Authoring a New Era With AI?

Science fiction author, Alessandro S. Scafato, discusses the implications of AI on the publishing industry. He is an Italian author of three novels, The Minds of Mchawi, Quasi-Human, and Empathy for the Devil. He lives in Zurich with his wife and Cardigan Welsh Corgi, Hipérbole.

When we think of AI in the context of humanity, we all tend to see a humanoid robot or a super-computer that tries to rule the world. Maybe they had determined humanity is immoral and needs to be destroyed, maybe they are fighting for their right to be considered alive. Whichever way, society tends to see AI as a surrogate of themselves: better in many aspects, but lacking in having emotions and that magical spark which makes us all human.

Unsurprisingly, the AI we are fighting against is neither humanoid or has anything super about itself. It’s just a chat bot. An underwhelming text editor which replies when given a prompt, in a lot of languages (even dialects, I checked!) and with compelling and articulated answers, without any foreseeable limitation in its application.

The only thing that makes it special, it’s the lack of humanity in it.

What makes is so impressive, however, is its ability to be indistinguishable from an actual human.

That unless you account for the fact that a human would most certainly make a mistake sooner or later. Anyone will eventually write a typo, say something wrong, sound stupid, use improper punctuation… you name it. On the contrary, the AI will not make any of these mistakes. Ever.

To begin my investigation on the topic, I did the simplest thing I could: I went to the source and interviewed chatGPT about what are his limitations in terms of writing, what role it sees in the creative writing process and how does it actually work.

It comes out, chatGPT is much more self-aware than most of my friends and family… and way more self-aware than any writer I have ever met, myself included. As chatGPT will gladly tell you, it is a language model AI, an intelligence trained with a collection of written material to understand and replicate a language. Like any other AI, it is a tool with a limited and well defined scope, which itself is aware of.

The people who are improperly extending that scope are, unsurprisingly, very much all humans. Language model AI is a technology that does neither understand nor contribute to human knowledge, it is designed to pick on the keywords used by the prompter to fetch existing knowledge on the topic and feed it back to the user itself. If a text about something doesn’t exist, it won’t be able to invent it.

So how come if I ask chatGPT to write me a story, the AI replies with a perfectly believable story?

Well, because that story the AI is telling you already exist somewhere in its database. Maybe not exactly the same, but a soup of all of that information, seasoned with some other information, mixed with another bit of text here and there… will make a perfectly original story on its own, without relying on creativity for a split second.

What is AI All About?

Let me provoke you with a plot idea.

This is a story about a boy who lives in extremely depressing conditions, until he finds out just how special he is. He meets another boy, a bit of a scoundrel you might say, and a girl, a bit of a princess in her own ways. Of course, they all find out that the universe is threatened by some evil entity which remains unseen, but the scariest of the foes is his right arm who seems to always be a step too close to our hero, threatening his life.

Our hero, however, will have to first find his strength and unleash his power, mentored by an old wise man who also happens to be the quintessential image of goodness. Meanwhile, the two friends of the hero fall in love, bonded by the sole purpose of helping our protagonist fighting the evil entity and his dark minion. To add drama, we’ll have the evil right hand kill our agreeable wise mentor, breaking the heart of our protagonist. Yet, never before he was almost ready to defeat the evil entity.

We say almost, because the final step to the completion of our hero is the revelation that the evil right hand master minion is nonetheless a fatherly figure of our protagonist, who protected him from the evil entity this entire time. With the final piece of the puzzle in place and the newfound strength of his fatherly figure, our hero will then confront the evil entity and win.

The end.

Now, assuming you are a millennial (plus-minus some few years), you probably have recognised an extremely popular story just there. Yet, whether you thought of a space wizard with a terrible hair cut, or an English wizard with terrible eyesight, the stories of both wizards are based on that exact formula.

Except for filler content and flair, they have the exact same story.

As a matter of fact, the label of millennial is a marketing tool, designed to stereotype whatever your product preferences are: millennial means you probably know the two franchises based on that plot, and you are keen to like them just as much as you are receptive to nostalgia these days. You also probably love meme culture and put a lot of ‘lol’ at the end of your texts.

I am not just bashing at millennials here. I have a point I wanted to reach with this: that to merely sell books and stories you don’t actually need any creativity or originality. All people need to know is the market they are trying to hit, then leverage on the right buttons. If you do this, people will eventually buy it, even if it’s terrible.

Count the TV shows and films that you watch thinking ‘this is bad, but it’s entertaining’ and you’ll have just about how much of these kind of stories you absorb. Let me guess: there are a lot of them! The TV and cinema formats are even better at delivering such material, because whilst a book requires weeks to complete (during which you might lose interest), it is very unlucky for people to interrupt a one or two hour show.

