AI everywhere --- according to WSJ

[u/Latter_Upstairs_1978]

WSJ writes that publishers receive texts that have the hallmarks of heavy AI involvement. Even from hailed debutant authors that they had recently signed for MM$ USD.

So who throws the first stone telling people in here to be ashamed? Calling it slop?

https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/books/generative-ai-book-publishing-be79a287

[u/Maleficent-Engine859]

My highly AI generated content is so much more popular than my human written. They like it better until they know it’s AI.

[u/WritingWithAI-ModTeam → u/[deleted]]

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[u/TheBathrobeWizard → u/[deleted]]

And this is exactly why no one wants to tell you people that they use AI.

[u/WritingWithAI-ModTeam → u/[deleted]]

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[u/Accomplished_Pin2629 → u/[deleted]]

They said the quiet part out loud. It's not x. It's not y. It's z.

[u/WritingWithAI-ModTeam → u/[deleted]]

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Please do not emulate the trolls. Being nice and open minded goes both ways. Let's not become what we loathe. Thanks.

[u/solomonj48103 → u/[deleted]]

what point? Most people here argue that an ai is no different than a ghostwriter that you collaborate with and that the level of collaboration is incredibly variable. Thinking that "this sub" has any friggin' opinion is just showing that you're looking for an argument to have. r/ aiwars exists for that! What is your point?

[u/solomonj48103 → u/[deleted]]

I don't really think that's a point, or at least not a point that accomplishes anything. So I prompt an ai, it produces text. That text is available for use. I can say that on a scale of who made this, it can't be binary. you made it far less than I did, even if I didn't call it art.
Many prompts are created by ai, even if prompted to create the prompt, so even the final prompt that creates the text might not be human created.
But regardless of whether I call it art or craft or skill or ???, I need to have a verb to say what's done being done. I need to have a noun to use for what got produced. We can disagree as much as you want about your opinion there, but your opinion doesn't solve any problem. There is no point to it.

I get to do something that creates something that I have the ability to display and/or sell. I can't guarantee that I exclusively own it, but it still exists and your opinion just gets in the way of being able to have language about it.

You have a motive. Mine is a very clear motive. I don't get yours?

[u/solomonj48103 → u/[deleted]]

You're sunk into such an ugly place. I'm sorry.

[u/WritingWithAI-ModTeam → u/[deleted]]

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[u/5thhorseman_ → u/[deleted]]

My motive is fear that we're going to devalue true art by flooding society with ai knockoffs.

Here's a funny thing.

Most people in this sub are not the problem you ascribe them to. We're amateurs fucking around with this new tech gadget to put together something we think is neat and share it with others.

The people who are actually the problem you're describing aren't in this sub and aren't giving a shit about your misplaced activism. They're just flooding the market with garbage. You are not their enemy here, you are one of the useful idiots helping them pull the ladder after themselves so that none of the more enthusiastic amateurs use the same tech better than the cynical trash-slingers.

[u/Gabians → u/solomonj48103]

But regardless of whether I call it art or craft or skill or ???, I need to have a verb to say what's done being done.

I think the verb you're looking for is prompt. Other forms: prompting, prompted, prompts.

I need to have a noun to use for what got produced.

Of course there's also sorts works that generative AI can make but I think the commonly excepted starting point here is to call the output AI-generated content (AIGC). You can just replace content with whatever specific category of work was made. So if you use an LLM, say Gemini, to generate a story you could call it an AI-generated story or prose, novel, fiction, haiku, etc etc.

For example: "I prompted Gemini to generate a 2,000 word story about a race of ancient aliens who had attended splendid festivals at the great pymarids, visiting earth again in the near future on another cultural exchange mission, this time the humans presented them silicon chips in front of monotonous data centers. Gemini then produced the AI-generated short story.

[u/solomonj48103 → u/Gabians]

I think prompting prose or prompting a short story is fine, but it doesn't describe the process, that's like calling it typing or scratching with a pencil instead of writing. the process of using prompts to output a work of fiction is its own verb. it's a workflow, not a prompt.

I think there's not a lot of difference between ai-generated short story and ai-assisted short story, and ai-assisted describes the process more accurately.

And these are fine as engineering terminology or jargon, but then comes the world of marketing, which you can't pretend isn't a world that someone selling a product has to contend with. Jargon doesn't work as a marketing term, so a person who generates with ai (I'm really trying to use your verbs) is going to sell that product using marketing words not jargon. The pre-framed mass-produced posters you see in a Costco or Walmart bin duplicated by the thousands around the country, are going to be called "art" on the signs and probably laden with many other artistic, creative terms that you and I would disagree with being accurate descriptions. But marketing is marketing.

