Another month, and another authors’ Round Robin. This month the topic has been set by author Skye Taylor
How does AI impact on your writing? And how do you see it infringing on creativity and copyright issues?
As a writer and an editor, I’m fascinated by the subject of AI. I feel we’re at the start of something new and amazing. Human beings have always been able to adapt, and creative people especially, and I’m looking forward to seeing how writers will use AI inventively in the future.
There are three questions in our topic this month. Here’s the first:
How does AI impact on your writing?
For writers of commercial fiction, I think AI can be useful in helping come up with titles and blurbs. Titles and blurbs are basically advertising copy, and publishers use them to sell books.
Titles often follow a trend. Anything with ‘The Little…’ in the title (little cafe, little hotel, little bookshop, etc.) is likely to be a heartwarming novel, for example, and thrillers have been through a long phase of having ‘Girl’ in the title, ever since The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.
This is where AI can be a good tool. It can look at already existing trends, copy them and come up with a similar idea. Readers find this similarity helpful, rather than off-putting, because it tells them what sort of book they’re buying. This in turn helps publishers sell the book.
Regarding my own writing, I’ve asked AI to help generate ideas with varying levels of success. I’ve never once prompted it and come away with the perfect response. I’ve always had to think creatively myself around the answers it’s given me.
As an example, I asked Claude.ai to write an 800-word blog post on dealing with AI and copyright as a writer. This is the title Claude came up with:
The AI Revolution: Navigating the New Frontiers of Writers’ Copyright.
A simple Google search showed me eleven other blog post titles about AI containing the words ‘Navigating the New…’ in the first two pages of search results alone.
This is all the confirmation I need that AI isn’t going to come up with anything original – that if writers want to use AI as a tool they’re still going to have to put in the work to come up with anything new and creative.
This leads to the next question:
How do you see AI infringing on creativity?
I’ve heard that some authors are using AI to actually write their novels. I’ve written previously on the question of Can AI Write a Romance Novel? and you can see how I got on in that post.
I can’t see at the moment – or even in the future – how AI would ever be better at creating an engaging, compelling and original story than a human being.
At the moment, I see using AI creatively as a bit like having a patient friend who’s willing to listen while you talk about your thoughts with them, and who sometimes sparks off a great idea. But the great idea will always have to come from the writer. AI might help provide a spark, but ultimately, it’s you the writer who is going to have to do all the creative work, because AI can only copy others.
This leads to the third question:
How do you see AI infringing on copyright issues?
I wrote above how I’d asked Claude.ai to write an 800-word blog post on copyright and AI. If you’d like to see it’s reply, you can download the pdf here. There are a lot of people who use AI to create blog posts, but personally I don’t see the point publishing yet another blog post that simply copies the hundreds that are already available.
I’m a member of the UK’s Society of Authors. The SoA has already put out this statement on where they stand in relation to AI, which says everything I’d like to say, only puts it much better. Their statement covers my concerns and the concerns of my author friends, particularly that authors should be asked for consent before their work is used by an AI system, and developers should be open about the data sources they’ve used to train their AI systems.
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People have described AI as a new Wild West. It’s a concern that AI is in the hands of a few big tech companies, and it’s a concern that it may lead to further edging out of diverse voices.
But writers have always embraced technology in the past, from the first printing presses to self-publishing online, and my feeling is that writers and creatives will be at the forefront of using AI in ways others might not have foreseen.
Do you use AI as a writer? If so, please drop me a comment. I’d be very interested to hear how you use it and how useful you find it.
And if you’d like to hear what the other authors in the Round Robin have to say on the topic, please click on the links below!
Connie Vines https://mizging.blogspot.com/?m=1
Skye Taylor http://www.skye-writer.com/blogging_by_the_sea
Bob Rich https://wp.me/p3Xihq-3oC
Aimee Maguire https://ajmaguire.wordpress.com/
Helena Fairfax 
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