How Kindle Novelists Are Using ChatGPT's AI (theverge.com) 65
The Verge presents what it's calling "an interview with an AI early adopter," who is currently using ChatGPT not just to generate titles, but also the plots for their mysteries. For example, "I need four murder suspects with information about why they're suspected and how they are cleared. And then tell me who the guilty killer is."
The author says "It will do just that. It will spit that out." Q: You and a few other independent authors were early adopters of these tools. With ChatGPT, it feels like a lot of other people are suddenly grappling with the same questions you were confronting. What's that been like...?
Every group, every private, behind-the-scenes author group I'm in, there's some kind of discussion going on. Right now, everybody's talking about using it on the peripherals. But there seems to be this moral chasm between: "It does blurbs really well, and I hate doing blurbs, and I have to pay somebody to do blurbs, and blurbs isn't writing, so I'm going to use it for blurbs." Or "Well, I'm going to have it help me tighten up my plot because I hate plotting, but it plots really well, so I'm going to use it for that." Or "Did you know that if you tell it to proofread, it'll make sure that it's grammatically correct?'
Everybody gets closer and closer to using it to write their stuff, and then they stop, and everybody seems to feel like they have to announce when they're talking about this: "But I do not ever use its words to write my books." And I do.... The actual words, just to get them down faster and get it out, I do. So I've found myself in the past couple of weeks wondering, do I engage in this debate? Do I say anything? For the most part, I've said nothing.
Q: What do you think the line is that people are drawing?
It's a concern of plagiarism. Everybody knows that they crawled stuff with permission and without permission. And there's an ethical question.... I have three authors that I've read extensively, indie authors that I'm friends with, and I know they never gave permission for their stuff to be looked at, and I was able to reasonably recreate their style.... That I won't do. That, for me, is an ethical line....
But you could, if you were ethically okay with that, with this technology and what it allows you to do.
The author says "It will do just that. It will spit that out." Q: You and a few other independent authors were early adopters of these tools. With ChatGPT, it feels like a lot of other people are suddenly grappling with the same questions you were confronting. What's that been like...?
Every group, every private, behind-the-scenes author group I'm in, there's some kind of discussion going on. Right now, everybody's talking about using it on the peripherals. But there seems to be this moral chasm between: "It does blurbs really well, and I hate doing blurbs, and I have to pay somebody to do blurbs, and blurbs isn't writing, so I'm going to use it for blurbs." Or "Well, I'm going to have it help me tighten up my plot because I hate plotting, but it plots really well, so I'm going to use it for that." Or "Did you know that if you tell it to proofread, it'll make sure that it's grammatically correct?'
Everybody gets closer and closer to using it to write their stuff, and then they stop, and everybody seems to feel like they have to announce when they're talking about this: "But I do not ever use its words to write my books." And I do.... The actual words, just to get them down faster and get it out, I do. So I've found myself in the past couple of weeks wondering, do I engage in this debate? Do I say anything? For the most part, I've said nothing.
Q: What do you think the line is that people are drawing?
It's a concern of plagiarism. Everybody knows that they crawled stuff with permission and without permission. And there's an ethical question.... I have three authors that I've read extensively, indie authors that I'm friends with, and I know they never gave permission for their stuff to be looked at, and I was able to reasonably recreate their style.... That I won't do. That, for me, is an ethical line....
But you could, if you were ethically okay with that, with this technology and what it allows you to do.
Hold on a moment... (Score:4, Insightful)
"...Everybody gets closer and closer to using it to write their stuff..."
If you're using it to write your stuff then it isn't really your stuff at all. What, you can claim authorship 'cause you're the one who pushed the "GENERATE TEXT" button?
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People are already doing that and it's devastating the self published book market.
Used to be you could just pay someone a pittance to write a book on some trending topic for you, throw it on Kindle and turn a profit. There are people running courses explaining how to do it.
Now you don't even have to pay someone. Just use AI to write the book for you.
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it's devastating the self published book market.
Not really. Just as many people are succeeding, they are just different people.
That's ok. If your work product is indistinguishable from machine-generated text, you weren't producing anything of value.
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There aren't as many people succeeding. The authors for hire who specialize in writing a book in a few days with massive amounts of padding are out of work.
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Sounds like this AI would also make a great court reporter. It could hear and transcribe everything. This AI could likely fill out a great deal of common law documents that really are not that hard to fill out but do require a pinch of domain knowledge (and when it's legal stuff, do you really risk it by not getting legal advice?).
The amount of jobs these new AIs could be replacing is going to rack up fast in the next decade or so.
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Sure, not saying it's good or bad, just that it's happening.