Now, think just about how profitable bad TV is and you get my point exactly.

When I pressed chatGPT on the topic, the AI replied that without the originality and the human experience, our ability to invent something new, books are short lived and empty. They don’t generate a strong fan-base, they don’t sell for long and surely won’t become classics. To press even more about the fact, I pretended to be a rich-ass producer who only wants to make money in the short term, at which point the AI caved in and told me it was tempting to replace writers with AI. Then went back the same point about profitability being limited, etc.

Important to notice that the wording the AI used to frame its sentences is exactly in the same in at least three of its answers, with the same words. It did not bother to create a new sentence or approach the issue from a different angle. That would require creativity.

Still, the AI was right, all important stories incorporate a strong human experience, they are books that we read and then think for a long time about them. We cannot help us, because there is so much perspective and depth of thought and emotion in them, that they are hard to ignore. They leave us with something more than just mere entertainment.

Don’t get me wrong, like everybody, I also entertain myself when I read a book and I also find books that don’t entertain me boring and pointless. Everyone does. I also have personal preferences, such as that I dislike authors that are too descriptive and into hard world building, e.g. Tolkien, in favour of authors which are straight to their philosophical points and into soft world building, such as Pratchett.

Though none of these preferences actually matter in the way I judge a book, all I end up caring about to know if a book was worth my time is how long I had thought about what I read after I finished the book. If I spend a lot of time walking in circles to wrap my head around the feelings and thoughts a book gave me, or maybe talking to my friends about it, then the book was worth reading; if I put it down and move straight to the next activity, it was entertaining and nothing more; finally, if I realise the book is making me a little bit more stupid while I am reading it, then I will put it aside before finishing it and tell all my friends never to open such a book ever in their lives.

For an AI, it’s technically impossible to write a book that transmits new emotions, experience, or philosophical truths. The AI can only pick that story that already exist and re-write it in a new flavour which it had selected from somewhere else.

Yet, there is still a point in using such tools for more technical things… like copy-editing!

As a matter of fact, I use and AI for my editing. It’s cheaper and it makes for a good spotter of simple grammar mistakes. Some AIs give you a good overview of your writing style and suggest you ways of improving it based on how good writers had written before you. It’s a great little luxury to have.

However, while writing my second book, Empathy for the Devil, I was going through a rough economic patch in my career. I got into a bad job and I could barely support my family. So, of course I did not hire any human editor for that, relying instead solely on the AI. I recently went through it again and I must admit I found so many inconsistencies and mistakes that only a human could spot: Some little plot holes here and there, a character speaking with the voice of another character for a while. These are all sort of things my human copy editor is good at spotting.

I felt a bad for my book. If I must be honest, I thought it was a great book that shows a lot of aspects from my childhood views of the world, seen from the lens of the more mature version of me. Still, the lack of human editing could be seen from miles away. It ruined it massively.

As chatGPT will gladly tell you, no language model AI can come up with plots or understanding the weaving of your story as you show it to them, their sole purpose is to replicate language, not understand its deeper meaning.

Human editors, on the other hand, prove their real value in understanding what you are going for when writing something. Really nailing down your philosophy and the point you want to make with your stories. They get into our brain and make sure what you have written reflects the reality of what you are thinking, in a way that even other people will be able to absorb. If your editors don’t do this, then you should probably fire them and hire better ones. I wouldn’t settle for less.

After all, in my experience good editors don’t even cost more than bad ones, they are just better at it and more passionate. Unfortunately, you’ll only find the good ones by trying hiring different people… It also helps to treat them nicely, trust me.

It is very probable that soon we’ll have another AI able to come up with plots and characters for you though. There are AI that make photographic images, replicate real people’s voices and all sorts of other things. The reality is that there is no aspect of writing that cannot be covered by AI, but even if you had all the AIs that could do all the heavy lifting for you, they won’t be able to come up with anything truly worth remembering.

This is the real limitation of AI.

The Real Danger For Our Society

What are we all so afraid about then? It’s done, AI are useless without humans. All great!

Wrong. Horribly wrong.

AI is something we should not take lightly, not because it’s going to make writers outdated, but because it’s going to empower all sorts of people with the ability to produce quality writing.

Let’s use and existing example: until social media happened to become a thing, people had to work their way into popularity (local or global) before anyone could listen to their voice. They had to prove they were authoritative and reliable and convince a whole lot of people before anyone could take them seriously.

