#jane friedman

[nerdby]

If you support AI ANYTHING after reading about this then you are trash.

[aquitainequeen]

There’s not much that makes me angry these days about writing and publishing. I’ve seen it all. I know what to expect from Amazon and Goodreads. Meaning: I don’t expect much, and I assume I will be continually disappointed. Nor do I have the power to change how they operate. My energy-saving strategy: move on and focus on what you can control. That’s going to become much harder to do if Amazon and Goodreads don’t start defending against the absolute garbage now being spread across their sites. I know my work gets pirated and frankly I don’t care. (I’m not saying other authors shouldn’t care, but that’s not a battle worth my time today.) But here’s what does rankle me: garbage books getting uploaded to Amazon where my name is credited as the author. (Here’s but one example.) Whoever’s doing this is obviously preying on writers who trust my name and think I’ve actually written these books. I have not. Most likely they’ve been generated by AI...

Jane Friedman has since updated that the fraudulent books have been removed from both Amazon and Goodreads, but this has become a very serious problem. Friedman mentions in her post that 'When I complained about this on Twitter/X, an author responded that she had to report 29 illegitimate books in just the last week alone. 29!'

[frydawolff]

AI minimizers aren't worth engaging with.

[ahb-writes]

People Are Using A.I. to "Write" Unauthorized Books From Popular Authors and Sell Them on Amazon

Read the Article: "An author says AI is ‘writing’ unauthorized books being sold under her name on Amazon" by Clare Duffy, CNN (article appears in full, below)

Supplemental Reading: "I Would Rather See My Books Get Pirated Than This (Or: Why Goodreads and Amazon Are Becoming Dumpster Fires)" by Jane Friedman

❯ ❯ ❯

New York (CNN) -- An author is raising alarms this week after she found new books being sold on Amazon under her name — only she didn’t write them; they appear to have been generated by artificial intelligence.

Jane Friedman, who has authored multiple books and consulted about working in the writing and publishing industry, told CNN that an eagle-eyed reader looking for more of her work bought one of the fake titles on Amazon. The books had titles similar to the subjects she typically writes about, but the text read as if someone had used a generative AI model to imitate her style.

“When I started looking at these books, looking at the opening pages, looking at the bio, it was just obvious to me that it had been mostly, if not entirely, AI-generated … I have so much content available online for free, because I’ve been blogging forever, so it wouldn’t be hard to get an AI to mimic me,” Friedman said.

With AI tools like ChatGPT now able to rapidly and cheaply pump out huge volumes of convincing text, some writers and authors have raised alarms about losing work to the new technology. Others have said they don’t want their work being used to train AI models, which could then be used to imitate them.

“Generative AI is being used to replace writers — taking their work without permission, incorporating those works into the fabric of those AI models and then offering those AI models to the public, to other companies, to use to replace writers,” Mary Rasenberger, CEO of the nonprofit authors advocacy group the Authors Guild, told CNN. “So you can imagine writers are a little upset about that.”

Last month, US lawmakers met with members of creative industries, including the Authors Guild, to discuss the implications of artificial intelligence. In a Senate subcommittee hearing, Rasenberger called for the creation of legislation to protect writers from AI, including rules that would require AI companies to be transparent about how they train their models. More than 10,000 authors — including James Patterson, Roxane Gay and Margaret Atwood — also signed an open letter calling on AI industry leaders like Microsoft and ChatGPT-maker OpenAI to obtain consent from authors when using their work to train AI models, and to compensate them fairly when they do.

A Growing Problem

Friedman on Monday posted a well-read thread on X, formerly known as Twitter, and a blog post about the issue. Several authors responded saying they’d had similar experiences.

“People keep telling me they bought my newest book — that has my name on it but I didn’t write,” one author said in response.

Amazon removed the fake books being sold under Friedman’s name and said its policies prohibit such imitation.

“We have clear content guidelines governing which books can be listed for sale and promptly investigate any book when a concern is raised,” Amazon spokesperson Ashley Vanicek said in a statement, adding that the company accepts author feedback about potential issues. “We invest heavily to provide a trustworthy shopping experience and protect customers and authors from misuse of our service.”

Amazon also told Friedman that it is “investigating what happened with the handling of your claims to drive improvements to our processes,” according to an email viewed by CNN.

The fake books using Friedman’s name were also added to her profile on the literary social network Goodreads, and removed only after she publicized the issue.

“We have clear guidelines on which books are included on Goodreads and will quickly investigate when a concern is raised, removing books when we need to,” Goodreads spokesperson Suzanne Skyvara said in a statement to CNN.

Friedman said she worries that authors will be stuck playing whack-a-mole to identify AI generated fakes.

