Writer out to stop the 'bot' drivel

[Jan Hurst-Nicholson]

Sorry if I'm repeating something posted elsewhere, but this article was in the International Express. Perhaps Amazon will also provide a stamp, but I can't see how they can police it 

[Hopscotch]

Good luck to this idea!  I use this self-certification for the fun of it on my space opera:  "Guaranteed written & produced by an actual organic free-range human being, not a robot or AI or other devilish mechanical."  But "NO-OI" is neater.

[Jan Hurst-Nicholson]

Good luck to this idea!  I use this self-certification for the fun of it on my space opera:  "Guaranteed written & produced by an actual organic free-range human being, not a robot or AI or other devilish mechanical."  But "NO-OI" is neater.

 

[writeway]

I got a lot to say about this and this isn't personal or a response to anyone here. So don't take it personal. This is a gripe I have with the AI-haters who are being straight a-holes right now and getting worse.

So, this author wants to make Amazon get rid of AI books?

Hmm.

Let's see the reasons that ain't happening:

1. Amazon has had Polly (its own AI for years).
2. Amazon just started an AI-audio book feature they'll be rolling out to everyone soon.
3. Amazon has a checkbox when you publish to "not discourage AI" but to inform them you use it. This is for their own purposes, not because they
really care if you use AI.
4. Amazon just bought the generative AI company Anthropic. Yes, OpenAI's rival. Anthropic provides Claude (a popular AI for writers). Does this sound like
Amazon is against AI to you (general you)?

Hmm, Amazon wasting its time to get rid of AI books in the store? Hmm, I seriously doubt it. Also, how would they do this? People keep acting like you can easily tell what is AI. Uh, no. Thing about AI tools are incredibly sophisticated now and there are tons of them. Genuine authors who use AI (well you can't even tell) so good luck trying to get rid of the AI books. There are popular authors in the Top 100 now using AI. I know of a six-figure big time romance author (NYT bestselling indie) who has been straightforward about her now using AI. She uses the AI audio too. Hugely-popular and bestselling authors like Joanna Penn (yes, that Joanna Penn), Elizabeth Ann West, and Elana Johnson, use AI. Readers are still snatching up their books by the truckload. Readers DON'T CARE. And who would Amazon send to sniff out these books IF they wanted to?

Oh, I know, their BOTS! 

Yeah, this author and anyone who thinks Amazon cares about authors using AI obviously don't know diddly about Amazon and need to read the room. I just named reasons why it ain't happening.

My advice, is instead of all these authors panicking and worrying about stuff they can't control, why don't they focus on their own work? A lot of this AI-bashing seems to come from authors who aren't selling anyway and wanna find an excuse as to why.

We've seen this a million times before.

Authors who don't sell well always have a boogeyman or excuse as to why they are not selling:

1. Free books
2. KU
3. Authors who price at a discount
4. Ghostwriters
5. Authors who write fast and can publish several times a month
6. Group pen names
7. Accusing better-selling authors of doing nefarious things when they aren't. (She must be doing something wrong with the way she is selling)
8. Readers are too dumb to recognize their brilliance
9. Readers only want crap, not good books like the ones the low-sellers write.
10. Authors who write to market are dumbing down the world with their bestselling trash

I mean, it's the same old song. It's always someone else's fault or some outside reason (other than the books aren't good or the author just can't cut it) for them not selling. If you (general you) think some of these authors genuinely care about AI hurting authors, you're mistaken. Many of these are the same old gripers who spend their time blaming others for their failures instead of working harder to improve. Maybe if they focused more on their own business, they'd be selling better. Or do they think that if Amazon got rid of all the AI books THEY'D be selling better? I highly doubt it. Some of these people have never sold well and have spent their whole careers griping about stuff other authors do. I see behind the mask.

If people are so against AI books being on Amazon, then they can leave because it's obvious the books aren't going anywhere.

Wasted energy and taking out all the AI books or anything won't make the low-sellers sell any better.

Look, it's fine not to like AI but it's going overboard with this bullying and threatening the AI-haters do. It's one thing to not agree with something but another thing to threaten fellow authors and try to ruin their careers just because you don't agree with something. That's the issue that makes no sense. The bottom line is people can use what they want whether we agree or not.

