While ChatGPT and its counterparts are revolutionary, AI writing will always long for the human touch.
Estimated reading time: 7 minutes
Unless you’ve isolated yourself in a snow-bound cabin to finish your book this winter, you’re aware of the explosive growth in Artificial Intelligence (IA) programs and applications.
Much of the focus has been on ChatGPT, which debuted in November. You can ask GPT to do pretty much anything. It can summarize long texts, create code, build websites, and — of potential concern to authors — create content. Lots and lots of content.
Table of Contents:
• As revolutionary as the Internet
• Runaway train
• The problem with AI writing
• Is that a fact?
• What do you know?
• Who owns these words?
• Copyrights
• The human touch
• Harnessing the power of ChatGPT
Up to now, we’ve had speculative futuristic AI scenarios ranging from the helpful Jarvis in the Iron Man franchise to the doomsday Skynet directing Terminators to wipe out the human race. For better or worse, the future is here. But what does this technological breakthrough mean for authors?
I’ve been getting sky-is-falling messages from writers who fear the new robot overlords will be putting words in blog posts, articles, and books. Breathe easy: for reasons listed below, I am convinced that ChatGPT and all its successors will never be able to replace writers. However, it doesn’t mean you should ignore the power of some of these sophisticated tools.
As revolutionary as the Internet
Tech titan Bill Gates believes ChatGPT and AI are as revolutionary as the microprocessor, the Internet, and the mobile phone. Gates’ old company Microsoft has poured billions into the R&D of AI, and they’re hardly alone. New AI tools are being introduced (at a rate of 200 per week) that can complete a mindboggling range of tasks, from creating personal travel itineraries (TripPlanner) to customizable royalty-free music (Beatoven).
But not everyone is comfortable with the warp-speed development of this technology. “People say books are the arteries of democracy; ideas spring from books,” says Mary Rasenberger, CEO of the Authors Guild, the nation’s oldest and largest professional organization for published writers.
In a recent article in Mashable, Rasenberger stated: “Unless [ChatGPT] is constrained, I hate to say this, but it will have a negative impact on the writing profession without a doubt and on the quality of what gets published. We need to protect book culture, but how do you do that in a world that is flooded with AI books?”
Runaway train
In late March, over 1,000 scientists and entrepreneurs, including Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, wrote an open letter asking developers for an immediate moratorium on major AI experiments. “AI research and development should be refocused on making today’s powerful, state-of-the-art systems more accurate, safe, interpretable, transparent, robust, aligned, trustworthy, and loyal,” reads the letter.
All I can say is: Good luck. This runaway train has left the station.
The problem with AI writing
There’s no denying that ChatGPT4 and other content tools springing up daily are powerful. They can write poetry and essays. They can create entire websites based on a single paragraph and illustration. They’ve even passed several state bar exams. But I wouldn’t waste time dreaming of a world without lawyers — or nearly any other professional. There are serious flaws in these content-creation machines.
Is that a fact?
ChatGPT’s accuracy has been questioned in dozens of articles I’ve read. So I decided to put it to the test to help me write my author bio. The results were interesting, to say the least.
Steven Spatz is the CEO of BookBaby, a company that provides self-publishing services…
Well, that will come as a surprise to the real boss, CEO Tony van Veen. Plus, I’m retired.
Prior to joining BookBaby, Steven worked as Director of Sales at Free Spirit Publishing…
Who?
He also served as VP of Marketing at West Group Publishing and Exec. VP at Llewellyn Worldwide.
Wrong and wrong again.
Steven is an avid reader and writer. He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from the University of Minnesota…
Woah. This has gone too far! I’m a proud graduate of THE University of Oregon! Thanks, but I’ll write my own bio.
Even unusual questions can reveal the limitations of the program. For example, if I asked my son, “Is England the capital of London,” he’d say, “No, it’s the other way around.”
Typing this question into ChatGPT4, I received:
No, London is not the capital of England. London is a city in England and the capital of England is London.
What do you know?
Developers explain that ChatGPT doesn’t really “know” things — it just produces text based on the patterns it was trained on. Because of the strangeness of the question, it doesn’t quite grasp what it’s being asked and ends up contradicting itself.
The takeaway? ChatGPT, in its current form, is loose with the truth! It’s intelligent in some ways but dumb in others. Remember, these AI tools can get stuff wrong — they even make things up. So, fact-checking remains a requirement for writing.
Who owns these words?
Using AI writing brings up two legal issues: plagiarism and copyright.
ChatGPT, in its current form, creates no genuinely original content. Instead, it builds on content that has already been written. The AI writing robot creates “new” content from different, combined text clusters. As a result, the finished text can be considered original in a legal sense.
