AI in Writing: The Future of Creative Writing
What’s New in AI in Writing?
Today, Created by Humans (CbH), a pioneering platform that enables authors to license their works to AI developers, and the Authors Guild, the nation’s oldest and largest professional organization for writers, announced a new partnership to help protect and promote authors’ rights in the age of AI. This collaboration marks a significant step forward in addressing the challenges and opportunities presented by artificial intelligence in the publishing industry.
Many AI companies have trained their large language models (LLMs) on ebooks copied from pirated ebook websites. They did this without licenses from the authors and publishers—that is, without obtaining consent from authors or publishers or providing them compensation. Without licenses, authors and publishers have no means of controlling LLM uses, including end-user outputs that incorporate their works.
“Generative AI is here to stay and it does not appear that all the books LLMs have been trained on can be effectively purged. We urgently need to give control back to authors and their publishers, and licensing is the means to accomplish that going forward,” said Mary Rasenberger, CEO of the Authors Guild. “CbH’s platform provides authors who are interested in engaging with AI platforms a way to do so on their own terms, ensuring they have a say in how their work is used and are fairly compensated for it.”
Second, AI in writing is actually based on training the AI is being given, for free, by anyone who’s using it. Companies like Meta and Linkedin are opting in their users –making user-posts fair game for scraping.
Basically, they’re robbing people to power their AI, thanks to lack of strong privacy laws in most countries, except the UK, where it’s still possible to opt out. I suspect WordPress is doing the same.
Millions of AI users are all correcting, supplementing and literally training the AI to regurgitate information at phenomenal speeds. And based on its immense computing power (for which it’s depleting natural resources at an unsustainable rate), AI in writing is becoming increasing capable of vomiting out novels, scripts and poems that are not original or human ( but are a passing imitation of both, for most readers).
The Impact of AI in Writing
“There’s no scientific reason (yet) to think that sentience is physically impossible with machines,” he said. How we “manage the development of AI” will be the deciding factor. Companies are funneling billions of dollars into AI development, and some are even using preexisting AIs to aid in this process.
With the exponential rates of AI learning, and the amount of money pumped into AI research, I wouldn’t be surprised if AI sentience becomes a reality in my lifetime. The fact is, things progress much faster in the AI world than governments can make laws to govern them. Profit, and not ethics, or the future of humanity guides the AI innovators.
I’m worried that AI in writing will hinder the analytical capabilities of the next generation, just like calculators have ruined their grasp of arithmetic. We don’t yet fully understand the massive impact of social media and digital devices–the ways in which they have changed our ways of thinking and living.
With AI, students are no longer required to understand or study their subjects–how does this affect their understanding of the world and their ability to live in it or shape it? How will this affect their understanding of privacy, interpersonal relations, and trust issues?
To me, personally, the future feels uncertain. I’m an early-career author. Those smarter than me offer words of hope. Here’s the wonderful Gregg Hurwitz in Salon:
The big question is: In five years, will human beings, who have been making art and telling stories for tens of thousands of years, still be doing that? Or will our imagination have been subsumed by the robots? Will we be confined to their imagination? Is it inevitable that AI will become Sorcerer Mickey and we’ll be the eyeless mops hauling the sloshing buckets of our customized content?
I’m here to tell you that the end is not, in fact, near, that human beings will continue telling their own stories.
Who knows, though. All I see is that there are more writers than readers these days, and that many large publishing companies are moving towards AI use in books. Nurturing author careers is no longer a priority.
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Do you worry about reading books written by AI? If you’re a writer (as so many who read this blog are) where do you see AI in the scheme of things? Is AI in writing part of your future?
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Thank you for sharing!!.. what writing I do I let the fingers do the walking while my heart does the talking..AI cannot replace that!.. 🙂
Hope life is all that you wish for it to be and until we meet again….
May the love that you give
Always return to you,
That family and friends are many
And always remain true,
May your mind only know peace
No suffering or strife,
May your heart only know love and happiness
On your journey through life.
(Larry “Dutch” Woller)
I’m with you girl! 🙂
Writers and creatives, rise up!
AI has some useful features, but the jury is out as to whether it is going to be intrusive and take over our lives.
We’ll just have to wait and see, while crossing our fingers.
