Ramblings | JUDY L MOHR

AI-Generated vs AI-Assisted: Where I draw the line

If you aren't sure what I'm talking about when I say ChatGPT… What rock have you been living under?

Writers around the world (novelists, screenwriters, poets, short story writers, etc.) became concerned when ChatGPT exploded onto the scene in late 2022. No one really knew what it could do or how far it would go. And the market became flooded with AI-generated stories—most of which were not worth the 1s and 0s used to create them. But ChatGPT evolved… and so did the concerns.

In 2023, it came to light the copyright nightmare that was ChatGPT, and we're still trying to deal with that as an industry. Amazon added tags to their KDP system, requiring that publishers specify if a body of work was created using artificial intelligence (AI). Lines were being drawn about the ethical usage of the technology, and lawsuits were filed against OpenAI (and other AI developers) regarding their abuse of copyright laws in sourcing the materials used for training of the algorithms.

We are now in 2024, and there is still so much we don't know or can't agree on regarding the usage of AI within publishing. There is only one thing that is certain: AI is here to stay.

As writers and editors, we are now being forced to make decisions about how we will conduct business. It's about drawing a line between AI-generated works and AI-assisted works.

Accountability is a good thing… until it becomes reliability

When you are first starting out on forging a new routine, external accountability can be beneficial. Like meeting a friend at the gym on certain days of the week. If you don't show up, you get that phone call.

"Where are you?"

For writers, that external accountability can be used to help keep you on track with your self-imposed writing deadlines. Or it could be as simple as showing up for that write-in and buckling down to write.

However, there is a danger that accountability can shift to reliability.

Let's say that you've been going to the gym regularly with a particular friend, but that friend is going on holiday out of town. Are you the type of person who keeps going to the gym anyway, or do you find an excuse—any excuse—to not follow through on an established routine? If you're the one to find an excuse, then you have slipped into the realm of reliability.

We could have had a moon base by now

It's fun to sit down with my son and watch the old science fiction TV shows and movies. I've successfully got him hooked onto Star Trek (and he informs me that Deep Space 9 is his favorite series from the franchise). We've binge-watched Farscape (by far one of the best science fiction shows… so funny). We've had discussions about Battlestar Galactica, admiring how the various way the 2004 series pays homage to the original 1978 series. And when he's home on holiday, we've been diving into Babylon 5.

I've successfully convinced him that Firefly should have never been taken off the air when it was, and we both agree that the psychedelic trip into the monolith at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey is just a "WTF?" moment. (But seeing the original gave him an extra level of appreciation when Farscape did their parody scene.)

During our binge watching of old TV shows, he's been laughing at the absurdity of the situations (and how the writers got away with a lot of things that they would never be able to get away with today). But it's the inaccuracies of the past timelines for the show that gets him the most. How wrong did fiction get their predictions for reality? Whenever he gets incredibly cynical, my response seems to always be the same.

Before you start to criticize the science fiction of old, highlighting how wrong they got the predictions, take a look at the real history and the trajectory that we were on when those books were written and when the films and TV shows were filmed.