The Shy Girl Controversy

I've been following the controversy surrounding the horror novel Shy Girl in horrified awe. I don't have any problem in principle with writing with AI. I care about how good the material actually is and not whether it was written in the old-fashioned way or prompted. I think that there is a lot of anti-AI prejudice out there that will not even consider anything that was created with AI. To take a random example from Goodreads, "There's no value for me to art that a human didn't create." In other words, no form of prompt engineering or editing outputted AI counts as creation.

The term "AI slop" was coined because of work that was (1) created with AI and (2) of inferior quality. As such, humans are every bit as capable of producing slop as AI is. And a low-effort AI prompt is almost guaranteed to produce slop. Nevertheless, some people use the word "slop" to tag anything that was created with AI, which is where I draw the line. Just as one example from 24 weeks ago on Instagram at the time of writing this, someone has written "All AI “art” is slop."

Even worse, some people discount art that they actually liked once they learn that it was AI-generated. There's a reviewer of Shy Girl on Goodreads who initially reviewed the book positively. She only changed her review to one star (in part) because she found out it was written with AI. "i am disappointed as i did really enjoy Mia's unhinged books...womp womp 👎🏽👎🏽".

I don't care whether Shy Girl was written with AI. I believe that that is a separate issue from whether the book is any good. Having said that, however, looking at people's reasons for believing that the book was written with AI certainly leads me to believe that the book is not well-written, hence AI slop proper. But I consider that to be more a reflection of the state of the art than anything intrinsic to AI. 

So, why should an author care about whether they create a book that was written with AI? Why should it make a difference to someone who wants to publish it? One reason I'll dig into here is that right here, right now, a purely AI-generated work cannot be copyrighted. 

Suppose that person P₁ writes manuscript M with AI. Suppose that M is really generated with minimal prompting from P₁. Now suppose that publisher Pb decides to publish M into book B, and then person P₂ copies and shares B on qBitTorrent. The only way that Pb can prevent this or penalise P₂ for doing this is to prove that M was the product of sufficient human intellectual effort and authorship. 

Now, in this hypothetical, M was a purely AI-generated work with only minimal prompting. That means that Pb has no enforceable copyright in B, leaving P₂ free to copy and distribute it with impunity. Hence, Pb will not touch such works with a 40-foot pole!

It is obviously possible for me to generate a story with minimal prompting. I have in the past generated such stories for my own amusement. At the time, it did occur to me to share them, but then what would have been the point? Other people are equally capable of generating their own stories for their own amusement, and they are probably better served for doing so. 

However, some other people do have a motive for publishing such a story: to make money. This is especially true for people in the Third World who have a new avenue to improve their lives. Of course, they will potentially make much less money from the AI-generated work if they cannot copyright it. So, they attempt to pass the work off as their own in order for the copyright to hold. 

That explains the creation of Shy Girl right there: Mia Ballard is somebody who either cannot or will not create a work that is predominantly her own to make money. So, she generates the work with AI and tells everybody she did it herself so that she can copyright it and make money from it. (DISCLAIMER: She denies this and blames a friend who supposedly edited the book with AI. So, this can only be an allegation.)

AI is an undeniably powerful tool. And there is plenty of evidence that almost any writer can use it to improve their writing and no good reason that they shouldn't do this. But one does not want to jeopardise one's living by falling prey to controversy that costs them a book deal. What one should actually do about that could be the subject of a separate blog post or series of posts.

Finally, I don't use AI to generate text for my blog posts. Not because I am opposed to this in principle, but because I want to copyright them. And it seems a hell of a lot easier to do this if I just write the damn text myself.