Is Your Work AI-Assisted, AI-Generated, or Neither?

AI is everywhere and relatively cheap right now. Since AI companies are losing money by the billions, I expect this to change as soon as enough people have become addicted to using it. However, in the meantime, places like Amazon are asking people to confess if they used AI-generated work in what they are self-publishing. The problem is that there are a lot of people who either blatantly lie about the origins of their work or they are blatantly ignorant about them. One example is the books by Special Fiction Books. I am going to believe that their statement, "We’ll be upfront about AI. We use it to help with our marketing, because no artist alive can draw the 50 unique ads we need every week. We don’t use it in our writing..." is simply a misunderstanding on their part (i.e., that they fall into the blatantly ignorant category). The clearly use AI to generate their covers, but I guess they can qualify that as "marketing" images. 

Then there are their books, which have a plot and are clearly very edited and not pure AI generation, but at the same time there are sections that are 100% AI-generated according to checkers, and which read 100% like pure AI-generated garbage. I have read two of these books now (the second one I clicked on as a recommended read and got into it before I realized). They both contained AI elements.

First off, you can only say that you do not use AI at all in your work if you wrote it on a typewriter or you wrote it in MS Word and didn't use its grammar check. If while typing on your typewriter, you happen to be at a hotel in Hawaii and you ask Google to tell you where the nearest Mexican restaurant is, you would be using AI, but not using it for your manuscript, so you can claim that your work is 100% human-generated. If you have the funds to go to a hotel in Hawaii to write, my question is why are you reading my blog? You clearly have made it as an author, unless you are in Hawaii because you are the CEO of some company, but you really want to be an author.

Right now, I am typing this into Blogger, and I have Grammarly's check turned on, so I am technically using AI to produce this blog post, even though I am not accepting all the changes Grammarly would like to make. (Disclosure: I frequently use Grammarly to check my work and have for most of my writing career.) AI-assisted writing, such as using spell checks, is often encouraged and used throughout the publishing industry, so it is unlikely you will get in trouble for neglecting to tell anyone you use it. It also won't drastically change your writing (although it is getting worse about that as AI "improves"). Just don't have it rewrite every sentence in its own voice. (Unless you are said CEO in the above paragraph and you need to write a business e-mail.) 

The grey area with AI-assisted writing is when you brainstorm with AI or you use AI to help you research. Both of these are extremely dangerous areas. I rarely use AI to do research unless I ask it a question and then click the links it provides to see what the truth is. If it only turns up suspicious links, I go back to just looking at the search results. I know it is much easier to read the AI answer at the top of the search engine and much more difficult to skip it, but AI has (frequently) given me fake or false answers. You have to modify and limit your search using special terms to prevent it from doing so, and then, you might not get anything back at all. I do also sometimes brainstorm with AI. If I am having difficulty with a chapter, I might ask DeepAI a question like, "Why would John leave Martha if he loved her?" Google sucks at writing anything creative in my opinion. DeepAI isn't great, but it is better in my opinion, and it's a small company, which I prefer. 

The problem with grey area assisting is that it is relatively easy to go from picking out the interesting reasons John would leave Martha and incorporating them into your book to cutting and pasting responses to questions like: "Tell me in 1000 words why John left Martha." If you are cutting and pasting or looking at what AI wrote while you are actively typing (as opposed to reading it, closing it, and then typing), you have moved into the realm of AI-generated work. If you allow Google to do your research and again use what Google (or whatever AI) tells you without fact-checking it, you also have moved into the realm of using generative AI because there is a chance AI hallucinated your answer.

So, that brings us to AI-generated work, which I use for my book covers (with heavy editing) and am experimenting with right now for writing. (Don't worry, I am only planning to use it on one book, and it is being thoroughly rewritten. I have enough ideas of my own; I don't need AI to help me write them at this point in time. I will let people know if that changes.) Most people who feel they need to use AI to generate their book and are satisfied with the garbage it pumps out have no clue about writing and probably don't read much either. Still, I come across these books all to often when I am reading. AI can't format a book properly. It does not understand paragraphs, and you have to give it specific instructions if you want it to write sentences and dialogue correctly. It doesn't understand and will never understand human emotion in a way it can replicate in-depth characterization. It can't create real suspense because its programming kind of prohibits it from doing so. If you can't write, fork over the excess cash and have a freelancer write it for you. (Just make sure you use a couple of AI checkers to make sure they aren't using AI to write.) If your writing registers as anything more than 30% AI-generated, do not expect to copyright it. AI-generated work can't be copyrighted. From 1-30% you fall in a legally ambiguous area because some people do write like AI after reading so much of it. (This is one of my biggest fears when I am reading other people's undisclosed AI-generated books.)

So, my experiment is that I gave AI a detailed prompt and asked it to write an 8000 word romance based on that prompt. Now, I am converting that into a 50,000-word book, and I am about halfway through. I am checking what I write with AI-checkers to make sure it comes back 100% human and I am not accidentally or subconsiously copying sentence structure or issues that AI writing has. I also did not divulge my full plotline to AI because I didn't want the AI to ruin it. I used a simple plotline: a male hairdresser who is harassed in a small town. The AI did surprisingly well with it, I think, but I will see when I release it what other people think. I plan to start posting information about some of my books on here soon because I would love your opinions about them. Still, even if I am transforming AI-generated work, either in my covers or in my writing, I disclose it. I disclose it to Amazon, to the people in my review groups on Goodreads, and on my copyright page. If you use generative AI, you should do this, too. If you don't drastically alter AI's work, you should also expect lower reviews, and some of those reviews will probably make the disclosure for you.