How independent writers are turning to AI

On a Tuesday in March, Lepp was 80.41 percent done with Bring Your Beach Owl, but she was behind schedule. If she was to get the book edited, formatted, promoted, uploaded to Amazon'sKindle platform, and in the hands, she had to write 9,278 words in three days.

Six years ago, Lepp decided to become an author because she no longer wanted to have to say "corporate doublespeak" to employees. She had spent the previous two decades working in management at a number of web hosting companies, where she developed disciplined project management skills that have translated well to writing fiction for Amazon.

She found an unexpected path into a literary career when she joined Amazon's self-service publishing arm. The preferred terms for writers who are self-publishing commercially are independent or indie. She takes pride in delivering enjoyable potato chip books to her readers, and they reward her with an annual income that can reach the low six figures.

Being an Amazon-based author is a lot like being on a digital platform. Authors need to find fans and keep them loyal in order to survive in a marketplace where infinite other options are a click away. They follow readers to the microgenres into which Amazon categorizes their tastes, likemermaid young adult fantasy or time-travel romance, and keep them engaged by writing in series, each of which has a title and set release date. In his book Everything and Less, Mark McGurl wrote that the author-reader relationship was transformed into a service provider and customer by the Amazon platform. Authors need to write quickly.

Lepp has 49 days to write and self-publish her book. The pace is on the verge of being unsustainably slow. She used to survey her mailing list to find out how long it would take readers to abandon her. Four months was the average for the year. Writer's block is a luxury she can't afford, which is why as soon as she heard about an artificial intelligence tool designed to break through it, she started beseeching its developers on social media.

Sudo write was the tool. Since it was opened to developers last year, it is one of many artificial intelligence writing programs built on Openai's language model GPT 3. Sudowrite is a writing tool designed for fiction writers. Authors paste what they have written into a soothing sunset-colored interface, select some words, and have the artificial intelligence rewrite them in an ominous tone, or with more inner conflict, or propose a plot twist.

Lepp wanted to see what she could do with a 500 word chunk of her novel, so she put it into the program. She clicked "describe" to highlight one of the Nutmegs.

The program said that Nutmeg has more in common with creatures of the night than with day.

Lepp liked what he saw. She said, "Holy shit." Sudo write picked up on the fact that the scene Lepp had pasted took place at night and that Nutmeg had bright colored hair.

She wasn't sure how she felt about using artificial intelligence, but she was always quick to adopt technologies that could help streamline her operation. When she felt she was overusing a phrase, she compiled a database of novels to look at how other authors finished their sentences. She said she would use Sudo write the same way. A small increase in production can make a big difference.

Word-prediction machines are used in language models. The model adjusts its billions of randomized mathematical parameters until it is presented with a new text. This method is surprising. Despite never having been explicitly trained in math, translation, or programming, GPT3 gained at least partial ability to do basic arithmetic, translate languages, and write working code.

GPT-3's world is made up of words and mathematical representations of common characters, and that can cause it to behave strange. It's possible to give sensible responses to questions about what people have written. Ask which is more heavy, a whale or a goldfish, and it will tell you. Ask Napoleon what he said about hamburgers and he'll tell you that they're the food of the gods. It may or may not have any correlation to the world as humans understand it, because it is just making a guess based on statistical patterns. It's better at form and style than substance. There is an art to getting a story to do what you want.

There is a pull_quote.

The pseudonymous researcher and writer Gwern Branwen calls itprompt programming. Branwen wrote Harry Potter in the style of Ernest Hemingway, so if you ask GPT-3 to write Harry Potter in the style of Hemingway, it might be a bad idea. Write a few lines of Hemingway-esque Potter fanfiction, and the model seems to understand what you mean by style. It can go on to write other books in the same style. Thinking about the way the machine works and how it might respond to your query requires a strange degree of sympathy. It is like trying to teach a cat tricks.

Gupta and Yu collected plot twists from short stories and novels and presented them to GPT 3 as examples. They wrote sentences about smells, sounds, and other senses so that GPT 3 would know what a writer is writing about.

