DONIS CASEY: Write Errant

Here’s what’s been going on in Author World lately, Dear Readers: Like most of humanity, Author World (the residence of those of us who try to make money from our writing) has changed almost out of recognition in the past five years or so. Like all the other countries and communities, something happened following the pandemic and it wasn’t good. We stopped going to in person meetings and conferences for a couple of years at least, which affected our ability to network and schmooze. I mean, Zooming is a lot cheaper, which is great, but nothing beats real human contact for building personal relationships. As for me, now that I don’t have to worry about catching the plague every time I’m in a crowd, the economy has played havoc with my financial ability to spend a thousand to fifteen hundred dollars to travel to Bouchercon or Left Coast Crime or Killer Nashville or any of the dozens of other mystery-writers’ conferences in the U.S.

Then came AI. I’m sure you’ve read that many companies have scooped up copyrighted literature, music, art, with a steam shovel and used it WITHOUT THE CREATORS’ PERMISSION to train their AI databases. The most well known case is that of BARTZ vs. ANTHROPIC, a class-action suit against Anthropic for using millions of copyrighted books to train Claude. Nine of my twelve novels are included in the suit.

Anthropic is hardly the only offender, but the only class action suit I am yet involved in. I don’t use AI. First of all, I’ve been at the writing game for a long time and almost all my books were written and published long before AI was a thing. Second of all, I don’t even use AI for innocuous things, like asking when the War of 1812 was, because I don’t want there to be the slightest suspicion that I didn’t personally come up with and write every word in every story I’ve produced in the past, present, and future.

This is like a bear trap. If Claude, for instance, used an author X’s books to train on, and at some later date author X submitted an original new work to a publisher, who then ran the manuscript through Claude to verify it wasn’t written by AI – Claude (for instance) might say “This looks like 75% AI”, because it’s being compared to author X’s work that Claude trained on in the first place.

So. Book writers are being advised to save their early manuscripts so they can prove they created the work out of their own heads. Publishers are starting to require that authors swear they didn’t have AI write any or all of their books. I’m still writing, because like most other fiction writers, that’s what I do and I love it. But what I do to get my work before the public is a thing I have to think about long and hard now.

Very long story shorter, Anthropic settled for some billions of dollars, and both authors an publishers are supposed to be compensated for having their works purloined. The paperwork is all filled out. Now we wait.