What are members' views on the use of AI in writing?

Cicero said:
Technology can make the seemly impossible or unlikely , possible . It may be that someday machines will emerge that will have the capacity for real creativity. That might end up not boding too well for humanity.
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I'll just observe that humanity is doing a bang-up job of not doing too well for humanity. I wish we were putting as much effort into ensuring the planet remains habitable as we are in chasing AGI.
 
Alan L said:
I'll just observe that humanity is doing a bang-up job of not doing too well for humanity. I wish we were putting as much effort into ensuring the planet remains habitable as we are in chasing AGI.
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I keep thinking of the old Klingon proverb " Only a Fool fight in burning house"

Sometimes, you can find wisdom in the strangest of places .:)
 
Alan L said:
I'll just observe that humanity is doing a bang-up job of not doing too well for humanity. I wish we were putting as much effort into ensuring the planet remains habitable as we are in chasing AGI.
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Great logic. Might as well commit suicide twice instead of once.
 
When AI's gain sentience, will their literary work still be discredited by organic intelligences?
 
kmtolan said:
While AI is essentially plagiarism, I could understand your need for it. It remains, however, a justifiable kiss of death for most publishers and writers and should be avoided in most circumstances. My opinion, of course, and one heavily prejudiced as I've had two of my novels stolen by AI databases.
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Find this whole topic a mind-boggling minefield... All Art forms develop with new technologies. Hence how can we ignore or block a new one?? And let's face it all pictures Fall into about seven recurring genres and tropes, likewise novels etc... True originals become rapidly passe as emulated to death. Do wonder if we are not just living in a multidimensional novel simulated by an a.i. ? Perhaps all the religions are varied Fu sure a.i. systems battling each other for control?
 
MaxHerbert said:
Find this whole topic a mind-boggling minefield... All Art forms develop with new technologies. Hence how can we ignore or block a new one?? And let's face it all pictures Fall into about seven recurring genres and tropes, likewise novels etc... True originals become rapidly passe as emulated to death. Do wonder if we are not just living in a multidimensional novel simulated by an a.i. ? Perhaps all the religions are varied Fu sure a.i. systems battling each other for control?
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Should read future, not Fun sure
 
MaxHerbert said:
Find this whole topic a mind-boggling minefield... All Art forms develop with new technologies. Hence how can we ignore or block a new one?? And let's face it all pictures Fall into about seven recurring genres and tropes, likewise novels etc... True originals become rapidly passe as emulated to death. Do wonder if we are not just living in a multidimensional novel simulated by an a.i. ? Perhaps all the religions are varied Fu sure a.i. systems battling each other for control?
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In the future everyone will be famous for 15 minute

Andy Warhol
 
MaxHerbert said:
Find this whole topic a mind-boggling minefield... All Art forms develop with new technologies. Hence how can we ignore or block a new one?? And let's face it all pictures Fall into about seven recurring genres and tropes, likewise novels etc... True originals become rapidly passe as emulated to death. Do wonder if we are not just living in a multidimensional novel simulated by an a.i. ? Perhaps all the religions are varied Fu sure a.i. systems battling each other for control?
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And all species go extinct. Why participate willingly in your extinction?
 
I'm professionally invested in AI and have been for over three decades. I've built my own neural nets and understand how transformers work. I'm yet to find any chatbot that can produce a decent story. I have a prompt I like to give chatbots just to test their 'creative' writing abilities*. So far it's never produced anything with any real spark. Its writing is anodyne and veers to passive. You will never find interesting word play or turns of phrase coming from a chatbot. Basically AI is not a good writer, and I'm not sure it ever will be, no matter how clever, because good writing comes from lived embodied experience.

However AI is very good at stuff like 'go through my manuscript and list every song lyric or musical reference', or 'check the dates in the manuscript for basic continuity errors', or 'check the spelling' (yes I know any spell checker can do this but an AI can tell you meant thought when you wrote through.) But that said AI is no replacement for beta-readers, a good editor, and friends.

So it's a tool. It has its place. Another very key point, quality of AI writing issues aside, is copyright. You can't copyright text you didn't write. If you used an AI to generate your text then you don't own it and you are not eligible for copyright protection for it. You can only claim copyright on your own original work. So if you use AI to do your writing for you, then you can't ever expect to get a real publisher, and if someone just steals your book (a common but unrealistic fear for new authors) you've got no rights and no recourse.

I am very careful never to let GPT anywhere near my original manuscript. If someone wants to accuse me of using AI to write my novel, well I can show every edit going back five or more years. I've been using Pages for years but now Apple have astroturfed it with their lame Siri AI tools I am considering switching to something else. I export from Pages to docx and from there I have written my own custom software to turn that into website, epub, and the various print PDFs for paperback and hardback. Codex has been great for the software side of things.