Sometimes it takes it in unexpected directions, but it seems to understand the assignment. The program gave her characters with swords. She had characters fondling hilts as they sat on the porch despite not having any swords.

She thinks it's because the model was trained on more examples of high fantasy than the small genre of cozy mystery, so when she writes about magic, it assumes she's going to have a sword in her hand. It is going to have someone get bit, even though Lepp's vampire is a peaceful patron of blood banks. The romance dataset is always trying to make her characters have sex. Lepp said he gets a lot of stories about him grabbing her shoulder and wrapping her in his arms. I am a writer. Unless they jog, nobody is breathing heavily in my books.

The misfires were weird. It used to say that the Greek god Apollo's eyes were as big as a gopher's or that the moon was made of mother-of-pearl.

The moment before reality came back crashing down on them like the weight of an elephant sitting on them, Alice closed her eyes and sighed.

Lepp referred to them as moments when Skynet was drunk, despite the machine learning engineer calling themhallucinations.

Lepp was able to figure out how to steer the artificial intelligence. The process is similar to divination. She had to make some changes. She found that it helped lighten the load of a job that was mentally draining. She no longer had to struggle to find the right words to hit her target. It became easier to say the words.

She told herself she wouldn't use anything that wasn't in the program. As she went along, she became more comfortable with the idea.

She didn't think it was a big deal. My story is my world. I was able to come up with something. What if they were written by a computer?

On the first day of her workshop, Penn told her students that they were already an artificial intelligence assisted author. Are you a fan of Amazon to shop? Do you use a search engine? How can you be more artificial intelligence-assisted, artificial intelligence-enhanced, artificial intelligence extended?

Penn, an independent novelist and one of the most outspoken proponents of Artificial Intelligence, launched her online class last fall to teach writers how to use it. She shows students how to use artificial intelligence to analyze their plot and recommend changes. She tries to put her students at ease with what she sees as an inevitable change in what it means to be an author.

She said that she has had more resistance from the fiction community than she has before. She took a break from the social networking site because she was getting a lot of hate. Writers accused her of hastening their replacement by a "magic button that creates a novel," or of publicizing technology that will use to flood Amazon with generated books, or of violating what Penn sees as a misguided sense of purity.

She said that the reality is that even if novelists don't like it, they can use it or be left behind. Sudo write is what she calls an "extended thesaurus." She said that there are only a few ways to describe a crypt. She believes that in a future where writers are similar to "creative directors", they will give artificial intelligence high-level instructions and refining its output. She imagines licensing her model to other writers in her genre and fine- tuning her own model. She said that artificial intelligence is being used in music. It is possible that writing is the last art form to be disrupted.

One of Penn's examples shows how photo- altering tools changed how people consume and produce photography, from getting rid of the assumption that photos depict reality to creating a new aesthetic of deliberately imperfect authenticity. People's intuitions are all over the map, whatever changes Artificial Intelligence will bring, they are only just beginning. One person sent an email to Lepp telling her she was cheating if she used it more than 50 percent of the time.

Penn reached out to Orna Ross, the founder of the Alliance of Independent Authors, in order to establish some standards for Artificial Intelligence writing. When it got good enough to write books, Ross' previous stance was theoretical wariness. Ross saw the appeal and together they began soliciting feedback from their peers with the aim of formulating a code of ethics.

They left it up to the authors to make their own ethical decisions, instead of deciding on strict rules for a technology that's still in a state of change. The code tells writers that humans remain responsible agents and that they must edit and make sure it doesn't offend anyone. Text should not be cut and pasted. The use of artificial intelligence should be disclosed to readers where appropriate according to the guidelines.

Authors haven't previously felt the need to remind themselves that they are responsible for their writing or that they have to disclose their use of spellcheck. There is something different about using artificial intelligence. It can be seen in the way writers talk about it in the language of collaboration and partnership. It is hard to not see GPT-3 as an entity communicating thoughts because it takes instruction and responds in language. Maybe it's because it's not like a dictionary. There is a valley between a tool and a machine when it comes to artificial intelligence. The current moment is both exciting and frightening.

The tool is similar to having a writing partner. A crazy partner who throws out all sorts of suggestions, who never gets tired, who is always there. I'm in charge of the relationship that I have.