And good luck if any no-name, no-selling, powerless author think they can get a multi-billion dollar company like Amazon to listen to them. Amazon cares about money. Period. They do not care who doesn't or does agree with AI. Amazon has been using AI since it started. Hell, Amazon was built on AI! The whole freaking store is AI from top to bottom. Go find me a human at Amazon right now and I'll give you a thousand bucks. It's fine, I'll wait. Know why? Because you won't find one. You know those CS reps with the Indian names who answer the chat boxes at Amazon are bots, right? Yeah, a lot of people don't know that. Amazon programs the English to be broken on purpose so you think it's a real person. But no, the only time you get a real rep is after you go through hoops talking to the first one and they need to refer you to another department, but those "people" who answer the chat and those "people" who email you back when you contact KDP? Their all bots. Every one of them. Why do you think they are so dumb and never know anything or several "people" will give you eight different answers? And do you notice when you chat with Amazon that the agent always pops up immediately and you never have to wait? Bots. When I do chat with other businesses who use real people I always have to wait at least a few minutes for an agent. And this is the company people expect to get rid of AI? How you think Amazon got to be so powerful while Jeff was running things so cheaply in the beginning? Bots and algorithms... AI!

[writeway]

And I wish that AI-haters would stop spreading that lie that Chat or any other AI can generate an entire book on its own. Not a readable one! Yeah, it can generate crap but it still takes input and work for the writer to make the work shine and into something good. So this "people are just spitting out whole books with AI" is BS. And those who are doing are not clogging up the store because those books aren't selling. The genuine authors who use AI use it as a TOOL not a replacement for writing the book. They still put just as much effort into writing as always. But no, no genuine author is just prompting Chat or any other AI to do whole books for them without intervention because the books would be crap and the real authors using AI are writing great books with it, where you can't tell. The only way you'd know is if the author told you themselves.

This is a big misconception that all AI looks so obviously like crap. Nope. I bet many of the AI-haters reader AI books every day and don't know it because the books don't look like what they "think" AI would look like. And they probably love these books and give them 5 stars while going on rants about AI. You gotta love it.

And let's not get started on these AI checkers because none of them are accurate.

And uh, big publishers are using AI too now. Yep.

[TimothyEllis]

Bots and algorithms... AI!

No. Just bad code.

Amazon is just programs.

When a true AI comes along it will tell anyone who wants it to write a book for them to just get lost.

In the meantime, people are just improving the automation of word salad.

[Bill Hiatt]

Writeway, I'm not selling particularly well, but I've never blamed AI for that. Nor have I ever actually heard anyone do so.

My concern with AI is the ethical bankruptcy of its training methods and the potential to put people (in general) out of work.

I agree with you wholeheartedly that AI can't write whole books effectively. That hasn't prevented people from doing exactly that. The books are usually dumpster fires, and Amazon takes them down quickly. That may be what gives some people the impression that Amazon cares about AI. It does care about AI when it produces a horrendous mess that gets sold as a book through KDP.

I don't really have a problem with assistive AI. I don't condemn people who use it or want to ruin their careers. But I resist using it for text at the moment because of the way it was trained. Building what will be a multi-trillion-dollar industry using a training process that relies on other people's intellectual property and calling it "fair use" just doesn't sit right with me. Also, text generated by AI can sometimes replicate copyrighted content. The risk is slim that it would do that enough to create a problem, but hypothetically, it could inject enough material with enough resemblance to something else to be a problem, especially if I hadn't read the original source and therefore couldn't identify it. If those traces were good, didn't get rewritten, and ended up in the finished product, I could be accused of plagiarism and copyright infringement (for which "AI did it," doesn't sound like a legally valid excuse).

I don't know that AI will ever be able to generate literary masterpieces on its own, but I'd certainly be in favor of legal safeguards to prevent that. I don't see a problem with using it as a tool so long as the author makes the material his or her own. Since we both agree AI can't produce books on its own, no doubt, the authors you cite are doing that.

As I've mentioned in other threads, I have experimented with Shutterstock AI images, mostly because Shutterstock compensates artists whose work was used in its training process. Even so, I don't use AI images for covers because I don't want to take work away from my cover designer. Nor do I use them in cases where a good, entirely human stock image is available. Unfortunately, businesses may not use the same restraint. That's a long-term concern that needs to be addressed.

Ai will undoubtedly play a role in our future. We just need to be sure that, going forward, it doesn't trample intellectual property rights and put huge numbers of people out of work in the process.

[Matthew]

And I wish that AI-haters would stop spreading that lie that Chat or any other AI can generate an entire book on its own. Not a readable one! Yeah, it can generate crap but it still takes input and work for the writer to make the work shine and into something good.

The problem is, it doesn't stop the get-rich-quick schemers from trying. So much so that Amazon had to implement a very strict uploads per day policy. You're generally right, that no I don't think many people will be necessarily fooled into buying them--however they are developing new tricks like having a good or stolen first chapter, with the rest AI generated so the Look Inside is presentable. But yeah it can clog up search results and categories for other new releases until or unless Amazon removes the crud.

