World, Writing, Wealth discussion

As they have "non-GMO" labeling on food, should "not AI written" label become an industry standard for books? What do you think?

Will an AI tell the truth, that is the question? Which raises another question - if AI really wanted to get rid of us, would simply misleading us and encouraging something stupid be more productive than terminator types?

Hmm, maybe there's a story hidden in here. But could an AI write it?

I rather suspect authors might be tempted to toy with AI, presenting the changed results as their work. Cheating or not?
A friend of mine demonstrated me how a chapter in my book 📖 would look using AI. That was pretty impressive, although didn’t excite me as an idea. Took him less than a minute to produce something I write and rewrite for hours. Some would opt for a shortcut - why bother if you can come up with something almost instantaneously.
Remember that lawyer in New York that was caught citing non-existent precedents, which AI brought up (interesting to find out whether it lied deliberately 🧐)?

Imagine, me as a moderator instead of writing a few lines on a theme to open a thread, delegating the same to AI ?
Distinction btw AI written and human written can become important, for some maybe valuable either way,

The question of why bother depends on what the writing looks like. The only examples I have seen look a little "machine-written", but they might not have been good examples.

I have tried out as an experiment the AI driven narration systems available. Not straightforward although the choice of voices is extensive. Still have issues on pronunciation and expression which have to be edited in with code on text.
Each line or viewpoint/dialogue need separating to show voice change.
A human narrator may have pronunciation issues but once in character they can move quickly.

Have also used AI run grammar checkers which show faster and I presume easier (for AI programming) results. They still try sometime to alter phrasing and context rather than get a comma in the correct place. Again dialogue catches them out trying to correct, slang and abbreviations.

The offers of a new paragraph or even chapter I have declined. The AI work frequently fails to match tone or context. Perhaps I need to upload a larger sample.

I think some types of editor need to be concerned about future work and also narrators. Writers too, but I fear bland sameness, then again some genres match that already.

Ian wrote: "The question of why bother depends on what the writing looks like. The only examples I have seen look a little "machine-written", but they might not have been good examples."

It was non-fiction, which is more compatible with machine voice, and came out pretty good

Philip wrote: "I have tried out as an experiment the AI driven narration systems available. Not straightforward although the choice of voices is extensive. Still have issues on pronunciation and expression which ..."

Interesting experiments, thanks for sharing. I bet there will be many in not that distant future that would take an easier route - will task the machine and do small rewrites for "originality", which is still required to have a copyright

I'm not looking forward to the time when I have to question everything I read and see digitally.

What have I told you? Just saw it in another group: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...?
Chap-GPT will soon be your "favorite prolific author" ghosting for whoever

Meanwhile AI seems to be heavily biting into writing:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/9...

In process of publishing next book and now Amazon's KDP platform asks if any part, cover, text, etc has been produced by AI. You have to select yes or no then tick to confirm.

ACX the platform I use for producing audio books has Ts and Cs that do not permit AI narration.

Babel the platform I use for translations does not have that restriction as far as I have seen. I have used Google and other web sites to check paragraphs in languages I do not understand. In my books, where non-English is used and shown rather than described, I have also checked translation. Not always accurate even for brief sentences. i.e. I enter English get new language then translate back. Tends to lose pronouns and sometimes tense. Also caused by using gender based words e.g Le, La and Les in French instead of The. Never did understand why a table was feminine.

If you use russian, Philip, a table will be firmly masculine 🙋🏼‍♂️Also, no le, la and more are required 😉

I don't see why AI narration is not allowed. The AI is not creating anything, any more than a fax machine did when it transmitted documents.

Ian wrote: "I don't see why AI narration is not allowed. The AI is not creating anything, any more than a fax machine did when it transmitted documents."

Try Quilbot Ian. It can paraphrase existing text, or create from new. Paraphrase is occasionally interesting. New is rubbish so far, but I'm sure will get better. Grammar checking is another use and it is not good with dialogue. IN grammar and spelling I would state it is doing rules based analysis not AI. New text though...

A mate of mine is very into AI and has been hassling me to experiment with it for my fiction.

I can't get him to understand that for me... the writing journey is what I most enjoy. Using AI would take away my main pleasure in being a novelist. It is the antithesis of art.

Interesting topic because the latest book I read was one that, if you told me it was written by AI, I would believe you. I know there are some high profile authors today who just write a long, detailed outline and the ghost writer does the text, but this one just seemed very paint-by-numbers. A while back, I did hear about publishers, mostly in romance and cozy mystery, who work like that - not with AI, but hiring writers to fill in the text for detailed outlines and then a fake author's name is on the book. I think the writers are paid flat fees.

James Patterson has for years put his name on novels to draw readers and had a co-author who does the real writing. This is my opinion, but I think he gives these co-authors an outline and they write the book - then both of them gain financially. I stopped reading Patterson as soon as he came up with this scheme to cash in on his name.

Ian, AIs can create things out of nothing.

It is now common in many US courts to attest that an AI was not used or that all cites were checked by a real person. It appears in several jurisdictions that an AI made up cases and cited them in documents submitted to in the courts.

There is a site called Scribbr (scribbr.com) that has a "Free AI Content Detector" - you paste in text - their recommendation is between 25 and 500 words - and they will bring up the percentage of text that they detect to be replicated in an AI program.

Sounds useful, thanks, J.!

Good to hear, J. I wonder how they do that.

I am a bit worried about AI in that it will water down good writing. Then I realized it may not matter. Think about it this way, if you create a great story, someone will copy the idea and reuse it. AI will do that too on a massive scale. That is not good for mediocre writers, but it will be great for those that like that mediocre works. So think of Science fiction Stories about ray guns and aliens. there is a ton of mediocre work that many really love. That is fine, it will be bad for those writers, but the fans will be happy. The kicker will come when that works is to be paid for and someone finds out a computer spit it out. Where I do think it will be a problem even for the good writers is that the field will be even more flooded with work and there is only so much oxygen for all.