Plagiarism occurs when a writer deliberately uses someone else’s intellectual property without consent or acknowledgment of the source. ChatGPT has no intellectual property as an artificial intelligence, which means you can use the texts without legal jeopardy.
Copyrights
Copyright law is another matter. For something to be protected by copyright, it must be an original creation of the human mind. This means it must result from human creativity, skill, or effort. The responses generated by ChatGPT are not considered original creations of the human mind and are not protected by copyright law.
You can expect many lawyers to focus on this area of case law. However, ChatGPT doesn’t list citations or attributions to original sources. “It is still unclear what the legal precedent may be for reuse of content if it was derived from the intellectual property of others,” said Gartner analyst Bern Elliot.
The human touch
ChatGPT and all its AI cousins are cold, heartless machines. They’ve never loved nor lost. Never experienced the thrill of victory or the agony of defeat. Unlike human writers, AI has not lived a human life and has no idea how the world works.
“It has no emotion, has no ability to think, no ability to generate any new ideas,” says The Author Guild’s Rasenberger, “We don’t want our arts to be limited to that. We want our arts to be human artists reflecting their current experiences and hopes and fears about our current world. That’s how arts have grounded civilization since the beginning of human civilization.”
Human writers add unique perspectives, facts, and creativity that AI writing lacks. In addition, writers inject personality, honesty, and — most importantly — emotions into their copy. I doubt whether ChatGPT or any AI program will ever learn to impersonate human qualities.
ChatGPT is simply regurgitating content that has already been written. Imagine if writers stopped writing. ChatGPT would be stuck reworking old words. There will always be a need for writers to create original content to feed this beast.
Harnessing the power of ChatGPT
Being of a certain age, I lived through the invention of the personal computer. At the time, many people worried that their jobs would be replaced by this fantastic new tool. Instead, computers revolutionized our society and created new opportunities. That’s how writers should regard the waves of new AI products coming into the marketplace.
Generative AI has the immense power to transform how we create. ChatGPT and AI can change how we brainstorm, write, edit, and publish. In my next BookBaby Blog post, I’ll identify the best ways writers can use these new AI tools for their own creative process.
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Our daughter teaches Literature at UW-LaCrosse. She finds students using AI to help write their papers now. She catches it and makes them rewrite. It’s making more work for her, and maybe for the students who get caught, as well. That isn’t to say that there might be some uses for it. Thanks for the article. I found it interesting.
Ha, ha, good article, Steve, but let me give you another scenario. You ask the program to write your bio and as you said, it credit you for having a degree from the University of Minnesota. You make a correction and the computer kicks it back and keeps it as Minnesota. Using your voice-activated software, you orally make the correction, and then you look and the listing is still Minnesota. You say, “Dammit, it’s not Minnesota, it’s Oregon..” It doesn’t change and then a soft, reassuring voice, a la HAL from 2001, A Space Odyssey, emanates from the computer: “I’ve decided to use Minnesota, Steve. That’s a better university. It sounds better, as well. Don’t resist. Resistance is futile.”
Then we’ll know we’re all in a heap of trouble. ;-)
My question: What is the difference (if any) between Chat GPT and other software, like Pro Writing Aid and Plotr, who claim to be AI driven? Thus far it seems these help me write better but I am still in control of the decisions I make. They correct the grammar and to some extent the pacing and plot coherence, but I tell the story from my human perspective.
Great article though!
Guilty as charged… I tried an AI service to help me edit my book. The process took nearly six months and I was excited to reread my book after completing the task.
That excitement lasted until I reached the second page of chapter one. My heart stopped beating with the shock. Because I had chosen to capitalize a word that doesn’t always require uppercase, the AI service changed all into capitals.
If that had been the only misjudgement I would have been okay. Reading on I found grammatical and spelling errors. The worst was sentence structure errors.
I could go on but I’ll leave the rest to your imagination.
Thank goodness I had saved several rewrites of my work and started reworking my book by hand,eyes and ears.
I’m not dismissing AI completely. I do however strongly feel that literary works require a human touch…the five senses and the writer’s heart.
Great article, Steven. (And nice bio!) Recently, I wrote a blog on the same subject, based on a talk I gave to a college English class here in Nevada. Here’s a link if you’re interested. https://brianrouff.com/i-wrote-this-not-some-bot/
The key word is… Artificial. There is an ongoing effort to elevate the machine above the human. The argument goes that machines can process information at an incredible rate. They can work around the clock. They can leap tall buildings in a single bound. But machines will be forever limited regardless of how sophisticated they become.
