What happened when I tried writing a book using AI | Latest Tech News
Page against the machine.
It’s 9 p.m. on a weeknight and, like many stumped aspiring fiction writers, I’m using ChatGPT to pen a sci-fi short story. The premise? Survivors fleeing an Earth that’s been rendered a post-apocalyptic hellscape by AI data facilities, nuclear struggle, and environmental degradation.
They escape to a parallel planet free of death and strife, only to uncover that this so-called utopia is a place where life no longer has that means. This would possibly sound high-concept, but it’s a cakewalk for my cyberscribe, which churned out a vivid, 8,000-word short titled “The Better World” in just hours with only a few revisions.
In one surprisingly poignant passage, a refugee named Mara displays on her deceased dad while gazing upon the dying Earth from space: “Now the ship was rising and there was no one left on Earth who could remember the sound of his laugh.”
Philip Ok. Dick, eat your coronary heart out.
The cowl of the AI book, “Better World,” created using ChatGPT.
He’s a writing machine
Tim Boucher churns out a number of books a week using AI. Courtesy Tim Boucher
AI-assisted books are seeing a growth time, but their proliferation has spawned a literary backlash, with even authors who deny using the tech getting caught in the crossfire. This summer time, first-time novelist Jerry Falade had his staggering $2 million book deal cancelled by his brokers under suspicions of AI use — allegations he vehemently denied.
My manuscript muse is Tim Boucher, a prolific creator from Quebec, Canada, who has penned 125 books in a 12 months — roughly two per week — with the help of ChatGPT, Claude and other large language fashions.
Some of these, obtainable in E-book type, ranging from $1.99 to $4.99 online, have been created and printed in just a few hours.
Boucher devised these cyborg works, which include between 2,000 and 5,000 phrases and as many as 250 pictures, as a considerably Meta commentary on tech and society, like an Andy Warhol of authorship.
For Boucher, the purpose isn’t just to produce best-selling literature at lightspeed — the endeavor has collectively earned him only a few “low thousands,” he claims — but to experiment with what storytelling could be.
“I’m not just trying to replace a faster way to do genre fiction,” he told The Post. “I do the project that I find the most interesting given what’s available.”
A book cowl for “Wormwood” by Tim Boucher. Courtesy Tim Boucher
Not figuring out what passages are machine-made is an element of the enjoyable.
“On the back, there are two stickers: one says artificial intelligence and one says organic intelligence,” said the Quebecer, including that he doesn’t disclose “which part is which.”
Despite his transparency, Boucher confronted backlash from social media customers and even authors like Pulitzer-winner Michael Chabon, who consider AI books are destroying literary integrity.
“There were 48 or 72 hours where it was just people swearing at me nonstop and saying really hostile things,” said the Canuck, describing the response after confessing to his controversial pastime in 2023.
Boucher claims that by-product writing long predates Chatbots, declaring, “I didn’t invent unoriginal art in writing. People have been doing human slop for forever.”
Is the pen mightier than Claude?
Ethics however, artificially enhanced works are seen as a menace to human authors.
A current examine of 14,419 self-published genre-fiction books offered on Amazon between 2023 and 2026 discovered that 20% contained substantial swathes of AI-generated textual content, including practically 1,000 where over 90% of the prose was flagged as AI-generated.
Automating authorship can show profitable. While Boucher claims his tech-experimental works are presently more of a facet hustle, one unidentified creator generated an estimated $1.7 million in gross sales from eight AI-infused books in a single 12 months, according to a September MIT examine.
Unlike Boucher’s disclosed books, many of these technological tomes are deliberate ripoffs of authors’ current works, designed to hornswoggle unsuspecting prospects, often mimicking the titles, creator names or content of current works
Rasenberger claimed that AI-generated books fall short because they will’t seize the “human condition.” deberarr – stock.adobe.com
“A lot of books that are on Amazon are, we call them scammy books or zombie knockoffs,” Mary Rasenberger, CEO of the NYC-based Author’s Guild, told The Post. “They’re deliberately intended to steal sales from a particular book.”
Rasenberger says these literary impostors can exhibit telltale indicators, including flowery prose that “makes no sense,” writing that begins coherently but devolves into a “jumble,” and passages that repeat or contradict themselves.
Rasenberger lamented that robo-slop is “drowning the marketplace” and making it “harder to find the good human-written books.”
To defend prospects from unwittingly shopping for AI-heavy books, the Author’s Guild is lobbying for legal guidelines requiring publishers and online retailers to be more clear about AI use.
The Author’s Guild has even taken legal motion against major AI companies such as Anthropic for using copyrighted books to practice their fashions without the creator’s permission, notably introducing contract publishing clauses that pressure them to get permission, and proposing that consenting authors obtain up to 90% of the training licensing income.
“We think it’s so important to have labeling so that readers can distinguish and total transparency around how much you’re using,” said Rasenberger. “It’s one thing to use AI to research. But did AI create the characters? Who wrote the text? How much of the text?”
Not the a-slop-calypse
Boucher, for one, doesn’t consider that using the instrument invalidates its authenticity.
“I’m still executing my creative vision, but that’s no longer art because I incorporated an out-of-bounds tool,” he snarked.
Not to point out that using AI requires lots of creativity or onerous work, per Boucher, who’s been honing his course of since 2022.