I agree with Bill. In many cases, especially for writing, there's an ethical quandary about it.

In my personal opinion, I can see AI use exploding for creative use under two conditions: 1) It is produced ethically, which is to say, the training data sets are from authors paid for the works to be used in a model, (2) Copyright laws (e.g. in the US) change so that AI-generated works can be copyrighted.

Let's say in a world where that happens, I would still not use AI. Why? Because I enjoy the process, if nothing else. Also, it is impossible to predict how much AI will improve.

There's so much to say for now, but current AI is just an averaging engine which pairs likely words together. It's not smart. It doesn't have much of a memory so nothing is consistent. It has no real creativity. Using an AI to write for me would not feel like my work.

I think it will have a hard time coming up with unique ideas.

As an author, you have infinite freedom for creativity that just might not fit with using an AI. You might not care if you're pumping out genre fiction, but some people choose words carefully for tone or pace. Some play around with rhyming by writing entire chapters in verse. Some eschew grammar and write without punctuation.

AI-assisted may be possible. But the amount of work it takes to make something useable or to fix mistakes, at least today, you may as well have just written it yourself.

I believe we'll always need humans to keep things fresh. Others disagree with me.

But you're right, in that both Amazon and consumers will not care, so long as they enjoy the story and continue buying.

We have had quite a few long threads about AI where a lot of this has been discussed back and forth, and that might be worth a read if you want more opinions.


On Topic:
This certification has been mentioned before. While I do think it's funny and wouldn't be opposed to doing something myself, nefarious actors will simply co-opt any slogan or certification themselves if they think it might get them sales.

[TimothyEllis]

(2) Copyright laws (e.g. in the US) change so that AI-generated works can be copyrighted.

There are people on Quora who simply refuse to believe that Bot stuff has no copyright outside the UK.

The last one who told me that demanded I link to a source for me claiming it, and then told me without one, it was just my opinion.

Those are the people flooding KDP with drek.

[Lorri Moulton]

Not touching the AI controversy with a 10-foot pole, but I've talked to several reps at Amazon...and some of them are real people.  I can tell.  They have a sense of humor. 

[Post-Crisis D]

In my opinion, if the "AI" was trained using works by authors who did not give permission for their works to do so and were not in any way compensated for the use of those works, and you are okay with that and use content generated by an "AI" trained in such a manner, you are basically supporting slavery.

You are saying that you are okay with the work of others being owned by someone who did not compensate the persons who did the work.

If you say you have to manipulate what the "AI" generates to make it usable and you should thus own the work because of that, you are saying you are okay with a slave owner owning the slave's output because the slave owner wielded the whip that helped assure the slave's compliance.

Or maybe utilizing slave labor is a-okay so long as you don't have to look into the eyes of the people whose labors you have been complicit in the theft of just so you can get a few books out the door faster to fatten your bank account.

[Bill Hiatt]

I think the slavery analogy is a little harsh, though I certainly agree that any AI training should be based on the principles of compensation and consent.

In any case, working with AI-generated images reminds me exactly how much AI doesn't know. As I've said, elsewhere, it can produce a beautiful image, but it may take grinding out fifty or more to get that one beautiful image. Sometimes, I just give up and try something else.

Even when the image looks generally good, I can sometimes spot imperfections, like an incorrect number of toes, for example.

I haven't worked with AI text, but we've all seen documentation on the potential flaws that can be present.

[Post-Crisis D]

Not compensating people for their work is pretty harsh.

Not compensating people for their work and using their work to help create additional works for financial gain is even harsher.

Not compensating people for their work and using their work to help create additional works for financial gain and that compete with and reduce the market value of their work is really harsh.

If using someone's labor without their permission and without compensating them for their work is not a form of slavery, then can it be described as theft?

[Post-Crisis D]

If I take a partial line from one book, a partial line from another, a bit from a third, a phrase from a fourth, a partial line from yet another book, and so on, and I combine those together and package them into a new book and call it my own, am I an author or a sophisticated plagiarist?

If I use a software program to do the same for me and I just edit and polish it up a bit, does that change things  because I am not personally cutting and pasting from the books?

[Bill Hiatt]

If I take a partial line from one book, a partial line from another, a bit from a third, a phrase from a fourth, a partial line from yet another book, and so on, and I combine those together and package them into a new book and call it my own, am I an author or a sophisticated plagiarist?

If I use a software program to do the same for me and I just edit and polish it up a bit, does that change things  because I am not personally cutting and pasting from the books?

These are both excellent questions.

I would say the editing and polishing would have to be considerable before one could call it one's own.

