Book-Tok & Book-Tube “Gotcha’s”: Authors and A.I. – The Debacle Continues.

Hello there, friends and fans!

I’ve been watching a few book reviewer channels on YouTube lately, and I’ve notice a few of them criticizing some authors who have fallen foul of the ire of their readers because they’d been accused of using AI to write their books. Things like leaving AI prompts and AI responses in the finished, published works they sell from Amazon, for example – but that’s just the tip of this ugly iceberg.

There are also a few authors who have been caught-out stealing fan-fic’s of their works – and sometimes even completely unrelated fan-fics – and just changing a few details here and there, and publishing these under their own names.

As a life-long author who’s been at the writing gig in the old-school sense for the better part of three decades now, let me just tell you – I find that idea disingenous and outrageously offensive! The idea of using an AI tool to “write” my own characters – the ones created within the sacred spaces between my ears – and then presenting that as my own work – and selling it for a quick buck – is just… horrifying!

I can only imagine that anyone who does that isn’t a serious author, and is only going through the motions to make money out of it as quickly as possible, and not for the love of it – as I do!

Let’s chat about that for a minute – come on, have a seat!

AI has been around for a good while now, hasn’t it? The better part of about three years, if memory serves. I first started using AI myself some years back – just out of curiosity, after a former friend – who was a motoring journalist and podcaster – demonstrated it to me, and showed me just how useful it could be. And yes, that’s the point of AI tools, isn’t it? To be useful.

I found it came in handy for doing more detailed, comprehensive internet searches and collating information into a coherent report I could work from. I was amazed when he showed me how it could quickly draft a number of short blurbs to use in social media posts to promote my books – even when it sometimes (often) got everything about my books quite wrong! However, that was the part that caused me to stop using it – the fact that it got everything about my books wrong! I just need to point out that it took me years (at the beginning) to even trust the spelling and grammar check in Word for example, and even using a grammar-checking and alternative text suggestion tool I bought on a CD in about 2007, seemed a bit like “cheating” to me, so it’s still lying in a CD folder somewhere, pretty much unused!

The best part of the AI tools I’ve seen over the last three or so years, is the image generation function. This has come in very handy for making creative projects I use at work, i.e. generating cartoons and other elements like buttons, banners etc. to build into posters, flyers, invitations, newsletters and the like. On top of that, there were other tools, like Suno, which I use occasionally to make music tracks for my YouTube channel videos, and for book plugs and the occasional music video – which has been a lot of fun!

Now to be fair, I have experimented with AI just to see what it would do when asked to generate a few interesting scenes between characters, and the results have been nothing short of atrocious! It’s like reviewing something written by a ten-year old child tryin to sound grownup! And here’s the thing – even IF it had come out “exactly like” my own previous work, I would never have tried to use it that way. You see, that would defeat the entire point of my writing – to have fun doing it! That’s right – I write for the enjoyment of it, not because I figure, well, if I pushed out a couple books in a series, I could make a lot of money out of it! (I’ve been around as an indie author long enough to know that’s all bullshit anyway. There’s no money in writing these days, unless you’re one of the very lucky, very few – or a politician who is either loved or hated with money to pay some ghost-writer to peddle some political crap that automatically makes a bestseller list. So, no.

You might well wonder how have I used AI in my craft as a writer? In writing? Here’s the answer – not at all. Every word, every concept in all of my books was crafted from the depths inside this mortal brain! It’s all entirely original. I can’t believe that we’re living in a bizarre reality where I even feel I need to actually clarify this.

What I DID use AI tools for, was to generate high quality cover images, and in a few cases, illustrations for posters, ads for my books and for articles about my books and series and so on. I believe I’ve explained thoroughly why I opted to do so previously (The Artist’s Lament: Is It Really AI’s Fault?, Udio vs Suno: Which one is better? ), and I don’t think I need to go into massive detail about that here. I am not wealthy and I don’t make that much off the sales of my books anyway, so I can’t spend $$$ on paying someone to create cover images for me. Besides, where’s the sense in that, if all they’re going to do is use some paid stock image service to do so anyway – and use images that everyone else could in theory, also pay to use? There are free image services too, and I did use these previously – but there are quite a few cases where I’ve seen the same elements used in other people’s covers. Having a unique cover image is really better, isn’t it? AI image generators are free, so ’nuff said as far as I’m concerned. But all that is really beside the point of this article – which is that there is something rather “witch huntery” about this whole business.

