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

[Stanley Steamboy]

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.

Are you sure about that? If I hire a human ghost writer, I can copywrite what they produce for me. Who actually does the work is not the basis for ownership.

 

[davesag]

Are you sure about that? If I hire a human ghost writer, I can copywrite what they produce for me. Who actually does the work is not the basis for ownership.

The ghostwriter, being human, owns the copyright in their original work. They then assign or license it to you, which means you then own the copyright. The ghostwriter retains their moral rights as those are unassignable; they are innate. (Actually this isn't true in the USA but it is in most other jurisdictions)

Works produced by an AI legally can't be copyrighted, just like recipes can't be copyrighted (which is why all recipe books are full of waffle about how such and such a lasagne was their grandfather's favourite thing, and oh the snows go on forever…)

Copyright law is consistent about this across many jurisdictions, and certainly amongst countries that are part of WIPO. Only humans can copyright something.

My brother has just written a very detailed book on this very topic. See https://aicopyright.ai

 

[Busa]

I have been using AI for two things.
1 - create writing exercises. For example to train myself of writing chapter openings, creating tension, etc...
2 - editorial. to spot weak spots in my manuscripts. POV changes, pace issues, etc..

I find it helpful.

 

[EricJ]

I've largely not used AI (other than Google's Gemini when doing Googling things) in my work because if it's going to be jacked up, I might as well do it myself. Seriously though, I don't see much use for AI other than the entertainment factor, which I don't really get in a tizzy about. I mean yeah it sucks, and has a long way to go, but I don't see it right now wording for me. Like the meme said, I want it to do my laundry and dishes, not stuff I'm infinitely capable of doing myself.

 

[davesag]

Like the meme said, I want it to do my laundry and dishes, not stuff I'm infinitely capable of doing myself.

Exactly. In my case, right now, I'm using GPT to help me build a new author website. I've been writing non-fiction for years over in Medium, and it never monetises very well at all, even a very popular article gives very marginal rewards. So I started recently looking at SubStack and wrote a short essay on copyright law and AI, based on some differences between US law, which my brother covers amazingly well in his book (mentioned above) but which differs philosophically with Australian, Canadian, and other Commonwealth countries. I also published a couple of short stories on SubStack to get a feel for its paywall mechanisms and so forth. I have all of seven subscribers! W00t! None of them paying. Sigh.

But then a friend showed me how Nazi adjacent SubStack is, and how high-schoolish their weak-sauce libertarian view of censorship is, and I've decided I can't ethically, be complicit in their actions. So that led me to use GPT (the irony is strong with this Tesla owning, Starlink using hypocrite I hear you argue correctly) to go research what are, for my specific needs, the best possible solution. I want an author website that looks nice, has some info about me, has a simple to use email list and subscription system with degrees of paywalls, from guest to free subscriber to premium subscriber. All the s**t SubStack gives me but without the social aspects or, obviously, the Nazi adjacency and schoolyard libertarianism.

GPT researched everything from Ghost Pro to Behiiv and Patreon plus heaps more I'd never heard of. It gave me a very clean table view of pros and cons that suit my specific needs. It gave me a short checklist of questions to answer about each service. I checked all the services out myself and wrote up my homework like a good boy. GPT analysed my responses and said well you already have a free Netlify account that you use for your novel and your Photobots art project, and you own davesag.com but never use it, so, just a suggestion, but do it yourself and use Buttondown and VS Code and GitHub and Netlify and until you have more than 100 subscribers, or want to start actually charging people money it's all free.

Now could I have done all that research and reached the same conclusion? Yeah, nah, maybe. Probably. Would I have done all that research and reached the same conclusion? Yeah, nah, maybe. Probably not. GPT is like a bicycle for the mind in this regard. I got it to write up a detailed brief that I can give to Codex in VS Code to build out exactly what I need. It'll probably take me and Codex a day.

But websites built by AIs all look the damn same. This was rammed home to me when I looked at the website for my brother's book (which I think he used Claude to build, but I've not asked him). It's stylistically very close to the Daedalus website. Very similar use of typefaces and white space. I tarted mine up a bit with a subtly animating background that only starts to animate if the page sits idle for a few minutes, and I added a complete e-reader view to mine, but I am a professional software engineer and my brother is a law professor. Still at a casual glance they looked very similar, especially in light-mode.

So I explained this to GPT, with links, and told it to go research other authors' websites and find five that are all quite different from each other, and explain why it chose them. I went and did some gardening while it did that. It took an hour or so. The results it returned led me down a rabbit hole of looking at other author's sites, one a really interesting trans comic book writer called Charlie Jane Anders that I'd never heard of, one an African futurist academic writer who also does comics called Nnedi Okorafor, that, similarly, I'd never heard of, Ursula Le Guin's and Cory Doctorow's websites, and a guy called Peter Watts who I'd never heard of. All these sites could not have been more different. Again GPT gave me some homework to do. A short checklist of questions I had to answer about each of the sites, what my first impressions were, could I imagine reading a 2000+ word short story there, did the colour scheme work for me, etc. I spent hours really thinking about my answers, and wrote up a very detailed reply. A half a second later GPT said "Your reactions point towards a contemporary personal publication with excellent typography, clear navigation and a little wit." which is honestly spot on, if super generic advice. But the "a little wit" was a nice touch.

It left me with more homework. Now it's challenged me to find, myself, sites that I do really like. Examples of long-form content that's easy to read, and author information that doesn't just look and feel like every other site, but isn't radically different either. And I keep coming back to SubStack. I like their typeface choices and colouring. I like how it looks in light and dark mode. And this is GPT's trap. It's now so smart, so capable, and so accurate, that, as a research companion and sounding board it's so good that you can't keep up with it. Pre-GPT I'd have a much shitter website for Daedalus that's for sure, and I'd probably simply not bother with a well built, highly personalised author platform, I'd just keep using Medium and treating it like a hobby.

I think I'm just massively overthinking it and should just get the f**k on with it instead of writing this ridiculously long comment.

If interested here's my full conversation with GPT on the matter. That discussion led me down a whole separate rabbit hole on whether Daedalus counts as space opera (it does, but with twists), and then an insight into why we humans will always prefer fiction written by other humans, and not by machines. I wrote it up as an essay in Medium. This is the 'friend link' so free to access if you are not a subscriber.