I recently read an email from a respected author friend of mine, Autumn Birt. With her permission, I’m posting here what she shared. Since I’ve copied and pasted from an email, the formatting may not be the best, but I’m an editor, not a website designer.

I joked in my last email that you knew Jesper and I are real authors because of how long it is taking us (me, especially!) to get you book 2 of the Arcane Magic series. That lead to me wondering if AI books bothered you. So I had to ask!   The answers were VERY consistent. • 48% said they want to only read books by real authors • 36% said they haven’t read any AI books and don’t plan to • 8% said they found AI books to be poor quality • NO ONE said they liked AI books or were interested in it. I really appreciate that you support real authors writing books from the ideas that grow in their minds and soul. At least, I’m going to go with that. Otherwise, maybe only readers who don’t want to read AI books answer my survey questions?  I suppose that is a possibility, but I think in this case I can only go with what I know for certain. And besides the responses above, I had a couple of readers respond with a really interesting question. “How do I know if a book is written by AI?” That is such a good question! And one that is so much harder to answer than I expected. Really. I actually started to dig into this and thought I’d share a few articles and we’d all be so much more knowledgeable about AI writing. Nope. Well, on the surface, it could be that simple. Amazon asks authors if their book is written wholly or partially by AI. And if an author is honest and they used AI, they can select this or put within the title or book meta data that it was written with AI. So, you’d know. And I think that is fair. But not everyone is fair or honest, are they? Romantasy authors Lena McDonald and K.C. Crowne have both gotten caught with AI prompts in their books. Which means that not only did the use AI to write their books without letting readers know, they also didn’t bother to proofread their books before publishing them. There is just so much wrong with this! And those are just two authors who got caught. Who else has been more careful but using AI without disclosing it? How do you tell? You could run text through an AI checker such as Gramarly and Quillbot. But, of course, these are AI tools being used to find AI text, which was trained by feeding the AI real authors work. Soooooo…. yeah, some authors have tested these “tools” and had their 100% self written works flagged as AI.  So what is left? There are a lot of “indicators” that get spread around on social media. These include:• Over use of em-dashes (—) • Repetitive or formulaic writing • Lack of depth and insight • Monotonous tone • Inconsistent storytelling (logic gaps or ideas that don’t progress naturally) • Overuse of generic jargon or metaphors These can be indicators, but not necessarily clear ones. Some mimic “errors” made by novice authors. Some are wishy-washy? What is overuse of emdashes? Any? I hope not—I use them! Occassionaly…  I did find one article that I’ll share. It is from a reader who purchased a book they referred to as a “word salad.” It led them to delving into telltale signs of AI generated books. Check it it out if you want to find a few more ways to verify what you are about to read is written by a real human.

Delve into reader Steve Fenton’s search for clues to AI writing. Read Article

I hope this helps. I admit it isn’t an exhaustive list and there really is a lot of interpretation. I’ve seen real authors accused of being or using AI. I’m sure there are AI books that have enough of a “clean-up” done to them they would pass for real writing.  It is a strange time we live in and are moving further into. Now that AI exists, the only way to get rid of it would be a very large electromagnetic pulse that wipes out my electronics. Would you lose your kindle/e-reader if it meant no more AI (and email and the internet and…)? Ooof.  I’ll let you ponder a world without modern electronics much less one without AI. Maybe go and read a good book where such problems don’t exist (and where heroines and heroes might just swap whatever trial they are facing for our rather mundane issues)?  In fact, I’m going to get back to editing just such a book… Until next time, happy reading!

Autumn & Jesper

To be clear, I think AI can be useful, and I recommend it for proofreading. But you cannot rely on it too much because, frankly, it gets things wrong. And apparently, it can leave writing prompts in your book if you don’t carefully reread it.

Anyway, I hope you find the article as interesting as I did.