not have a price. Dollars cannot replace the theft.”