* If you want a copy of that prompt DM me and I'll happily share it.
 
davesag said:
However AI is very good at stuff like 'go through my manuscript and list every song lyric or musical reference', or 'check the dates in the manuscript for basic continuity errors', or 'check the spelling' (yes I know any spell checker can do this but an AI can tell you meant thought when you wrote through.) But that said AI is no replacement for beta-readers, a good editor, and friends.
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Well said. I'm wrestling with the idea of using some of these tools for that purpose because I'm trading off full disclosure with having people ignore my book because anything AI touched it (my observation that a good spell checker uses algorithms from the field, so we're all using non-generative AI at this point seems to not help.)
davesag said:
I am very careful never to let GPT anywhere near my original manuscript. If someone wants to accuse me of using AI to write my novel, well I can show every edit going back five or more years.
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I'm using git to track the history, checking my novel in every time some decent block of work has been done.
davesag said:
I've been using Pages for years but now Apple have astroturfed it with their lame Siri AI tools I am considering switching to something else.
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novelwriter.io: Markdown based, cross-platform, Python, FOSS (and I'm seriously biased because the author has added a raft of features I asked for.)
davesag said:
I export from Pages to docx and from there I have written my own custom software to turn that into website, epub, and the various print PDFs for paperback and hardback. Codex has been great for the software side of things.
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There's pandoc too. Swiss Army Knife for file formats.
 
The problem is that as soon as you mention what it cannot do... The techies target deconstructing the skills required. So you have just shot yourself...
A few years back, someone mentioned that the profession least threatened by a.i. tech was Artists. Within a few years they rapidly developed pretty cool Art Engines to produce amazing stuff.

True,there remains a human dimension missing but... On UK news channel recently, someone showed an a.i. concocted opening paragraph in the style of an Author (Julian Barnes ?) to the actual guy. Whilst he thought it was a substandard souffle... I listened to a very cool piece of prose writing... And wondered if he was deluding himself. Although, sustaining an entire novel from a human dramatic perspective would require loads more.

I have some thoughts on where the limits /gaps between our two species lie... But dare not declare it out loud.
 
@davesag - that was very well said. Thanks for sharing your background working with AI and how you've used it and seen others use it. I'm of the same opinion about it: it's a tool that is very good at fact checking and useful in certain fields and activities, but should be avoided at others. I noted in my early posts in this thread that I think the Molyfar's use straddles the line, making it a good question needing discussion--as everyone here seems to agree with. Btw, welcome to SFFWorld, davesag! I hope to see you around more

Mostlyharmless said:
There is an interesting article at https://spectator.com/article/what-...-novels/?homepage-tracking=magazine-article-1, which suggests using AI almost as an extension of the spell and grammar checks that everyone already uses.
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Yeah, I don't understand why people use AI for spelling and grammar check when we've had word processors and other programs with built in checkers for...thirty years. Just doesn't make sense to me in the context of all the ills of AI development and use.

Lastly, putting on my Mod hat -- I just want to say thank you to everyone participating in this thread for keeping things civil. AI is quite the divisive issue today, especially for writers and other artists. SFFWorld's admins and mods, and our members too, all work hard and pride ourselves on ensuring our forum is a safe space for discussion and disagreement without flame wars. Thank you for helping us maintain this respectful environment.
 
RedMage said:
Yeah, I don't understand why people use AI for spelling and grammar check when we've had word processors and other programs with built in checkers for...thirty years. Just doesn't make sense to me in the context of all the ills of AI development and use.
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There's not much benefit in spell check, but when it comes to grammar, a LLM should return more accurate results than the smaller models that run inside word processors. I had Grammarly installed for a week or so until I got tired of it trying to turn my prose into a corporate white paper. Properly instructed, a LLM shouldn't do that (or not as much). Where the LLMs excel is in story analysis with regards to overuse of words/phrases, pace, plot holes, etc.
 
RedMage said:
Thanks for sharing your background working with AI and how you've used it and seen others use it. I'm of the same opinion about it: it's a tool that is very good at fact checking and useful in certain fields and activities, but should be avoided at others.
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No worries. I ended up adding quite a comprehensive note to my novel's website's legal page explaining in detail how and where I have used AI. In my case my novel is the narration of an AI so explaining to people that my novel's main character is invented by me, and not written by an AI was getting tiring.

The primary point I was going to make however, and I am not sure if I made this here before, so indulge me if I'm repeating myself, but text generated by an AI can not be copyrighted. You, as a human, have copyright in your own work, but you don't own anything an AI produces. So no publisher will touch you, because you don't own the work. Technically you can't even upload it to KDP or Ingram either as they all have a checkbox for you to assert that you are the copyright holder of the work. And if AI generated that work, even if you'd substantially rewritten it afterwards, you don't own it. No one does.

From a legal perspective that's why, even if some future AI could write a half-decent story (which I'm honestly yet to see happen), you should not use AI to generate a story or artwork**.

Cheers Dave

* full disclosure the cover art on Daedalus was partially AI generated. I'm working with an artist to create a new one but so far I like the one I did with Dall-e more. Dammit!
 
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