ChatGPT may learn to write good stories... but will it be allowed to tell them? by Griselda Heppel

ChatGPT in action. Photo by Matheus Bertelli: https://www.pexels.com/ photo/laptop-office-working-internet-16094045/

Katherine Roberts’s experiment with ChatGPT got me thinking. As yet this AI writing tool can in seconds produce reams of prose, matching the prompts given, in a way that no one, adult or child, will ever want to read. So far, so good. (Or satisfyingly bad.)

But any complacency on the part of genuine flesh and blood authors is misplaced. As Katherine and others have pointed out, this bot learns quickly. We can’t rule out that, sooner or later, given enough original material from an inventive editor, say, it will be able to create a gripping, heart-warming tale with all the right kind of characters, and dialogue that doesn’t make your ears bleed. Something actually readable. Publishing houses will save heaps of dosh by eliminating authors altogether from the equation and we writers will, er, be written out of history. 

An alarming prospect, and not just for authors. However much ChatGPT improves, I find it hard to believe it will ever generate anything original or startling. Future generations are destined to be shortchanged by a stream of rehashes of the kind of stories and themes already out there. The most gripping, heartwarming tale will cease to grip or heartwarm as readers tire of the same elements presented in multitudinous different ways. I mean, how can a bot ever produce that fresh, original voice so desirable to an editor looking for new talent? 

But another aspect of this Disappearing The Author malarkey strikes me. As we know, it’s not enough nowadays for YA and children’s books to provide a cracking story with appealing characters. They must tick a number of other boxes as well. Characters - most importantly the hero - have to be from diverse backgrounds to reflect the richness of human experience, covering the spectrum of ethnicity, class, neurodiversity, identity, health, differently abledness etc. 

But - and here’s the conundrum no one as yet has been able to solve - if you, the author, don’t share your hero’s background, but have got there by research and imagination, you can stop right now. You are not allowed to write this book. It is not your story to tell. Since no one can live more than one life, it narrows down what an author is expected to write about to a very small canvas indeed. Which will not be published anyway because it isn’t diverse enough. QED.

American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins

A couple of years ago, a vast Twitter campaign attempted to prevent a novel centring the Mexican immigrant experience from being published, on the grounds that the author, Jeanine Cummins, wasn’t Mexican. In this case, the publishers took a commercial view, went ahead anyway and American Dirt became an instant bestseller. But in many other cases, online fury against an author achieves its aim and books are withdrawn. 

What then, if there is no author anymore? Rather hard to demand a bot be authentic to its ‘lived experience’ since by definition it doesn’t live and has no experience, only technique. 

So who will take responsibility for 1. Producing diverse books and 2. Ensuring their diversity matches their creators? Will it fall to the editorial staff in publishing houses to divide the story ideas among themselves, each feeding ChatGPT the criteria that matches their own background and experience, and if so, how will anyone know? I mean, how can we be sure that the story told in a ChatGPT created book is a story that particular book is allowed to tell? 

 Heavens. Here’s a whole new aspect of ChatGPT to worry about. 

OUT NOW 

The Fall of a Sparrow by Griselda Heppel

BRONZE WINNER in the Wishing Shelf Awards 2021 

By the author of Ante's Inferno  

WINNER of the People's Book Prize

www.griseldaheppel.com 

https://griseldaheppel.wordpress.com