Hey, AI is the biggest news story of 2023, and it's causing impassioned debate in the author community. A lot of the views being expressed seem quite polarized: on one side you have a kind of Pollyannish optimism – I, for one, welcome our robot overloads. And on the other extreme, apocalyptic doom-mongering. I'd like to try and plot some middle ground here – one which is aware of the dangers and respects potential rights issues, but one which also accepts that AI is already here, whether we like it or not. One which also wonders if there is a safe and ethical way to use AI tools – particularly ChatGPT. ChatGPT is the tool I've been playing with, hoping to make some marketing tasks a little more efficient, rather than something more creative. If you don't know what ChatGPT is, this is a good explainer from CNET. And you can test it out yourself here. You might not be able to access it, though, as the site has been slammed in recent weeks. The explosion in popularity of ChatGPT has caught everyone by surprise. A few days ago, it passed 100m users – the fastest growing consumer application in history. For context: it took Instagram two years to reach 100m users. TikTok did it in 9 months, the pace of its growth throwing all the other social networks into a panicked redesign. ChatGPT hit that milestone in 2 months. Why is AI so controversial?The depth of feeling on this issue is strong – which is to be expected with any technological advancement which has the potential to be hugely disruptive. But it's not just disruption which is causing concern. Aside from the whole raft of societal and political concerns around AI, there are pressing issues specific to authors – as well as our creative brethren in art, design, voice acting, and so on – which need to be tackled. Even though I see the positive potential with AI, significant questions remain about how those Al models were trained, whether any creator's work was used without their permission, and whether any rights were infringed along the way, as well as the legal status of work created with AI-powered tools. In my opinion, those questions have not been addressed in a satisfactory way, and I wasn't surprised to see a class action has been filed against Midjourney and Stable Diffusion which claims that billions of images were scraped from the web without authorization. (The first of many such actions, one would imagine.) There's an article here from Vice if you want to dig into this side of things further – it's a huge story which has been developing for several months before ChatGPT exploded on the scene. However, whether we like it or not – whether we're ready or not – AI is already here. AI is now being incorporated into Bing, and Google will follow shortly with its own version of AI-augmented search. AI tools are now being incorporated in all sorts of other places too, which will increase their usage exponentially. For example, WordPress announced today that it is testing generative AI art blocks – meaning that the 810 million sites in the world running WordPress will now be able to easily generate AI art by typing a description of the image they're looking for right there in the back end of their own sites. Change doesn't wait for you to be ready. AI isn't going to pause while everyone explores all the moral and legal issues around creators, rights, infringement, and the copyright status of anything made with these tools, or the ramifications for society at large. AI isn't just here already – it's about to go mainstream. And that's going to make it impossible to ignore. But if you're not quite ready for this new reality yourself, don't worry because you're in good company. The King of Search wasn't ready either. In partnership with Reedsy. Meet the editor, designer or marketer who can help bring your book to life Are you looking for the best publishing talent for your next book? Look no further than Reedsy! They are a creative hub for over 150,000 authors, providing access to handpicked professionals with experience working on bestselling books for top publishers. Get free quotes from vetted professionals who specialize in services such as design, editing, marketing, and translation. Every professional has an extensive profile detailing their past work and portfolio – so you know that you're only choosing the best! Get $25 off your first Reedsy hire
Google's Bungled AI LaunchBefore the explosion of attention around Chat GPT, Google had been beavering away at various Al projects for years. Dedicating huge resources. Acquiring cutting edge AI companies. Spending big to hire the best AI talent around. Making it a real focus for the company, in other words, unlike its approach to ebooks. But Google was still caught by surprise – it didn't seem ready for ChatGPT's big debut, and Microsoft beat it to the punch by partnering with the company behind ChatGPT to incorporate it into its search engine, Bing. Needless to say, that's a huge development because without Search, Google is nothing. Yes, Google has all sorts of other business areas today, but most of its income comes from Search in one way or another – the central logic behind its industry-leading ad platform – still most of Google's revenue – is predicated on dominating search. I don't think it's engaging in hyperbole to suggest that AI is an existential threat to Google – even though Google is one of the leading companies in AI. And you don't need a supercomputer to tease out that contradiction because Google did that at lightspeed, appropriately enough. Google had to respond – and it did, by rushing its own efforts and dropping the ball. The day after Microsoft announced that ChatGPT would be incorporated directly into its search engine Bing, Google brought forward its own announcement of something called Bard which was like ChatGPT and would also be incorporated into search. One measure of what's at stake: Google's shares went up 5% after the announcement. One measure of the risks: when Google's AI was fond to have