Well yeah. If it was made by the ai, which was made from stolen ip, then anything the ai makes is automatically public donain.
Where this gets messy is ai assisted works. What percentage, what level of purity, do you demand for a creative to claim ownership of a work? And it’s not so easy as pixels painted or words written, but methodology. If I have an ai ask me questions about my setting, then I answer those questions, then have the ai compile a summary for me, I think I can claim ownership of that. High humanity. What if I sketch a scene and have the ai finish it for me, but then I come back and clean up what the ai fucked up? Jury is still out on that, but I’m leaning towards “low humanity”.
But what most people imageine, and what a lot of stupid techbros do, is input a single line and try to say that they made whatever gets slopped out. Zero humanity.
They don’t deserve it.
All they’ve done with AI is take the proverbial 1 million monkeys on typewriters will eventually turn out a masterful novel and sped the concept up to a few milliseconds.
And they’ve upped the number of monkeys.
The problem with the million monkeys theory is they will eventually starve to death.
It’s not a million monkeys, it’s an infinite number of monkeys, and that infinite is necessary because the odds of a monkey typing out anything legible for a free sentences (let alone works of Shakespeare) are way lower than one in a million.
The saying itself also includes an infinite amount of time, though that isn’t necessary, as an infinite number of monkeys will produce every possible combination in the time it takes to type that combination.
But (and it’s a big but), even then you just have a relatively tiny number of works to sort out from the massive amount of random garbage. You can be sure that there are groundbreaking papers out there for every subject that would advance technology by millennia, but they are all somewhere among those infinite stacks of paper (from the monkeys that randomly decided to stack each page as it finished, instead of eating it or ripping it up or just continuing typing on nothing, fighting their neighbour, and every other possible behaviour… Those stacks of paper to review themselves will be rare).
Another big but, even if you can figure out a way to automatically sort the readable from the garbage, you’ll still have to somehow figure out which one is “Advice for people of 2026 to quickly catch up to technology of 10,000 (as if society never collapses)” or “A practical joke: tricking the people of 2026 into ruining their future even more by claiming they can advance 8000 years of technology (lmao)”. There will also be an infinite number of mixes between the two.
The saying is more about the concept of infinity combined with probabilities. With an infinite number of attempts, every single possibility will be seen, no matter how low the odds.
LLMs aren’t like infinite monkeys, they use statistics to correlate words and basically go from an average of all the words they’ve been trained on to a specific case by predicting the most likely next word given the preceeding ones (and statistics are good at talking about the big picture, not so much when trying to predict specific samples, which is why they produce slop instead of descent results like the star trek ship computer, which is based on human writers writing what an AI they imagined would do).
Put the authors in the shredder with the books
Give them their own namespace
AISBN, and you may have to make it a 128-bit unsigned integer because 64-bit only gives them 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 possibilities, fewer if they use a check digit.Then we’ll know to ignore it from a single piece of objective information.
What is terrible is it will be hard to tell sometimes, publishers are awash with slop.
Its to the point if you can prove it was written before LLMs existed then the value of your work is suddenly much higher.
This reminds me of low-background steel. Certain applications of steel requires very low amounts of radiation. After nuclear testing started releasing radioactive isotopes into the atmosphere, newly forged steel incorporated those radioactive isotopes. The only way to get low-background steel is by finding a pre-atomic age source of scrap steel like a ship wreck.
That’s so neat and yeah very similar example!
Publishers are using AI to edit and approve books. But that seems to fall into their acceptance of using AI as tools, just not the actual writing process. So it’s basically a placeholder rule until they figure it out and change it, and they say as much.
I know several publishers with strict rules about LLM use. Some folks here write as if LLMs are used absolutely everywhere but there are not.
I admire your take, but it would amaze me if there are many fortune 500, or even fortune 1000, companies not using generative AI. Especially those focused on white collar work.
I think the real question is how much outsourcing of thought each company, and each department, is pushing on its employees. AI as a proof reader? AI as a ghost writer? Those are very different things.
Using is one thing, as a passive productivity tool. I use spell check and google too. Its the promise of grand tranformation that failed. Agents fail, non deterministic logic is fickle, and prices are insane.
I research this topic as my day job, run an AI shop, and teach ai adoption for fortune 500 and governments btw. Which is why I can speak confidently about the lack of ROI. Im not anti-AI. Im just a realist which makes me sound cynical compared to most prosteletyzing AI hype.
