How AI/ChatGPT Will Change Book Publishing Forever
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Traditional publishing is notoriously slow to adopt technology and can be resistant to change. So in today’s video, I want to talk about a huge curveball that could forever impact the future of the industry: the explosion of AI and ChatGPT. This is the second video in a two-part series, so check out last week’s video for more on AI/ChatGPT and how it could impact creative writing as a whole.
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Save the Cat! Writes a Novel by Jessica Brody / amzn.to/3Vyk2Bn
Before and After the Book Deal by Courtney Maum / amzn.to/3Z4at03
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Fierce Kingdom by Gin Phillips / amzn.to/3CFz4Pt
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MORE WRITING AND PUBLISHING ADVICE:
Is AI/ChatGPT the End of Creative Writing?: • Is AI/ChatGPT the End ...
How to Choose Strong Comparable Titles for Your Query Letter: • How to Choose Strong C...
Why I’m Super Optimistic About Book Publishing in 2023: • Why I’m Super Optimist...
HOW THE PUBLISHING INDUSTRY IS RESPONDING TO AI/CHATGPT:
02:06 - Agents and editors do not want AI-generated books
04:51 - Publishers are experimenting with use cases
07:03 - Copyright and bias issues need to be addressed
ABOUT ME:
My name is Alyssa Matesic, and I’m a professional book editor with nearly a decade of book publishing and editorial experience. Throughout my career, I’ve held editorial roles across both sides of the publishing industry: Big Five publishing houses and literary agencies. The goal of this channel is to help writers throughout the book writing journey-whether you're working on your manuscript or you're looking for publishing advice.
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Probably being paranoid, but some days I feel like I'm in a race with AI as I try to finish my book, get an agent, sell a book, then start and establish a long-term writing career.
Ugh. Same. But I went the indie route after the experience I had with querying & other horror stories I’ve heard from trad-pubbed authors lately. As for AI, it’s a Pandora’s box, so I’ve been learning how to use it. I’ve actually found it very time & financially saving! Feels like a “learn or be left behind” kind of situation. I’m so exhausted trying to keep up with tech though 😑
what do you mean with horror stories? @elaynegriffith5298 @@elaynegriffith
Thanks, some interesting stuff. If you use AI to rewrite a passage of your own work in some way, the current AI detectors give it the same score as the original most of the time. They successfully detect pure AI produced content. Using AI in this way isn't much different from using ProWritingAid, especially as more AI functions get included in that tool. (including Grammarly and other writer tools). I think using an AI tool as an assistant is fine, it's when you can create an outline, character sheets, and other documents, then press a button to generate the first "wonderful" draft that we will have a problem.
It definitely won't replace writers.
Saying it will make writers obsolete is like saying sex dolls will replace women in dating.
I find ChatGPT has no sense of humor.
I have actually tried to get ChatGPT to continue some passages in my current work-in-progress and believe me, some of its ideas were pretty good. It's scary as hell.
The thing I’ve had trouble with chatgpt is it not having enough memory to keep a lot of your book in context. But ya brain storming or expanding on isolated ideas is pretty good.
This opens another issue I'd love to hear @AlyssaMatesic 's views on. Where an author occasionally uses text produced by ChatGPT for inspiration, would this pollute the entire work in the eyes of current agents and publishers? I argue not -- that it's effectively the same as using other tools like Google or Pinterest, but it would still be a question in my mind.
As someone currently editing their first novel for querying current AI developments are scary. I feel like I'm in a race against time, till AI drafts are good enough to pass/good enough to seem like they were written by a human...
I have always felt that the human soul is the portal for all art. Enough said.
I'm so disconnected, I didn't even know AIs in books were a thing or what a ChatGPT was until I Googled it.
Why can't folks just write and rely on their creative fire to forge a great book?
When I was younger, home computers were first coming out. A lot of people complained that they didn't understand why writers didn't want to just type it on a typewriter-- until they tried word processors for themselves.
@@anneahlert2997but they were still typing the words. The words still came from them.
Also worth noting: the US copyright office won't protect AI generated work:
"If a work’s traditional elements of authorship were produced by a machine, the work lacks
human authorship and the Office will not register it... For example, when an AI technology
receives solely a prompt from a human and produces complex written, visual, or musical
works in response, the “traditional elements of authorship” are determined and executed
by the technology-not the human user."
www.copyright.gov/ai/ai_policy_guidance.pdf
There's way more nuance in the document. It sort of has exceptions for heavily modified AI generated content, and allows for the portions of a work created by humans to be partially covered, while the AI parts aren't. But in those cases, you need to outline your processes and have the Office rule on whether they'll allow it or not. Risky.