You see, it’s now not enough to have found proof that author A, B or C is using AI to write their books for them – the trend is now to just look for something, anything, which could insinuate that an author – any random author – *might* be… and that’s bad enough, isn’t it? And then you have allegations and ruined reputations – and embarrassed authors who *may* be innocent and have relied on the services of beta readers and editors (who might have used AI to change the text without informing the author) making foot-shuffling explanations in long-winded social media posts. The truth is, these are difficult, complicated times – and there’s simply no way to know what the truth really is, is there?

With all the people running around accusing authors of using AI to write their books for them, is that in one video I watched, one pointed out the publication dates of a series of books by the same writer, and using the fact that they were published around 6 months apart to indicate that they were *definitely suspicious* and marked tham as “AI” – without any proof. “Who can write so many books within 6 months of each other?” they asked – missing the entire point that publication dates don’t really mean anything – or at least, as much as they seem to think they do. Allow me to explain:

Here’s the thing. If you were to check my publication dates for my own books on Amazon, you would see that a lot of them reflect broadly across the same span of years – in this case, from 2022 to 2024. How many books do I have on Amazon? Let’s check quick – according to Amazon, I have 81 titles connected to my author profile. Naturally, these are not all my own – on Amazon, every collection or anthology that you contributed to is also listed on your profile. According to my own records, around 43 of these are my own exclusive works.

Does the publication date of these 43-odd books mean that I published them all between 2022 and 2024 – a span of 2 or 3 years? Yes. Does it mean that I wrote them all between those 3 years? Of course not.

You see, I’ve been at this writing game for quite a long time now. I started indie publishing back in 2005, with the release of my first novel (“Blachart”). And if you were to delve into my publishing history, you would see that – like every indie writer I’m sure – it’s really a lot more convoluted and complicated than “it was just published in 2022”. The reason for this is as follows – these books went up piecemeal, as I wrote them and finished editing them, I published them – then via Lulu. Then in 2014, I got a publishing deal with a small press based in Texas, which meant I had to take these books down from Lulu, and the publisher put them up on Amazon via KDP. That publishing deal went sour in 2016, and I went back to indie publishing again, having to revamp and refurnish all my books I had at that time, and republish them again via other platforms (Lulu, Smashwords, Ebooks2go etc.) and then added more new books to them as time went by. In 2019 I got an offer from Brandon Mullins at Moon Books Publishing, and went over there – this time I didn’t need to take my books down.

Brandon handled the KDP and Amazon side of things, as at that time writers from South Africa still couldn’t sell or upload books from here on KDP. Thinks were looking up – sales climbed, and I got audiobooks on Audible as well, also via Brandon. And then, the unthinkable happened – Brandon suddenly died early in 2022. For over 6 months I sat wondering how I was going to get the rights for my books back from Brandon’s KDP account. His wife had no clue how to operate his KDP account, allegedly couldn’t figure out which bank account the sales royalties were paid to, and appeared to have no real interest in helping me get this mess sorted out from half the world away. Long story short, I eventually got my books taken down from Brandon’s KDP account in late 2022, and by then I was able to open my own KDP account and republish them myself – which I did in batches over a month or so, which explains why their latest publication dates are all so close together.

Meanwhile, most of the older titles in these books are already in their 5th and 6th editions, and have been available in various forms since about 2005 at the oldest. This is of course long before AI tools became available – so therefore, if you buy one of my books and find an error, be it a typo of some kind, then understand that that was MY typo, and not the result of me somehow using an AI tool back in 2019 or so – way before those tools existed! I may be good – and I may occasionally write about time travel – but even I am not *that* good!

While it seems roving bands of people wielding pitchforks and torches are attacking some authors on social media for seemingly random, mundane things like the publication dates of their books as “positive proof” or “indicators” that they “probably” cheated and used AI to write and publish their books so “quickly” – I have just given a demonstration of why this isn’t necessarily always the case. There could be a myriad of real-world, unknown explanations for why these authors books were published so closely together – aside from using AI to “write” them. Granted, *cough*  not everybody’s books are as good or well-written (or fun or entertaining) as mine! …But still!

So while AI is viewed as a menace by some – who do not always have the point or the weighty argument they think they do – it is also a useful tool for many others. What we should bear in mind, is that like any tool, it is neutral – it is the intention of the user that matters, and makes its effects and outcomes good or bad – and that just arbitrarily launching into witch hunts isn’t good for anybody.