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That's a common fallacy used for automation and ai but it's not true.
One AI enhanced human replaces a dozen human writers.
One factory automated with robots replaces 800 workers with 3 workers.
One checkout person running a self-checkout with 6 terminals replaces 5 human workers and is backed up by 1 self checkout repair person per city (or even state) who basically replaces the cash register repair person 1:1.
One farmer with automated gps tools replaces *hundreds* of farmers.
Amazon replaces tens of thousands
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So wait, what's the problem? If I have a pretty cool idea for a story I could go use this thing to help me write it out. I could then use the photoAI to create a cool book cover.
This cuts out all the expense of being an author and getting your material to your hopeful reader base.
There is enormous upside here. I could both work my day job and be a self published author for my hobby that might even gain me some money and attention from the literary world. If that's your goal.
I can't wait until I can explain
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I'm not saying it's necessarily bad, although the books these guys churn are basically a rip off.
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The way I see it is this (Score:2)
On the plus side it might force mega corps to spend more money on higher quality stuff. But the downside is some authors and artists need to make a living off their "meh" work to get to the
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It's usually better than they stuff they write themselves.
I say it's better if they all use it.
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Also, it will completely destroy quality. I have read some "enhanced" books (well, tried to) were obviously the text was post-processed in some really stupid probably automated fashion to make it more "flashy". Because there were really bad issues, like the protagonist suddenly doing or saying things that were completely out of character, this really made the book unreadable. As Artificial Ignorance has no insight, this is exactly the type of crap it will write. And if I run into something like that it gets
Autotune for text. (Score:4, Interesting)
This is going to turn everything into the same old same old.
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Every source of light brings into the world an opportunity to cast shadows.
What if I were to describe that the last forty-odd years of my life observing you doing your day-to-day human has always reminded me of ELIZA output? What if 10e+3 is nowhere near the magnitude required to reach unity? The concept of Instrumentality with humanity is therefore terrific, literally, as in "imparting a sense of terror of a limitless magni
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10e3 = 10*10^3 = 10*1000 = 10,000
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There's already successful types that write the same damn book over and over and over again,
aka Danielle Steele. I happened to read somewhere that she admits all her stories are the same, just the people and locations are different.
Re: Autotune for text. (Score:2)
Also everything published by Mills and Boon.
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Steele is a romance writer. Romance is the most formula driven genre there is (and best selling genre overall), because that's what the audience wants, and won't buy anything else. You can't sell a romance novel that breaks the formula.
Bestselling romance novels have been written by chatbots for many years. Not quite search and replace on the names, but very close.
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That was my conclusion after trying it out. It will identify one or two themes in your prompt, and regurgitate the common tropes of it.
And nothing more.
Hollywood will love it. No more dealing with the Writer's Guild of America! And the scripts will be exactly the same.
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That was my conclusion after trying it out. It will identify one or two themes in your prompt, and regurgitate the common tropes of it.
And nothing more.
Hollywood will love it. No more dealing with the Writer's Guild of America! And the scripts will be exactly the same.
Yeah, probably. This stuff will make porn scripts look like the height of sophistication though.
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This stuff will make porn scripts look like the height of sophistication though.
Which is different from today how?
Creativity (Score:4, Interesting)
"Sweat of the brow" aside; if you can describe your idea in less words than the output I would argue the idea itself does not surpass the threshold for creativity required for the input/output pairs to be eligible for copyright protection. This means ChatGPT forms an extremely effective compression algorithm with a massive dictionary. The input essentially forms a hash key to index and look up the uncompressed data from the dictionary database. This reveals a great deal about the low information entropy (entropic density) of the input used to generate the output.
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That would be untrue if the state of the model were saved and restored. It's a compression algorithm. If you change the dictionary content you won't be able to decompress the same output twice, of course not. ChatGPT obviously has state and it is obviously not static. If you wanted to use it as an effective compression algorithm it would require a static state.
Tough challenge (Score:1)
Even real authors such as Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson somehow failed to match the depth of Frank Herbert's writing to conclude the original Dune series. And they were using his notes for the plot.
Hunters of Dune: The New York Times said of Hunters of Dune that "Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson go through the motions, but they don't often seem to be having much fun with their material ... by the end of Hunters, they have done little more than set the table for Sandworms of Dune."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Sandworms of Dune: Conversely, the novel was criticized by Publishers Weekly for its writing and storytelling methods: Longtime collaborators Herbert and Anderson set themselves a steep challenge-and, in the end, fail to meet it-in this much anticipated wrapup of the original Dune cycle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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I would hardly say the later Dune books praised "hard right ruralism." In fact, quite the opposite.