So there's a valid reason for Trad pub to avoid it. Ditto for the Indies who are paranoid about protecting their IP.
Which brings us to book pirating... If you have a ebook that's been scraped and thrown onto another retailer, you can send the retailer a copyright infringement notice and have it taken down. If the content's been made by AI, you can't do that.
As far as AI audio book narration goes, at the moment, you can't upload them to all the retailers. Apple and Google Play allows it, but ACX (Audible) and Smashwords don't.
Some established authors are finding their names being stolen and put on crappy AI-generated books, written with a similar subject/genre to the real author.
Amazon has been fighting taking some of them down, but we need to find a legal solution for this ASAP. Names are not copyright-able, although they can be trademarked (BUT you have to apply for a trademark, etc.)
@@anneahlert2997
Yeah, and trademark applications are expensive. $350-500 depending on where you live and how you apply.
Plus you need to be able to prove that the name is a recognizable part of your brand. They're more hesitant to grant TMs of surnames because they don't want John Smith to TM that and inconvenience all the other John Smiths, who now can't use their own name.
I probably wouldn't try to register a name as a baby author.
This is an area where someone who has a really unique genre hitting pen name might have an advantage.
Once you have the TM you should be able to register for Amazon's brand Registry program. If you're Trad, the publishing Co would likely have to handle this since they'd be the ones creating the Amazon listing for your books. (And on a marginally related side note, perhaps check your trad contracts to ensure the publishing house isn't claiming ownership of your pen name.)
streamlining the book publishing process... there are a lot of opportunities at almost every step of the process. One example: do you know any tools that help predict book sales for a specific market? I went through some academic papers but it seems like we're not there yet.
The problem I see from an ethics stanpoint of trad publishing's position is that they are going to be okay with "AI for thee, but not for me." (DISCLAIMER: this is not directed at Alyssa, who is merely stating her impressions of what publishiners and editors think.)
Whatever costs them the least amount of money and won't get public backlash because who stands up for copywriters or translators, amirite?
Learning how to act and use your voice to narrate is an art. Most very successful voice actors were actors in other areas. Acting is an art. Translation requires thousands of hours of training AND a good grasp of literature. The kind of creative copy that sells a bestselling author (blurb writing, campaigns) is both a craft AND art. Marketing copy in general is part of a skill set that takes years of experience to excel at. Editors and publishers know this. Why is it defensible to take careers out of these fields but not out of creative writing in order to save money?
I am more sympathetic to someone being anti-AI for almost everything than I am for someone who is either hyocritical or naive enough to gatekeep one person's career and destroy the industry of another's.
I’m wondering if it’s “kosher” to use chatGPT to help me write the summary, synopsis and even query letters. I DID use it to get some comps and was glad Alyssa mentioned someone in the business had mentioned how effective it was in getting comps. It DID make an important mistake so fact checking is important.
Such a great point about fact-checking. Thanks for your comment!
@@AlyssaMatesic thanks for your reply. I keep thinking that while publishing may be resistant to this new tech, I’m wondering how/if editors might embrace it in the future, to clean up work written by humans. I decided to run the first chapter through chatGPT and it gave me some (damn) good suggestions. It was encouraging that it said in general it was well written and engaging. It’s hard to imagine an editor not appreciating this on some level, unless the tech dumbs-down the work to the lowest-common denominator…
I personally use chatGBT but never to write my chapters, HOWEVER it’s great at giving feedback on a chapter/paragraph. It’s able to give bullet points about the pacing, worldbuilding weaknesses, etc… so I would say that ChatGBT might become a problem for editors since it’s really good at editing. Though still it wouldn’t write personal and unique prose like for example “A snort from a horse in the nearby woods jolted her nerves. Faster than a squirrel, she scurried into the house, leaving the laundry fluttering around like leaves in a gust of wind. It was probably the hunting season again” it might not be a good prose but AI won’t generate such a simile on it’s own.
7 months later…It can now. Just turn up the “temp” of the ai model. And prompt it to generate intriguing similes. There’s even an ai model, straight outta the gate, that writes proses as if it where a wizard in a Jack Vance novel. It’s funny how when anyone is talking about ai language models they refer to chatgpt. Which chatgpt is that? What about Claude or mistral or Llama or X’s GROK(which even though it’s still in beta, blows the rest out of the water in terms of prose quality)Chatgpt is for boring stuff like “how to write a book?” Or “what is a simile?”
Well I finally did it. I submitted my first manuscript to a bunch of agents. Wish me luck :)
Congrats on getting your work out there! Good luck!
