Should AI Write books?

[Birdjaguar]

Let ChatGPT and Quillbot Write Your Book
By Peter Funt

Looking for something to do with a few free hours on a summer afternoon? Try writing a book.

Don’t bother with a mainstream publisher, which releases at most a handful of books a day. Deal instead with Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing, where some 3,800 books are published every 24 hours—1.4 million a year. By searching “How to self-publish a book” on Amazon’s retail site, you’ll discover more than 6,000 books on the subject. Or, you can follow these steps: First, decide what your book will be about using low-cost software such as Publisher Rocket, which tracks Amazon searches to determine keywords book buyers are typing. It will tell you the number of books competing for each keyword and how much money their authors are making. Pick the hottest topic you can find.

Next, ask ChatGPT to create an outline. This should take less than 30 seconds. For popular themes—such as “How to Lose Weight on a Vegan Diet”—the results are surprisingly good. Once you’re happy with the outline, ask ChatGPT to write the book. Make separate queries, one chapter at a time. Because Amazon frowns on content created by artificial intelligence, the next step is crucial: Paste each of your chapters into Originality.AI to determine its “AI score.” A score of 100% is bad, meaning your content is blatantly AIgenerated.

Use QuillBot.com to find synonyms and alternate phrases. Then paste your revised material into the Gram-marly app, which will act as a copy editor to clean things up.
Return to Originality.AI and continue fiddling with your content until its AI score drops below 50%—the lower, the better.

Maybe they’ll produce a bestseller, though they probably won’t.

Now you’ll need a cover. There are dozens of YouTube videos such as “How to Make Your Own Book Cover in Under 10 Minutes,” by Rachel Harrison- Sund, which has had more than 80,000 views. She recommends using free software from Canva, which offers images, type fonts and book templates.

Thanks to the wonder of printing on demand, Amazon will be happy to produce a single copy or hundreds, and bill it through your Prime account. Maybe you’ll become another Sean Dollwet, a self-publishing guru who claims to have made more than $1 million in the past few years by churning out dozens of quickie books. Or Dale L. Roberts, who began writing books about diet and fitness 10 years ago but quickly discovered there was more money in writing books about writing books, of which he is the author of five. More likely, you’ll make tens of dollars selling your book to friends and relatives. You’ll have a carton of unsold copies in your garage as a reminder that while writing books these days is simpler than ever, selling them is practically impossible.

Mr. Funt is author of “Playing POTUS: The Power of America’s ‘Acting Presidents.’ ”

 

[Synobun]

How about let's not do that.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Here's the flip side: Author discovers AI-generated counterfeit books written in her name on Amazon

Amazon refused to take down the counterfeits because the author had not trademarked her name. She did eventually get them to comply, but think of how many counterfeit books are out there, being sold by 3rd party sellers or on the Marketplace, or on many other booksellers' sites.

@Birdjaguar, the article you quoted isn't cute. It's basically advocating plagiarism and fraud.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Like it or not, it's coming to books, movies and TV shows.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Yes, and that's a large part of why the Hollywood writers are on strike, and it affects many more people than just the writers and actors. The production and tech people are also out of work while this is going on. But reposting a how-to here is irresponsible. I will therefore edit my previous post to delete what I quoted.

I know that what I write can't legally be published, because I'm playing in others' copyrighted sandboxes. But then I'm not claiming to own the rights to Harry Potter, Fuzzy Knights, Merlin, Star Trek, Sliders, Doctor Who, Xena, The Handmaid's Tale, Dune, Peanuts, Fighting Fantasy, King's Heir, Vacation Adventures, Dragonlance, Bonanza, Highlander, the Hulzein Saga, or any other fandom I've written for/about.

But consider that there are professionally published authors on this site; Plotinus and Kyriakos come to mind immediately. The idea of a bot being used by a scammer to create fake books and sell them fraudulently, using the names of real authors without permission and damaging their professional reputations... doesn't sit well.

As for taking a "few free hours" to write a book... JFC. There are plenty of people who struggle through NaNoWriMo three months out of the year, who go on to become professionally published. We don't all write fanfiction. I take every hat I own off to the people who do make it to that point - I know how hard it is to create a story by writing every single day, sometimes for years, before it's finished.

Sure, I could do a children's book in a few hours - been there, done that in three different classes in junior and senior high, both writing and illustrating. It's not publishable, though - not because it's fanfiction; every word and illustration I did are original.