A quick comment: I work at a college and listened one day to the scholarship administrator complain loud and long about the number of essays submitted with scholarship applications that had been written by AI. Those applications were automatically disqualified because they were not the original work of the student. The same thing has happened with suspension appeals — students use AI because they believe it will increase their chances of having their appeal approved. But just the opposite happens because the appeal is not the student’s original work. At my college, using AI is considered to be a breach of the student code of conduct akin to plagiarism. I think this is happening more and more at other college campuses in America. I’ve also heard of American magazines that reject articles written by AI (The Atlantic I believe is one). American publishers are also on the lookout for AI instead of original writing created by real human beings. So, while I think it’s important to be vigilant and to put limitations on the use of AI, I don’t believe the situation is that dire. Yet.
Good to hear that so many measures are being put in place to attempt to minimize the use of AI in academic and professional settings! It’s unfortunate that students feel that they need AI to produce work they deem as more worthy of approval, instead of speaking from their individual experiences and using their own words. A friend was recently telling me how their child is struggling to work with groupmates on projects, as so many of their peers have come to rely on AI to complete their assignments for them. I feel that AI is a development which education systems will eventually have to implement, considering how prominent and prolific the technology is, but I hope that the most it will be used for is to check facts, verify sources, etc. instead of cancelling out originality altogether.
I recently did a survey from Oxford Uni (possibly from your link) that asked whether 20 headlines were AI generated or not. I got 19/20 right (assigned a real to an AI, so at least not fooled the wrong way). But I have been trained over the years to think for myself. As you say, what is going to happen with today’s education which is more and more by rote. Governments have no interest in the education of the masses, because the last thing they want is for the population to actually think sensibly. It needs it to accept spoonfed rubbish.
So, yes this slippery slope is avalanching towards us, and like some of your other commenters, I’m glad I won’t be here for much longer.
But I think readers who want proper books will seek them out, just as we do now. Maybe it will be more difficult to be a ‘published’ author. Maybe we will need to use AI to get our genuine self-written, self-published works some exposure. But there will be people looking for good books. And we never did expect to become rich on our books, did we?
Wow, that’s an impressive score! Public awareness and education are so important, yet fake news and the encouragement of media dependency is a very real concern. I’m grateful that I have a relatively solid grip on distinguishing between true and false, but AI is getting steadily more convincing by the second. I don’t blame readers for not being able to tell AI-written stories from otherwise. Though I do have hope that readers will still continue to value human creativity over generated content. And you’re absolutely right — I’ve never associated writing and publishing with becoming rich!
“…let them file taxes and do the laundry.” Fast forward 100 years, and I imagine your archived blog post being labelled with a ‘warning – this post contains out-dated language that may offend some android readers.’
You know, ageing is a difficult thing to come to terms with, but sometimes I feel relieved I’m at retirement age, because the world really does seem to be going to hell in a hand basket. AI seems like just another way of obfuscating the truth. I’m sorry, but I really do think human society is hurtling towards oblivion. The sixth extinction is not far off now. My only hope is that when humans have wiped out themselves, and taken many other species with them, our precious planet will be able to renew itself and spawn a less troublesome set of fauna.
That’s something to take into consideration! I often worry about the same thing, but I suppose the best thing for me to do is simply make the most of the current moment and appreciate everything I’m capable of doing. A cliche, I know, but one of my best coping mechanisms. Here’s hoping for a better future, both for humanity and the planet.
You bring up some very interesting points. In the past I’ve used AI for optical character recognition and for finding addresses in huge databases and for controlling robot motion. I think that for those kind of tasks AI is just a helpful tool. However, I don’t want to see AI generated fiction stories, paintings or other art. It means something that it was created by a person. Like you say AI has been trained using the work of human authors and often without their consent. It isn’t truly creative, but that may not be obvious to the reader.
AI can undoubtedly be useful in so many areas, and there’s no question that it can help improve efficiency and productivity. But, as you said, I would hate for it to take away from human creativity and individuality. Already, the loss of jobs is concerning and I hope publishers don’t neglect the many talented writers out there simply looking for an opportunity to share their work with the world.
I do hope that there are readers and art lovers out there who appreciate – and demand – creations by humans. But just yesterday I read a comment by a person who tried hard to find genuine hand-crafted art on etsy and nearly gave up (among all the dropshipped AI stuff). I wonder if platforms with very strict policies on AI could be great successes? Ironically, you need AI-powered software to detect if uploads are AI :-/
What I find also upsetting are these “reverse Turing tests”: Artists having to prove that their art is genuine. There was a heart-breaking story of an artist who was not allowed to participate in a contest as their art was considered AI, even though they provided ample proof that it was not. Same with professors not accepting genuine student essays “because the software says its AI”.