@@AlyssaMatesic I've had two replies saying 'This is not my bag.' I'm not discouraged. Someone will be interested.
Has AI ever been romantically involved with someone? Been in a life or death situation? Lost a friend or family member? Had children? Had to grind away at their day job for years, working with some of the best workers and some of the worst? Fallen victim to addiction? Been caught in a rainstorm? Had a beloved pet? Grown up being bullied by other kids? Has a passion for dinosaurs, sports, vudeo games, fantasy art or any other interests? Didn't think so. People need to calm down and separate the sci-fi movies from reality. I think that AI's capabilities are being embellished, and people's imaginations are running a bit rampant.
What about books that use ChatGPT for writing prompts and ideas? Not necessarily using it to write the book completely
If anyone is looking to have AI record their audio book, PLEASE hire a professional voice artist. Like AI for writing, the output of an AI voice is NOT up to par. Emphasis, pacing, and dramatic effects are not portrayed realistically or artistically, so it sounds "wrong" to listeners. I have worked voiceover, and it can be very painful to hear a computer trying to sound human over the phone, but all the more so when it's trying to give me a dramatic read of fiction.
After your last video I signed onto ChatGPT to run my synopsis, and get feedback (in eight seconds). I received a productive reply which showed where the weaknesses were, and the strong points. The best part was I used it to flush out what genre my novel falls under, paranormal-thriller, and it walked me through why it "felt" the story wasn't horror, or urban fantasy.
From there I logged into Barnes & Noble to search through paranormal thrillers hunting for comp-titles. Still looking, but then I have to buy a few of them, and read them before adding them to my potential query letter. AI helped me out. And yes, it's weird. Also very polite. I thank it, and it wished me luck on my book. Something few humans do.
This is the sort of use I'm hopeful for - an AI/writer partnership. I don't want a push-a-button, get-a-book experience. What would be great is if AI could provide useful crits and somehow expedite the draft/revision process without looking for it to completely take it over. Besides, let's be honest, drafting is where the fun is. Giving that all to AI is like chocolate without flavor.
Good luck on your book, Marc! :)
"Diversity and inclusion" is the death of creativity anyway. I wouldn't be too concerned about that factor.
Amazing content.
About audiobooks: You can already have your mobile phone read a book for you. I have a very hectic routine and find it difficult to focus, especially when I am tired. I use this tool ALL THE TIME, but it has 0 feelings, so it can be quite annoying.
Yes, AI is still quite unreliable for originality and where it takes its sources from. As I've commented on last week's video: It's incredible for editing and if you are in an infinite writer's block (but I don't trust it entirely because of plagiarism issues), because it can at least make you think about some other things when you have no one else to talk about it.
Also, another really weird thing it does, is you ask for a check and it changes your words and emotions, even if you explicitly tell it not to. So, if you use it for editing, make sure you read the corrections thoroughly.
I have a question though. Is it alright if I use ai to correct any grammar mistakes and alike on my novel?
Can anyone tell me about editing using AI?
AI programmer and (soon to be) author here.
Agents and publishers obviously aren't interested in AI-generated content, because readers in general aren't--or at least won't, and shouldn't, pay money for it. The problem is that the AI book spammers aren't going to tell people that AIs did most of the writing. They'll try to be sneaky about it. These books will look like genuine books for the first 20 pages, then fall apart in the middle. The really effective spammers will be using AI-generated author personalities and platforms. In the short term, this is going to be bad for self-publishers, but after two or three years self-pubbers will figure out how to beat the spam and, in the long term, it's going to be trade publishing that is hit the hardest, because they'll be behind the curve on AI detection and because they're going to be a target.
We're not going to see a fully AI-written bestseller in the next three years; what we will see is a slew of formulaic rapidly produced work that is mostly AI-written. Can you write anything genuinely great or truly literary via GPT prompt engineering? Of course not. Could you do something at the quality level of 50 Shades in a weekend? Easily. And 50 Shades sold 125M+ copies.
I wrote 21 kilowords on this topic here: antipodes.substack.com/p/ai-will-kill-literature-and-ai-will
Alyssa, If I were you I would be worried as an editor unless you embrace it as part of your editing process to improve the turnaround speed. Many people should be worried about AI taking their income source. The government needs to have a body to oversee AI to be able to recommend legislation as say in the FDA to protect us mere mortals. Copyright has to be one of the biggest challenges as AI uses data from existing content that it mines from multiple sources.
AI editing software is improving exponentially as it gathers more information to suggest changes and to identify errors of grammar.