Even if it means sorting through a lot of useless text, she wants it to remain crazy. She is reassured that she is the one guiding the story even though she likes the hallucinatory nature of it. Working with artificial intelligence brings with it both the possibility of creative frisson and questions of control.

Ross said that he wanted it to be more reined in but not fully reined in. They become something else after that.

Lepp was falling into a rhythm with the artificial intelligence. She would sketch a scene and let the program write it. After editing the output, she would paste it back into Sudo write. She pushed it back by writing a few sentences and letting it go. She realized that she no longer needed to be alone. She was on time. She had increased her production by more than 20 percent.

When she finished the first chapter, she sent it to herbeta readers, a group that gives early feedback, with instructions to highlight anything that sounded off or out of character. There was nothing strange about it.

She said that it was kind of weird. It makes you wonder if a computer can mimic me.

Some of the sentences her readers highlighted as being particularly good came from the machine.

There is a pull_quote.

When she gave the chapter to her husband, he was a bit uneasy. Lepp said that he turned to her and said, "Woah, you put our favorite sushi restaurant in here?" She hadn't The scene was written by the artificial intelligence.

They did it again and again. She said that he was in constant demand. I wasn't sure if I wrote that. I swore to you that I didn't write it. The man I was married to, who knew me better than anyone else on the planet, couldn't tell the difference, and that was the first thing that made me uncomfortable.

Lepp thought she was being paranoid. A lot of sushi restaurants have well lit booths and wood panelling. She noticed other changes. For her, writing had always been a full experience. She dreamt about her characters and woke up thinking about them. She realized that the work had stopped when the artificial intelligence took on more work.

I was going to sleep and not think about the story. I would forget why people were doing things when I wrote again. She said she would have to look up what someone had said. She usually uses a moral lesson in her novels. She realized by chapter three that she had no idea what the book would be about. She thought she had followed the artificial intelligence down the rabbit hole.

It didn't feel the same as mine. I didn't feel connected to the words or the ideas when I looked over my writing.

Authors who want to push the boundaries of automated writing can come to the founder of the workshop. The thriving genre of expert how-tos include how to network on LinkedIn, how to beat stress and be happy, and how to become a best-selling author. He had always wanted to write a book but had never known when he would be able to. A Jasper.ai employee showed his friend the tool he had been working on.

It has the potential to do a lot more than just generate marketing copy. I'm just going to tell them to screw it. I'm going to write a book this weekend. He wrote a book called Amazon Copywriting Secrets and put it up for sale on the market.

A workshop teaches others to do the same thing. The majority of his students are interested in what a book will do for their business, not out of a desire to become a writer. The phrase "minimum viable book" is used in his workshop.

The cornerstone of your marketing will be content. If the book is about questions that show up in searches. You have more credibility on a topic if you have a book in your hand.

It takes a lot of work to get a book written by an artificial intelligence. The voice of Jasper is more constrained than that of Sudo write. Even though users can tell it to write in whatever style they want, it seemed to speak in what I can only describe as the voice of content itself: upbeat; casually familiar yet confident; extremely enthusiastic. It brings up Musk and hustling.

The longer a text lasts, the more language models can't work. Predicting which words will come next is difficult to craft a coherent argument or narrative. GPT is limited in its ability to structure longer texts by the fact that it doesn't have the memory to read a book or any text longer than 1,500 words. If you ask GPT 3 to write an essay, it will produce a repetitive series of sometimes correct, often conflicting assertions, drifting off- topic until it hits its memory limit and forgets where it started.

Jasper uses templates that feed GPT-3s output back to itself. Jasper will write an outline of the review, then a paragraph about each point in it, and then a conclusion for the review. It is similar to the formula for five-paragraph essays used in high school. It claims that the socks can be worn in any condition. The first socks were created around 5000 BC.

The author gives Jasper a short summary of their topic in the template. Jasper wrote a compelling personal story about it, followed by some text about the problem, the history of the problem, and so on. It's definitely not random. The more automation you do, the more generic you have to be.

