According to a recent poll from the writers’ advocacy nonprofit The Authors Guild, 13% said they do use AI, for activities like brainstorming character ideas and creating outlines.

The technology is a vexed topic in the literary world. Many authors are concerned about the use of their copyrighted material in generative AI models. At the same time, some are actively using these technologies — even attempting to train AI models on their own works.

…Anderson says he fed parts of his first novel into an AI writing platform to help him write this new one. The system surprised him by moving his opening scene from a corporate meeting room to a karaoke bar.

“And I was like, you know? That could work!” Anderson says. “I ended up writing the scene myself. But the idea was the AI’s.”

Anderson says he didn’t use a single actual word the AI platform generated. The sentences were grammatically correct, he says, but fell way short in terms of replicating his writing style. Although he admits to being disappointed, Anderson says ultimately he’s OK with having to do some of the heavy lifting himself: “Maybe that’s just the universe telling me that writing actually involves the act of writing.”

Read more:

Veltman, C. (2024, April 30). AI is contentious among authors. So why are some feeding it their own writing? NPR. https://www.npr.org/2024/04/30/1246686825/authors-using-ai-artificial-intelligence-to-write