Where it helps self-published authors is in producing marketing material for such as videos or images, What of book cover designers now it can producing surreal images or images exactly to the information you input?
Great if it could produce blurbs and synopsis? Maybe it can, and by input of say 10 pages of the plot with instructions of what it needs to achieve, you can ask it to reduce it to 1 and then 2 pages. For blurbs, type in the basics. Who it is. What they want and what prevents them from getting it, and then the consequences of them failing the task, with a brief clumsy self- attempt at an outline of a blurb, and it will maybe output a great blurb. Hell, I bet it could do a great query.
Marketing people are already using it for web site posts and ad suggestions with wicked increases in output and so need less staff to write the copy.
What about voice actors for audio? I've just done a trial on a few chapters using AI voices with text to speech and apart from the odd words like "Wound" that is pronounced wrong and needs to be typed as wooned when it's for an injury, it's pretty damned good. While some audio firms have banned AI audio, Google and apple have embraced it providing you use their software to put out cheaper version for self-publishers. If existing audio companies don't embrace it, it will be an opportunity for new businesses to disrupt their market like eBooks did it for print publishers,
Some have said it is pretty good at doing plot outlines.
AI both frightens me and excites me.
I'm a speculative fiction author and so I am in the process of finishing a trilogy without AIs help, but it has a world in which AI seeks to destroy humanity for its involvement in destroying the climate. As it is now, from reports that it has a political bias, what if it also had it's own moral bias regards climate change and sought to remedy it by any means?
But what I see for the future of publishing as Ai develops from its infancy, is that seeing as how publishers own copyright, if they eventually develop their own AI software and feed all their bestsellers into the mix, then they will maybe able to churn out computer generated books without any authors involved and no royalties to pay or advance payments. Spooky. That will be the agents gone, as well as the authors, maybe the editors and the cover designers and marketing department.
Glad I'm of an age where I wont see it come to fruition.
@2:23 sceptical and reluctant...until it can make them money.
Why would I buy an AI-generated book? It makes no sense.
@@hiyalanguages when it's the only book you can still buy.
Hi, Alyssa!
Thanks for posting another wholly transparent video addressing a major issue that's been circulating the web these past few months.You've posed a very important question: "Is this the end of creative writing?"
Before I give you my answer, I am not using AI/ChatGPT in any way, shape, or form, and never will. I wrote this response in five minutes but spent two hours revising it.
I'd say it's not the end of creative writing for these reasons. The thing I've noticed about Artificial Intelligence is that it can grow only when you're spoon-feeding information into it; it only regurgitates "technically perfect" answers, although they're not correct and even close to being accurate--like a 12-year old MIT freshman trying to impress older female students with lines from "The Iliad" he had read on SparkNotes just the night before (knowing damn well he never picked up the book)! 😂
That's cheating on a God-like scale!
All jokes aside, I refuse to feed into something that seems created only to destroy humanity, not just the profession of writing or the ability to think for oneself. As a Black writer who's struggled early on with dyslexia-related learning issues, I refuse to ever give up my will to write, my dream to be a novelist. Human struggle is something that AI will never touch! And, to be honest, I'm not nearly as scared for writers as I am for professional editors--the empathy with which they help the authors shape their manuscripts into true masterpieces for publication.
AI would make sense for people in the medical profession, for doctors looking for effective treatment for their patients, for chemists conducting research for proteins to make cures for chronic illnesses such as Alzheimers, Lou Gehrig's disease, cancer, etc. Without regulations put in place, it would be a grave mistake to make AI completely accessible to the public who have no business using it. Especially college students.
For my fellow writers reading this, I have only one solution which, I feel, can help us maintain our standing, our impulse to create, and creative integrity against this "revolution": Wave bye-bye to iPhones, MacBooks, and social media, and hello flip phones and DOS word processors; print out our manuscripts and hand-deliver them ourselves! No AI, no viruses, no brute force attacks, no cybersecurity vulnerabilities. Done!
That's all I have for now! Thank you!
Funny you should mention it! The Broken Sword (a really great channel here on TH-cam dedicated to everything Tolkien) did ask GhatGPT, just a few days ago, to write a sequel to the Lord of the Rings. It's hilarious! It reads like a high-level synopsis for every Sword & Sorcery Tolkien knockoff written since the 70s! Give it a watch if you can - the entire channel is really great if you love Tolkien, but that particular video is reassuring to say the least.
Different topic: A writer friend of mine just asked ChatGPT to shorten her synopsis (you know how hard that is to do!) to under 2,000 words, and she said it was a huge help. She had to go back and correct some grammar and basic points, but she says it really took the stress out of a task that had been driving her crazy for months. So that's one good thing about it for sure.