It's true of both forms and content. People have approached him with the idea of generating a memoir. It's too general. Jasper will produce startlingly adequate copy if you stick to a topic like selling on Amazon. There are so many similar ways to write out there that the artificial intelligence has a lot to pull from.

Is that different from what people do? The man wonders. He said that no one has ever thought of an original new thought in a century. Everything that has been said has been said in a way that resembles what another person has said. Is it possible that we're being original in our thoughts? We can either take a thought and then look at it in a different way, or we can.

He doesn't know. He has been writing a novel. The world of "Pitchlandia" has to be defended from the "9-to-5 virus" if it wants to survive. Some of the things Jasper provides make him wonder, and he was the one who designed a new template for it. Is it possible that each of the unicorns formed a league to protect the realm? He said that it was probably developing that from another idea. You make a new story out of it.

Jasper isn't the primary goal for people. To establish themselves as authorities in their field, they are using it to generate posts about products they are selling or books that will serve as billboards on Amazon or other social media sites. They use it because they need to say something in order to maintain relevance on platforms that are so flooded with writing. It raises the possibility of a spiral of content generated by artificial intelligence, all of it derived from existing content, which wouldn't be so different from the internet we have today. One Jasper user pointed out that it would be naive to think that most top 10 lists of any product you search for would be true.

There is a chance that I have inadvertently read content written by artificial intelligence. In Facebook groups, I have seen people show off lists of things to do. If it isn't already it will be everywhere. There are a few paragraphs that are no longer certificates of human authorship.

I realized that applying a Turing test to everything I read could be a good thing, especially in the more commercial corners of the internet where artificial intelligence is most often used. The questions it made me ask were the kind of questions I should be asking anyway: is this supported by facts, internally consistent, and original, or is it coasting on pleasant-sounding language and rehashing traditional wisdom? Maybe this is a good text if it is the crisis.

It is difficult to use these programs and not wonder how you would fare in such a test. I told the Jasper template to come up with some topic ideas about artificial intelligence. The dispiritingly familiar first option was "how artificial intelligence is changing the way we write."

Humans may eventually be replaced by artificial intelligence writing programs. It wrote that while this may be true in some cases, it is more likely that a writing program will supplement human writing skills. To make sure human writers are relevant in this changing world of technology, it's important that computers don't take over your job. What do you bring to the table as a writer?

Following the program's lead, Lepp adjusted her approach. She keeps Sudo write on a shorter leash. She pastes everything she has written so far into the program, and only then lets it write. She tells it to write a description of what happened in the scene.

There are two big fish tanks with tons of fish in the lobby, but I don't care what it looks like other than that, it's high-quality fish. She gave her 150 words about crystal chandeliers, gold etching, and marble after she told it. My time is better spent on the mystery and the story than trying to describe the lobby.

She admits she has become reliant on it. She thinks that her writing wouldn't be as rich and that she would be more burned out if she didn't have it. It is easier to come up with my own words and then edit them than it is to work with the artificial intelligence. It's not as taxing. It's less tiring. I need to pay attention in a different way. I still feel connected to the story even though I don't get as much into the writing as I used to.

She recently increased production with the assistance of the program. She is now writing two series simultaneously, toggling between the witch detective and a new mystery-solving hero, a 50-year-old divorcee who comes into possession of a magical platter that allows her to communicate with cats. She felt she had to expand to stay in place. With her profits going back to Amazon in the form of advertising, she needed to stand out among her competitors. Her revised spreadsheet predicts 10 instead of six.

She understands the fear of her peers. Ebooks gave Lepp and her peers a chance to get a dream job. They have worked hard to keep up with the demands of the reader. When the programs get better how much more can authors take? She said that there was a concern that we just got our feet in the door. Everybody is afraid because we can't sustain a pace against a computer

There is technology that isn't there yet. She believes that novels that are too generic would be created if fiction were more automated. She doesn't doubt that it will get there eventually, based on the improvement she's seen over the last year. It wouldn't have to go a long way. She said that the same basic form with a slightly different twist is what readers of genre fiction are used to. It is exactly the sort of thing that should be handled by an artificial intelligence. You can do that and then nothing is original anymore. She said that everything was a copy of something else. Readers like that kind of thing.