Exploring AI Part 3: benefits for authors and books

Content alert: the following was written by a human.

In this three part series exploring AI, Books Forward is chatting with Dr. Andrew Burt, author of lots of published science fiction, including his newest novel, “Termination of Species”, for those who like AI, biotech, chess and a bit of romance.

Dr. Burt was VP of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) for several years. He heads Critters, the first writers workshop on the web and home to other writerly resources. He runs ReAnimus Press and Hugo-winning Advent Publishers, helping award-winning and bestselling authors breathe life into great books. Outside of writing, he’s been a computer science professor (AI, networking, security, privacy and free-speech/social issues); founder of Nyx.net, the world’s first Internet Service Provider; and a technology consultant/author/speaker. For a hobby, he constructs solutions to the world’s problems. (He jokes: Fortunately, nobody listens.)

PART 1: Changes in publishing

PART 2: Limitations and legalities

PART 3: How, specifically, can authors use AI to benefit writing, publishing and selling a book?

As for help in the writing aspect, that depends if you want the result to be your voice. If that aspect is important to you, be careful using AI. Some AI’s can try to mimic a style, but it won’t be as authentic as your actual voice. Just like if you ask your cousin Pat to help; whatever Pat does on the project reduces your part in it.

If that isn’t important to you, then AI can do all sorts of things, from suggesting avenues to explore in your project, creating outlines, tightening up what you’ve written, summarizing it, to writing all the actual text itself (at least at shorter lengths).

AI’s are decent at language translation, though you’d still want a native speaker of the target language to smooth out rough edges.

AI’s probably can’t help a whole lot with publishing a book. They might offer some generic advice, but a search engine is probably going to point you to more helpful advice. Same with selling a book; AI might give you some generic strategies, but will be light on specifics.

Are there AI systems you would recommend?

The go to’s for general uses are the well known ones, ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude. These have generally been trained on the largest amount of data and tweaked to produce the overall best output. (But beware using them as a replacement for a search engine, since they will lie like a slick politician and smile while they’re doing it).

There are various systems geared for various tasks. Grammarly is a well known tool for checking your grammar. (But not so useful in fiction, where perfect grammar doesn’t always hit the spot.) Some fiction writers find Sudowrite useful for generating ideas and plot points. Jasper has a lot of features geared to a variety of types of writing. Some target specific types of writing: Many folks like Copy.ai for writing marketing content and ad copy. Something like Rytr can help create website copy, high volume blog posts, etc. (i.e., written material that non-writers would like to create without hiring a writer).

There are lots of these, just google “AI to help me create ____” for whatever kind of writing you’re looking for, or “AI to help me ____” for whatever activity you’d like help with. There’s a gazillion of them, and more every day, so it’s hard to give a one time list.

Okay, so let’s say I’m an author who has opened text-generative AI software for the first time. How, specifically, should I approach it in order to get the results I want?

First you have to know what you want it to do for you. Saying, “write me a bestselling science fiction novel” is too grandiose at this point, so you’ll have to know what smaller piece of the writing pie you want help with. Then just ask in plain English. 

You might ask it, “What are some plot points for a novel about a young unicorn searching for horn cleaning powder?” Here’s the kind of answer you might get: (This is from ChatGPT 3.5)

In a magical land filled with enchanting creatures, our protagonist, a young unicorn named Sparkle, discovers an ancient prophecy that foretells a great danger if unicorns do not maintain the purity of their horns. To ensure the safety of their kind, Sparkle embarks on a quest to find the elusive and legendary horn cleaning powder.

Prophecy Unveiled: Sparkle stumbles upon an old library where she discovers a hidden prophecy that warns of a looming darkness threatening the unicorn realm. The prophecy reveals that only the purest of horns can protect the unicorns from this impending danger.

Mysterious Ingredients: The ancient texts provide clues about the ingredients needed for the horn cleaning powder. Sparkle sets out to gather these rare and mysterious components, facing challenges and overcoming obstacles to obtain them.

Fellowship of Creatures: Along the journey, Sparkle encounters a diverse group of magical creatures, each with their unique abilities and knowledge. Some become allies, while others pose unexpected challenges. Together, they form an unlikely fellowship, united by a common goal.

Trials and Tests: The quest is not without trials. Sparkle and her companions face magical puzzles, dangerous creatures, and tests of character that push them to their limits. Each challenge brings them closer to the truth about the horn cleaning powder.

Betrayal and Deception: As Sparkle gets closer to completing the powder, she discovers a traitor within the fellowship who has sinister intentions. This revelation leads to a heartbreaking betrayal that tests Sparkle’s resilience and determination.

Race Against Time: The darkness foretold in the prophecy looms ever closer. Sparkle realizes the urgency of her mission and faces a race against time to create the horn cleaning powder before it’s too late.

Epic Confrontation: The climax sees Sparkle and her companions confronting the source of the impending darkness. In a grand and magical showdown, they must use the horn cleaning powder to protect their realm and preserve the purity of unicorn horns.

Resolution and Transformation: The successful use of the horn cleaning powder not only averts the danger but also brings about a transformation in Sparkle and her companions. They return home as heroes, having forged unbreakable bonds during their epic quest.