Thanks for writing this blog post!
Such good points! And another issue with AI detection software is that they can sometimes be fooled, whether that may be by mislabeling genuine work as AI, like you mentioned, or vice versa. I’ve read some comments on social media saying that artists whose work is confused for AI should take it as a compliment, but I can only imagine the frustration the artists in question must feel about having their hard work disregarded. Same goes to students who face similar struggles. Thank you for commenting!
Damyanti,
This was timely and pertinent topic to cover. I’m glad you went in-depth on it.
At a writing group I host here in Fort Worth, TX, “Is AI Replacing Us” was one of the group’s themes a few months back. As you said, AI, in terms of composition, is truly a force to reckon with. I’ve told GPT and Gemini to writing rhyming and spoken word poems about random topics, and the material it cranks out, admittedly, is top notch. One of the things I mentioned in the group is that, although it’s as advance as it is, the prevalence of this technology challenges us to step up our game as writers.
In order to stand out to a point where it’s undeniable something isn’t AI, this is a good opportunity to recommit ourselves to become eternal students of the craft and constantly be in the process of improving our technique.
Also, AI can greatly aide us in our writing careers by helping with the nitty gritty aspects in and outside of the composition realm, such as marketing, writer’s block, and formatting. I actually used Gemini to come up with a back cover summary for the book I’m working by just describing what the book was about. That saved about a good 2 hours.
In any case, I appreciate the though-provoking piece. You definitely got a good conversation started.
Thank you so much! Your comment is just as thought-provoking and insightful. Although AI seems to be alarmingly capable and can be disheartening to watch, I like the bright side that you pointed out — it gives us the opportunity to better our writing in an attempt to outdo AI and prove why real, human stories are so valuable. It makes me all the more grateful for my love of storytelling and for the works of the incredible authors out there.
Wild Ike Asimov said it best when he said, “Let’s get one thing straight. I wrote my stories for the enjoyment of one person. Me. The fact that others liked them as well is a blessing.” As long as I keep that straight, Ai will never worry me.
Amen!
I love this! Such a simple truth, yet sometimes so easily overlooked. I need to set that quote as my daily reminder.
With my writing, I’m just going to keep on doing me, and the devil take the hindmost. I will say, though, that I bailed out of higher education teaching and curriulum development in the nick of time, right before generative AI hit.
I’m glad to hear you managed to make a timely escape! AI seems to be taking over everywhere, and I worry for the students who have such easy access to the technology and for the teachers who must handle the proliferation of AI in their students’ work.
The effect of No Child Left Behind’s standardized testing on students’ ability to think was bad enough. Writing is thinking!
I don’t worry, yet, because AI in writing and art is so easy to find, because of its blandness. That will change. Soon, AI’s will be the agents judging our books for publication!
I dread the day!
Fortunately, Damyanti, a billion people make up the potential-readership pie. A small slice can feed hungry artists, including those who choose NOT to use generative AI. Rule-based grammar and spell checkers are one thing. However, generative AI used for rephrasing a sentence or writing an entire manuscript violates the essences of creativity. AI presents writers and readers with an ethics question, demanding an ethical answer: When does a prompt justify using the words stolen and regurgitated by a computer?
That’s a good point. I just worry that the technology may advance to a stage where readers, and even writers themselves, are no longer able to tell the difference between AI and human-written stories. And the issue of ethics is definitely an unavoidable one, yet the rules and guidelines are still so hazy. Here’s hoping that creativity continues to flourish and writers do not have to relinquish their enclaves to AI-generated stories.
Your stance, Damyanti. It speaks volumes, and I believe authors who take a stand will set themselves apart as breathing creators from the drivel that comes from soulless computers.
I dabble with it in chat bot form. It’s a matter of keeping my enemies even closer. It really is superior to google in finding information, but you have to fact check it. There is no avoiding its influence now, so we might as well learn something about it. Love your take on it.
I like your way of looking at things, and I have to agree — with AI’s growing influence, it is helpful to know as much as we possibly can about its capabilities and potential job scope. I just hope that the threat doesn’t become too overwhelming for creatives.
It is a legitimate concern.
Part of me is certain the “Big 5” publishers will use AI to produce books. No more human authors to deal with, except for a few to supply new fodder for the AI machine. I can understand writers under pressure to deliver to use Al as an aid. But as an indie, I have no use for it.
A scary thought. I have no interest in using AI to replace my own imagination, and I hope publishers recognize the value of human experiences and uniqueness in creating stories.