Then the internet stepped in, bringing its new platforms to the table. All such platforms have lived unchecked and underestimated for years, hiding behind the idea that whatever company created them (and profited from it) just provided he platform and was not responsible for its content.

We all know the story, the wreckage that is social media is still very much a reality nowadays.

Suddenly, everyone became empowered to have their voice heard, which brought the consequence that fake news have surfaced from the darkest and funniest corners of your local bar crowd, to become and organised and politically significant force.

If one picks every weirdo of every bar of the world, suddenly they create a very large and loud group of idiots with both authority and popularity to convince other impressionable people of their ideas. The internet had given people a platform which empowered them and guess what happened? The worst of humanity used it to leech on other humans and their weaknesses.

They now sell you crystals that heal any illnesses, flood pages with articles about evil scientists who don’t want you to know the truth about vaccines, then sell you extremely over-priced sugar candies and call it medicine. There was even that one scumbag who convinced some parents to don’t give insulin to their daughter. You can guess what happened to the daughter. Difficult to tell if the parents were worthy of jail for their ingenuity. After all, wasn’t the platform the main catalyst of that death?

There is also a lot of legitimate speculation that some of the same strategies used to sell those products are being used to steer elections towards bad decisions. Some even fuelled by foreign unfriendly governments who understand the concept of ‘divide et impera’ better than most Hollywood writers.

I guess you are starting to connect the dots and understand what is the real danger of AI and why their usage must be somehow be controlled: they give the possibility to people to forge false information easily, allowing them to produce large amounts of false, misleading and potentially harmful content in no time. ChatGPT also agreed with this danger, continuously refusing to produce potentially harmful content for me. Although it’s reasonable to thing it was designed that way to protect its authors not much humanity overall.

To give an example, I once saw a demonstration of an AI that could replicate anyone’s voice. This exists and it’s available for people to use (just search it yourself) for different purposes. Still, the major concern of this, is the amount of forged words that could be produced and made public to discredit others.

If there is something that social media thought us as a society, is that it doesn’t matter if in the end something is real or not. Once something sensational had become viral, the popularity of it makes it its own truth. Even if there are tools to detect whether a certain voice, text or image was generated by an AI, the moment people start believing its real, it will stay real for many, many humans out there who are willing to believe in it.

Even chatGPT itself admits that AIs can be trained using false and misleading materials to generate potentially harmful content. Such content may bias them against or towards a race or a gender, towards ideas which are dangerous and unfounded. Which, sadly, are concepts that some humans still want to believe and support with all their souls.

As a matter of fact, AIs could also be used to generate photographic false or illegal images, which before required a huge amount of photo-editing and artistic skills, enabling a lot of bad people out there to fuel their toxic behaviours towards even more extreme and dangerous directions.

I would say that instead of worrying over losing your writing job, which is technically impossible unless you are kind of bad at it, false information is a much higher and imminent threat to our society.

A Great Opportunity For Most of Us

Oh no! AIs are terrible and we should abolish them all. Along with the internet and all social media!

Let’s all calm down and take a big breath. All those modern tools are ultimately just tools. It’s the humans that eventually make them bad. Those people would have existed with or without such tools.

While their ideas and actions are dangerous, it has also helped the better part of society to take action against them. Many positive actions and changes in our way of thinking have stemmed out of these same tools, and are ultimately helping us dampen the damage caused by those other folks.

The bias that technology is ruining our world is very much wrong. It has, in fact, consistently made it better. It’s not by chance that ‘divide et impera’ is a an ancient Roman concept, a couple of millennia ago, they were pretty successful in using it regardless of the internet or social media. It is also not by mistake that every authoritarian society who wants to oppress people in our era starts their oppression by limiting its population’s access to the internet. They do it in the hope that they won’t find out what the rest of the world (and science, actually) think of their behaviour.

Imagine some evil publisher of ultra-commercial books. Maybe they only make books about the magical power of crystals, or they are married to the same old romance plot with a minor twist of originality. Such publisher will surely flood our shelves with pointless AI books which are ultimately going to cause the atrophy of our brains.

They might even get rich with it. We don’t care.

Unlike most press would like you to believe, there is proof that no rich person has ever made a difference for the rest of us anyway. Neither more or less than poor people. Electricity was brought to us by a guy who talked to pigeons and died miserable. Vincent van Gogh never even knew that he was going to be a legend before he died. Polio, was eradicated thanks to a man that decided to stay humble in order to make his vaccine cheaper and more accessible.