made a basic error in the marketing materials, Google's shares' fell 9%. That's $120 billion off Google's market cap. Yegads. Apple and AI AudiobooksApple announced last month that it would accept AI generated audiobooks for the first time, something that most retailers like Audible don't permit, as things stand. Not only that, but Apple would provide AI narration tools to authors and publishers. You can see why the idea is attractive to some: audiobooks can be expensive to produce (or require an incredible time investment if you are producing them yourself). Having AI narrate an audiobook would seem to solve that problem neatly, greatly reducing the time and money needed to produce audio editions. The appeal for Apple is even more clearcut. Apple says it wishes to make the creation of audiobooks "more accessible to all. Of course, what it doesn't say – out loud, at least – is that it wants a chunk of Amazon's lucrative market share, is determined not to repeat the mistakes it made with the ebook market, and thinks the best way to do that is to massively expand its selection of audiobooks by removing the barriers to entry, and to drive the prices down. Kind of using Amazon's playbook there – AI really is turning things upside down! Less amusing is the fate of those narrators, who are suddenly facing an existential threat of their own ten seconds after finally seeing a viable and healthy audiobook market come into being. And I'd personally be surprised if any real audiobook lovers welcome this development either. You might have noticed some YouTube videos now seem to have AI narration, and the quality is generally quite terrible – although it's claimed that AI narration will soon be almost indistinguishable from human narration. However, even if the quality of AI narration improves considerably, I'm suspicious that the quality could ever be as good as a human narrator – who does so much more than simply read the text. Besides, once Apple has cut the narrators out, you can bet they'll put the squeeze on authors next. That's not the only concern around AI and audiobooks because a controversy is brewing:
As mentioned above, Victoria Strauss at Writer Beware is planning a post on this later today, so keep an eye out for that. (And if you want to ensure your work isn't used in this manner by Apple, see that Twitter thread for instructions.) ChatGPT and AuthorsWhat's probably of most concern to authors is how AI might affect the future viability of their profession. The disruptive threat facing today's narrators is just the beginning. The most obvious concern is that we could be replaced by a bunch of storybots chained up in the basement of Simon & Schuster. But after playing with Al a little, I think we're still quite far away from it producing professional grade creative work. Of course, we can't real out a great leap forward there, given the pace of technological development. I'm a practical sort, though, so even though there are genuine controversies around AI tools, I want to know a little more about how they work – so I can understand the issues better. I also want to see where all this AI stuff is headed, figure out how it might impact my business in a negative way, but also see if there are any positive uses for this stuff, which stay away from the more controversial areas. Is that possible? Are there any practical uses for this stuff right now? Why should anyone care? All these are valid questions which I am asking myself, ones which I hope to explore over several emails. I'm no expert on this stuff at all – if anything, I'm late to the party. But I've been playing around with ChatGPT recently and can definitely see some potential in book marketing terms. (I'm not using it for creative work at all.) I heard someone suggest that you don't think of ChatGPT as an expert-on-call, as the media often portrays it. A better way to approach it, perhaps, is to think of it as a team of interns with boundless energy. They often make mistakes, you definitely have to check their work, but they can take a lot off your plate – however, only with clear parameters and lots of oversight. Here are some things I've been playing around with – using ChatGPT specifically.
I'll get into the details next time but, overall, I can tell you that some of the stuff generated was useful and some was terrible. However, it is worth noting that most of the bad ideas were written in convincing language. If I didn't have experience, I might not know which is which. I got better results when I began crafting more deliberate and detailed prompts (I recommend going wild here – see this example we're discussing on my Facebook Page).
And I got the best results of all when I forced ChatGPT to refine its responses – one the most impressive parts of this tech. ChatGPT can give you an answer for whatever you ask, but then you can kind of interrogate it and force it to amend its answers based on more specific parameters – enabling you to ratchet your way to something quite useful indeed. Not very like having an expert on speed-dial. Definitely more like managing a team of eager but inexperienced research assistants. When you start crafting your prompts carefully, analyzing the results, and forcing ChatGPT to iterate, that's when things get super interesting for me, and when you begin to see the real power of this tool. Perhaps this helps dismiss some of the more fanciful concerns about replacing humans completely. A human is still needed – at this point anyway – to ask the Al better questions, to analyse, interrogate, and curate the output, to iterate the prompts, essentially to know when the true destination has been reached. And then – most importantly – to execute on the information generated. We're not being done away with quite yet. Dave P.S. Prompting music this is Daft Punk with Digital Love.
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Friday, February 10, 2023
Ready for AI? It's here anyway...
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