I've come to the conclusion that it is impossible to tease out any coherent political message from the Dune books. I've tried.
The most obvious thing about Dune is that it's a story about extreme fascism, or at least, about extreme authoritarianism-- told exclusively from the viewpoint of the authoritarians. The basic premise seems to be as follows: Humans behave like animals or children, they are incapable of making wise decisions for themselves, and their only hope is to find a group of "enlightened ones
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Frank was a brilliant and inspired world-builder who at one point was also a competent, workmanlike novelist. (The original "Dune" is a well-constructed novel with a good story; so is "The White Plague"). In his later years, he lost the "competent and workmanlike" part, perhaps due to his declining health.
I've been trying to read through the final Dune novel (Chapterhouse), and my God, it's a slog and a half. There are endless internal monologues, and endless passages where two supposedly hyper-intelligen
They're giving the wrong instructions (Score:2)
What they *should* be instructing ChatGPT to "put together a novel that's most likely to bring an unknown author ten million dollars".
There is no line to draw (Score:2)
I think it is that simple. ChatGPT is just a took like Google or a spell checker, just a lot more advanced.
It is an interesting combination of some scholarly analysis and combination of different sources, mixed with some limited (surficial) logical understanding, and an element of confabulation.
As long as you know how to use that in your writing process, I don't think there is anything wrong with that, and I don't think there is anything that can be done about it. Given that an AI is a master of style, it w
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I tried - this is not stealing any jobs (Score:5, Interesting)
It created a scenario of a string of burglaries in wealthy homes, that seemed to be connected to a string of art thefts. Some back and forth on investigation and theories, fx all theft happened when homeowners were out of town. Detective suspect that the thief is both a professional art thief and someone close to the vicims so sets a trap, and they catch a thief who turns out to be a trusted family friend with a gambling problem.
Since I assume you are smarter than ChatGPT I will not point out the obivious logical errors, same type you can find many other examples of it making, but this thing is not stealing our jobs anytime soon.
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We've all seen that movie, and TV show, many, many, many times.
This this is basically a Hollywood script writer with better spelling and an extension cord.
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If you believe this tool has no benefit you're not seeing the big picture.
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If we now assume I am less intelligent than ChatGPT, could you please explicit the logical error for idiots like me? I'm just curious. Is it that the gambling problem is unrelated to the rest of the script so it's not so great? Is it that "trusted family friend" does not work because the families are different and have no friend in common? Is it that "art theft" implies museums (not homes) and therefore no "homeowner" to be out of town?
Monomyth (Score:2)
You can just study the incredible similarities between all written works, starting with web pages about disney princesses, or the flamewars where dune fans claim star wars ripped off a lot of stuff from the Dune books.
Why are you writing books if you didn't study the history and theory of literature?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
"Kindle novelists"? (Score:2)
A strange expression (since Kindle is an app, not a genre). I think what they mean by it is "self-published novelists".
Anyway, the author they interviewed is kind of a hack. (You can read her stuff for free on Kindle Unlimited). If I were trying to find authors to interview about the potential impact of AI on the modern novel, I'd probably try to aim a little higher than that.
What I dislike about this author's remarks is her lack of respect for the audience. "If I can use [ChatGPT] to get the words out
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Regarding blurbs, well, she probably finds it mind numbingly boring to write them up. Why NOT have an AI handle that task. Do you not have a work task that you wish you could automate away?
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Regarding blurbs, well, she probably finds it mind numbingly boring to write them up. Why NOT have an AI handle that task. Do you not have a work task that you wish you could automate away?
If the blurb is "mind-numbingly boring" to write up, it will be "mind-numbingly boring" to read... and with a blurb like that, no one is ever going to read your book! Come on now.
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That's a solid point.
but but but AI does a great job writing up my fantasy football weekly report!!!
I'm Getting Nervous (Score:2)
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Your fears are misplaced. This isn't a paradigm shift. It's a parlor trick.
What you get is... (Score:2)
a) plagerism, or
b) derivative crap that sucks badly.
If you can't come up with what you need, maybe you need to either do research for data, or maybe you should try something other than writing.
Yes, I am a published writer, and a member of SFWA.
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Indeed. Probably mostly plagiarism of crap that sucks badly though. If I ever run into this, it will get a zero-star review and an exact explanation what the problem is. That review will probably take more time to write than I will invest into such a surrogate "story". Writing taks talent, insight and creativity. All things machines cannot have and ChatGPT is no exception. Since we do have review system for books and since any reader with at least some standards has gotten burned before, I predict this will