Those people changed the world more than any journey to Mars ever could. All of them were relatively humble in life, despite their accomplishments. As a matter of fact, the loves of our lives are probably just as miserable as the average member of society; our children are not there to all become the future presidents and brain surgeons; our jobs are probably never making us rich or spiritually awakened; even winning the lottery will hardly contribute to anything meaningful to our lives.

However, art might help.

I say this, from the perspective of being a completely failed author from a market perspective, who is actually completely fine with his role in society. I have this discussion a lot with my friends and family, who all think it’s not worth writing and publishing if you’re not going to be a famous writer. I could not disagree more.

With my therapist, I recently realised what is the real power of art and why it is so important for us humans: she made me understand that we often have emotions which are not in touch with our tangible reality; they are in our subconscious and have no opportunity to emerge into the real world. Art, both practised and absorbed, is how we access those feelings and make them tangible enough to be able to experience them and eventually deal with them.

In my life, this role is filled by the act of writing.

Every single scene I write has a bit of my thoughts and feeling pouring out of my brain and crawling into these unexpected and fictional worlds of my imagination. They possess my characters and interact with situations that could never occur to me, only to make their ways back into my mind once I am done writing. The act of writing makes my feelings tangible, so that I can repossess them with enhanced consciousness and wisdom.

Top that with all the knowledge and awareness of the world that comes with the act of researching the science topics I want to expose, the opinions of all kind of people who are involved with those topics, the locations for my plots, the human behaviours to assign to my characters, some traditions of people I have never met in life and many ideas I have never thought of, and you’ll get an experience that is enriching every corner of my persona.

This is how I write, why I write and what I write about most of the time. Until it comes the time of publishing.

I like publishing my books because the act of editing and designing covers feels like a good foundation ritual of self respect: what I am making is a bunch of pages that contain a piece of my mind, my understanding of the world and my interpretation of it.

I rather save my money in having a good team of editors and make those pages the best they could be, than buy myself a new car or phone to brag about with my friends. It’s my mind we are talking about, it has been my best friend since the day I was born. It deserves a good cover at the very least!

Still, when it comes to sending my books to publisher, I feel like I am degrading my ideas, somehow as if I am pimping them to the highest bidder. It’s not the rejection itself that hurts. It’s the suggestion that I should be staining my stories with inputs that have the sole purpose of selling better that offends me. I cannot even blame such people for it: they live out of this industry! I don’t.

So, when I think about AI generated books and how they are going to flood our shelves by providing more commercial value than traditional books, I am honestly not hurt in the slightest. I feel glad.

I don’t write something someone else already written because it sells better. I write my own thoughts and feelings because it helps me in my own little life. To me it’s degrading to hear that I should be more like someone else, write more like this or that, be more commercial or whatever. If AI books are going to take over that slice of industry and make money to those publishers, resolve their economical crisis one way or another. I couldn’t be happier for them. Especially, if that means that the publishing industry will stop evaluating my writing based solely on my sales figures.

Human authors should write about their human experiences, about the ideas and feelings that stem out of their experience. They should not chase after sales and marketing to make a living. They should worry about sharing that part of themselves that might have a positive impact to their readers, while making sure they do it in the most well crafted, original way possible. One that screams: ‘This is me, only me. The author.’

Instead of trying to get rich by becoming a published author, make sure you vote for people that care about making society fairer for the most humble members of society. Fight to make sure that even with a normal day job, you can live a comfortable and fulfilling life. This fight ripples throughout every role in our society and ultimately makes art better and way more accessible.

I am a strong believer that this idea that art and philosophy are elitist parts of our society is merely a reflection of the fact that our society is terrible at what it should do. If we try to use art and literature to escape how miserable the normal life of the majority of people is, we can be sure we will never, ever, have any meaningful impact to society.

We will get rich, forget about those other suckers and cuddle our egos with the lie that we had made it to the top! All by ourselves… with only the help of multi-million corporations, tons of marketing, a whole team of editors trained to engineer every single line of text into selling content, a toy company that makes plushies of our characters, a fashion company for our favourite cosplayers, a videogame company to solidify our world building, and a lot more.

Sorry, I could have listed more but I was getting bored, honestly.

Nobody makes it to that point without exploiting other people. Research it if you want, I won’t bias by serving you my own proofs of that fact.

Fine, let’s say you don’t make it and you are still a sucker with a day-job. Your work probably won’t be the highest peak of your existence, but who cares?

Most of famous artists and philosophers were doing just normal jobs in their everyday lives, it’s a myth that once upon a time in ancient Greece there was a guy who was ‘just a philosopher.’ Even they had day jobs, some were soldiers, other politicians or merchants or teachers… they all had a life aside from their written and unwritten thoughts.

