The Dilemma of AI in Your Favourite Books
I’m not a very confident person, which means I’m not the best at taking compliments. If you called me the prettiest woman in the room, I’d probably assume you were just being kind. But if you ever come to compliment a piece of my writing, I will embrace it (and you, perhaps) wholeheartedly. You could argue I inherited the writing genes from my very well-spoken mother and her writer parents. Still, only I know the hard work I have put into coming up with random rhymes for my poems in 5th grade, brainstorming topics to write articles on, and learning synonyms for “said” to add to my password-protected fanfiction.
Hence, when I recently stumbled upon the news [story] about a fantasy author accidentally leaving an AI prompt in one of their books, my heart sank beneath an onslaught of uneasy emotions. The sight of ChatGPT’s response preamble gawked at me from the screenshot of the e-book going viral. It read, “I’ve rewritten the passage to align more with J. Bree’s style, which features more tension, gritty undertones, and raw emotional subtext beneath the supernatural elements.”
I immediately felt depressed at the realization of the dishonesty this author subjected her readers to, followed by a feeling of selfish relief that I wasn’t one of them. But then again, what if I am, and I just don’t know it? So you see, an onslaught of emotions. I don’t want to be the bearer of bad news, but this wasn’t a singular incident in the recent events of artists falling victim to the temptation of AI slops. Readers found similar notes in two more books, raising broader questions about the credibility of authors in general.
There’s now a knowledge gap growing between an author’s work and their readers. We may never truly know how much of a book has been written by the author themselves, and how much was shaped by AI. The aforementioned mistake was clearly an oversight by the self-publishing author, and sure, they are probably feeling immense regret—whether that’s for using AI or getting caught, that’s open for interpretation. Still, it does not absolve them of using AI in a work marketed and believed to be wholly their own.
Ethics and AI
The ethical implications of using AI in the creative space, such as writing a book, are colossal. Plagiarism sits at the forefront of it all. Tools like ChatGPT and other GenAI models were born off of the internet; they exist to retain and reassemble information, not create it. Even when they do appear to create it, their outputs are often labelled hallucinations, which is yet another pressing concern in the myriad of issues stemming from the use of AI.
In short, their responses are basically a mix-and-match of content that’s already available out there. Take the earlier excerpt from ChatGPT, where the author essentially asked it to mimic another writer’s style to describe one of her characters. This blatant theft of content and art is utterly disturbing when there is already so much apprehension in discerning real from AI-generated content. Nonetheless, J. Bree must be having the last laugh right now.
On a more serious note, though, this incident could be the beginning of the end for authors and books. There has already been a relative decline in real-time readers, thanks to relentless hustle culture and the wonders of doom scrolling. Even I, an avid reader (it hurts to call myself that now), find it particularly hard to get through one chapter without getting distracted by a ping on my phone. The last straw for the doomed book industry has been the readers’ faith in their favorite authors’ ability to craft a deep, meaningful world of characters to get lost in. Now, with the increasing reliance on machine learning tools to generate just what the readers want, how will the authors retain their interest without sacrificing their moral integrity and creative flair?
As a reader and a writer, I am stuck in the limbo of feeling betrayed by the prospect of a bleak future for books and recognizing the need to keep up with the integration of AI in nearly every aspect of life. A different author who was caught using AI in one of her books earlier this year defended it by claiming she did it for her book to stay “competitive in the market,” admitting to having relied on ChatGPT to make “minor edits”—those being shaping the main characters to make them more “relatable.”
These incidents not only highlight the importance of being transparent about the writing process but also reflect the desperation of authors to stay relevant in the big, brooding world of capitalism. When given the choice of churning out a limited amount of quality content in an acceptable amount of time and heaps of suboptimal content in half the time, it does not seem like the most difficult choice. But the irony is, it is. An artist primarily builds their identity and brand around creating things from scratch. After all, nothing is sweeter than the gratification of achievement and the appreciation we receive for it. This is why giving in to the temptation of using AI for content generation feels so unimaginable at first.
The question that also bugs many writers like me is how much intervention of AI passes as AI-generated; if I run the first draft of my write-up through an AI tool with specific instructions to fix grammatical and structural mistakes, it will automatically “refine” the content for better readability. Get this now: the idea is mine, the premise is mine, and the entire write-up is mine—yet now it is marred by the sophisticated eye of ChatGPT, which swears by the refined version, assuring me that it will make the cut as the front-page story in a reputable magazine.
I have done a lot of writing, including a fair share of copywriting, blog posts, and human-interest stories. Yet the creative part of it remains the most personal to me. Because the awkward rhyming poems I used to write were my first attempts at expressing admiration for the people I loved, spending hours perfecting conversations between my characters was how I brought fake scenarios in my head to life, and finally, admiring other writers’ brilliant, unconventional plots became my holy grail – fueling the hope that one day, I might write something just as powerful.
The growing skepticism of readers is directly tied to the prospective death of creative writing. I have had people tell me my writing sometimes reads as AI-generated—meant as a compliment, of course. But this is also why I make an effort to be as verbose as possible, which is a pretty sad reason, and it physically pains me to have to defend the arrangement of words I craft with so much love and passion. Yet, as a writer, I understand that I carry the responsibility of being transparent about my creative process.
Perhaps the only way to push back against this rising tide is by staying true to our morals and refusing to sign up for these AI models. But the pressure to produce, sell, and stay relevant is bound to catch up sooner or later, and we risk being left behind., sell, and stay relevant is bound to catch up sooner or later, and we risk being left behind.
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The views and opinions expressed in this article/paper are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Paradigm Shift.
Bazigah Murad is a journalist passionate about uncovering societal issues, cultural dynamics, and the nuanced portrayal of women in South Asia. She can be reached at [email protected]