If you aren't sure what I'm talking about when I say ChatGPT… What rock have you been living under?

Writers around the world (novelists, screenwriters, poets, short story writers, etc.) became concerned when ChatGPT exploded onto the scene in late 2022. No one really knew what it could do or how far it would go. And the market became flooded with AI-generated stories—most of which were not worth the 1s and 0s used to create them. But ChatGPT evolved… and so did the concerns.

In 2023, it came to light the copyright nightmare that was ChatGPT, and we're still trying to deal with that as an industry. Amazon added tags to their KDP system, requiring that publishers specify if a body of work was created using artificial intelligence (AI). Lines were being drawn about the ethical usage of the technology, and lawsuits were filed against OpenAI (and other AI developers) regarding their abuse of copyright laws in sourcing the materials used for training of the algorithms.

We are now in 2024, and there is still so much we don't know or can't agree on regarding the usage of AI within publishing. There is only one thing that is certain: AI is here to stay.

As writers and editors, we are now being forced to make decisions about how we will conduct business. It's about drawing a line between AI-generated works and AI-assisted works.