A.I. Authorship & Normalizing "Based on an Idea by" | Opinion

There's been a lot of talk in the world -- and in my world specifically -- about A.I. authorship lately. Enough talk that it gets the gears in my head going.

There's a lot of talk around the words to use when it comes to work generated by A.I. and the authenticity of it. People will say to those creators "you're not really an author" to which they're fire back "what do you mean? I came up with the idea, I submitted the prompt!" The first group will fire back "it's copying the work of others!" and the second will say "that's just what reading is!"

And then there's the closest example: "this is no different from Ghost Writing! Those people paid someone under contract to write for them under these guidelines, isn't that the same?"

The short answer is: NO. It isn't.

The longer answer is more nuanced. The big thing these A.I.-advocate creators don't seem to grasp is how much a book changes in the writing of it. In a way that can only happen when there's time being taken, in a way that can only be done by a human.

Take Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris. You could plug all the information that Harris had when starting that novel into a LLM and get it to spit out a story that might roughly cover the same beats: a young female FBI agent fighting sexism in her field, a horrible serial killer that prays on women, a race to uncover the truth before a senator's daughter is kidnapped. But you know what you wouldn't have? Hannibal Lector. Famously, Harris had no idea that Lector was going to appear in Silence to help Clarice Starling. He'd written Lector into his previous novel, Red Dragon, but he hadn't intended for them to be a series when he started. It was only when he wrote himself into a corner around Chapter 5 and was asking himself how he would get Starling from Point A to Point B that it came to him: "why doesn't she just go see Hannibal?"

That's something an LLM just can't do. It cannot stop mid-stream and think to itself "hey, what about this?" It's too fast. Part of the artform is the time it takes, that's what part of building a novel is. People who have only ever "written" generated novels: what you're not getting is how much of a benefit that time is. The time to reflect, think about the next scene, make changes on a micro-level that affect the final outcome in tremendous ways.

I cannot explain to you how often the above situation with Harris happens. You cannot predict how a book will turn out based on the initial plan. It always gets tweaked, even if you think it won't, and the only way to get that is time.

On some level, this is just a part of the way humans think. We know now that when you access memory, that's not some file on a hard drive in your skull that's perfectly preserved and exactly the same every time you access it: your brain recreates that memory from scratch every time you access it, each time with miniscule tweaks and edits as you tell it again and again. The same is happening with your book. You think about that big scene you want to write, and it's ten scenes away and you're writing the scenes in-order and you're imagining it, like a goal at the end of a long journey. Then the next day you sit down to write and you imagine it again, only nine scenes away now. Then the next day again, eight scenes away. And every time you think about it, you think you're imagining the same thing: but you aren't. Your brain is making micro-changes every time it re-tells itself that story, again and again, and by the time you get to it it's different than it would have been if you'd written it one day one. That's something AI cannot do.

To say nothing of author voice! I don't read Stephen King over and over again, regardless of genre, because I like B-movie horror. I could get that anywhere. I read him because I like his voice. And if you think I'm crazy, remember, that was how he got caught writing under the pseudonym Richard Bachman all those years ago: an astute reader noticed the similarities in the author's voice and figured it out. AI written text flattens that into all one voice, or at the very least, a voice that is not the authors.

What prompted this rant, and it has gotten away from me, is that there is already language in the industry for the role these Generative AI-users are doing, at it is: "based on an idea by."

When Harlan Ellison wrote Daredevil #208-209 for Marvel Comics back in the day? He didn't 'write' those stories, he was given the "based on a idea by" credit and a staff writer wrote that. This happens all the time in other parts of the industry: a fan might write in an idea for an episode of TV that the writers actually like, so they pay them a nominal fee and they get a "based on an idea by" credit. But someone else also gets credit for writing that episode or issue, because everyone recognizes, and always has, that "coming up with the idea" is NOT the same as "writing the story." And you'll note that most industries are also fairly clear on which of those matters more, given how it's credited and how royalties are allocated.

So this is my pitch: Generate your AI novels. Sure. Besides the fact that it's killing the planet and using resources while some people starve, do your thing. But you can't say 'written by.' All AI-generated-or-assisted novels should say "Written by [Insert LLM Name here]" and then, below that, "based on an idea by [your name]."

That's the pitch, that's the only way to be honest about this. Because while AI is new, the language regarding your role is not, and the language we use to describe you is not, and has never been, "author."

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