Chat GPT and writing fiction

The Grapevine #112

Hello and happy Sunday!

Generated with Bing AI image generator

There’s a lot going on in the world, and whenever that happens, the world of books and publishing is affected as well. These past couple of weeks I’ve focused more on the tech and content generation aspect of my love of books: I’ve been reading less about books from the point of view of literature, but rather from the point of view of writing them.

As we’ve seen from the previous report on BookTok, there has been a shift in the publishing world and how the world interacts with books. With the rise of Chat GPT and Machine Learning, we’re in for a major shift in fiction writing.

It only ever made sense to me a few months after it hit the graphic design world. It’s a lot easier to process an image and it takes a shorter period of time to assess whether a photo is believable or not.

There has been talk of a photo that won an award for professional photography and the discussion was around whether the “author” can take the credit for producing the prompt, or whether it’s considered a form of plagiarism and therefore it shouldn’t be granted an award.

What I’ve been doing for the past few issues of the Grapevine is to illustrate with my AI generated photos of cats and books that they’re little masterpieces in themselves. I mean, look at this cat reading a book in the style of Andy Warhol! 🥹

I’ve never been inclined to draw or doodle. With me it was always words. Some people draw circles and butterflies in class or when they’re focusing. I always ended up writing poems. They weren’t very good, sometimes just random words.

Which takes me to my point here: it’s a lot harder for humans to assess the veracity and quality of written text.

In my case, I’ll admit I’m biased when it comes to holding something in my hands that resembles anything that took care and attention. If I get a book with nice hardback covers, I’m already assuming that thought and process went into it. The amount of times I was fooled because of this almost irrational prejudice… the previous Grapevine's weird titles from Amazon are another illustration for it.

For some reason, reading the text that Chat GPT produces freaks people out more than the very believable photos. Because it responds to prompts, to reactions and words. And people mistake that for intelligence and sentience.

I was disappointed to see an interview by author Yuval Noah Harari who was invited to Piers Morgan‘s show - a guy I viscerally despise.

Yuval looks and sounds completely terrified by where the tech world is headed and his statements are fatalistic and completely untrue. From the get go, he claims that AI can make decisions and it disappoints me how wrong he and other people seem to get Chat GPT.

The crass analogy to make for what Yuval is feeling is to find a farmer today and ask them what their job would look like if it weren’t for tractors, plows and other such machinery they use in their daily work. They would probably be unable to fathom how significantly harder their jobs and output would be.

The world of writing is in for a similar upgrade and the writers of the future will most likely embed content generated by a machine into their creative process to such a degree that they won’t be able to imagine working without it.

For anyone familiar with translation work, this has come in the form of machine translation and predictive typing a good few years ago. Any seasoned translator who has embraced it and embedded it into their work has endured and has probably never regretted it, despite the enormous patience it took and frustration it undoubtedly caused.

What Yuval is missing is that there is no stopping it, and it’s not just starting now. This has been in the works and has been coming for years! Pleading the world to stop the advances of AI won’t work!

Understanding how it works and how to make it work for you, though, that’s where the focus should be. And it can work wonders if you employ it in the right way.

When I did my Creative Writing MA studies, we learned about how famous authors work. I was not surprised that some of them still prefer to use pen and paper and write the old fashioned way. I myself prefer it as a creative process, but I do hate the transcription stage of this process. Because like it or not, publishing houses still prefer electronic format for manuscripts so this step is absolutely required. Unless you’re a well established author who has a team that transcribes for them.

The other hurdle I find here is that whenever I transcribe, my text never remains the same. I modify it, sometimes completely so that it ends up being a whole different piece.

What I was stunned to find was that some authors use pen and paper for a very capitalist reason: a manuscript written by Salman Rushdie’ hand with his scribbles etc. is worth a fortune on the market! Because of course, you can reproduce the words in type form infinitely at the menial price of a few pounds and bundle it up into a visually pleasing book. But there is only one original manuscript, that has been touched by him and was the basis of the books reproduced.

I guess this practice won’t die out completely. Writers write because they don’t know otherwise. They can’t stop themselves. So AI won’t take their jobs and work from them. That defeats their raison d’etre. But I imagine it could help George R R Martin out of his writer’s block if he used it properly. And it would bring satisfaction to the millions of fans who are still waiting for the final volume of Game of Thrones.

Will it be the same ‘quality’ (another big word)? Yes! Because I imagine whatever Chat GPT would create, he would use as a starting point. He would curate it and shape it and word it to be his. Would someone else be able to create the same output? I don’t think so. Because the prompt I would use and what I would do with the response is unique to myself. And what someone with George R R Martin’s mind would do something completely different with it.

I didn’t set out to write the Grapevine like this today. But I found my thoughts meandering around this topic and this is what came out.

I will leave you with these recommendations from The New Yorker.