Though, even the ones with strict rules may sometimes have difficulty determining if something was written with AI. Especially if the “author” does some basic proofreading and cleans it up manually before submitting it to the publisher.
True I ironically see momentary spelling mistakes as a sign of humanity, informally.
If the authors dont disclose to publishers they cant know too. For authors they get pressure to write faster because everyone is atleast AI assisted.
TBH i dont care if its AI written but the result of AI writing is sloppy. Lots of fluff and weird wording. Also sloppy research is likely as AI spits out facts and the authos dont have to look into the source anymore. Peer reviewing must become stronger and will be a quality sign for publishers in future.
Not everyone is AI assisted for every single project.
The specific part:
Use of artificial intelligence
By registering with ISBN Canada, you declare that your publication was written by a human author. You may use AI tools only for limited support tasks, such as brainstorming ideas, checking grammar, or formatting your book. ISBN Canada limits the quantity of ISBNs for works whose content is primarily generated by AI (text, illustration, translation). LAC is currently reviewing its policy regarding the use of AI content creation and our guidance is subject to change.
If you cant come up with an idea, check your own grammar, or format your book on your own… I fear you may not be a very good author.
Its like saying “You can use AI for rough sketches, ideas of what to draw, and maybe color ideas for your art piece to be featured in the Smithsonian”
Ideas, sure. But grammar and formatting are typically completely different jobs like editing and typesetting. If you’re going the indie route and self publishing, you might not be able to afford to hire someone else to do that work.
Those also happen to be things that LLMs are actually good at. They’re (mostly) not creative tasks and instead just follow a set of rules.
Its also incredibly hard to catch erors in you own writing. Skilled writres are usually good readers, and we have mnay silkls to dcpoyher txet, often with out noticeing.
(Errors introduced deliberately to illustrate.)
There’s a reason virtually all books make it to print with errors. It’s very hard to catch all errors.
It’s also a fantastic use case for LLMs, since the structure of language is the exact type of low-hanging task LLMs are actually good at, even with cheap/fast models.
I’m willing to give a bit of a pass on the grammar—someone may have learning disabilities or not be writing in their first language. And formatting a book is simple and mechanical enough that a piece of software might get it right. If you’re relying on an LLM for actual plot, though, you’re doing it wrong.
to be featured in the Smithsonian
Come on now, getting an ISBN is nowhere near the level of recognition of being featured in a major museum. Not really analogous. Having an ISBN is by no means exclusive or impressive – it just means you’ve got a book prepared for publishing. A book, any book. Could even be a really bad, worthless book. Just the big news here is that it can’t be an AI-generated book.
AI turns everything to crap.
Not true.
Some stuff was already crap and AI just smears it in lipstick.
The silly thing is that the rule that’s always been the rule in data processing hasn’t changed: GIGO, or garbage in, garbage out. AI tempts people who would otherwise provide quality work to skip the quality part for the sake of speed.
Proper use of AI doesn’t really speed anything up; it just changes the scale of how you can leverage the results. And people, being lazy, settle for “good enough” output slop generated from “good enough” inputs.
So in reality, AI throws a spotlight on how crappy many people’s work is.
Come on, you have to admit that “proper use” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. The GIGO problem is not just a result of "mis"use, but a pervasive and steadily worsening problem.
That was the point; AI encourages slop. It’s still people who are making the choice to leverage it that way. And we’ve seen that it’s virtually irresistible.
As they should be. Same as them not having much of a chance of getting Copyright on AI stuff.
Not directly related, but so many fun slop web serials were completely ruined by AI use hundreds or even thousands of chapters after their first. Ai writing makes me sad right now, because -unlike in coding- Ai is really not good at engaging dialog & designing an interesting plot.
Shockingly writers love the idea of getting paid for not doing any work. Do you know what they don’t love? Paying for Claude tokens, so they won’t even use the strongest LLMs for generating their slop.
Shockingly writers love the idea of getting paid for not doing any work.
“writers” love that idea.
But if they don’t write, they’re not writers, are they?
ahem I think you mean SI /s
Their plan foiled by a simple renaming!
Yea, didn’t you hear calling it otherwise makes you tHe EneMy?
So, what’s the plan for books written with AI?
Dumpster hopefully
Firestarter
