With how much of a wave AI is making, and the amount of trouble and concern it is stirring up amongst artists and consumers, it does make you wonder if authors will begin using these tools to write whole sections of their (possibly) bestselling work.
Is AI Really an Issue?
Yes and no… it depends. AI serves as a very good tool, as well as a major convenience, for most of us who want to avoid the tedium of drawn-out tasks. Photoshop generative fill, ChatGPT, and the many voice synthesisers, have their uses and legitimate purpose as a product. But most, if not all, have been examples of controversy within the creative world.
Many figures, whether prominent or not, have taken to social media and various other platforms to talk about the ‘theft’ and recycling of existing work by AI—essentially scrambling the pieces of a puzzle and making a whole new picture with it, with no credit attributed to the original creator.
Credit is one thing, but so is the debate of quality over quantity. Fortunately, most authors advertise by their name, as well as the aforementioned quality and types of stories associated with it. But what if a rather lazy—sorry, I meant modern-minded—author has AI tools writing the majority of their work?
You can see how that may undermine a lot of great literature and drown out those who genuinely put their all into their literary work by flooding the market with subpar novels and typical stories. It sounds like a joke, but utilising AI would be much faster than the many years it often takes to draft, write, tweak, and refine a novel into the best version of itself.
Is It Really Feasible for AI To Write Novels?
It’s hard to say, but it’s not unlikely. What AI can’t do right now, it may very well be doing flawlessly within the next year or so.
The issue with AI is how quickly it can learn and outpace us. Of course, a good chunk of online AI content, which mostly consists of spam and shallow text-to-speech videos, sticks out quite badly to most of us. AI is often repetitive, clunky, or just not able to always be consistent and consider contexts; pitfalls that it may one day conquer.
Even if it never truly claws itself out of that failure, simply pairing the speed and capabilities of AI with the grace of a human editor makes producing majority machine-written novels with it a suddenly feasible concept. So, even as it stands in mid-2023, there is the potential that AI can successfully write sections of novels and entire short stories, and I have zero doubts the ability of these dubious, non-feeling algorithms will continue to encroach upon the sanctity of the humanities.
What About Ownership?
Good question. It’s quite the conundrum when you think about it. Just who owns the story and the segments produced by the AI tool?
After all, AI scrapes everything from online data and whatever is fed to it. We should also consider that the author will be commanding the AI and possibly editing what it produces, as well as the developers and owners of the AI tool itself. So, which of these own the story? And, if not just one, then how many do?
Well, under most copyright and fair use laws (plus the difficulties of proving anything), it would be very hard for anyone to successfully argue the AI copied any particular story, unless it was abundantly clear that whole sections of text matched other works. Therefore, ownership would probably never be attributed to the sourced examples used to train the AI in the first place, piggybacking off their hard word.
As for the human author and the AI developers, that one is tricky. There would have to be proof that the author did indeed use AI, and the particular tool in question. Even if such things were proved, I’m sure it would still fall well into fair use and transformation of content (which would really be a transformation of a transformation, as AI already pinched content to begin with).
Ultimately, it would seem like anyone, even you or I, could employ available AI tools to assist in our novel and take all the credit. That thought makes me question the point of studying a literature degree…
What Will Come of All This?
As of now, that is essentially impossible to answer. I feel almost certain that there will be some avant-garde novel written entirely by an AI, which will receive a lot of praise and outcry, whilst sparking many debates about machine rights and creative attribution. Regardless, that moment signals that the clock has struck midnight for all authors and book enjoyers; the genie is out of the bottle and never going back in, AI would be there to stay, as it effectively is by this point in 2023.
Until that day, I suppose we should be fine. Hopefully there won’t be anything egregious when it comes to AI’s presence in literature. Novels and books are not akin to throwaway spam content, they are paid-for works that people take the time to enjoy from cover-to-cover and utilise for educational purposes.
Personally, I think the fully-commercial use of AI writing tools will most definitely creep in with time (and I was right, if you look here). We can only remain optimistic that most authors, budding or established, will have the decency and respect us and not serve up rehashed, artificially generated content.
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