AI And The Creative Arts
Recently, NaNoWriMo, the annual event where one tries to write a novel in 30 days, minimum word count 55,000 words, recently posted an AI policy. Like everything else on the internet, it lacked any sort of nuance. Like everyone else on the internet, I had a knee-jerk reaction. In a nutshell, without explaining what AI and why? They simply said blanket condemnation of AI is ableist and biased against the poor. I, of course, said, “OK, then I won’t edit anyone’s NaNoWriMo manuscript because all they did was tell ChatGPT to write a book for them in about a day. Why would I edit that?”
And like any knee-jerk reactions, I got called out for an overreaction. Some pointed out if you use Microsoft Word, ProWritingAid, or use Google for research, you’re using AI. Not all AI is generative AI, which will write music or prose or spin up images for you, all of dubious quality and all of it more or less plagiarized. But…
Word is not plagiarizing other people’s work. ProWritingAid and PerfectIt use what amount to huge dictionaries to suggest changes. You’ll find I probably reject half to two-thirds of those suggestions because I process your prose through wetware, a cute little scifi term for that mass of gray matter in your noggin. Google was primitive AI out of the gate. It has to be in order to process literally trillions of queries and results in short order. But hang on to your hats, kiddos. Even ChatGPT isn’t AI.
ChatGPT, Midjourney, and Udio, systems that generate prose or poetry, images, and music respectively, simply take what they call “Large Language Models” and scan them for something matching what the user asked for. It’s essentially spellcheck and autocorrect on steroids with dubious results. Musician and producer Rick Beato, on his YouTube show, asked one app to generate an Ed Sheeran song from scratch. The results were awful. For reference, I looked up lyrics to an actual Ed Sheeran song, as he’s not on my usual playlist, and compared. Yeah, Ed needs to sue the app manufacturers for… Would that be slander or libel? Anyway, these systems, despite the hype, are what they call machine learning. Not quite AI. It can simulate a conversation with you, but regardless of what Sam Altman* touts, they amount to a plagiarism app. There’s no real use case for it beyond maybe a chatbot to give call center agents a little peace. They use much more energy than the average search engine.
So, what is Reaper Edits policy? For starters, no NaNoWriMo ban. If you can squeeze out that novel in 30 days, I can edit it. However, you might want to do as Stephen King suggests and let that sit on your hard drive for a month or three. It’s a first draft, and weeks or months not looking at it will bring that out. Plus, it’ll likely need a dev edit. If you want to spend $1705 for a NaNoWriMo project (based on 55k words), I’ll take your money. But you have to decide if maybe that’s a good use of your money. If so, you still may want to see what you can do with it before you send it my way or any other editors. You’d be better off getting it to where you only need a copy edit (a saner $275 at 55k words at present rates.)
What I will do going forward is ask if you used ChatGPT or similar app in the creation of your work. If so, we cannot work together. If the only AI involved was whatever MS Word did to it, that’s different. Such apps are, as I said before in this space, a flashlight, not a substitute for writing.
* Sammy says his company can’t make money without copyrighted material for his “AI.” Well, Sammy, time for you to bootstrap. Maybe Taylor Swift’s billions will trickle down to you. Have you considered not eating all that avocado toast? That’s like saying, “I have to steal your car so I can make money driving Uber.”