Yahoo Finance Could an AI write Spare? Take our quiz to spot the fake literary intros
See if you can spot the AI-generated material in our interactive quiz
The listing on Amazon looked real enough: How to Write and Publish an eBook Quickly and Make Money. The author, Jane Friedman, is an award-winning veteran of the publishing industry. The title seemed in line with her other work, which includes The Business of Being a Writer. The description seemed credible.
But it was fake. Along with four other titles, How to Write… was taken off Amazon after Friedman complained. She believes the books were written by AI.
If so, it would only be the latest in a growing history of such incidents. “Mike Steves” was a respected travel writer. Yet when users ordered his guides to France through Amazon’s publish-on-demand service, they were disappointed. Rather than insider knowledge, they found repetitive and vague descriptions, apparently created with the help of generative AI. On closer inspection, not only were the books fake, but so was Steves’ whole profile, right down to his photograph.
AI is becoming more and more disruptive in publishing. Earlier this year, sci-fi publisher Clarkesworld stopped accepting new submissions after receiving a flood of AI-generated material. Publishers, wary of Amazon’s power, have been reluctant to speak out, but the problem is growing.
“It’s inevitable we’ll see more of this kind of thing, because we’re not doing anything to change it,” says Dr Carissa Véliz, associate professor at the Faculty of Philosophy and the Institute for Ethics in AI, at the University of Oxford. “All the incentives are there to create content as cheaply as possible, and the way to do that is with an AI. There’s no disincentive whatsoever. You can earn money in a cost-effective way. That doesn’t take into account all the motivations people might have to infuse the public sphere with misinformation, which have nothing to do with money. After a time of resentment towards people who were seen as guarding these privileged positions, like editors, I think we have to admit that we need guardians of truth. Because people are going to trust less and less of anything they read as AI creates more content.”
It was inevitable that unscrupulous uses would be found for generative AI, which can create large amounts of text, in any style and subject, on demand. All the same, the speed with which AI plagiarism has increased has caught publishers by surprise. Where non-fiction leads, fiction will surely follow. The most obvious targets will be niche genre fiction, but as the programmes become more sophisticated, others will follow. Fans might welcome this: imagine an endless stream of new Lord of the Rings books, or fiction personalised to your tastes. But authors will worry about being put out of a job.
In his essay Philip Massinger, T S Eliot wrote that: “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.”
For now, AI remains a bad, immature poet. But give it time…
