Are Authors Using AI to Write Books?

Yes, we are, but not how you think. Here's how…

Now let's get this out of the way straight up:

Personally, I do NOT use GENERATIVE AI to WRITE my books. I do not use AI to come up with dialogue or storyline. I do not enter prompts so that AI can generate ideas, help me come up with solutions to plot holes, or write any parts of my stories for me. I do not use AI to take the place of me doing the writing. I show up and use my brain to come up with ideas, characters, ‘beats,’ conflicts, and everything else that shows up on the page.

This is what I DO use AI for...

RESEARCH

Gone are the days when I would have had to contact a qualified medical person to help me answer questions like:

"What would a treatment and rehabilitation program look like for a 70-year-old with a broken neck of femur?"

or

"What questions would a GP ask to help diagnose someone with dementia?"

Instead, I can enter these questions into a search engine and get some guidance. I can also ask Alexa questions from my seat, like "What is the average temperature in Ireland in Summer?" or "What other conditions can mimic the symptoms of Dementia?" by yelling out to the little, grey speaker-looking thingy on the shelf in my kitchen, without having to move an inch.

EDITING

Thanks, Grammarly!

I use the free version of Grammarly, which picks up grammar, spelling, and punctuation issues in my writing as I go. Grammarly underlines text that it thinks it can improve, and when you hover over the underlines, it gives you a suggestion, much like the spellcheck feature in Microsoft Word. This is a form of AI. Grammar is my weak point, especially tenses. My brain is not the most linear-thinking brain in the world lol.

Sometimes, when I enter a sentence that doesn't seem right but I'm not sure what the problem is, I will enter the sentence into AI and ask, "Does this make sense?" Most of the time I get the response: "Yes, this makes perfect sense." But if it says no, I will have a go at rewriting the sentence until it sounds better to me.

I do not use AI for development editing or structural editing. I draw a line in the sand at using AI to come up with NEW IDEAS. This is what GENERATIVE AI is. I would not ask AI to write or rewrite something for me.

MARKETING

Brain-generated text

Marketing isn't writing books, but it IS a part of being an author and doing author work. So, full disclosure here:

I do use generative AI to:

• Generate alt text to describe images on my website, like this one ->

  AI came up with the following label:

  "Smiling woman with glasses writes in a notebook with a blue pen, showing handwritten poems by a window."

• Generate website meta descriptions for search engine results. AI came up with the following for this blog post:

  "Do authors use AI to write books? Discover how authors are integrating AI into their process without replacing their creative touch.

• Generate social media post text when sharing my blog posts.

• Generating email subject headlines for my monthly newsletter

Interestingly, BookBub reports that around 45% of authors are using Generative AI to assist with their work tasks. These tasks include research and marketing (like the ones listed above), as well as cover art, writing jacket copy (blurb, etc.), translation, plotting, audiobook narration, and writing the book itself. This is a very wide spread of tasks.

AI BEST PRACTICES

The Author's Guild has compiled a list of Guiding Principals for best practices of AI use. This includes recommendations such as fact-checking, not copying and pasting AI-generated content into your manuscript, and publicly disclosing any "substantial use of AI to generate text." This makes sense, right?

But did you know there are books that were written entirely by AI?

Someone sat at their desk, opened ChatGPT, and entered a prompt like: "Write a 70,000 word novel about a boy who paints his face to be a clown at his sister's 10th birthday party, then can never wash the paint off and has to live as a person with clown face paint on for the rest of his life. Break the novel up into 5,000-word chapters, and write it in the style of Marley Betts." They then copied the AI-generated content from the results box, pasted it into a document, saved the document, uploaded it into their self-publishing platform, gave it a title, whacked on a cover (or got AI to do those things too), then released the book with their name on it as the author.

To combat that, Amazon now has a limit on the number of books a person can publish in a day. They implemented this limit because some people decided to do this repeatedly, every single day.

That limit is now 3. Now I don't know about you, but I certainly would not be able to write 3 books a day, even if they were short stories.

So, how do we combat unethical use of AI for writing books without having to rely on the honesty and integrity of the 'authors' themselves?

You tell me.

Much love,

Marley x

P.S. I used AI to research, but not write this book ->

Will you be shocked when I tell you that I also did not use AI to create the cover art?! Poor, overwhelmed Becky and her family were lovingly drawn by me. Read all about them HERE or click on the cover image.