A full disclosure post.
Since I recently received a review in which it said it felt like my book might have been written with the help of AI (due to em dash overuse and long horizontal line separators for change of scenes), I wanted to talk about it.
I have used AI in the past for various tasks (but writing my book for me isn’t one of them). After years of living off-grid with no or little electricity I wanted to enter back into the job market and I used AI to help me whip up cover letters and learn what the job market expected. I played around with it for other things too, and found it relatively useful for finding errors in scripts—especially after not coding for years. Or for figuring out software I was unfamiliar with.
I won’t lie: I did play around with it to test its editing and writing capabilities while I was outlining my first novel, before I started writing in serious. I knew nothing about how this technology was created, nor how others were using it, and just wanted to see what it could do. I hadn’t been on SM or watched news in years at that point. I was entirely out of the loop.
Later I started freelance work for an AI annotation/training company and learned a bit more about how models work/fail. I’m still no expert, but the experience I acquired made me be far less interested in using them. Also, the text AI did generate or how it would alter a paragraph I’d written usually made me cringe, even after trying to tweak it. I eventually decided it wasn’t worth the effort—not for ethical reasons, but because I didn’t like the voice it would inject into my writing, or rather, what it would inevitably take.
I did use AI to generate images for my story initially. No license or attribution needed, and great atmospheric images—the deal sounded too good to be true. Especially since I wanted to focus on writing, not visual art. You can still find them at the beginning of my insta profile. I left them there deliberately, not to market but to be transparent.
I learned later how AI was trained and stealing from artists in the process. I was upset, because I was financially ruined with no real job, a kid to take care of and now no good way to visually present my story. But I still made the decision to stop using AI. I created my own covers from scratch and stock images, and made a few illustrations by hand, with my less than adequate graphic design skills.
And while they could be better, I’m damn proud of my work.
In the review, my writing style was criticized as sounding very AI, and I guess I can see that somehow, but also… eww.
When I started writing I wanted to publish solely as a web-serial. The very long form but fast pace of webserials was what really attracted me. The idea of just posting as you go, absolutely didn’t work for me though. I needed to edit and re-edit before I really ‘got’ my own story. So I decided a series of long books it would be instead.
I wrote around 600k words in a flow of creative exploration before I went back to figure things out (and that’s not the end of what I have planned). I haven’t reduced those 600k to one book. Instead I had to rearrange a lot since I now realized where I was going. I cut characters and elements and rewrote the beginning, turning it into a first book. In webserial form I’d never have been able to do that.
But my love for some of the webserials I’ve read during many sleepless nights, greatly influenced my style.
They’re often quite unpolished (I read a lot of fan-translated ones)—with evocative, short sentences, reminiscent of comic style. The author’s (or translator’s) voice comes through raw and real. The prose can feel simple, choppy and awkward sometimes but still take you on a wild ride.
I really enjoyed that. In the end I did polish my text more than I initially planned, though I’m sure it could still get plenty more shiny if a professional took to it, but a lyrical polish was never the intention.
So that’s where the style of my writing comes from. Though obviously, I did it my own way.
To clarify: Even if ethical concerns weren’t an issue, AI is not something I’d want to use for my writing. It adulterates voice and meaning, hijacks imagery and erases subtleties, because it can’t understand them. Instead it turns text into something insipid that sounds almost decent on the surface but has absolutely no deeper layers of human meaning to unravel. Sentences and paragraphs become empty appearances instead of threads into the lives and worlds meant to arise from writing.
Yes, from my early experimentation, I’m convinced this happens even when you’re ‘just’ using it to edit something you’ve written.
Besides. I want to be able to say this is my work, not some kind of random-word amalgamation.
So, no, I don’t use AI for writing. I also no longer work for AI companies or use it for images.
As for formatting:
Long separator lines are part of markdown formatting, which I use for all my writing, but incidentally it’s also what AI uses for displaying text. It’s a very simple formatting language that translates great into html and similar, making it ideal for reliable ebook creation, or more advanced typesetting with LaTeX, which is how I make my print versions.
I get that markdown makes it look similar to AI, but… I also use letters and words, and so does AI. How can that be an indicator.
While I was hit hard by the suspicion voiced in the review, I’ll say that the review was still fair. Instead of bashing me with a 1*, the reviewer gave me three and commented that the story was ‘good’. AI accusations can be harsh, and due to my em dash count I assumed I’d get hit at some point—I’ll probably receive more in the future. This one was a reasonably civil one and I appreciate it. Reviewers have the right to say how they felt about the writing, of course. And while I’m still sad someone felt icked enough by my writing to think it’s AI, I’m also glad I was prompted to write this in return.
I don’t want to go on a rampage to defend my work—I think the human creative community will eventually to come up with better ways to support its members before the onslaught of AI emptiness. I’m not sure how that will look, but I don’t think accusations or certifications are the answer here. I get that trust is built over time and I think in the end trust or lack thereof, is the only thing that we’ll be left with as a way to judge.
Just like poorly edited work detracts from trust indie authors face in the publishing world, so does AI generated work—but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to build eventually.
Sample chapters, WIP publications and direct contact with the artists can all help establish deeper trust. While they won’t be direct evidence one way or the other, they do show the labor of love that an artist puts into their work, and I think in the end we’ll learn to distinguish emptiness from human produced.
If not, I suppose we’re all doomed.