AI is everywhere, and here to stay. It has infiltrated almost every aspect of our lives and feels unavoidable. In the future, the presence of AI will only increase, and we must choose when, or if, to use it. As an author, you can ignore it and write the old fashioned way using only your brain, your fingers on the keyboard (or notebook if you want to be really old school). In this way, you have the satisfaction of knowing that you are fully responsible for the finished product; it is yours and yours alone.
You can also embrace it and use AI tools to assist in the writing process to speed things up, help with sentence structure, inspiration, or in some cases, write the entire manuscript. Many authors are choosing this route, and inevitably there are those who are using AI tools to churn out multiple novels in the hopes of making a quick dollar.
This means the market is becoming saturated with AI written books, which makes it harder for your book to be seen. Savvy marketing is more important than ever, and producing a great book with an eye-catching cover is vital. Readers are learning what an AI written book and AI generated cover look like, and a lot avoid them.
Books written in conjunction with or entirely by AI tools have a robotic feel to them that often makes them bland. They contain formulaic sentences and phrases, can have errors in continuity, character development and grammar and can be ‘flat’. AI, after all, mimics genuine human emotion; it can’t truly feel. It chooses words and phrases from a huge well of human-written work and applies them emotionlessly. It follows the rules of grammar, but does not know when to break those rules or when there is a grey area, where the technically correct grammatical choice is the wrong one. These are the issues with AI written books that have been published without a human touching them, especially using less sophisticated tools.
It is far cheaper and quicker, of course, to use AI to generate covers and books, and to edit them. However, without human input in these phases of publishing, the finished product has an AI feel to it that is increasingly being noticed by readers. Humanising AI output has become a business, but a lot of this humanising is being done by yet another programme and not by a human.
There is nothing wrong with using AI to help you write, and using it for initial editing and basic cover design. But before you publish, get your manuscript copy edited and/or proofread by a human editor. Let a person add the warmth and quirks that characterise humans, as well as improving the often repetitive and generic sentence structure and word choice generated by AI tools. Likewise, using AI to help decide on your cover is great, but use a human cover designer who will give that cover depth and meaning, so it stands out and catches the human eyes skimming titles and covers, looking for a good book.
In the future, AI will improve and even the most basic of AI programmes will be better at mimicking human emotions. But even then, I hope the creative process of writing, editing, and cover design is done by people. Storytelling, the creative process of making an entire world and populating it with people who exist only within the pages of a book, be it physical or electronic, is part of what makes us human. It would be a shame to lose that.