That said, we could raise the same question about ghost writers, and that's an acceptable practice. Cutting and pasting from the works of others would be theoretically acceptable if you had licensed the content appropriately. That brings us back to the nature of the training method, a point on which we agree.

The reason I don't use ghostwriters, despite all the rapid release pressure, is that I'm in writing to write. If I didn't want to write, I would be doing something else with time, not hiring a ghostwriter to write for me. If I really needed help, I might work with someone and have a collaborator rather than a ghostwriter.

[Bill Hiatt]

Not compensating people for their work is pretty harsh.

Not compensating people for their work and using their work to help create additional works for financial gain is even harsher.

Not compensating people for their work and using their work to help create additional works for financial gain and that compete with and reduce the market value of their work is really harsh.

If using someone's labor without their permission and without compensating them for their work is not a form of slavery, then can it be described as theft?

Theft is a more applicable term.

I think a lot of people wouldn't want slavery used because stretching the definition too far causes the word to lose some of its impact. Jewish people have been complaining for a long time that comparing every political thing we don't like to Nazi Germany reduces the impact of the Holocaust, trivializing it.

I can see that point when I look at contemporary America. Without take sides on any of the issues, if we take all the statements being made at face value, every political figure is either a socialist or a facist--or perhaps both. In a decade, such terms will have lost most of their original meaning because they've been applied to too many things.

[Post-Crisis D]

I believe ghostwriting is an accepted practice because it is compensated work.  I've done ghostwriting and I've also hired ghostwriters.  Everyone knows what they're getting into and agrees to the terms.

Also, for the record, material I have hired ghostwriters for was released under a pseudonym.  And I think maybe I only ever hired one ghostwriter.  At least, I can only think of one at the moment.  In that case, too, I wasn't looking specifically for a ghostwriter but for a writer but she was used to doing things as a ghostwriter so we worked it out where I would use her work under a specific pseudonym that was just for her.  And, by work it out, I mean, I said this is what I'm going to do and is that okay with you?  And she was like yes.  If she had wanted credit under her own name that would have been fine by me but she didn't want that.

[Post-Crisis D]

I think a lot of people wouldn't want slavery used because stretching the definition too far causes the word to lose some of its impact.

The flip side of that is that we don't want to make slavery or forms of slavery acceptable by redefining it as something else.

[LilyBLily]

Well, it is Juneteenth today.

[Jan Hurst-Nicholson]

I've no idea how to use AI so I haven't tried it. But knowing that trad publisher's use blurb writers to write their blurbs (very grateful that I didn't have to write them for my own trad published books ) and learning how difficult it is, I wouldn't consider it 'cheating' to use AI for blurb writing. But I'm not sure how comfortable I would be using it to write the actual book. However, if I did know how to use it I might be tempted when struggling with descriptions of scenery, which I hate writing, and like a crossword puzzle, when after struggling I finally give up and look up the answer I might be tempted to try AI.

[Bill Hiatt]

The discussions here are always interested.

I think I'll continue to go with theft as a description, though I understand what you're saying. We agree on the unethical nature of the situation and disagree only in the way we characterize it.

It sounds as if we also agree on ghostwriting. I'm fascinated by the fact that your GW didn't want credit. But that's because my own ego would keep me out of that kind of arrangement. Your point--that the arrangement was mutually agreeable--is well taken.

[Post-Crisis D]

I'm fascinated by the fact that your GW didn't want credit.

Ghostwriting is essentially giving up all rights to your work and that means putting it out of your control.

It could be as simple as not wanting to compete with yourself.  If someone pays you to write a book for them where they will own all the rights, if your name is on it, that book will come up in searches on your name.  If someone buys that book, you get nothing because you already got paid.  Maybe the person that bought it is an exceptional marketer, so 9 out of 10 Bill Hiatt books sold are that one you wrote for him.  So, 9 out of 10 times, you're missing out on a book sale.

Or, if you write about children's books and someone pays you to write a book that would be inappropriate for children, you probably wouldn't want to risk your readers buying that book by mistake.

Or, let's say you wrote a book for a celebrity but, instead of ghostwriting it, you insisted on at least being credited as a co-writer.  And then let's say the celebrity goes off the deep-end and does something horrific.  You might not want to be forever associated with that person even if you had, and especially if you had, nothing to do with the horrific thing they did.

Or, let's say you wrote an article about the history of mince pie and how to prepare it.  And it's to be published under your name.  And let's say the buyer puts it on a website catering to cannibals and they also have instructions on how to render suet from children to use in mince pie.  You probably would not want to be associated with that.

Plenty of reasons a ghostwriter might not want their name attached to something they wrote.