Imagine taking a book down from the shelf and discovering the content was, partly or wholly, machine-generated? Or, as a book reviewer or influencer having to debate whether to read an ARC (advance reader copy) that has caught your eye because it might not be a genuine work of imagination but, instead, a story cobbled together by AI ‘scraping’ of author databases?
Authors are already challenging the theft of their copyrighted work, while publishers and literary agents do their best to stem the tide. But, as a recent post on social media by a reader demonstrates, we’re in an AI minefield wondering which way to turn.
The book reviewer asks whether there’s a way to quickly find out if a book is AI-written, or whether there’s a blacklist of AI authors (to my knowledge, there isn’t). The reviewer mentions reading an ARC where the author had mistakenly failed to delete an AI prompt and ends with a plea that they ‘want to put my time and effort into stories that authors put their hearts into’. This gets to the nub of the matter.
AI is incapable of original thought. It can only use what we give it and, in novelistic terms, is churning out sentences according to algorithms. There are, apparently, ‘tells’ – such as the use of the em-dash, the ‘three descriptors’ rule and so on. But these are writing tics AI has lifted from genuine works. I like to think I can tell whether someone has used AI in a passage of writing – there’s a bland quality, and a strange, stilted perfection that doesn’t exist in a writer’s messy mind. There’s a lack of voice. But AI is getting better at mimicking us.
So, in the absence of a ‘blacklist’, the Society of Authors has given authors a platform on which to declare their work has been created by a human, without the use of generative AI. The new scheme – Human Authored – was launched at this year’s London Book Fair and I’ve signed up to it. It is billed as the first of its kind to help protect an entire profession. Visit the website here for more information.
Writers are doing themselves a disservice by using AI, as well as conning the reader. To quote from the Authors’ Guild: ‘As a writer, it is your original voice, thinking, and creativity that make you the writer that you are. As an author or journalist, you contribute your unique view and thoughts and your unique voice. AI outputs, by contrast, are generic mash-ups of pre-existing works ingested during training.’
To end on an optimistic note, perhaps, amongst the slew of AI generated slop, consumers will increasingly and actively seek out the authentic.