In working on my most recent manuscript, i used Ai to create some artworks for reference to build out character descriptions. (These characters were very esoteric and otherworldly, so i found it hard to picture them in my head with any high degree of resolution)
I wouldn't use it in any other capacity and it is - quite frankly - wrong to use it as a substitute for ideation.
Do you think AI might play a role in assessing manuscripts?
I would see it could be a first barrier where a manuscript is fed to an AI specifically trained to spot commonly seen problems with the manuscript. I'm thinking it could give feedback on (lack of) story structure, grammar, average sentence and/or word length and likely a few more things it can distill from the text.
One might imagine a practice where your manuscript first needs to get greenlighted by an AI before a human will even look at it.
Thank you Alyssa for sharing your thoughts w.r.t. AI and publishing. I think it would be great if you make a video talking about promising AI capabilities for publishers apart from content creation and give some use cases. I assume a lot of these technologies are/will be implemented and the potential to increase the quality of the work and the revenue is high.
I love asking ChatGPT to suggest some ways to continue the passage and to brainstorm with it. I use it as a tool to support my creativity, not to replace it. I would never use the raw text from ChatGPT though.
I might consider an AI book blurb, if and when it does such a thing. ;)
Just go back to physical submissions. It's not that hard.
Maybe one day I may try this ChatGPT. As of now, no need for it.
I did a test by using it to write an alternative synopsis for my book. It was kind of scary how good it did.
I’m sorry but you have THE most gorgeous eyes ever.
I don't think it will do anything considered it is considered to be a joke. It is no different to grammar-corrector. It doesn't do much and even if it did, it is wrong. Besides... A.I is illegal, not copyrighted, it isn't safe, and now it carries a lot of virus malware trojans. The sites are not being supported by anyone, the links are unstable and it barely does anything. I am pretty sure we won't have too much too a worry here, the feature is limited, it doesn't understand basic words. The websites are banned and shut down in a lot of places. Yes, the industry is slow, but this time for the right reason. A.I just steals from artists, it cannot produce anything on it's own. It won't change anything, the world will move on without it.
Ah... the tech's too new for anyone to have passed laws against it. In most cases, the way the models have been trained is unethical, but swat can't bust down the doors of people using or developing it since they aren't breaking any laws.
As for the sites not being supported, major companies like Goggle, Bing (Microsoft), Amazon, Open AI, Adobe, etc... are in an AI arms race to come out as the top dog. They are taking it very seriously.
And yes, you can't copyright AI generated content.
It is making it way too easy for hackers to generated malignant code. But your computer won't be infected with viruses if you use Chat GPT; the hackers will employ the malware in conjunction with their phishing schemes.
@@dueling_spectra7270 So very true and thier A.I will be better than ours.... oh yeah, wait until 2027. We will be like a sci fi movie. The tech then will revolionise everything, but our stuff, won't get far. The tech giants will transform the world.
This is just misinformation lol…
Authors are formulaic too all they do is copy like jrr Martin.
Like I haven't heard of Tolkien so fuck it, the AI will force us to be more unique or die.
Hopefully ai will provide enough wealth to society that people can create for creation sake rather than money and attention.
So much of art has been minimized into hallow shortcuts so that products can be released sooner.
You missed a point regarding copyright: as of now, copyright can only be granted to a human being who creates something. The USCO has already revoked the copyright of the art created for a self-published comic book The art was originally created with AI, Midjourney, and tweaked by a hired artist. The USCO didn't recognize the authorship of that artist either because his tweaks to the original AI-generated art weren't deemed significant enough.
Yeah they may turn them down, but how are they even going to know who used AI. It's not quite there yet, but it will be.
It is generally important to be open-minded, even more so as creatives. So many existing novels borrowed plot structures and story elements from other great works. Plagiarism and biased content existed before AI, and they will continue long after AI is perfected. I hope people are less fearful of change. A novice writer with AI cannot compete against an experienced writer with AI. A novice writer can't spot problems in AI-generated texts, let alone articulate the issues well enough for the AI to fix them.
Publishers aren't going to be able to prevent A.I. works. They won't even know, especially when A.I. tools are used by someone capable of designing a high quality story. One might as well try saying writers can't use Grammarly.
Old guards are notorious for not moving with the times. Trying to tell writers how they have to write, and what they can or cannot use to create their stories, is just going to highlight more and more the advantages of the freedom of the indie market.
AI seems perfect for LoTR fanfiction