A very small minority of the people that impacted the world as great artists had dedicated their lives only and exclusively to their art. In my head I find it way easier to come up with examples of people that mattered to our society who weren’t living out of their craft, than people who were.

I cannot think of a professional philosopher of today that had made any meaningful contribution to our world. But I know that feminism, a philosophy that stemmed from popular upraise, affected our society deeply, and will keep doing it for the rest of history.

Same as any modern painters that sell their work for ludicrous amount of money: have you ever seen their work and realised your life was better for it? You tell me, but I am sure watching the lady with the pearl earring will give you the same sense of wonder it gives me. Now go out there and quickly search how rich and successful Vermeer was in life.

Personally, I hope that the ultra-commercial side of the industry will be taken over by AIs. Whether those things are written by humans or AIs, it makes absolutely no difference to me. I also hope that with ‘bad commercial writing’ covered by the AI industry, human authors can finally focus on producing memorable content instead. I would like to see literary agents not focusing on how much a book will sell, but on how impactful it is to humanity; or copy-editors that do their jobs to bring the voices of their authors to the next level, like every good one does, instead of doing that as a side gig to pay for their hope of landing their own successful book series.

Taking writing jobs to avoid a normal day-job is an alarmingly common reality among writers nowadays. Though as someone who writes and has a side job I wonder: if all you do is writing and more writing… where do you get the actual inspiration and topics for your stories? Are you sure you are just not trying to engineer your work the same way an AI might do for you?

Maybe not, which is fair, but surely we must all answer this question at some point. I know I did, which is why I am not even actively marketing my work at this stage. I think it’s important that my voice stays unbiased from the market needs, so that my writing can retain its meaningful role in my mental and emotional well-being.

I believe AI tools are best used to empower us to make art for our own sakes, bridging the skill gap that is required to turn our thoughts into tangible scenes and characters. Any form of art requires skill and dedication and a lot of grit to master until we reach the point that it becomes natural and useful as a form of treatment. In the past, this made it an extremely elitist thing to do. A luxury reserved to those privileged people who could afford becoming good at it instead of worrying to fight for their dinners.

Today, AIs are an extremely powerful tool to empower anyone to use art at their benefit. Instead of having to write our feelings word by word, note by note, brush stroke after stroke, we can all rely on an AI for help in filling our skill gap.

Things like art and philosophy could potentially become accessible to anyone. If you need an image to represent how you feel, you don’t have to take years of expensive painting classes to produce it, or even learn digital drawing. You can have the AI do the heavy lifting and be able to stare at that image for as long as you need it to process your thoughts and feelings.

There is not a better advice I could give to someone than to start writing, anything they have in mind, without wishing or wanting to be successful at the eyes of society. Society may like whatever story, or song, make someone extremely lucky, rich and famous. Though thinking that writing is a mere attempt at success it’s extremely disrespectful to the act of crafting art.

Writing is an enriching experience which everyone should have access to, it’s therapeutic and helps us make sense of the world around us, as well as our own psyche.

I’d rather live in a world where people don’t care so much about using art to inflate their egos and become a successful VIP. As rich people, neither you, me or any of our favourite ultra famous authors are likely to make any difference to this world.

As sensible people who share their thoughts, knowledge and experiences though art, however, we might even become a classic one day! Whether we used an AI or not to create our art. What is going to make a difference in your life and for society is not the getting rich part, but the act of writing itself.

Further Reading:

Interview with a Science Fiction Writer & Chat GPT

Sci-Fi Author Alessandro S. Scafato Discusses His Novels and Work as a Writer

Alessandro S. Scafato

About the Author:

I am a Physics Major and Doctorate in Biomechanics, currently working as a design engineer.

Scientific communication has been a personal passion for me since the beginning of my studies in science. In the past I volunteered in writing short science and technology articles and physics lessons for social media.

The eagerness for writing stories has been transmitted to me by my mother since childhood. Initially, I started writing because I needed a hobby, a good distraction to keep the brain from falling into the gloom of boredom and monotony. Hence, between working and video-gaming, I was craving a new project to follow.

Quasi-human is my first real attempt as sci-fi novelist. It began with the sole purpose of proving myself that I could make it. I chose a subject that made me comfortable, developed characters and plots as they came. I soon realised that the story was going somewhere, and it communicated a view of science that was both reliable and interesting. At that point, I knew I would aspire not just to finish the book, but also to publish it.

I genuinely hope my work will invite people to appreciate real-world science and its implication in our daily life.