Ghostwriter In The Machine: Much Closer Than We Think

Just days after my piece on ChatGPT's use in writing books went live, more developments in that field emerged. The AI interface is now cited as an author of more than 200 books on Amazon, and that number is set to grow. But over at Inside Hook, they aren't too concerned about AI overtaking humans in writing books:

As long as these books are properly labeled and part of Amazon’s self-publishing milieu, this might be more of a novelty at the moment. And we still approve of ChatGPT as a tool, even in publishing — but given that the program is still riddled with mistakes and odd errors, skilled human writers and editors are still 100% necessary, even for the most mundane of guides (or bad space erotica).

I'd have agreed with this a couple of weeks ago, except that OpenAI has announced the arrival of GPT4, said to be the advanced version of the AI model behind ChatGPT. Now some, like Kenneth Whyte at The Whig, are predicting the impending end of the human author in several sectors, including journalism where pithy, punchy machine-made copy will do for readers struggling against a tsunami of automated output...

...all of it optimized to outperform human product in algorithmic searches. The machine story will be good enough for most people and for most purposes. The content churned out by today’s media companies will be somewhere between worth less and worthless, making it difficult for those companies to afford original, high-value human journalism.

This avalanche will extend to book publishing, according to Whyte's projections, as the internet facilitates the (self-)publishing of AI-assisted books in genres where literary flair isn't a prerequisite, such as "guidebooks, basic biographies, basic histories, basic personal finance, basic personal advice, basic diet and health books, puzzle collections, and how-to series." There's even an AI-powered book-marketing service now.

Similar bells are also tolling for audiobook narrators as firms offer libraries of AI voices for various uses beyond Waze direction prompts, smart appliances and virtual assistants.

Against this wave of intelligent automation, The Writers Guild of America, a labour union of writers in numerous media sectors, seeks to ban AI work from being used as source material and introduce measures to protect their writers from being made redundant by AI. The guild also claimed that "AI software does not create anything. It generates a regurgitation of what it’s fed" and that "plagiarism is a feature of the AI process".

All these aside, the AI tsunami is all but inevitable as technology becomes even more essential to our lives. Over time, as the trend takes off, more will use AI to create content under shrinking time constraints. As quantity grows, quality will matter less and less, up to a point where writing is no longer art or "artsy" but a mass-consumed commodity. "In a nutshell," Whyte states, "generative AI has the potential to destroy a lot of value in the literary world without producing a single great work of literature."

But just as one out of a million monkeys at typewriters will somehow create a masterpiece, trained AI models can make art if given enough chances. An acquaintance playing around with ChatGPT Plus is startled (as am I) but pleased with the results, albeit with a little tweaking, and is planning a volume (or several) of AI-aided short fiction and poetry.

Yes, writers can finally write more and write often with AI and some seem fine with that, like romance authors. As more embrace AI as a writing tool, more books will be produced and, presumably, more gems and new voices will emerge and get read, and publishers will have to take notice as genres that were once considered niche enter the mainstream through sheer volume of work and readership. Though I don't think AI can crank out a romance novel because the writing for that genre is "formulaic".

Perhaps what fogeys like me will miss about publishing once AI assistance becomes the norm are the variety in our editing-room war tales, the joy of discovering the elusive sparkle in the mire, and the cataloguing of writer snafus for memoirs that may never see the light of day. Where's the allure in sifting through the slush pile when everything looks immaculately machine-manufactured? And AIs don't make hilarious typos, do they? Nor are they likely to engage in witty repartee. Y'know, human things.

Well, plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

When the Gutenberg press was invented, it was a matter of time before books no longer belonged solely to the privileged. Then the internet happened and everyone can now be a writer, publisher, journalist, and opinion-shaper, for better or worse.

As treasure hunters of the literary kind, editors, publishers and agents now have a burgeoning galaxy of stars to search for the next supernova hit. The vastness of the infinite is daunting but I believe we're up to the challenge.

And it's not as if AI is infallible. There are cases where AI made mistakes and even amplified misinformation. Gatekeepers will not be out of a job, far from it. If the post-truth situation is projected to be as dire as this post says, we have our work cut out for us. Hiccups in these early AI assistants only mean we have more time to adapt.