AI and the Author
Thou shalt not suffer an AI to write
I’m far from an expert in the world of book publishing, but I’m pretty good at spotting a pattern when it hits me square in the face.
When I was shopping around for a way to bring About Five Years (“A5Y”- yes I am that lazy) to market, every submission form demanded to know how much of the book had been written by an AI. Queries to agents include a checkbox for any AI ingredients, and that’s pretty clearly an immediate rejection filter. Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing, which I ultimately used, wants to know how much was AI written, how much I re-wrote after the AI wrote it, and which faceless-threats-to-our-humanity did I employ.
My purpose for bringing A5Y to market is completely honorable - I am genuinely worried that people in our industry are either not seeing, or are deliberately ignoring, what’s going on. That’s why it’s priced so low — I’m not expecting to make any money on it. And yes, I did use AI as I was writing it, but not the way people seem to expect.
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When I was in college1 there was a lot of chin-scratching about use of the Internet, back then still a mysterious and therefore Capitalized thing, in the writing of our papers. There wasn’t a very good way to cite the gopher2 pages I used, and when I emailed a professor at a different school about a publication of his, there was a very serious discussion about whether that was proper.
Now my kids are in college, and they’re experiencing that same wide-eyed consideration of generative AI in their Honor Codes and in their classrooms, and all of that doesn’t yet contemplate the convergence of AI and the more traditional pull-based research mechanisms with which their professors only recently became comfortable.
(I wrote a book on that.)
Here’s how I used generative AI in producing A5Y:
I used ChatGPT as a research assistant. If I wanted, say, the size of the SEO market, or information regarding the decline of search traffic, ChatGPT saved me hours of googling and cross-checking, and gave me the links so I could go follow up.
I used Claude as my editor. I find Claude to be far better at long-form than ol’ Chas, and so questions of continuity (you kind of lost your theme in chapters 5 and 6, buddy) or structure (I don’t know why you thought this was important enough to be its own chapter, maybe try again) went to Claude.
To my mind, this isn’t the same as if I had gone to Claude and asked it to write a book for me; in fact in several areas the AI’s predictions were in rose-colored contrast to my own. But more importantly, and more challengingly, I’m thinking about why it matters so much to me that you know that I actually did the typing3.
The answer, of course, is ego. If I was truly only concerned about getting the information into hands, I would have taken a different path — one that didn’t have my name all over the cover. And I think that’s something I missed when I was writing about the resistance and the head-in-sand across the content industry : people identify closely with what we do, and we don’t easily relinquish that just because some new technology and some market forces are nudging us out to pasture.
in the 1900s
Google it.
And if you know me, you know that most of what I typed was a delete key.