AI Is Destroying the Trust Between Writers and Readers
The proliferation of artificial intelligence has raised new fears about the long-term viability of writers’ already tenuous profession, as the technology infiltrates prize-winning writing, scrapes books for learning material, and perhaps erodes readers’ attention spans.
Key points
- I don’t know whether, or to what extent, AI was used in creating these books whose content otherwise seems to bear little or no resemblance to my novel; I found only one that contains an up-front disclaimer acknowledging AI authorship.
- In some ways, I felt lucky to have just my title copied; in late 2024, my friend the novelist Daphne Kalotay discovered that her author page on Amazon featured a brand-new novel that she hadn’t written.
- This book, which Kalotay described as “an AI hallucination based on descriptions of Russian Winter,” her 2010 novel, had been paired with a title and cover from a completely unrelated book from decades earlier and was being sold under her name.
AI-enabled meddling is turning the reader-writer connection into a hall of fun-house mirrors, and threatening to break the trust that is essential to that bond.
Additional details
- “What was most unsettling,” Kalotay told me, “was how difficult it was to prove it was garbage.” In the end, the Authors Guild, an advocacy organization of which Kalotay is a member—and which has launched a certification program designed to distinguish human-authored books from those generated by AI—succeeded in getting….
- Although he hadn’t read my novel The Weight of Ink, it was his understanding that it featured a character with Parkinson’s who chose to die by assisted suicide rather than endure her decline.
- But as Will Oremus noted in a recent Atlantic article, new-book releases on Amazon skyrocketed after 2022, around the time that AI models became widely accessible to the public.
- As a novelist, I’ve been chided for details including a character’s self-defeating relationship decisions and an incorrect date for a 17th-century full moon.
- Just a few weeks earlier, I’d asked ChatGPT a few questions about my novel; it responded to certain queries with this false rendition of Helen’s plotline.
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