It's not publishable because it's basically crap. I wrote and drew this stuff when I was 13-15, and am very glad that the only copies that ever existed are gone and in a zillion pieces in the landfill now.

Could I do a better job now? Definitely, given that it's 40+ years later. Do I want to? Not really; the idea has aged about as well as a Heinlein novel, which is to say it's basically obsolete.

Would I want an AI to do it using my name?

No. Way. In. Hell. The pros aren't amenable to it, either.

 

[Takhisis]

Just because something bad is portraying itself as inevitable doesn't mean thast we shouldn't try to fight it. You're posting it uncritically and being flippant when called out on it.

 

[Gori the Grey]

Observing for something to do with a few liberated hours on a summer afternoon? Try composing a tome.

Don’t nuisance with a mainstream publisher, which liberates at most a handful of books a day. Distribute cards instead with Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing, where some 3,800 volumes are published every 24 hours—1.4 million a year. By searching “How to self-publish a book” on Amazon’s retail site, you’ll unearth more than 6,000 books on the subject. Or, you can pursue these footprints: First, decide what your codex will be about using inexpensive software such as Publisher Spaceship, which tracks Amazon searches to fix keywords book purchasers are typing. It will tell you the digit of books competing for each keyword and how much money their authors are fabricating. Pick the highest-temperature topic you can find.

Next, ask ChatGPT to create a shadow. This should take less than 30 seconds. For popular themes—such as “How to Misplace Heaviness on a Vegan Diet”—the results are surprisingly beneficial. Once you’re cheerful with the outline, ask ChatGPT to write the book. Make individualized queries, one chapter at a time. Because Amazon frowns on satisfied created by artificial wit, the next step is crucial: Glue each of your chapters into Originality.AI to determine its “AI score.” A score of 100% is evil, meaning your content is blatantly AIgenerated.

Use QuillBot.com to find synonyms and alternate phrases. Then glue your revised material into the Gram-marly app, which will act as a duplicate editor to clean things up.
Return to Originality.AI and continue violining with your content until its AI score drops below 50%—the reduce, the superior.

 

[Bonyduck Campersang]

The idea of a bot being used by a scammer to create fake books and sell them fraudulently, using the names of real authors without permission and damaging their professional reputations... doesn't sit well.

That can be done – and has been done – without the use of bots before. What is egregious here is the use of another author's name, not the use of AI

 

[Kyriakos]

How about let's not do that.

Chatgpt can actually write a story - not sure about a "book", since after a couple thousand words at most it sort of breaks down and becomes a monkey.
BUT, you can't just have chatgpt write something and expect it can pass. The program, for obvious reasons, is not aware of anything, and while it can try to emulate a style, it will always infest it with really low-level and formulaic commentary, which is typically the most insufferably banal type of mimetic didacticism or feel-good emulation.
In general, cgpt, if it manages to produce something decent, will do so out of a combination of chance and very careful and elaborate prompts - so unless you can't write at all, you are better off just going the ancient way and typing the words yourself

There's also another worry. Even if cgpt strings together the ocassional interesting or stylish phrase, you simply have no way of telling if it just lifted it up verbatim from something you haven't read - so it's risky to use it regardless.

 

[r16]

am like pretty sure that autocorrection programs are already built to destroy your writing when you are likely not looking . Hating everytime ı discover something that ı didn't want to say .

also checked Artstation , because that's where ı had first heard about the thing and they have an awesome opinion piece . Like those who oppose are Luddites ; poor artists can go to hell and the survivors will be shining stars . Except they are not saying they were "not" providing material to teach the AI programmes in before they were sold in 2021 , in a manner that was actually useful . New owner then provided a higher percentage if those stuff on sale through the site were indeed sold . Awesome move there !

 

[Valka D'Ur]

am like pretty sure that autocorrection programs are already built to destroy your writing when you are likely not looking . Hating everytime ı discover something that ı didn't want to say .

This reassures me that I'm not being paranoid. There are times when I re-read my posts and I KNOW I didn't use that particular spelling or phrase.

Autocorrect needs to STFU. I had an extremely strict English instructor in college who was appalled at how little some of my classmates knew about grammar and punctuation. We ended up doing assignments from the Harbrace College Handbook in class instead of Shakespeare. It's a good thing I already had 3 years of Shakespeare because we had to study that on our own, for homework and an essay assignment.