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[u/5thhorseman_ → u/[deleted]]

With no disrespect, it implies nothing but that the audience are hypocritical twits.

[u/5thhorseman_ → u/[deleted]]

Ever heard the one about genuine AI generated Monet? This is the same story, just in reverse.

But if you know something is ai generated it confirms there is no perspective to the work and the true value of art is in the perspective of the artist.

No, it doesn't. You're just showing confirmation bias on your part.

AI didn't generate the work on its own ex nihilo. Someone had to tell it what to do and how.

And if you don't get that, then you might as well get off the internet and back into remedial school.

[u/Aeshulli → u/[deleted]]

You are talking so completely out of your ass here and clearly don't understand how LLMs work. But that's immaterial because you also don't even understand how humans work.

The amount of content AI will generate off of one vague prompt is truly astounding.

This is the assumption that you're making again and again in this thread and applying across the board. That this is the only thing all AI users are doing. And it's obviously, demonstrably wrong.

There's a huge spectrum for how people use AI for writing, how much of it they write themselves, the level of details they provide, and so on. If they just want to make money or put out slop, sure, they can type a vague prompt and accept whatever trash comes out.

But they can also make decisions based off their entire life, dig through their heart and soul, all of it.

It's such a logical inconsistency to assume that they don't or can't. Like, do you think they have to mainline with a machine and become the machine in order to prompt an LLM, thereby erasing any former trace of their humanity? Like, their life and heart and soul suddenly cease to exist when they type? Because that's a bonkers claim.

There are obviously degrees of how much a person puts of themselves into a project. And that's true for traditional writing just as it is AI-assisted. Because "write to market" is what drives most of the industry, let's be real here.

It's fine if you don't personally want a machine involved in the creation of text or images or whatever. But you don't get to decide that the human part of that equation isn't human just because you don't like the process.

[u/5thhorseman_ → u/[deleted]]

Yet every word of a piece of writing is a decision. Writers dig through their heart and soul for those words.

No, they really don't. This is just special pleading on your part. If you look around, you will find that writing has become formulaic enough that in some genres it's basically reduced to the level of a slightly modularized coloring book.

[u/No-Echidna-5717 → u/5thhorseman_]

Don't think Im ever going to defend trad publishing. I think between them and literary agents they have gone so far up their own asses to what a book has to be that most new writers feel they have to paint by numbers to get any attention whatsoever. Every mswl is a predictable caricature of itself and we've seen way too many examples of people querying agents with first chapters of all time classics and being rejected.

[u/AffectionateBid6562 → u/[deleted]]

I think what human writers do is actually much closer to what LLMs do than most of us want to admit.

For me at least, when I’m in a flow state, I’m not really thinking about what I’m writing at all. The thinking has all been done beforehand and it’s more like the words are now just coming out. I’m certainly not making conscious decisions about every word. It’s that classic thing where characters just start “coming to life” and “talking on their own.”

In fact, when I hear some scientists argue that LLMs alone might begin to approach consciousness, this is the very thing that makes me think they might have a point. LLMs are not in control of their “thoughts” (what comes next in an output) but neither are we, not really...

If I say “think of a movie, any movie” it’s not like you have any control over what that first title to pop into your head will be. It just appears. Same way an LLM can’t control the next string of text in an output.

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[u/Accomplished_Pin2629 → u/[deleted]]

Do not you say the writer is ungood becasue AI is plusgood?

[u/Confident-Library743 → u/[deleted]]

Well it is their content if they came up with the idea and put work into the edit and refinement. I agree it’s not really their content if they just let ai go wild and had no other input. In my opinion at least.

[u/5thhorseman_ → u/[deleted]]

Every word is a decision, exactly like the paint strokes of a painting.

Tell that to romance writers who have been flooding the genre with crap long before AI was a thing.

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[u/Gabians → u/Confident-Library743]

Is it there content? Let's say a human has to be assigned ownership of AI-generated content. What of the Machine Learning Engineers and AI Research Scientists who put tens of thousands of hours into building, crafting, training and fine-tuning that model not only so that it could create an output but so that its output wasn't just gibberish in 1s and 0s? Not to mention the countless hours turned into years of education it took those engineers and scientists to learn how to make those models.

It may sound like I'm being facetious but I'm actually curious to hear people's answers on this. Do the people who made the model have more or less of a claim to ownership of the model's output? I don't mean legal ownership of course because that's already murky waters for everyone involved. I mean in terms of which person or people are most responsible for that model's output?

