Tag Archives: women writers

Scraping sounds better than stealing

The topic was AI. Today, the topic is always AI. Let’s be honest, whether we see it as a sophisticated search engine, a gushing editor or techno teacher, most of us are using it.

At this online writers’ group, we started by regaling each other with our experiences of dabbling in AI – those silly hallucinations and unnatural conversations where very answer ends in question. Of course, what was said in that meeting ‘stayed in the room.’ With that rule, I braced myself for writers admitting they used AI to help them create and edit their work. But no, a few of us admitted trying it as an editor while others sought its help with research. In my case – I’ll step outside the room – I’ve used it for editing passages of a novel I wrote years ago and was undergoing a major editing/rewriting. I would give Co-Pilot a few pages of a chapter that I felt was sagging and asked it to tighten it up. The Co-Pilot version rearranged some sentences to make them more concise, but in many cases more adjective laden – I’m not a huge fan of adjectives in creative writing. Let the verbs and metaphors do the heavy lifting I say. For me, this teaching tool showed me what I needed to look for in my writing that could be effectively rewritten.

The conversation quickly turned from how we were using it to how it was using us. One author moaned at how Anthropic ‘scraped’ seven of his novels without his permission or financial compensation. He is currently involved in a class-action lawsuit being spearheaded by the Society of Authors. Using a link now available on the SoA website, another novelist discovered one of her books had also been scraped. Outrage mixed with fear – what about the other AI platforms? How do we find out about them? And what about those unscrupulous so-called writers who are using AI – our books – to write formulaic tripe that will sell like hotcakes?

I probably didn’t make myself popular by mentioning that a publisher of one of my academic textbooks contacted me to ask my permission to use my book for training an AI platform. If I opted in, whenever my work is used, it will be referenced with a link to the publisher’s website, and I would receive a small royalty. Of course, I opted in. Really, it wasn’t for the money. My reasoning, which I shared with my fellow writers, is that at least I know my book draws on and refers to peer-reviewed studies, and the final draft of my book was peer-reviewed by two scholars in the field. I was pleased to contribute a reliable source to an LLM. Better this than the grey literature and internet folk linguistics that is being scraped as I write this blog.

No one commented. I was likely to be seen as a traitor.

A few days after the meeting I stumbled across a counterbalance to all this by Wired magazine’s editor, Kevin Kelly. He feels honoured to have his books included in AI training. Kelly says that in the not-too-distant future, ‘authors will be paying AI companies to ensure that their books are included in the education and training of AIs.’ That is, authors will pay for the influence of AI responses that include their works – a type of indirect advertising. Hard to believe this in the current climate.

The one word that didn’t come up at this writers’ meeting, which in hindsight I wish had, is ‘creativity.’ For me, it’s not so much about my published books being so precious. It’s more about the process. The creation and recreation of texts. In the words of Henry Miller ‘Writing is its own reward.’ No bot can take that experience away from me (to paraphrase an old song).

What I’ve been reading

Ocean Vuong is a brilliant writer – an utterly unique voice. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous was his first novel and is written as a letter from a Vietnamese American son to his illiterate mother, knowing she will never read it. Using poetic language and humour, the novel explores themes like identity, trauma and homosexuality. It also conveys a strong social message about the damage done to American families and communities by the opioid crisis. While so much of this novel is philosophically and poetically quotable, I’ll close with this gem:

‘Do you ever wonder if sadness and happiness can be combined, to make a deep purple feeling, not good, not bad, but remarkable simply because you didn’t have to live on one side or the other?’

I can’t imagine a bot producing that, let alone enjoying the act of creating it.

The Older Writer

Older than who or what? I don’t know. I’m leaving this a dangling comparative for now, something I would tell my students and editing clients not to do.

I’ve realized of late that I have become an older writer,to use a phrase that gets bandied about these days in writers’ networks. Though I see myself as middle-aged, who happens to possess a Senior Railcard, I’m not eligible for some writing competitions and funding grants reserved for the under 35s. The flipside of this is that I can enter competitions for the over 40s and others for the over 50s. I’ve not convinced these age categories help the underrepresented. They just decrease the number of possible applicants, making these smaller and usually less-noteworthy awards.

There’s also an underlining assumption that older writers write for older, more mature, audiences. Children’s literature and young adult fiction blows that theory out of the water. In my thirties and forties, most of my protagonists were in their twenties. In my fifties, I wrote about a nonagenarian. Sure, my writing style has changed somewhat over the years, and I would like to think that I’m a better editor and rewriter of my own work than I was thirty years ago. But when it comes to published writing, I usually can’t tell the age of the writer from their works.

Martin Amis once said that ‘Talent dies before the body.’ He supported his point by claiming that Roth, Nabokov, Updike, Joyce and Tolstoy ‘disintegrate before your eyes as they move pass seventy.’ The generalization is obviously ageist, and in typical Amis fashion tinged with sexism – where are the great women writers in his list? I don’t think he was implying women writers didn’t disintegrate with age the way men apparently do. It’s more likely women writers weren’t worthy of study or mention. Examples abound of older writers having their first novels published or winning literary prizes in their 50s and 60s. Margaret Atwood, Annie Proulx, Hilary Mantel and Annie Ernaux come to mind. All females for sake of balance.

Edward Said famously examined ‘late style,’ as he called it, of artists, composers and writers towards the end of their lives. He didn’t make judgements on the quality as Amis did. Said was interested in the commonalities in these later outputs, only to suggest that such works are about dreams unfulfilled, understandings never reached – a sense of being out of touch with tradition and popular trends at the same time. Different and reflective, rather than disintegrating talent. Being older than I was when I wrote my first short stories and essays, I accept this view and put a knot in the dangling comparative.