Embracing the Process

by Gay Yellen

Recently, our local newspaper devoted an entire page of articles with disturbing headlines on the subject. The lead essay announced this: AI-HUMAN HYBRID EYED TO PREVENT ROGUE AI. My mind’s eye instantly conjured up the scary image of a human-robot cyborg. Hard to say what form it might actually take, but there’s no comfort in this quote from a co-founder of the tech start-up behind the idea: “I think we still have a lot to learn from humans.” Gee, thanks.

The second headline felt like a slap in the face:

AI COMPANIES DESTROYING MORE BOOKS THAN YOU THINK. People who write for a living are painfully aware of the literary larceny perpetrated by e-book pirate sites that secretly clone our books for their own profit. But this topic goes beyond the personal.

Scott Brown, a seller of rare books in Portland, Oregon, is up in arms against AI companies that slice off a book’s bindings before scanning the pages and dumping what’s left. The majority of those tomes may result from the glut of over-ordered, unsold “best-sellers,” but too often, rare books are also turned into mulch, despite alternate scanning methods that do not harm the original. I’m currently researching a subject that reaches back centuries, and it’s already hard enough to find original accounts from those years. The thought of losing even one rare resource is… well, I don’t want to think about it.

Old-fashioned copycat plagiarism still happens, too.

It happened to me when I was the editor of a national monthly magazine. The perpetrator was a freelancer from Australia who was looking for assignments in the U.S. He dropped off a few work samples with his resume and asked to return the next day to see if I would hire him.

Looking through his material, I spied an article on a topic I’d covered months earlier, so I pulled that one out to read first. By the end of the second paragraph, the words seemed eerily familiar. Long story short, he had blatantly copied—word for word and comma for comma—a piece I’d written for an issue we’d published months before. The only difference was his name in the byline instead of mine.

Now that literary larceny has gone digital, it’s much more common. Thank goodness for sites like Writer Beware and professional groups like The Authors Guild and Sisters in Crime to spread the word to help writers fend the off the hoodlums.

We’re told that AI benefits myriad of professions, and it’s true. Even for a writer, it’s useful for quick fact-checking. But too often, the information it spits out is just plain wrong.

I’ve heard that some publishers use AI to flag the increasing number of bot-written submissions in their over-burdened slush piles. Sounds good. But apparently, an AI weed-eater cannot always distinguish between AI-slop and a truly original manuscript from a human author. It is known to have flagged a legitimate writer’s work for using an em-dash instead of a period or a comma or some other grammatical styling. Almost every author I know employs an em-dash when it’s needed, including me.

Distractions like these can seep into the creative process, leading some authors to second-guess their choices at every turn. Currently, my focus is on the way-back-when, and I rely on sources from centuries ago. Instead of leading me to a list of possible sources, the web often offers up AI summaries in reply to my query. And too often, the bot gets it wrong.

Will human creativity be erased from history?

Will the same happen to humans? An article in the New Yorker some months back contained this quote from the Nobel prize-winning “godfather” of AI, Geoffrey Hinton. “Unless you can be very sure that it’s not going to want to kill you when it grows up, you should worry.”

So, will AI be a benefit to humankind, or be a threat to our existence?

 Gay Yellen’s award-winning writing career began in magazine journalism. She also was the contributing editor for the international thriller, Five Minutes to Midnight (Delacorte), which debuted as a New York Times “Notable.” Her Samantha Newman Mystery Series is packed with suspense and laced with touches of romance, heart, and humor. On Amazon , or to order from your favorite bookseller.