Throwing Away the Joy of Writing

I don't read too many other blogs these days. Simply because so few people write them.

But the subject of AI-written books has come up repeatedly in the handful of blogs I still read from people in the publishing industry. The problem with AI-generated things is they have no soul. No creativity. Nothing new. AI follows a trope outline so everything sounds exactly the same.

There's nothing inherently wrong with a trope. Genres are based on tropes. You read a romance for a happy ending. You read fantasy for an exciting adventure with imaginary beings. You read a mystery, knowing justice will be served in the end.

But AI takes the trope and dulls it down to the basic elements. There are no surprises. No revelations. Basically, there's no fun.

 But there's so many new writers out there who think AI is the end-all, be-all to writing books. And that's their big mistake. Because those writers think that nook is their "creation". It's not. A machine created it. And guess what? You can't copyright something YOU did not create.

Which is why Ingram rejected 4.5 million (yes, 4,5000,000) books from their system over the last five and a half years. Why? Because the legal copyright owner or licensee did not give them permission.

You may tell a machine or even a person what to do, but that doesn't mean it's your creation.

Want some examples?

1) I go to a bakery and order a cake. I tell the baker I want a chocolate cake with vanilla buttercream frosting. Now, do I own the recipes for the cake and the frosting? Hell, no!

2) Meryl Streep is heading to the Oscars and gets a custom-made dress from Designer X. Meryl might make some suggestions like wanting full-length sleeves and lots of sequins. Does Meryl own the copyright to the dress? Nope, Designer X does.

So if I tell ChatGPT to write a romance with two characters named Ginger and Fred, do I own the copyright? Nope! I didn't create the story itself.

And that's not even getting into the legal peccadillo about creation by a non-human! (Go look up Naruto v. David Slater, et al., also known as the Monkey Selfie Case)

And most of all, here's my part of my thought I left on another writer's comment section after he was blasted for being anti-AI:

AI robs people of the joy of storytelling. And I love being in the "Zone" as my Hubby calls it--when you're so deep in the story you're living your main character's experience and the words flow from your fingertips.