'Prove you are not a robot' - Anne Rooney

 

My whole working life now is a giant CAPTCHA.

Publishing contracts generally now have a clause requiring that you don't use AI in preparing a book. I usually try to get the publisher to add an equivalent clause, that they won't use AI in preparing it either — not in editing, proofreading, indexing, illustrating or translating it. This last bit is to protect the jobs of other real people and to protect the quality of the book I've written but it does nothing much to deter them from using AI to write the book entirely and never let me near a contract. That is the real (personal) threat. I know illustrators and translators are ahead of me on death row, but as I write mostly non-fiction I'm not far down the list. It's easy to get AI to write non-fiction as long as you don't mind it being rubbish — or at best dull.

AI is good at dull. What it's not good at is innovation, humour, and finding/making unexpected links. It's not good at seeing a new angle. It's not good at knowing what is interesting, particularly to a child. It's not good at using language a child will enjoy, rather than just understand. It can write a book, but the book will not be fun to read. 

Occasionally, when I have completely finished a book, I will ask AI to write an outline for the book, just from a brief description of it, such as '50 interesting questions about astronomy for nine-year-olds'. So far, it has never come up with anything remotely interesting. It is a triumph of banality. I even got it to write a list of chapters to include in a book on AI  which I finished at the end of 2024. Although there was some obvious overlap (you do have to explain what AI is), it didn't even know what was interesting about AI. 

So now my working life consists of writing as unlike AI as possible so publishers still want me to write something. Maybe it's not just life as CAPTCHA. Maybe it's life as the wicked queen in Snow White. So far I'm still the fairest, but for how long? The more of my own books AI reads, the better it will become at copying me. This is why we don't want AI trained on our books. 

At the moment, keeping one step ahead makes me write better books. They have to be more imaginative, they have to be more up-to-date (ChatGPT's training ended a couple of years ago so I'm the only one with access to scientific discoveries that happened last year).  I think I can keep ahead for a while at least. But only as long as the public and publishers continue to value originality and quality and wouldn't rather just have something cheap and mediocre. 

Mirror, mirror, on the wall...

Anne Rooney

Out now: Weird and Wonderful Animal Facts
illustrated by Ro Ledesma, Arcturus 2024