My day job is with a web development company and while the coders here find AI useful, my writer colleagues are less enthused. Here’s how I’m experimenting before making a decision.

Online community discussions often center around plagiarism, particularly in regard to how “training” the AI platform uses the published works of human authors and artists. The claim is that AI learns to copy the style of an author or artist so well that it can regurgitate “new” content similar to what the human might create.

And you don’t have to be particularly famous for someone to AI-regurgitate your work. For instance, I just read a series of posts by authors who found AI-generated study guides for sale alongside their original works, and five fraudulent books were attributed to blogger Jane Friedman last year that she never wrote.

KDP, the self-publishing arm of Amazon, has policies in place for AI, but you may be surprised to know that they don’t exactly forbid it. Here’s what they have to say:

We require you to inform us of AI-generated content (text, images, or translations) when you publish a new book or make edits to and republish an existing book through KDP. AI-generated images include cover and interior images and artwork. You are not required to disclose AI-assisted content. We distinguish between AI-generated and AI-assisted.

In the writer groups I monitor, nearly every day someone is grumbling that Amazon has shut down their KDP account for crossing the line on AI-generated content. Usually, it’s for using AI-generated images on the cover, but sometimes the book content is flagged. Tools have been developed to analyze and detect for the use of AI. Commonly, teacher’s tools check for students who are trying to avoid writing their own assignments, although they aren’t foolproof. No doubt many an essay has been altered enough to pass inspection and we all know at least one innocent student who was accused of plagiarism following an AI screening.

AI-assisted is different and most of us have been using tools like these for years. If you write with Grammarly or another spelling- and grammar-checker, that is a form of AI assistance. As I mentioned earlier, software engineers frequently ask AI to help them write tricky bits of code, and WordPress offers all kinds of AI plug-ins for website building. Even the Authors Guild says that AI technologies “hold promise to help writers as a tool to edit, refine, or assist in ideation, brainstorming, or outlining.”

The first volume of Agatha Annotated took years, so getting assistance seems like a good idea. I’m just not sure how AI can help me. I did try a little experimenting, however.

Christie frequently used fictional names for factual places and businesses, such as the “Blitz” hotel which all her readers would recognize as the Ritz hotel. It’s a kind of shorthand for understanding what sort of place the Blitz might be. One business that I suspected had such a shorthand name was “Mortaulds” from The Mystery of the Blue Train, but though I researched mightily, I couldn’t figure it out at all.

Thinking AI-assisted research might be more thorough, I asked ChatGPT for help as a test. Here’s what it replied:

In Agatha Christie's "The Mystery of the Blue Train," Hercule Poirot mentions "Mortaulds" in relation to the character of Ruth Kettering. The reference is to the Mortauld family, who are wealthy and influential in the story. Ruth Kettering, one of the central characters, is the daughter of Rufus Van Aldin, who married into the Mortauld family.

It goes on about how the Mortauld family background is essential to unraveling the plot, but that’s all nonsense, of course. Mortaulds is where Mrs. Harfield invested her money which she then left to Katherine Grey at the very beginning of the story.

Fortunately, I did not rely on ChatGPT when I was researching Agatha Annotated. Instead, I found a financial expert who immediately recognized the play on words. Perhaps AI can help me find more experts, but I don’t think I will rely on it for research.

So the jury is still out for me on whether AI is a useful tool or not. I’ll keep watching to see what other authors are doing with it, but I suspect it will be old-fashioned, time-consuming research for me!

Photo by cottonbro studio