Welcome to 2024—it’s surreal. Remember all the year 2000 hype and fears. We wondered what would happen to our computers as the millennium clock struck midnight. Would they self-destruct? Turn into expensive paperweights? What about things that really mattered? You know, nuclear warheads and their launch codes. Looking back now, it seems anticlimactic. I had a DOS run computer (black background, orange tree) that reset itself to 1/1/1900, but other than remembering to manually date my documents, nothing else happened. Just in case, I’d backed up all my documents on 5.25” floppies, with an additional backup on 3.5” floppies. I come from a legal background. Belt, suspenders.

As we enter 2024, a different technical controversy rages. AI—artificial intelligence, or as my husband refers to it, artificial ignorance—sometimes I think he’s spot on. While I don’t have a handle on the technical aspects of AI, I know it needs to be trained. To train it, developers are feeding the programs published books. Most obtained from pirate sources. Piracy has been an issue for authors for years. Needless to say, authors receive no royalty from the pirated books. Nor do they for works used to train AI. The Author’s Guild discussed this matter in September. They also included a link to a website with a partial list of pirated books. You can read the article here.

Amazon has begun asking if any part of an indie author’s book, including the book

Photo by Igor Omilaev via Unsplash

description, is AI generated. They are not refusing to publish AI written books, but they are collecting the information. They exclude spelling and grammar checking programs from the query, although some of the more popular ones offer a “suggested revision” function. Whether or not that constitutes using AI is left to the discretion of the author.

This controversy led me to look at the writing programs I use. Plottr, Scrivener, ProWritingAid, and Atticus are in my common use arsenal. Of the four, only ProWritingAid offers features beyond spellcheck. It has recently introduced a suggested revision function. As a lark, I dropped a blog into the program and allowed it to suggest revisions to my work. The suggestions were stilted to the point of sounding like 1960s robot speak, or downright funny. I’m sure they will improve over time.

It’s a brave new world out there. Whether to use AI is a decision every author will have to make on their own. It’s not for me. I love the creative process too much, and I vigorously object to purloining someone’s hard-earned words for use as a free training aid. Others may have different opinions, or may decide that AI has a place in their plotting or outlining process. To quote Alice, “Curiouser and curiouser.” All options are open.