ChatGPT and AI have created worrying issues for writers throughout 2023. Gary Dalkin considers the impact of AI and looks at potential future developments and how they could effect the world of writing.

Every day we hear that AI is causing a revolution in some aspect of writing or publishing. Here is just a small selection of recent headlines: ‘Zadie Smith, Stephen King and Rachel Cusk’s pirated Ew works used to train AI’ (Guardian); ‘The author embracing AI to help write novels – and why he’s not worried about it taking his job’ (Sky News); ‘Fiction Analytics Site Prosecraft Shut Down After Backlash’ (Gizmodo)…

What’s clear is that AI is moving so rapidly that you would have to read several articles about it every day to keep up. The problem is twofold – what is happening, and what might be about to happen – the latter because this is a technology as much speculated about as it is understood — and that is even by experts working in the field.

Unknown quantities

The truth is that no one knows how AI might change not just writing and publishing, but the world, both because we don’t know just what the technology might be capable of – it is developing exponentially and people are constantly finding innovative new things to do with it – and what its limitations might be.

Equally, we don’t know the extent to which individuals and societies will accept AI into their lives, or how they might push back to limit its impact. And with everything changing so rapidly the result is a new frontier, one where what is technologically possible, what the law says is legal, and what companies large and small can get away with all converge in surprising and chaotic ways. Take Prosecraft, which probably closed down before you knew it existed. Prosecraft was a website run by an American writer and entrepreneur called Benji Smith. He said that his site was, ‘dedicated to the linguistic analysis of literature, including more than 25,000 books by thousands of different authors.’ When, following a backlash in August, Smith took Prosecraft offline, he wrote a blog post explaining that he originally created the site to help himself work out how many words there typically are in different genres of fiction. From there he moved on to analysing novels to produce statistical breakdowns of thousands of titles. He gave the example of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, which apparently has 26,814 words, a ‘vividness’ score of 83.93% and uses passive voice 8.08% of the time — by Prosecraft’s metrics. The problem was, Smith had not only used long out of copyright classics like Alice, but also thousands of very much in copyright works by living authors. Smith argued his use of the texts was protected under the principle of ‘fair use’ and said he never made any money out of Prosecraft, arguing that he was a victim caught-up in the writing world’s backlash against AI.