It’s time for yet another installment of the Insecure Writer’s Support Group. We meet monthly on the first Wednesdays to offer each other support, help, guidance, and release our insecurities into the digital ether for the others in the group to systematically shoot down until we can feel better. If this sounds like an activity you want to get in on and you haven’t already, join in here.

As always we have members of the group donating their time to keep us on track and make sure the support is flowing freely. This month they are  Ronel Janse van Vuuren, Natalie Aguirre, Sarah – The Faux Fountain Pen, and Olga Godim! Thank them by clicking on over to their site and leaving a comment.

Every month we get an optional question to inspire a post. This month it is: What is the most unethical practice in the publishing industry?

Hoo boy, this is a loaded question. Should I start by mentioning the proliferation of scams (marketing scams, publishing scams, even fake literary agents and agencies) targeting authors who just want some genuine help? I could write several posts about them, although I have so far avoided this pitfall (thankfully), because there is a wonderful website called Writer Beware which raises awareness and calls out scams as they find them. Seriously recommend the website for your own safety as an author, which is why I included the link.

Beyond the outright scams which take your money and give you nothing in return, there are even sneakier “pay to publish” companies. Self-publishing can be overwhelming, and so scary. These companies offer to guide you through all of it, from ISBN to formatting to editing, and then sell your books for you. All you have to do is write the manuscript and hand it over, along with anywhere from 500-2,000$ for all of their services. Tempting? VERY. Will you ever see any of that money come back to you, or even make some profit off of your book sales? VERY UNLIKELY.

Or I could bemoan the absolute, total, and unquestioned chokehold one certain website has over all aspects of publishing. I am a bit worried about getting in trouble for this, so we will not name this website, but it should be pretty obvious when I point out that this one site is said to control anywhere between 50-60% of print book sales and somewhere in the range of 75-80% of e-book sales. YES, up to 80%. That sounds pretty dang unethical to me. This enormous monopoly literally forces authors (ESPECIALLY self-published authors) to work entirely within the long arms of this website to have any hope of even the tiniest bit of visibility or sales for their books. There are alternatives, but they just don’t have the global reach of this website and we all know it.

But I think I will take this post in the direction of an issue which has been cropping up more and more often, and has been on all of our minds lately. What’s the most unethical practice in publishing? I would argue that it’s using artificial intelligence to write books.

You’ll notice that I specified ‘to write books’ and not ‘to copy edit’ or ‘check spelling’ or ‘generate cool names’ or ‘research pirates in the south pacific in the 1770s’. As a tool to edit and perfect your writing, I don’t personally have any problems with AI. As a point and click to prompt and write an entire 60-100k word novel, I have all kinds of issues with it being literally and functionally unethical.

Where did that artificial intelligence get the words it wrote down for you when you prompted it to write you a story? To write any kind of intelligible language in answer to your questions, all AI had to be trained. To train the AI, their creators dumped hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of previously created content into their databases for them to sort out based on their algorithms and ‘learn’ the language to respond to you. And so, until that artificial intelligence experiences the singularity and develops its own consciousness and intelligence, the answer is that it plagiarized the words it gave you from other authors who were not compensated for anything. As the Author’s Guild puts it, “unauthorized, unrestricted, and uncompensated use of authors’ works to train generative AI has created tools that are used to displace professional writers” (AuthorsGuild.org). This seems very unethical to me.

We have also covered the AI question in two other IWSG posts, which I won’t re-hash for you. I’ll just reiterate that the main points of those posts were about AI being unethical because it takes what other authors have already done, chews it up, and spits it all over your computer screen.  To summarize both of those older posts, I feel like A.I. does not ‘create’ in the way we humans define creating. It does not make something out of pure nothing, or add a net positive to the negative space which was there. A.I. takes in big gulps of what humans have created, mashes them around a bit in digestive computer juices, and then throws it all back up. And I feel the exact same about consuming A.I. regurgitation as I would about consuming any other puke. No, thank you.

I would like to leave you with something more positive, and the same Author’s Guild article I just linked is about the best practices for using AI in your writing, so I went ahead and linked it again just to really drive that point home. It’s full of good ways to protect yourself in this muddy ethical quandary we now find ourselves in. For instance, did you know you have to disclose any AI use to your publisher if you used AI to generate any text in your book, or you risk violating your contract? This article explains exactly what you have to disclose, and why.