The cowl for Boucher’s “The Complaining Wizard,” a book Boucher created using artificial intelligence. Courtesy Tim Boucher
Instead of copy-pasting prompts into ChatGPT, the Canuck begins with a title and a temporary written idea, and then often makes use of image turbines like Stable Diffusion or Midjourney to storyboard his world.
He then enlists Chatbots to flesh out characters and storylines, producing passages in chunks, modifying them by hand and working them back through AI until happy.
“I see the creative act as something that’s happening a step or two back,” he said. “It’s the selection, the arrangement, the prompting, the editing, the original inputs that are human.”
Contrary to fears that AI reliance causes mental atrophy, Boucher said his course of has made him a “better writer” by educating him construction and prose he won’t have stumbled upon on his own.
Machine studying
The cowl of “The Eleventh Watch” by Tim Boucher. Courtesy Tim Boucher
But might AI truly improve my writing, or is it just the high-tech equal of getting another person to do your homework?
I put Boucher’s methodology to the take a look at via an abridged experiment without the illustrations or E-book meeting.
For somebody technologically illiterate, the programming facet already felt like a “Good Will Hunting” math downside. It started with importing recordsdata named manuscript-generation.md, gated-manuscript-generation.md and namer.md, which set up the writing protocols and conventions for naming characters, locations and other fictional components.
My spartan immediate called for a 5,000-word story about people fleeing a dystopian planet to some far-flung Valhalla light-years forward in science and every part else, only to discover that life has no that means because every part from plants to people is renewable — or so they assume.
With a number of revisions only a few traces long, the AI collaborator ultimately turned this imprecise premise into a 14-course-meal.
“I didn’t invent unoriginal art in writing,” said Boucher while defending his craft. “People have been doing human slop for forever.”
kavzov – stock.adobe.com
The protagonist, Mara, is an orphan dwelling among 38 refugees in a ship’s hull, scavenging animals for food and burning pc elements for heat.
Among them is Elias, a self-proclaimed Messiah who guarantees salvation in a place called the “Better World,” where rivers run clean and people “enter hospitals and leave well.”
A silver craft, piloted by Rusk, a distinctly disinterested inexperienced alien, ferries them to an “Avatar”-esque Elysium of pristine forests and translucent, multi-legged creatures.
Housing, food and medical care are free: “the machines make plenty.” Animals, plants and even loudspeakers restore themselves virtually immediately, releasing residents to litter with abandon and fly through the trees without a care.
The society’s darker logic comes into focus when its chief, interrupted mid-speech, vaporizes the offender with a ray gun. The sufferer promptly rematerializes and complains.
“They have abolished death,” Elias whispers. “They’ve abolished the objection to killing,” Mara replies.
Judgment day
This NY Post author discovered the AI-assisted manuscript concurrently deep and by-product. DC Studio – stock.adobe.com
Bringing my novella to life took a few drafts. I needed Earth to be more dystopian and death-filled to give the refugees emotional incentive and have them be enamored with the “Better World” before noticing the cracks.
I also discovered it a bit by-product — a Frankenstein quilt of “Planet of the Apes,” “Terminator,” and “Idiocracy” — but then again so was my premise.
My GPT collaborator did produce some wonderful turns of phrase, notably describing the view of the dying Earth from space as resembling “burnt cloth embroidered with fires.”
But for every profound assertion, there was a passage overstuffed with descriptors, maybe overwhelmed by my parameters and enter.
For Rasenberger, AI writing will never approximate its creators’ counterpart as it doesn’t expertise “the human condition.”
“I think sometimes these AI developers confuse, they think that our brains are just like computers, and that part of our brain does that kind of stuff,” she said. “But a lot of the way humans relate to the world is through our senses and through our emotions.”
She added, “AI can try to mimic that, but it’s never going to have that soul.”
For me, the cardinal sin of farming out writing to AI was sacrificing the “writer’s block” I discovered so important to the artistic course of. I consider the wrestle to formulate phrases is how you sharpen swords and how diamonds are fashioned under stress.
Would I end up just like the aliens in a “Better World,” changing into dumber and more callous as technology advances?
Coincidentally, a 2025 MIT examine discovered that extreme use of ChatGPT for writing can negatively affect cognition and essential considering, although — echoing Boucher’s level — hybrid usage might probably show helpful as effectively.
Boucher sees a future where human writers will turn into “obsolete” for sure sorts of informal studying where leisure and info are enough, but not for other artwork types that society holds to a “different standard.”
“I come up with a cool product that fits into my world and people are interested in it and they like it and they buy it, how wrong is it?” He said. “I think we have to evaluate what each of these things is.”
Ultimately, it might appear that AI scribes work best when handled as a software, not a crutch.
My mechanical muse even appeared to sound the alarm on AI overreliance in this shockingly self-aware passage from “A Better World” while describing the destruction of Mara’s home planet.
“There had been a time when the computers were said to be thinking on humanity’s behalf. Their owners cleared whole forests to build more of them, dammed rivers to cool them, and buried towns under the transmission lines. Every year the machines promised to use less power for each thought….When the power grids finally failed, the computers continued to consume what they could, running on private reactors and the last of the rivers. The people who had ordered them built had already gone somewhere else.”
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