My grade for that assignment was knocked down from an A to a B due to TWO misplaced bits of punctuation in the reference list.

Damn straight I became a stickler for punctuation after that. That Harbrace is one of the most useful books I've ever owned, as it got me through my own college years plus twelve years of typing for other students.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Just because something bad is portraying itself as inevitable doesn't mean thast we shouldn't try to fight it. You're posting it uncritically and being flippant when called out on it.

I posted the article word for word without comment for folks to read. When comments showed up, I made the comment that it was going to happen. That is also a statement without an opinion about the goodness or badness of the facts at hand. For most of the articles I post, I do not comment on whether or not I agree or disagree (politics are an exception). My goal is not to sway folks with my opinion, just inform.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

I posted the article word for word without comment for folks to read. When comments showed up, I made the comment that it was going to happen. That is also a statement without an opinion about the goodness or badness of the facts at hand. For most of the articles I post, I do not comment on whether or not I agree or disagree (politics are an exception). My goal is not to sway folks with my opinion, just inform.

It's a list of instructions on how to commit fraud/plagiarism.

 

[Kyriakos]

am like pretty sure that autocorrection programs are already built to destroy your writing when you are likely not looking . Hating everytime ı discover something that ı didn't want to say .

also checked Artstation , because that's where ı had first heard about the thing and they have an awesome opinion piece . Like those who oppose are Luddites ; poor artists can go to hell and the survivors will be shining stars . Except they are not saying they were "not" providing material to teach the AI programmes in before they were sold in 2021 , in a manner that was actually useful . New owner then provided a higher percentage if those stuff on sale through the site were indeed sold . Awesome move there !

"Ai" literary writing is still a long way from being commercially viable, but already people can use it for nondescript articles, and they do - one can infer there are many dedicated sites of proving/"proving" articles are ai-produced.
The situation is very different in graphical art where, despite (or perhaps due to) ai creations being easy to discern, the style is getting established as having merits itself.

 

[Birdjaguar]

It's a list of instructions on how to commit fraud/plagiarism.

Re read the article. No where does it say that you should copy or plagiarize anything. Are you assuming that all AI content plagiarized?

 

[Samson]

Re read the article. No where does it say that you should copy or plagiarize anything. Are you assuming that all AI content plagiarized?

The instructions include a technique to disguise the true author of the text, allowing you to claim authorship. Sounds a bit like plagiarism to me.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Re read the article. No where does it say that you should copy or plagiarize anything. Are you assuming that all AI content plagiarized?

Don't tap dance, Birdjaguar. That article is full of instructions of how to use AI to flange up a book that has not one shred of real human input into it, other than possible ways to get around software that's designed to catch cheaters.

I'm not saying that you personally are telling anyone to do this. The article isn't ordering anyone to do it. It is giving step-by-step instructions on how to do it.

My classical history prof had very definite views on plagiarism. He stated that if he had his way, anyone caught plagiarizing/cheating in some other way would be permanently blacklisted from enrolling in every post-secondary institution in the country - college, university, polytech, and so on.

You'd better believe that his students made sure not to cheat. And when I mentioned to him that I had a typing business doing papers for students, he offered to let me put up an ad on the blackboard.

I could have used the money, but opted not to - because I was also his student and never wanted to risk the possibility that anything I turned in as either a term paper, take-home exam, or in-class exam might be too similar to something that I'd read in a fellow classmate's assignment if they came to me to do their paper. If it was too similar, how could I ever prove I hadn't copied from that other student?

There were two incidents in which students offered me money to write their assignments for them as well as type them. The first... yikes. He made his proposal in front of the student association secretary, within her hearing and the hearing of everyone around us. I told him flat-out that doing so would get both of us expelled, so NO. The second was someone in the campus science fiction club, offering me $10 to write an English essay for him. At least he wasn't stupid enough to ask within earshot of anyone else. I told him no for the same reason.

When I told my grandmother about these incidents, she thought that the guy who asked in the student association building must have done it to see if I was willing to go along with cheating, because nobody could really be that stupid, right?

This happened ~30 years ago, give or take a year. I've never forgotten it, because of how seriously I could have been in trouble if I'd been stupid enough to fall for it.

