The publishing company Hachette announced last week it was pulling Shy Girl by Mia Ballard because it had been flagged as possibly AI-written. Ballard’s defense is that she wrote it herself, then “an acquaintance she hired to edit the self-published version of the novel had used A.I.”
This reminds me of the occasional cop-out that “it wasn’t me, it was my ghostwriter!” After televangelist Pat Robertson wrote the viciously anti-semitic New World Order (the Illuminati composed of international Jewish bankers are gaining control of the United States!) one of his associates told a reporter that it wasn’t Robertson at fault — he has the book’s ghost-written. Which I can believe. However if it’s Robertson’s name on the book (or Hilary Clinton’s, or Jeff Bezos, or whoever’s), he owns it. Period. I’m also quite sure if a ghostwriter had put anything in print that Robertson genuinely objected to — endorsement of gay rights or feminism, say — it would not have seen the light of day.
According to Shy Girl readers the book’s AI tells include “generic and confusing metaphors and repetitive phrasing.” If that was the work of Ballard’s editor, why didn’t she notice? Did she accept them without thinking? Did she think they were an improvement? No way does she come out of this looking good.
Stepping away from that specific case, I’m reminded of a book I read some years back, Laura Shapiro’s Something From the Oven. It’s a food history that recounts how starting in the 1950s, the food industry embraced the idea that cooking was becoming passé. Why would anyone want to put in the work or endure the kitchen mess when modern science had supplanted cooking. All you needed was a condensed soup in a can. Or dehydrated meals. Or frozen meals. Or TV dinners. Or microwavable meals. A lot of food kit advertising falls into this vein.
The death of cooking would have worked out great for the industry: more processed is more profitable. Instead, people kept cooking. Today it’s perfectly possible to eat healthy without ever cooking (expensive, but possible): frozen meals, food kids, DoorDash to deliver from restaurants. People still cook. A lot of people enjoy it.
That’s not a putdown of people who use short cuts. I use occasional microwave meals and I buy bread in between baking sessions. I have recipes for veggie burgers but why bother when there are perfectly good premade veggie burgers? The rest of the time I cook because I enjoy it. Yes it’s more work but that’s part of the satisfaction. It’s fun and rewarding.
AI companies want us to believe that writing is a burden. Why not employ their LLMs, then we can take the effort off our shoulders? It’s just like when society replaced the horse-and-buggy with the car — free the human horses! Except we are not horses tied to a wagon against our will; it’s more akin to people who choose to run marathons. Yes, it’s less exertion or strain to get in a car; doing it easy isn’t the point. The challenge is part of the fun. Miranda Yaver makes a similar point.
The food industry was never able to kill cooking. Convenience food wound up serving our needs instead. Let’s hope the same is true with LLMs.
In other news:
AI as a tool for worker surveillance.
LLM art steals from others. Which makes it ironic an AI artist is outraged people are stealing his work.
The Toddler administration’s goals for LLMs are apparently bad ones. Perhaps more AI deepfake videos of their political enemies?
