Generative AI and large language models (LLMs) have developed rapidly in the last few years, and now represent one of the most controversial topics in the publishing world. We regularly survey our partners to understand how they’re using different platforms and technology and to share those insights with our audience, and we recently did the same for AI. We heard from over 1,200 authors who told us how they’re currently thinking about AI in relation to their work.
EDITORIAL NOTE: Most critics of AI, including creator platforms who are taking steps to suppress the use of AI, are responding to the emotional backlash without having taken it upon themselves to consider the various uses of AI.
- Many unscrupulous creators use AI to deceive their audience.
- This can take the form of deepfake political news.
- Others use AI to generate fictional stories as though they were true, such as short-form interspecies animal stories, whose conventional counterparts have attracted more than their share of views and likes. Many of these conventional stories are either true or they are untrue. We are given only the word of the storyteller to suggest they are true. The use of AI at the present state of the art to tell these stories only makes it obvious to most that they are untrue.
- Generative AI is also used, on the other hand, by storytellers of fiction or nonfiction who would rather not spend a small fortune on paid artistry services to illustrate their stories.
- This includes me, for example, at GoYrOwnWay.com in my use of generative AI to illustrate historical accounts such as Plato’s Timaeus and Critias, better known as Plato’s Atlantis, which unfortunately did not come down to the modern era with original illustrations.
- Many, many other nonfiction creators use generative AI occasionally to dress up their narratives with engaging illustrations or animations. In general, there is no suggestion nor reason to believe that these uses of AI are deceptive. This includes illustrations in eBooks, such as those in the second edition of Back Up Your Data!, soon to be available on this site.
Critics and creator platforms, however, riding the momentum of the emotional backlash against AI and unknowingly captured by the transparent groupthink bubble that surrounds it, continue to disparage and restrict its use without considering its perfectly legitimate uses.
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