“What’s frightening is that this can happen to anyone with a name that has reputation, status, demand that someone sees a way to profit off of,” she said.

The Authors Guild has been working with Amazon since this past winter to address the issue of books written by AI, Rasenberger said.

She said the company has been responsive when the Authors Guild flags fake books on behalf of authors, but it can be a tricky issue to spot given that it’s possible for two legitimate authors to have the same name.

The group is also hoping AI companies will agree to allow authors to opt out of having their work used to train AI models — so it’s harder to create copycats — and to find ways to transparently label artificially generated text. And, she said, companies and publishers should continue investing in creative work made by humans, even if AI appears more convenient.

“Using AI to generate content is so easy, it’s so cheap, that I do worry there’s going to be this kind of downward competition to use AI to replace human creators,” she said. “And you will never get the same quality with AI as human creators.”

❯ ❯ ❯

Read the Article: "An author says AI is ‘writing’ unauthorized books being sold under her name on Amazon" by Clare Duffy, CNN

Supplemental Reading: "I Would Rather See My Books Get Pirated Than This (Or: Why Goodreads and Amazon Are Becoming Dumpster Fires)" by Jane Friedman

[dragonncat]

good news!

Friedman suspects [the removal of the books] is due to her speaking out about the issue on social media.

just another reminder that speaking out WORKS

[younes-ben-amara]

الدرس 10 من دورة جين فريدمان عن كيفية كسب العيش من الكتابة – الجمعة في رديف 🖊️💰

ما هذه المجموعة من المختارات تسألني؟ إنّها عددٌ من أعداد نشرة “صيد الشابكة” اِعرف أكثر عن النشرة هنا: ما هي نشرة “صيد الشابكة” ما مصادرها، وما غرضها؛ وما معنى الشابكة أصلًا؟! 🎣🌐هل تعرف ما هي صيد الشابكة وتطالعها بانتظام؟ اِدعم استمرارية النشرة بطرق شتى من هنا: 💲 طرق دعم نشرة صيد الشابكة. بالشراكة مع ميكو أفرغ بريدك الوارد! 🎣🌐 صيد الشابكة العدد #204 السلام عليكم؛ مرحبًا وبسم الله. 🎣🌐 صيد…

[richdadpoor]

'Nonfiction' Book About Maui Wildfire 'Smells of AI'

Wildfires in Maui have devastated the communities in Hawaii over the last week, but a new book listed on Amazon about the natural disaster has raised eyebrows from reviewers. Top 5 Shopping Tips for Amazon Prime Day The book, titled Fire and Fury: The Story of the 2023 Maui and its Implications for Climate Change, is an 86-page narrative of the recent wildfires in Hawaii that has a tinge of…

[gamesatwork]

e428 — Is you is, or is you AIn’t my AI?

Stories about #AI, #GenerativeAudio, #GenerativeBooks, Jane Friedman #brandjacking experiences, #GenerativeAgents, #NPCs #GenerativeBucketLists from #söka, Benji Smith #prosecraft and much more!

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash Published 14 August 2023 Andy, Michael and Michael get together for a show full of generative AI: audio, bucket lists, books and agents.  Andy starts things rolling with a Nvidia follow on article from last week, and a throwback to e156 from 2016.  Then things start to get exciting with a number of generative AI examples, beginning with Meta’s AudioCraft, an…

[biestcallisto]

So this is becoming a thing, huh?

[mikyapixie]

10 years ago today Sonic Boom premiered on Cartoon Network!!!

The episode were short but man they were hilarious!!!😆😆😆

[akultalkies]

Diane Keaton, Jane Fonda, Mary Steenburgen, Candice Bergen, Andy Garcia, Don Johnson, Craig T. Nelson, Ed Begley Jr, Wallace Shawn, Richard Dreyfuss, Alicia Silverstone, Mircea Monroe, Katie Aselton, Tommy Dewey,

[roseshavethoughts]

My Top 5 Troma Movies

My Top 5 Troma Movies #Cinema #FilmReview #MovieReview

Troma Entertainment is a film production company known for its low-budget, independent, and often controversial movies. Here are five of my favourite Troma movies, in no particular order: The Toxic Avenger (1984) Directed By – Michael Herz & Lloyd Kaufman Starring – Mitch Cohen, Mark Torgl, Andree Maranda, Pat Ryan Jr This movie tells the story of a scrawny, bullied janitor who becomes a…

[cecilereads]

