AI Policy.
I am a member of ALLi (the Alliance of Independent Authors) and of the Society of Authors (UK). They each provide guidance on AI usage and have suggested that authors should publish an AI policy.
Firstly, I write my own books. Me, myself, and I. Everything you love or hate about my stories and my writing style comes directly from my head.
As such, I am in the process of registering my English language novels with the Human Authored logo scheme, which is a joint project between the Society of Authors and the US Authors Guild. Below is a detailed explanation of all AI tools I use or have used in my writing process.
What tools I use and how I use them:
Grammarly—I use Grammarly to help with spelling and grammar. I am very dyslexic and sometimes even Grammarly doesn’t know what I’m trying to spell!
Wispr Flow—I use Wispr Flow to dictate some of my writing. I find Wispr Flow super helpful (and it is the first dictation software that understands my Scottish accent), but it does have major limitations. It doesn’t really format anything; I end up with a wall of text, and when I first started using the software, I was spending more time adding punctuation and paragraph breaks than it would have taken to type it in the first place. Dictating also has its limitations. It’s excellent for a speedy first draft, but when I dictate, I find I leave out so much detail. I always edit by typing. The vast majority of my writing is still typed rather than dictated; however, dictation does help me as a dyslexic author.
Claude—I use Claude for two main purposes:
- To help me learn the Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS) rules. It wasn’t until very recently that I even learned what a style guide was! I purchased the CMOS book. But again, I’m dyslexic, so I edit as much as I can with Grammarly and my CMOS book, but when I’m not sure, I give Claude the passage I’m working on and instructions to point out grammar errors and use CMOS to explain them to me. I have learned so much, and my writing, I feel, has improved greatly.
- I use Claude to insert punctuation and paragraph breaks for the wall of text I end up with when I dictate with Wispr Flow. It is not creating or rewriting the prose; it is formatting the dictation into a readable draft. It’s a purely time-consuming admin task that Claude handles, saving me hours I can use to begin editing the dictation and writing my stories.
ChatGPT—I use ChatGPT for marketing, business planning, and research. ChatGPT can help me think through the next step I want to take in my publishing business and research things I want or need to know for my stories or business. ChatGPT can be very useful, but it sometimes just makes stuff up. I always double-check anything it tells me before I use the information.
PAST USAGE:
My thoughts on AI have changed over time as I’ve thought about it and learned more, and I reserve the right to continue to think and learn and allow my thoughts to change as I do, but be assured that if my thoughts or practices change, I will update this policy!
I have previously used AI for the following:
- Character images for marketing such as TikTok posts and newsletters
- Place holder eBook cover
- The Brazillian Portugese translation of Claimed by the Storm
Why I previously used AI for these purposes and why I choose not to now:
I used it because, at the time, I couldn’t afford human-made illustrations. I reasoned with myself that it was purely marketing, I wasn’t selling the images, and because I couldn’t afford to pay a human illustrator, I wasn’t taking anything away from anyone. I also used self-edited AI images as a placeholder for an eBook cover until I could afford to have a graphic designer produce one. Admittedly, I hadn’t done much thinking about AI at that time. But since I’ve started using a human illustrator, there really is no comparison. Human-made illustrations cost thousands of times more per image and take weeks to produce instead of fractions of a second, but they are so much better. I don’t think I’d use AI-generated images again if I went back in time and knew what I know now. I’m much happier paying for a real illustrator. The images of my characters you see today are all created by talented human artists. I’ve been working with a few artists for a while now, and I plan to keep doing so.
I used AI to produce a Brazilian Portuguese translation of Claimed by the Storm and I also tried it for Italian too for a short time before removing that eBook from Amazon.
The translation industry is changing dramatically. There seem to be three ways of thinking: no AI whatsoever, AI all the way, and AI assistance.
Translators have used software to help translate books for a long time. I’m not opposed to qualified, experienced translators using AI in their process to help with their work. If AI allows a translator to work faster and produce the same quality of translations, I think that’s fine. What matters to me is that a knowledgeable, talented person is doing the work and AI is just another tool.
However, this is not the process I took for the Brazilian Portuguese translation of Claimed by the Storm. I used an AI called Scribeshadow to translate the novel, and then I paid a couple of bilingual beta/proofreaders to read and correct it before I published.
I did not know and appreciate at the time how much skill was involved in translation, especially for fiction, especially for an author like me. As a Scots and English speaker, I naturally mix both languages in my daily speech and mix both languages’ grammar and vocabulary in my writing; it means my writing voice is unique, not only because of my proclivity for long sentence structures. Translating one of my novels requires a translator who not only understands English and the target language but also understands Scots, or can notice when Scots vocabulary or grammar structures are used and translate accordingly. I didn’t appreciate this when I first started looking into translations and trying out different options. Scribeshadow is proving extremely popular among self-published authors for a reason; compared to a human translation, it is about 100x cheaper, and many authors trust the translation without any human checking, likely because they write in standard English and because even a bilingual beta reader isn’t cheap.
The Brazilian Portuguese version of Claimed by the Storm is still available in eBook on Amazon. It is regularly read, and it feels wrong to take it away from readers, who have expressed they are happy with the translation quality but I don’t plan to translate the 2nd book in the series so perhaps I should remove the first, I will think on this more.
I do not plan to use AI in book translations again, and instead I am open to licensing the translation rights to publishers, as at this time the upfront cost and work involved in translations do not make economic or time sense for me.
My thoughts on AI generally:
I believe AI should be used to help people, not to replace humans or human creativity. It should be used for admin, learning, and repetitive tasks that couldn’t previously be automated.
I believe that AI should be regulated. I think professional bodies for authors should have thorough AI policies that discourage, or preferably prohibit, the use of AI to generate writing for their members. The writing and creation of stories should come from people.
I am against AI-generated stories and feel that ALLi should take a stronger stance against AI-generated writing. I am happy with the work the Society of Authors is doing with the Human Authored logo scheme.
I understand that this policy is rather long, and if you’ve read this far, thank you. I wanted to add that I feel AI shouldn’t become a crutch for people. Writing and creating stories takes time; no author begins as a good writer or storyteller. We all start out quite rubbish, really, but it’s the process of writing and writing and writing more and of reading and reading and reading more that makes us better writers and storytellers. We can’t offload all our thinking and creativity to AI. The world of art will become a homologous, boring, soulless place if we do. We’re at the start of a new technological boom and it’s easy in our world of dichotomy to fall into extremes of thinking, but it isn’t helpful. We have a choice to make: does AI forever decimate our creativity and the ability of artists to make a living and express what it means to be human, or does it become a genuine tool that helps us but doesn’t create for us?
Stories are how we experience and understand the world. The telling of stories is uniquely and innately human. It should remain such.
I hope that by listing all the AI tools I use or have used and what I use them for, and sharing my own thoughts on the subject, I have answered any questions you, as a reader, may have.
All my books I write myself; they’re imperfect because I’m human.