To AI or not to AI

Recently I was filling out some paperwork about my novel, Bound by an Oath, for a bookstore and I came to a question that brought me up short. I was asked to declare that I had not used AI in my writing. At first, I was mildly outraged. Of COURSE I hadn't used Artificial Intelligence! That would be cheating, and I am not a cheat! And then I started to wonder if anyone who had used AI would give a truthful answer in any case. (I always wonder the same thing of people answering their doctor’s question about use of illegal drugs.) How could you prove it if they had in fact used AI?  

Back when I was teaching a summer school class on Introduction to the Bible it was an in-joke with the other faculty that I caught someone cheating every year. It was easy to do. I always had samples of the students’ writing and so I knew their capabilities. If they handed in work that was suspiciously complex or profound, I simply Googled a sentence, and it would pop right up from its original source. Probably the only reason other teachers did not regularly find examples of cheating in their classes was because their students did not write in class, or because the teachers could not face the issues that arose when someone was caught plagiarizing. For me it was a matter of ethics – both the students’ and mine.

But using AI is different from plagiarizing. It can be a very useful tool, if used ethically. Authorsguild.org  suggests that in creative writing AI should be used for brainstorming only and that any use of AI should be disclosed to your publisher and to your readers. That’s a start. If everyone was honest and trustworthy there would be few issues, but the problem still remains of the undisclosed use of AI. Is it even possible to distinguish AI writing from human writing so that misuse could be detected? I used AI to answer this very question,

and I have to say that I would not have suspected it was written by a computer program, had I not known.

According to AI Overview on Google (ironically) “you can detect AI-generated text using AI detectors and by looking for certain signs”. There are several AI detectors out there. They were probably all created by AI as well. Perhaps it takes AI to catch AI.