This novel combines elements of fantasy, adventure, and friendship as Sparkle’s journey unfolds, offering readers a magical and enchanting experience.

Wow. That’s quite an answer. There are a lot of pretty detailed ideas one could follow up on in that. (Yet, generic in many ways.)

I must say I feel there’s also something sort of creepy about that answer. Just guessing what each next word might be has led to a pretty detailed and on-point answer. It doesn’t feel like just random word guessing going on. As a computer scientist, I understand the math and algorithms behind the curtain, but it’s pretty mind boggling that “what’s the next word” has produced this. One possible explanation is that human language and thought isn’t as complex and unpredictable as we think it is. That’s a mind-blowing thought.

There’s also something I find unnerving about the path it took of “purity” of horns and the danger to the existence of their species if their horns aren’t pure. My prompt was only about cleaning horns; I didn’t give a reason for cleaning them. ChatGPT decided “purity” was a reasonable underlying reason for a unicorn wanting a clean horn. I was a bit disturbed, I’ll admit, that some kind of racial/species purity concept popped out. Since we know the algorithm is based on next-word probabilities, maybe it suggests there’s a lot of human created text it gobbled up talking about… “purity.” Sadly, that maybe says more about humans than it does about AIs. Ultimately all the text these AIs work with represent a sort of sum total of what humans say and think about the world. The AI output we get is a kind of mirror on humanity, and we may not always like what we see. On the other hand, really? If I think about cleaning clothes with a powder, or dishes, or teeth, or a carpet… I really don’t jump to “purity.” There are a lot of synonyms in the thesaurus for “cleaning.” Why did it go with “purity”? Hmm.

And again, if one followed this as an outline for a novel, one has ceded a lot of the human creativity to a software system. There’s a lot of generic plot coupons listed there. If I were writing a novel about a unicorn, I’d rather come up with my own creative points. Although, on the flip side, there are only a certain number of categories of conflicts in fiction; so the category ideas might be fine, but the specific implementations, maybe you should come up with on your own to keep it your own story.

Nonetheless, I can easily see generic-loving Hollywood movie studios eating up this kind of derivative, template storymaking. (And video creation, etc.) M-M-M-Max Headroom, anyone?

Can you give examples of a less effective AI prompt, vs. a more effective one?

Interact with a chatbot as if it were a person. Give it background, ask it questions, and use complete sentences.

The more specific the better, so the AI can find information that’s more on point. “Write me a poem” will get you a poem on some random topic, whereas “Write me a love poem I can send on Valentine’s Day to my partner, who has recently had a lot of medical problems” will get you something much more on topic.

You can ask a series of questions, so you can start with one prompt, see where you think it’s lacking, and get more specific.

Don’t be afraid to give lots of context. If you have a specific question, give it as much background as you can. For example, in the unicorn idea above, I could have provided details of other characters I have in mind, my reasons behind wanting horn cleaning powder, other details of the world setting, etc. Many AIs will accept whole books as input in order to answer your questions about them.

If you want it to create a certain style of text, tell it that. You can ask it to write like it’s a pirate. If you give it lots of your own text as input, you can ask it to write in your style. (But be wary for your artistic voice, since some software imitating your voice is not really your authentic voice.)

Asking the same question again, exactly the same or slightly different, can get you quite different answers, so play around. AI’s keep the context of your discussion for a certain amount of time (e.g. while the web page is open), so you can get different answers because of this context, or lack of it.

You can ask for specific kinds of output format, like tables, bullet points, HTML, etc. You can ask for a specific length of output, like a number of words or sentences.

Remember that the data in the AI may not be the most recent, nor all inclusive of everything humankind has ever written. They’re all trained on some specific set of (very large) text, but it’s not everything. And it doesn’t store a copy of all that text; it just uses the text to generate a kind of map of how words appear near each other.

You can tell it when you think it’s not giving you what you want.

Try the various AIs, as they’ll all give different answers.

What else do you want authors to know about AI?

AI’s don’t “understand” the text they’re dealing with; they’re working based on probabilities of what words should come next, based on all the massive amounts of text they’ve been fed. It’s worth noting that AI developers don’t themselves fully understand what’s going on inside these AIs. There’s a certain amount of art/magic/luck involved in what they’ve created.

Despite how human they might appear in a conversation, today’s AIs (probably!) aren’t at the level of actual human-ness. (Yet.) We don’t really know what makes humans human, and these AIs are built to mimic how our brains work in various ways. Just looking at the design of the software, all they’re doing is comparing input prompts to the network of probability data stored inside it. On the other hand, we don’t really know how the human brain works either, although we definitely possess the concept of personal freedom, personal goals, and we clearly have emotions; none of which the current crop of AIs have shown.

Nonetheless, these AIs can do some amazing things, both within the domain of writing, and in all the areas outside. We have to be sure we each think about personal limits to how we use them. At the society level, as with any large, complex piece of software, unpredictable things can happen. We have to be wary of letting them act upon the real world without tight supervision. And that’s just today.

Whereas tomorrow…..!!