Dear O'Abby: Can I use Chat GPT to write a book?

 Dear O'Abby,

I've seen a bunch of stuff recently from authors who claim to have written multiple books in a year using AI and that they are making very good money from them.

As a writer who has spent several years painstakingly writing and editing and polishing my own books, and making about enough to buy one cup of coffee per quarter, I'm wondering if using Chat GPT might be a way to both speed up my output and increase my income.

Are there any issues with using Chat GPT to write a book?  I feel like there are probably pitfalls I haven't considered here...

Kind regards,

No Robot

Dear No Robot,

Technically, yes, you can use Chat GPT to write a book.  It might even turn out okay if you keep refining the prompts you give.  The machine learns from consuming an enormous amount of data from all kinds of sources and if you give it the right prompts and information to start with, it can spit something out that looks and feels like a book.

The problem comes when you try to sell that book.

Because the AI takes material from the internet to "learn" it is likely using intellectual property that belongs to someone else.  Which means you may have issues when it comes to copyrighting your AI generated book.  

There are also rules popping up all over the place about being upfront about what is and isn't AI generated.  When self-publishing through Amazon, you need to indicate whether you used AI to write the book.  I've noticed that this is also something many agents are now asking when you fill out their Query Manager forms too.

But there is a distinction between AI generated content and AI assisted content and I think there are places in the writing process where using a tool like Chat GPT could be useful.  I would never ask it to write the book for me, but it can be helpful with things like suggesting a title or character names.  It can also be helpful with research and even with outlining if you're willing to put in a lot of time and effort.

I've never tried it for editing,  but I believe it can help with that too - at least as a first pass.  It will catch grammar and syntax errors, but a set of real human eyes is still important.  The AI will likely correct things that are not grammatically correct, but are part of your own authorial voice or the voices of your characters.

One place I've found AI to be useful, is in cutting down my synopsis to the various different lengths required for different agents.  My basic synopsis for the novel I'm currently querying is close to three pages long, but some agents only want a one page synopsis, while others are happy with two and another group might want less than 500 words.  The AI generated synopses aren't perfect, but with a few tweaks and polishes, they do the job.

At the end of the day though, writing is an art and machine-generated art is never going to have the heart or the soul or the unique point of view that you write from.  Personally, I write because I love to write.  I love the process of spinning a story from my imagination onto the page and getting under the skin of my characters and discovering who they are alongside them.  It may be more time consuming than plugging a few prompts into a chat-bot and seeing what gets spat out, but it's also way more rewarding and enjoyable.

So, while I might use the odd AI tool to help me along the way, I would certainly never use Chat GPT to write for me.  Why would I deny myself the very real joys of writing?  Even when some days are painful and hard and getting royalty reports can be soul destroying. At the end of the day, writing is something I love to do and even when it's hard, I wouldn't hand my characters to a machine to deal with.  Would you hand your kids to a robot to raise?  No.  I thought not...