Last Updated on December 3, 2023 by ADMIN-TOM
Artificial Intelligence – AI
It’s a subject that is creating great disturbances in the dark side of writing. The dark side being that area where so called authors are claiming the rights to a book or books that has actually been written by an AI app. Most writers will be up in arms about this, especially where digital stores like Amazon don’t seem to be referencing anywhere on their sales pages where a book has been written using AI. This is despite the fact Amazon asks indie authors if there is any use of AI in the books they are publishing.
Personally, in regards to writing, I would never use AI to create a novel. However, I have experimented with using AI for the book’s blurb and for the book cover. On top of that I have used AI to create images for book marketing. But here’s where I came across a problem with AI, in both the creation of the written word and images. Because AI, usually gets it wrong, sometimes in spectacular style.
I used AI to create three lots of blurb for the books in my Brittle Saga Trilogy. These have each had glaring mistakes. In one the AI created a whole new character. In another it changed the name of a character and the third was useless as it didn’t describe the book contents in a meaningful way. I managed to salvage a sentence in two out of the three blurbs and the rest is written by me.
As for images, take a look at the image below.
It’s supposed to be a World War One trench which I was going to use for marketing one of my books. The fact the soldiers are faceless isn’t a problem, as this will be viewed on social media platforms like X and Facebook where the image will be too small to pick up facial features. What is a problem is the image of a young lady in a gown in the trench, standing to the left. What is she doing there?
In the case of the images for each book cover, these also had errors of varying degrees. In one instance, the image of an ocean going liner based on the Titanic ended up with six funnels! So I’ve had to manipulate each image using GIMP to create changes and add descriptive text. Most images created by AI have been changed by around 70-80% more or less, which makes it almost a whole new image.
Using AI in a small and probably insignificant way is, as far as I’m concerned, fine. But to create a whole book with AI and then declare it to be the work of a human is very wrong.
Just be sure the next time you go to a book signing that the author is human.
Copyright © Tom Kane 2023
