Writing and Artificial Intelligence

robot looking down with white face and neck and grey metallic circuitry

With Artificial Intelligence (AI) seemingly having crept up on us, I knew it was only a matter of time before I was confronted with an issue in my work.

The Human Imagination vs AI

It happened last week and it involved a well-intentioned person, someone who'd never written a book before and who was only a few thousand words into the novel, who contacted me to chat about the book. They mentioned that they’d ‘put one of their chapters through AI’ and were very pleased with the result. ‘I don’t have the sort of imagination to come up with some of the descriptions AI gave me,’ they said. They continued to say they were so pleased that they were thinking of getting significantly more help from AI, maybe even getting AI to write the whole book, because they wouldn’t be able to write their book the way ‘AI could’.

What about the Rights of the Original Creators?

This may sound fairly innocuous to some, so let’s think of another scenario. Copyright. Copyright protects writers and other creatives from having their work or part thereof unlawfully copied and reproduced – plagiarised – without the author’s express, written approval. Moreover, the author has the right to ask for financial compensation if they agree to grant permission to reproduce their work.

However, did you know that AI requires no such permission? The companies that own AI technology trawl the internet and willy-nilly, shamelessly, plagiarise the content of millions of hard-working authors’ … with impunity … and for free. And then, people like the person who contacted me think that AI is brilliant. In this regard, it's not brilliant at all. It appears brilliant because it has plagiarised the content generated by the wonderful human mind, the human imagination. The writing skills of the minds behind this content have been honed and refined over many years of training and practice.

bronze statue of Shakespeare

An AI Test

Saying that AI is ‘brilliant’ at writing is highly subjective. A few weeks before this, as a test, I ran a query through AI asking if it could write a short book and specified several parameters. It returned some steps and an outline and asked if I wanted it to start drafting the chapters. I didn’t take AI up on its offer but looking at the suggested outline alone, I found it was prone to exaggeration and cliché, as well as being repetitious and formulaic. That’s not to say that AI won’t become ever more sophisticated. I’m sure it eventually will. After all, it’s a learning tool and the more content it digests, the more sophisticated it will become.

A Useful Tool

AI is useful as a tool. It’s great for providing suggestions for marketing material, such as blurbs and synopses and author bios. Nevertheless, it’s not the be-all-and-end-all. You need to tweak the results. It offers ideas that you may not have thought of, but they may be expressed in a way that is overly fancy and exaggerated, with not quite the right tone. You can get AI to change the tone, but you’ll still need to add your human touch if you want to sound original and natural.

Remember the Humans

AI is here to stay, that much is clear. There are many amazing applications of AI in medical and other fields. It's in the field of creativity that I would dearly love AI companies to be held accountable and be required to compensate the authors whose works they plagiarise with impunity. That may well be an impossible wish. My intention behind this article is to make people more aware that in the field of writing, AI does not produce original content. It directly uses the content it finds online that has been generated by brilliant writers who’ve honed their craft over their whole careers.

Little girl sitting in a field with sunlight shining into her face

Photo Credits:

Possessed Photography on Unsplash (Robot)

Melissa Askew on Unsplash (Girl and light)

Taha on Unsplash (Shakespeare)

Emiliano Vittoriosi on Unsplash (Featured image)

 

 

Book Writing Coach
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