How Kindle novelists are using ChatGPT (The Verge)

[highplainsdem]

https://www.theverge.com/23520625/chatgpt-openai-amazon-kindle-novel

Earlier this year, I wrote about genre-fiction authors using AI in their novels. Most wrote for Amazon’s Kindle platform, where an extremely rapid pace of publishing, as fast as a book a month, is the norm. AI helped them write quickly, but it also raised complex aesthetic and ethical questions. Would the widespread use of AI warp fiction toward the most common conventions and tropes? What parts of the writing process can be automated before the writing no longer feels like their own? Should authors have to disclose their use of AI?

With the debut of ChatGPT, many of the questions these writers were dealing with have become more urgent and mainstream. I checked back with one of the authors, Jennifer Lepp, who writes in the cozy paranormal mystery subgenre under the pen name Leanne Leeds, to see how she was thinking about AI now. She’s still using the GPT-3-based tool Sudowrite — in fact, she is now paid to write tips on using it for the company’s blog — and has begun incorporating some of the more recent tools into her fiction. We spoke about what it’s been like working with ChatGPT, how its debut has roiled the independent author community, and other topics.

-snipping to get to the writer's comments-

And there’s an ethical question. I can go in and — right now, I’m listening to Jim Butcher’s audiobooks. I love his tone. I love the deadpan snark. So I went into the AI when I was thinking about trying to get something like that with a character and said, “Rewrite it in the style of Jim Butcher.” Bam! The same kind of deadpan, urban fantasy phrasing.

-snip-

I basically started out by just telling it who I am and what I need. “I am writing a paranormal mystery that takes place in the small town of Table Rock, Texas. It has a female amateur sleuth. This is her name. I need a murder victim. I need how they were killed. I need four murder suspects with information about why they’re suspected and how they are cleared. And then tell me who the guilty killer is."

-snip-

That writer went on to say that she has plots for 6 murder mysteries that were ChatGPT-generated.

Curious about what others here think of writers using ChatGPT this way.

[Srkdqltr]

1. Ok... so the reader can tell ChatGPT what they want to read and bypass the author altogether?

Probably not but interesting anyway.

[DavidDvorkin]

2. I want to write my books myself

Using AI to do it is no different from using a ghostwriter, which I would never want to do.

[dalton99a]

3. Kick