You wrote that book with AI? You are now totally screwed.
It happened again.
A friend referred an author to me. He’s looking for a developmental editor.
There are a lot of questions I ask authors when I consider working on a book.
Who is your audience?
What’s your idea?
If you were looking for an editor, what shortcomings of the book are you already aware of that you were hoping I could help with?
How were you hoping to publish this?
Can you afford me?
I’ve always asked these questions. But now, I ask another question before any of these.
Did you use AI to write it?
(And yes, I’ll test it and I’ll check.)
If you used AI, you’re screwed
I’m sure AI saved you a lot of time. It made the book read better. It made it better organized. It helped you research things. Efficient tools are great.
But if you used AI to generate the text, you are now totally screwed.
First off, you can’t copyright the text. According to the copyright office, AI-generated text cannot be copyrighted.
If you try to get a traditional publisher, the first thing they’ll do is run your work through an AI detector. If it fails, they’re going to reject you. All of them — every traditional publisher — will reject you.
If you somehow manage to get a traditional publisher, their publishing contract will require you to specify how you used AI. If you lie about that, they’ll find out. And they’ll cancel your contract.
If you try to pay a hybrid publisher, it’s the same deal. They have no interest in a book that can’t be copyrighted — because they have no protection against some rip-off artist coming out with their own edition.
If you self-publish, you might just be able to get the book in print. Of course, someone will notice. And they’ll humiliate you. Or worse, they’ll come out with their own version and rip you off, and you have no copyright protection. Even more likely: Amazon will detect it and eject you from its platform. Do you really think Amazon isn’t checking?
You could lie to the copyright office. That’s a federal crime. Probably not a good idea.
What about an editor, like me. Couldn’t somebody like me fix it?
That’s a lot harder than it sounds. You can’t just tinker with the text. You need to rewrite every sentence.
You’re basically asking, not for an editor, but for a ghostwriter.
How much would it cost to completely rewrite every sentence of a 50,000-word book?
At least $50,000.
And after that, it will still need review and editing, since the ghostwriter/rewriter won’t be able to capture the nuances of your idea and your voice in the first draft.
And no, you can’t find an automated piece of software to rewrite it — the output of that machine is just as AI-generated as the original.
So, these are your choices for that AI-generated manuscript:
- Pay a crap-ton of money to get it rewritten.
- Self-publish it and hope nobody notices, and put yourself at reputational risk with the possibility of having your book kicked off all reasonable platforms.
- Lie to publishers about how you created the book, hope they’re too careless to test it, and risk both legal action by the publisher and federal prosecution.
How does that time- and effort-saving choice to use AI looking now?
Do the work
Writing is hard. Not only that, the results of your writing are imperfect.
Use AI to help with the research. Use it to brainstorm. Test ideas out with it. Use it to find the right word. All that is fine with me. I’m not an anti-AI zealot. When appropriate tools are available, use them.
But don’t use them to write the text of the book.
If you write the book yourself, without AI-generated text, I can edit it. That will cost you at least $10,000. But the results will sound like you, and will reveal the power of your ideas. You’ll be able to pitch publishers and maybe get a deal.
If you write the book with AI, you’ll get none of that. You’ll pay a lot more, take a lot more risks, and have a lot less impact.
It’s your choice. But now at least you know what the consequences of your choice are.
It’s really not a hard call.
I am enjoying your AI pieces. They got me to thinking. So suppose an AI author churns out mediocre and un-copyrightable pot-boilers. When might they have value? Imagine a free public library of such novels. Would they be any less interesting than those Nancy Drews and Hardy Boys I relished as a kid? Or some of the thrillers I waste my time with now? Or… Suppose I built a physical room to house a physical library comprised entirely of AI books. I’d call it an art piece. And it could have value aside from the individual books. Ha! Come to think of it, I’ve seen a few websites like that. Where the copy existed only to prop up some kind of search chicanery. Ok, ok, so this has little to do with editing, or writing for that matter. Oh, which gets back to your point, I think, that AI can be useful, just not to write. Thanks for the prompt.
Looking at what you wrote, you’ve assumed that publishing is free. Publishing costs money. Printing and distribution cost money. There is no economic model for uncopyrightable content; there’s no way to pay the publisher.
The better business model for this is a machine that generates pot-boilers on demand. The copyright is on the algorithm. The value of any individual work goes to zero.
I think Josh Bernoff is right about one important thing: you shouldn’t hand an AI your novel and ask it to write the book for you. That isn’t writing. It is outsourcing the writing.
But there is a distinction worth making.
I use ChatGPT in a very different way. I write the prose myself. I then use the AI as a kind of writing coach: give me alternative words, suggest more vivid verbs, analyse the emotional tone of a passage, identify repetition, or give me a family of words around a particular idea.
I then decide what, if anything, I want to use. ChatGPT does no writing for me.
That is not fundamentally different from using a tool such as MasterWriter, which many writers have used precisely to find alternative words, associations, sensory descriptions and emotional vocabulary. Nobody would look at a manuscript and say, “This is MasterWriter-influenced fiction.” Nor would we say that about someone who consulted a thesaurus, a reverse dictionary or a book of emotional words.
Writers have always been influenced by things outside themselves.
John Lennon once saw a circus poster that helped inspire the imagery of “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!” We don’t therefore say that the poster wrote the song. The artist encountered something, absorbed it, and transformed it through his own imagination.
That, to me, is the important distinction with AI.
If I ask ChatGPT to write a chapter and publish the result, I haven’t written that chapter.
If I write the chapter and ask ChatGPT, “Give me twenty alternatives for this weak verb,” or “What is the emotional tension in this scene?”, and then choose my own words, the creative act remains mine.
That is a writing tool. Not a writer.
The danger, I think, is not AI assistance itself. It is allowing convenience to replace the difficult, frustrating and ultimately rewarding process of finding your own voice. This distinction matters enormously in fiction.
I could edit what you write. A publisher could pay for it. A copyright office could protect it. That’s workable.
You’ve drawn the line exactly where it needs to be drawn to preserve the publishing model.
I love this article. Every writer should read it. Especially those that say, “Sure I use AI to generate text. But the insights and ideas are all mine. I’m the human thinker behind the prompt.” (Yep. Keep telling yourself that.)
The Copyright Office doesn’t give a crap about your original thinking. They only care about where the text came from.
I wrote a novel and published it a year and a half back. I had a copy written in 2008 and 2022 I believe. I hired an excellent developmental editor who helped improve the narrative flow with suggestions, but never wrote a sentence. Before I self published it I ran it through ChatGPT and the old version of Microsoft copilot to do a line edit. Does that fall within the appropriate guide guidelines for publication that you positioned in your article? A plan to do the same with my non-fiction Book, which I’ll also use my Developmental editor just to make sure that it reads well. Curious about your thoughts on this thanks. Great article.
You should be fine so long as it didn’t write most of the sentences. Editing is fine. AI-generated writing is where the problem arises.
Thanks. I thought so as I was Leary of using it all.