The talk this past week and last week have been the idea of AI bots creating works. First, they came for the artist and many of the artists that I know and follow are rightfully outraged that pieces that they have spent hours on, labored over, are being recreated, sometimes poorly, in minutes. Recently, this has come to writing.
As you all know by now, I am an avid reader of Pride and Prejudice variations and Sherlock Holmes pastiches. I pay for Kindle Unlimited so I can peruse their library of P &P variations. Some are so well written that I have them marked as favorites while some are okay. Almost all of them are enjoyable in some way.
Last week, an author of such variations came out on Twitter to say that she’s been writing with an AI program for some time now. It’s how she can crank out her books so quickly. There was a huge blow back to her by people who were shocked that an author would admit that they, loosely stated, plagiarize other peoples work by use of an AI program that scrapes existing on the web and gathers the data based on instructions given by the user. It then processes the data and spits out fresh content.
There’s a theorem that states if you put a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter for an infinite amount of time, the monkey will eventually type out the complete works of Shakespeare. In short, this is what AI writing programs are doing. In less time. With more “monkeys”. Already colleges and universities are rewriting their syllabuses to include the use of AI programs as plagiarism. If universities are considering the use of AI programs to write papers as plagiarism, then why are authors under the impression that this is perfectly fine.
Back to this author. I won’t give names because as much as I would like to call them out, they aren’t worth the time and hassle that could follow. One good google search will get you the same results. I searched this author and was relieved to find that I have not read any of their works. Author of 15 P&P variations and winner of readers conferences and historical bestseller lists is fine and good when her readers thought she was just writing good stories. But now that she’s doing the electronic version of plagiarism for her stories, I wonder how her book sales will vary. If one is going to just rip passages from other books and pass them off as one’s own, do it the old fashion way like certain other plagiarist authors out there.
Searching for this author sent me to a link for an “Academy” that she and five other authors run. For only $99/month they can teach you for you use AI to crank out the complete works of Shakespeare. I’m not linking the “academy”, it’s just an MLM to get people who want to “write” their novel and crank out money. Also, her website, when I clicked on it sent me to a “you won a free Amazon card!” spam bot. It seems everything about this “author” is fake.
Writing is a passion. You put your heart and soul into it, you bleed on paper (or onto the laptop for almost all of us now) to get your story out there and you hope that readers will like it. You don’t set up a system that pulls words out of other people’s souls and transfers them into a cohesive amalgamation of sentences to crank out like a machine. I looked up the other four “authors”. Two are in the sci fi market, one is in cozy mysteries, and the others are in the romance genre. Seriously, stop. Romance already is fighting for a place and the right to be appreciated and respected. The minute it’s discovered that someone is cranking out romance novels using an AI program, we’ve taken six steps back. The scariest thing is that one of these authors that run this academy might be an author of several nonfiction books. I tried to verify and the only person coming up under that author name was a person who wrote romance, non-fiction, and biographies. If this is indeed the same person, then this has escalated into the truly horrifying. If there is someone out there using AI bots to write a biography, can anyone truly trust that the book is real? If they’re using this same AI bot to write non-fiction, is that truly non-fiction? Fiction is bad enough, cranking out words that are not your own is bad, cranking out words that are supposed to be the life of someone or is listed as non-fiction when it, in fact, had no bearing on reality at all and was artificially created, is a complete other can of worms. That’s miles beyond plagiarism.
If you want to write, write because you love it. Or because you have words and thoughts that you need to get out before you explode. If you write P & P variations, or Holmes Pastiches, it’s because you have a deep love of the characters created by those authors and want to tell stories that are burning in your heart. It’s no more than fanfic writers are doing. Which, by the way, fanfic authors are fighting to keep AI works out of their archives because even we know that AI writing is a form of plagiarism.
Readers, be careful what you read, announce it on Goodreads, if you find another author who uses AI bots for their “works” Shame them, if they have any. Or hit them in the pocketbook. Enjoy what you want, but please, read words and books that come from people who write for the love of it, not for people who just want to make a quick buck as fast as they can.
As you can see, I had words today, that all came out of my head, through my fingers and onto this keyboard. No other creations were activated to write this blog. It’s a passionate subject.
Well, pool season opens on Monday! And will it, the proverbial time by the pool with your cold drink. Make sure you bring along your favorite book.
Mouse's Reading Nook 