Monday, December 26, 2022

"How Kindle novelists are using ChatGPT"

From The Verge, December 24:

An interview with an AI early adopter

Earlier this year, I wrote about genre-fiction authors using AI in their novels. Most wrote for Amazon’s Kindle platform, where an extremely rapid pace of publishing, as fast as a book a month, is the norm. AI helped them write quickly, but it also raised complex aesthetic and ethical questions. Would the widespread use of AI warp fiction toward the most common conventions and tropes? What parts of the writing process can be automated before the writing no longer feels like their own? Should authors have to disclose their use of AI?

With the debut of ChatGPT, many of the questions these writers were dealing with have become more urgent and mainstream. I checked back with one of the authors, Jennifer Lepp, who writes in the cozy paranormal mystery subgenre under the pen name Leanne Leeds, to see how she was thinking about AI now. She’s still using the GPT-3-based tool Sudowrite — in fact, she is now paid to write tips on using it for the company’s blog — and has begun incorporating some of the more recent tools into her fiction. We spoke about what it’s been like working with ChatGPT, how its debut has roiled the independent author community, and other topics.   

When we spoke last time, you had gone through an evolution of using Sudowrite, first mostly as a sort of thesaurus, then experimenting with incorporating its text into your work, then letting it lead you and having an alienating experience with that and reining it back and using it primarily to flesh out descriptions you’d outlined. What’s your process like now?

Well, I had hoped that it would help me write two books at the same time, and that failed spectacularly. Apparently, I’m still connected to my own writing. So, on the one hand, that was good.

You thought that it could allow you to toggle back and forth and write two books simultaneously? 

I figured, Hey, if I don’t know what to write, I’ll just pop something in there and it will get me going, and I’ll be right back into the book I left a week ago. It didn’t quite work out that way. If I didn’t know what I was doing, it didn’t matter what it spit out at me. It wasn’t going to help me reconnect with material I already wrote.

You and a few other independent authors were early adopters of these tools. With ChatGPT, it feels like a lot of other people are suddenly grappling with the same questions you were confronting. What’s that been like? 

I definitely am still grappling, and I think I’m grappling a little bit more publicly. For the most part, people before had kind of rolled their eyes — I don’t think they understood what people were using AI for. ChatGP3 exploded that. Every group, every private, behind-the-scenes author group I’m in, there’s some kind of discussion going on.

Right now, everybody’s talking about using it on the peripherals. But there seems to be this moral chasm between: “It does blurbs really well, and I hate doing blurbs, and I have to pay somebody to do blurbs, and blurbs isn’t writing, so I’m going to use it for blurbs.” Or “Well, I’m going to have it help me tighten up my plot because I hate plotting, but it plots really well, so I’m going to use it for that.” Or “Did you know that if you tell it to proofread, it’ll make sure that it’s grammatically correct?’

Everybody gets closer and closer to using it to write their stuff, and then they stop, and everybody seems to feel like they have to announce when they’re talking about this: “But I do not ever use it its words to write my books.”

And I do. It doesn’t drive my plot. It doesn’t generally drive any of the ideas in my books. It doesn’t create characters. But the actual words, just to get them down faster and get it out, I do. So I’ve found myself in the past couple of weeks wondering, do I engage in this debate? Do I say anything? For the most part, I’ve said nothing....

....MUCH MORE

Earlier in "It's not human but it's alive":

Way back in 2014 we were looking at:
The First Conscious Machines will Probably Be on Wall Street
Or in porn....
'Deep Learning' as Applied to Investing

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