When people hear the word ‘author’ images of brooding intellectuals tucked behind typewriters come to mind. But what if we told you that they’re taking on a new face?
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is making strides in just about every sector. The creative industry is no exception. Even news media outlets are using AI to source and produce articles. Once rudimentary and reductive, AI has become a powerful tool, and it’s taking the writing industry by storm.
Let’s look at the contribution AI has been making to the world of literature.
Early Use Of AI In Writing
The scale of AI-generated work is unprecedented today. However, it’s been used as a tool for authors for a while.
Emulating Jack Kerouc’s famous 2017 novel ‘On the Road’, Ross Goodwin drove from New York to New Orleans using AI to compose his experimental novel ‘1 the Road’.
Goodwin traveled with AI in his laptop and connected it to sensors like a GPS, camera, and microphone that recorded his trip. Everything he did, from where he went to what he browsed online, such as the mega casino bonuses CA sites that kept him entertained along the way and the travel blogs that kept him informed, were recorded. The AI transformed the input from these sensors into words printed on rolls of receipt paper. This created one long mass of text that Goodwin published without editing.
While the novel doesn’t have much of a coherent plot, it was Goodwin’s way of presenting the machine-learning text verbatim for future study.
But it wasn’t just a repetition of what was said and seen during the trip. Creative lines like ‘All the time the sun/ Is wheeling out of a dark bright ground’ were also produced.
Published in 2018, ‘1 the Road’ is the first example of a book written by AI.
AI Authors Today
Five years on, the creative power of AI has come a long way. Where before the output was choppy and incoherent, it is now much more sophisticated and aligned with digital marketing and online content creation.
ChatGPT is a shining example of how AI is being used to publish fully-fledged creative stories.
Since its launch in November 2022, ChatGPT has become a leading content creator. By mid-February 2023, over 200 e-books in Amazon’s Kindle store either had ChatGPT listed as an author or as a co-author. The fact that Amazon doesn’t require authors to disclose whether they use ChatGPT means that this figure is probably higher.
Amazon has even created a new subgenre called ‘Books about using ChatGPT, written entirely by ChatGPT’.
Books created using ChatGPT include:
The Power Of Homework
Published in January 2023, this children’s book follows the story of a boy who learns to love his homework. The entire story was created using prompts that the author entered into ChatGPT. The graphics were also generated by the AI using Dall-E 2.
Bedtime Stories: Short and Sweet, For a Good Night’s Sleep
Kamil Blanc wrote this 27-page children’s book in four hours using ChatGPT in December 2022. The book teaches children moral virtues.
It received a high rating of 5 stars, proving just how far AI’s creative capabilities have come.
There are many other books just like these, and they’re only getting better. Who knows, maybe one day a computer will be present at book signings?