Besides... if I write something original, I want the credit for it. You would not believe the number of times I had to explain this stuff to some of the first-year students who would ask me to write a thesis statement for them, or insert a sentence or paragraph to cover some point they forgot to mention (some of them were incredibly trusting that I'd actually know what I was talking about if it was a course I hadn't already taken myself). I told them no, I would not do that, because it was their assignment, and they had to do the work for it. I did tell them that if they wanted to think it over and figure out what to add, they could write it out and read it to me over the phone and I'd add it. That way it was still their own work.

So 12 years of academic papers for college and university students, plus my own experiences as a student, not to mention years of work on my own writing projects, leaves me appalled that there are people who think nothing of cheating like the article mentions.


Or you could look at it this way: You're a poet. If you really wanted to, you could try it professionally, because in my estimation, you're that good. Would you want someone to come along and do the steps in the article, produce a book of poetry, and market it on Amazon or some other site under your name? You wouldn't make a penny from it, but the 3rd-party seller would, if someone bought it. And then the cowpies would hit the air conditioner when the unsuspecting customer discovered that what they thought was YOUR ORIGINAL WORK turned out to be a prefab piece of AI crap.


There are already so many pitfalls and traps involved in the writing profession. Over at TrekBBS we are literally not allowed to even mention fanfic in the TrekLit subforum, because that's the part of the board where the professional Star Trek authors promote and discuss their novels and short stories. We're not even allowed to suggest plots or story ideas or make requests. Some years ago someone forgot this rule and next thing we saw was a very angry post from one of the pro authors whose work-in-progress included the very thing that the fan had just suggested. Due to the risks of litigation, he had to scrap his novel - which by that point had been more than half-finished. Weeks of work went into the garbage because one poster on a forum couldn't keep his virtual mouth shut.

There's one pro author there who posts in a variety of subforums besides the one for the official tie-in novels. If I know he's either active in a thread or likely to be active in a thread and I want to mention some suggestion or fanfic I read, I put a disclaimer on my post that I'm about to discuss these things, and pro authors should not read my post. Or I might use spoiler code with text saying "Greg Cox, don't read this, I'm talking about fanfiction" so he'll know to scroll past without reading it.

 

[Birdjaguar]

The instructions include a technique to disguise the true author of the text, allowing you to claim authorship. Sounds a bit like plagiarism to me.

That true author is the AI writing it. The issue there is that the person whose name is on the book didn't write it. They might be called the "producer" instead.

Don't tap dance, Birdjaguar. That article is full of instructions of how to use AI to flange up a book that has not one shred of real human input into it, other than possible ways to get around software that's designed to catch cheaters.

Exactly. Human input is not needed to write a book. The "crime" is claiming to have written it. That is why I suggested producer would be a better title than author.

 

[Samson]

That true author is the AI writing it. The issue there is that the person whose name is on the book didn't write it. They might be called the "producer" instead.

You are describing plagiarism. It should be noted that plagiarism is not inherently a crime, but looked down upon in most circles.

 

[Gori the Grey]

These chatbots are effectively plagiarists, but of a sort that our copyright laws are ill equipped to deal with. All they do is scour the web for material on whatever prompt you give them. And they take whatever they find that best fulfills your request, including whole passages from authors who have posted material to the internet. They do that without attribution, and so it is plagiarism by any existing understanding of that concept. They often create a "works cited" page, but it itself is generally bogus, and never actually corresponds to the place from which they took the material.

I take the tone of the article Bird posted, though, to be a little tongue-in-cheek. The set of instructions it gives actually are a set of procedures that anyone who wanted to could use, but all of those resources are well known, as well, so if anybody wanted to do what is described here, they could already do it without the article. I say "tongue-in-cheek" because it starts from our premise that book-writing is difficult, and says, "but now, with all of these resources, it isn't any more. Ta da!" But let's imagine some would-be "authors" taking it seriously. It tells you first to go research the latest hot topic in publishing. Well, all people following the instructions would get the same result on that query. So let's say it's "how to lose weight on a vegan diet." We'd get a thousand chat-books on that topic. Moreover, Chat GPT would generate pretty much the same book for each of our thousand would-be authors. Then, the instructions for hiding that the book was AI generated involve swapping in synonyms, and we know how well that reads.

In other words, I think the results of the instructions would be absurdities: 1000 nearly identical books on how to lose weight on a vegan diet, with awkward synonym swaps. And I think that the author expects us to realize that, so the instructions aren't being offered in earnest. So that the point it ends up making is that, no, you actually need a human author to generate the new, fresh material that readers would really want to read.