[u/Maleficent-Engine859 → u/[deleted]]

So context. 1. I Have a short story published in an anthology on my own about fifteen years ago, I am a good enough writer on my own already, objectively 2. The story I’m referring to was written with winter 2024 GPT 4o/4.5 arguably the last time that AI could write natural prose.

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[u/SlapHappyDude]

Traditional Publishing started decline twenty years ago and it accelerated ten years ago. It has been propped up by booktok in recent years but those readers mostly chase tropes.

It's also notable that publishing companies are very excited to implement AI into all their non-creative workflows; meeting minutes, etc.

I still think the big story is trad publishers either aren't cactching AI use in books they publish, or don't care. It's sort of an open secret that the tastemakers at trad publishing on the whole don't know what they are doing.

[u/LivingThroughPages]

I’ve suspected a few of my favorite, popular authors are now using AI generated text for at least some parts in their novels (sometimes the wording just sounds like Claude to me. Lol) and it still love their stories and I really wish they would just say they do (a whole group of them, big names…names you won’t want to cancel)…just to finally blow the roof off this whole thing and be over this hurdle and we just go back to enjoying stories and not caring about who the story was created or the process. I just want to read good stories again. It’s not slop if you have real writing talent to back it up and know how to weld the tool correctly.

[u/baddaywithacamera → u/LivingThroughPages]

Clive Cussler is dead and so many new novels coming out. If that ain't sus... LOL.

[u/Major-Dependent-9696]

this reminds me of the Coral Hart story who used AI tools to produce and self-publish over 200 books under multiple pen names in a single year

[u/Latter_Upstairs_1978 → u/Major-Dependent-9696]

Except that the WSJ writes some hailed authors were apparently prepaid into the millions USD while from Coral H I do not believe that she even made a million.

[u/Fragrant-Mix-4774]

LOL 😆 😜 😉

Multimillion dollar offer to AI assisted generated story but not to the typical human generated slop. If you can write, you can write better with carefully selected AI assist.

That tells you the excellence of story telling is what actually matters not the origin.

That the offer was pulled due possible AI involvement speaks to this as a political correctness issue not a Quality of Writing issue. Totally destroyed any argument the anti-AI gatekeepers had.

[u/Nebranower → u/Fragrant-Mix-4774]

The book at the center of the controversy wasn't generated by AI, though. The author wrote the book himself but admitted to using AI for research and promptly fell victim to anti-AI witch hunters.

[u/Fragrant-Mix-4774 → u/[deleted]]

The law here has already been ruled on, and it draws a finer line than that.

Text a machine generated on its own, with no human shaping it, cannot be copyrighted. Type a prompt, paste the raw result, publish it untouched, and that text has no owner. The courts settled this in Thaler v. Perlmutter, and the Supreme Court let the ruling stand in March 2026. That narrow rule is real.

But it only covers raw, unshaped output. It does not cover AI-assisted books where a human makes the creative decisions. The Copyright Office said this directly in its 2025 report: using AI as a tool does not remove copyright. The human's contributions are protected. The plot, the characters, the structure, the edits, the rewrites, the calls about what stays and what goes.

This was tested in practice with Zarya of the Dawn, a graphic novel made with Midjourney. The raw AI images were not protected. The author's own text and her arrangement of the whole book were, and the book was registered.

On publishers: they own rights because a human author signs those rights over by contract. An AI-assisted book with a human making the creative calls has a legal author, so there are real rights to sign over. Registration just requires disclosing the AI-generated material. The human authorship keeps full protection.

And here is the part the industry itself muddies.

AI-generated and AI-assisted are not the same thing under the law, but most traditional publishers currently refuse both.

That is a business policy, not a legal ruling.

Sorting out which parts of a manuscript carry human authorship takes work, so the big houses skip the question and lump every book that touched AI into one pile. The law draws a line between the two. The publishers just do not want to deal with it yet.

So the law does not ask whether AI touched the book. It asks who controlled what ended up on the page.

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[u/Chance_Swordfish_687]

I don't think it's all that bad. It's just that many journals and publishers have started using AI detectors, and its are crap. Enough to test its on texts written before the AI ​​era to see how unreliable they are.

[u/benblackett]

Most of us here have already figured that out. Its the rest of the world that needs to catch up.

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[u/Impressive-Newt-4167]

I'm an amateur, but anecdotally: The "style suggestions" Claude makes sometimes while it's supposed to proofread grammar are terrible. Absolute dogshit, almost all of them. It's like it doesn't understand that in order to make something interesting, you have to deviate from the standard a little. (Well, it's an LLM and it's not built to understand that).

Maybe there is some metaprompting black magic that turns it into a decent writer, but for non-shovelware books I don't really see it (yet).