Artificial intelligence is all the rage these days. I'm sure you've seen it on the news and on social media. But what is it? What does it do? Generative artificial intelligence refers to programs that produce, for our purposes, artistic works (think, text, art, visual). The key to understanding AI is that these works are produced without much, if any, human intervention. For example, you can use an AI program called ChatGPT and create your very own book by asking the program certain prompts. This all sounds great, but AI has the potential to replace human-authored books (however, if you've seen some of the output you might think otherwise). So how does this affect your book besides the fear that robots are taking over the world? Many AI programs generate their output by mining other creative works. These programs are essentially "trained" on pre-existing works, and many do this without permission. So your book could conceivably be copied over and over and over again without your knowledge.
So what is an author to do? Ask your publisher to include a clause that would prevent this from happening. The Authors Guild recently drafted a clause, which you can see here. We're in a new age of creation, so it's time to act differently and protect your works in our new metaverse.
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