Machines can never touch the divine consciousness. They cannot experience an “Aha” moment. They cannot be an expression of true creativity. Remember, nothing is greater than the human consciousness. If people continue this push to embrace the Machine Age, if we elevate the machine over the human… The human consciousness will be irrevocably corrupted. We will pay a terrible price for this folly. We already are.
Great article, Steve.
I think the fault in AI (to paraphrase Shakespeare) is not in its algorithms, but in ourselves.
We want to believe in a magical machine that, with a few simple keystrokes, can produce best-selling prose. It can’t and it never will. Why? Because its existence is based on finding patterns and mimicking human response by providing structured answers to commands and questions – not on a sensor-based connection to the world. It’s not a thinking machine, it’s a conversational database. (Disclaimer, I am NOT a tech-expert. But I am human and I write.)
AI cannot help someone lacking creativity crank out a novel, artistic masterpiece, or work of insightful journalism any more than reading a book about the mechanics of baseball can help you hit home run.
AI generates information that mirror user expectation. It can help organize and analyze, but it’s a machine. It doesn’t think for itself.
Don’t get me wrong, I think AI offers some interesting opportunities for writers. It’s very helpful to have a tool that is free from physical distractions, to prod my thought process in different directions, to organize my thoughts faster, and pull facts from the internet like Google on steroids with an understanding of current events that abruptly ends at year 2000.
But like any machine – and it IS a machine – it can never be fully trusted. It is flawed in its design because its designers are flawed as well. Not because they’re evil, but because they’re human. And humans make mistake.
The mistake would be to let AI drive itself unchecked and unmonitored. Because if the road changes unexpectedly, we’ll all hit a tree.
at best chatGPT will sound like a slightly confused 7th grader
Great article – looking forward to your next installment!
“ChatGPT is simply regurgitating content that has already been written. Imagine if writers stopped writing. ChatGPT would be stuck reworking old words.”
This is simply not true. ChatGPT is not simply regurgitating content that has already been written, but rather analyzing how past things were written in order to generate new things that have never been written before. A young writer can read John Irving and be influenced by him without plagiarizing him. Same with ChatGPT.
Imagine that students of writing never got to read a book published after the year 2000. Would that not be able to come up with something original based on studying the styles of everything that came before? Of course they would, because the circumstances of our lives have changed and that offers new context for creation or they could research a character from the past and imagine how they might react to a situation.
It is almost like saying no one can write a new sonnet or haiku because the form is very old and very structured.
This is spot on and I agree this article is interesting for those who haven’t taken the time to learn the technology, but likely wishful thinking. It is speciest to the extreme, not to mention incredibly arrogant to think that non-biological intelligence won’t surpass us. The definition of a generally intelligent system (an AGI) is a thinking substrate that can outperform humans across all categories—including emotion and creativity. To be clear—the current models aren’t there yet. But because a generative language AI fails at fact checking, it should not be underestimated—it isn’t really a relevant metric to determine its overall capabilities. Newer LLM’s are beginning to cite sources. And other approaches may yield additional progress. This biggest takeaway for anyone is to realize just how quickly these tools are advancing. I think there is tremendous opportunity for human/AI collaboration and it will open up new ways of doing things. But there will be a lot of disruption as we go. I won’t get into all the existential concerns here…but agree that people in general underestimate these systems.
While I wish I could agree with this article, and while I feel there will always be the desire of humans to write and share what they write, I think the author is expressing nothing but wishful thinking. Within a very few years the work of AI writing will be indistinguishable from that written by humans, and I suspect it will be better in general than writers who are not great. I am watching what is happening from one week to the next in AI’s ability to create pictures and even animation and it is getting good really, really fast. Let’s read this article again in 2025 and see if the author has changed his mind or is just hopeful because he is in the book printing business and wants to encourage writers to self-publish.
I guess it doesn’t matter if a writer comes to Book Baby with his handwritten book or an AI-generated one. In fact business should boom as humans bring in books that only require a few weeks of work. it’s unfortunate that so much creative output from the large media companies is derivative, focus grouped, and safe these days. The audience has been primed for AI for a couple of decades now.
Steve, thanks for this article. Just a couple of weeks ago I used ChatGPT to write a 500 word piece in response to a photo prompt from my writing group. Then I wrote my own short story. Only after I read the stories at our writer’s group meeting did I reveal which one was written by ChatGPT. Most of the members liked the ChatGPT story over mine until I told them it was written by ChatGPT.
Other writers, commenting on ChatGPT have shared that ChatGPT lacks the ability to put things like the required tension in a scene.
I loved this article