AI, ChatGPT and the Author — Is AI Really the Problem?
I have noticed recently, particularly on Facebook, that simply mentioning AI can produce an immediate negative reaction.
An image was made using AI, therefore it must be rubbish.
A piece of writing involved ChatGPT, therefore it cannot be genuine writing.
A voice was generated by AI, therefore somehow it is cheating.
I don't agree.
I use ChatGPT, and I make no secret of it.
I use it to help find errors I may have missed, check spelling and grammar, spot inconsistencies and continuity problems, discuss whether a plot or an idea works, research possibilities and sometimes suggest a better way of expressing something that doesn't sound quite right.
I don't automatically accept what it tells me, sometimes I use a suggestion, sometimes I change it and sometimes I reject it completely.
The final decision remains mine.
I also use AI-generated voice for my audiobooks. Since my stroke, my own speech can be indistinct, and at nearly 80, recording several hours of clear narration myself would be extremely difficult and stressful. AI has enabled me to produce audio versions of my books to a standard I am happy to offer for sale.
But using an AI voice does not mean pressing a button and receiving a finished audiobook. Again, the technology is the tool. I wrote the words and I decide how they should be spoken. I have to listen carefully to the narration, correct mistakes and adjust pronunciations, often generating a passage several times before I am satisfied with it.
Pronunciation can be particularly difficult with place names, here in the Philippines. Sometimes the AI simply cannot pronounce a name correctly from its proper spelling, so I have to experiment with changing the spelling or writing it phonetically until I get the pronunciation I want. Every corrected section then has to be listened to again before it becomes part of the finished recording.
It is time-consuming work. An audiobook with a finished running time of around three hours can take me three days to produce and finalise.
The narration has to be checked, pronunciations corrected, sections regenerated where necessary, and everything listened to and approved before I am prepared to offer it for sale.
AI may make something possible or faster; it doesn't remove the work or the judgement.
But I think we are in danger of blaming the tool rather than judging what has actually been produced.
Take images. AI-generated images are becoming remarkably good. Are they perfect? No. Quite often you can still detect that an image has been created using AI. Faces can be a little too perfect, backgrounds can contain odd details, and occasionally AI produces something that makes you wonder what planet it thinks human beings live on.
But that doesn't make every AI-generated image rubbish. It means the person creating it still needs to look at the result, reject what doesn't work and improve what does.
The images included here illustrate my point rather well. One was created by me using Photoshop.
The other was produced with the help of AI.
Both used the same foreground but they were made in different ways, and you may prefer one to the other.
That is exactly the point. Judge the finished images. Which works better? Which do you prefer?
The fact that AI was involved in creating one of them should not decide the answer before you've even looked at it.
The same applies to writing.
If somebody asks ChatGPT to “write me a novel”, copies the result without thought and publishes it, I would not expect the result to be particularly good.
But that isn't because AI was involved. It is because the author, no writer, obviously not a real author, involved gave very little thought to it.
We regularly see advertisements claiming that AI can write an entire book for you in five minutes without you having to do a thing.
Technically, perhaps it can produce tens of thousands of words in a remarkably short time. But producing words and writing a book worth reading are not quite the same thing.
Take a look at my books, images and audiobooks for yourself, and then let me know what you think. Does knowing that I use AI to help me, change your opinion of the finished work?
Judge the work, not the toolbox!
peter-anthony.co.uk
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