Isaacs reading list in Heartstopper

Season 1

Dune Messiah - Frank Herbert

Naruto vol. 72 - Masashi Kishimoto

Quantum Mechanics - Leonard Susskind & Art Friedman

A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder - Holly Jackson

Proud - Gareth Thomas

Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

Radio Silence - Alice Oseman

Gender Explorers - Juno Roche

The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

Noughts & Crosses by Malorie Blackman

There is no Planet B - Mike Berners-Lee

Season 2

Ace of Spades - Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé

The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays - Oscar Wilde

Booklovers - Emily Henry

Les Misérables - Victor Hugo

The Little Prince - Antoine de Saint-Exupery

We Are Okay - Nina Lacour

The Outsider - Albert Camus

Birthday - Meredith Russo

The Awakening - Kate Choppin

Crush - Richard Siken

Boy Erased - Garrard Conley

The Swimming Pool Library - Alan Hollinghurst

I Love This Part - Tillie Walden

We Have Always Been Here - Samra Habib

Summer Bird Blue - Akemi Dawn Bowman

Ace - Angela Chen

[deposedefenddeny]

A courtroom sketch of Luigi Mangione seated between his defense attorneys Karen Friedman Agnifilo and her husband Marc Agnifilo during his first federal court hearing in New York, drawn by Jane Rosenberg and published in The Guardian.

[writingquestionsanswered]

Anonymous asked: Sorry if this is a stupid question, but is it okay if I just say fuck it and write something "poorly written" on purpose?

[Ask edited for length]

I'm going to try to tackle this question in parts, because it's actually a quite good question with a complex answer. So, bear with me...

The answer to "is it okay to write something 'poorly written' depends on two things: the chosen definition of "poorly written" and your intentions with the work.

Defining "Poorly Written" - What does and doesn't qualify as "poorly written" is largely subjective, meaning that it's different for everyone and every situation. There are certainly things that fall into a more objective category... like, if your work is riddled with typos and bad grammar, that will be broadly seen as "bad writing." But, just because a few people say something on the internet doesn't make it broadly true. When you see advice on the internet like "if your character holds important information back from the reader until the end, that's bad writing," don't just assume that's true. Dig into it. Research it. Verify it on multiple reliable sources. If you can find that same advice coming from multiple reliable sources (see below) it's probably broadly true and something you should strongly consider if you want your work to be broadly successful. You can break a "rule" here and there, but be mindful about it.

Some of my favorite reliable sources for writing advice: K.M. Weiland/Helping Writers Become Authors, Joanna Penn/The Creative Penn, Writers Helping Writers/Angela Ackerman/Becca Puglisi, Jane Friedman, Advanced Fiction Writing, Chuck Wendig/Terribleminds, Kristen Kieffer/Well-Storied, Mignon Fogarty/Grammar Girl, Nathan Bransford, Abbie Emmons/Make Your Story Matter, Bethany Atazadeh, Brittany Wang

Your Intentions with the work: obviously, if you're writing for yourself or a small group of friends, just for fun and entertainment, do what you want. If you're writing with the intention of publishing and you want your work to do well, you do need to mostly stick to the "rules" that are known to work on broad levels.

The reason you see advice like, "all dialogue should serve a purpose," is because it's understood that broadly-speaking, most readers don't enjoy dialogue that is obviously fluff and serves no purpose, for the same reason that your eyes glaze over when you're in a group of friends and someone starts telling a long and irrelevant story about some minor inconvenience they had the other day. People don't like their time being wasted, and if you force your reader to read two pages of your characters having a completely irrelevant conversation about fashion, you're going to lose the reader's interest.

I see a lot of advice like, "If your characters know important information that they don't tell the audience until the end, that's bad writing..."

Part of the problem with advice that you see from random people on the internet is that, quite often, they see a bit of broad and reliable advice, but when they repeat it, they strip it of a lot of the additional information that makes it true. This bit of "advice" is a great example of that, because there's a lot of detail missing. For example, having a character withhold information from the reader is fine to a degree (this is called an unreliable narrator), but there needs to be some indication early on that the reader isn't getting the whole story. There need to be other clues the reader can pick up on throughout the story that makes them question whether or not they're getting the whole truth from the reader. Otherwise it comes off like the writer dropped it into the story at the very end for convenience or drama's sake.

Others I've seen are "If your character has a backstory that's not 100% relevent to the plot, you need to cut it"

Stories can be plot-driven (more about the plot than the characters), character-driven (more about the characters than the plot), or a combination of both (where both have equal importance.)

If you're writing a story that is partially or fully character-driven, who your character is--and how they got to be that person--is one of the most important aspects of the story. Not only because it helps the reader understand why your character is where they are when the story starts and why things need to change, but it helps explain why they make the decisions they make, who and what's important to them, why it's important for them to reach their goal, and gives us a starting point for how they're going to change throughout the story. It's their backstory that is going to build all of that up for the reader.

Backstory explains your character's important life experiences up to the start of the story. So, there is no point in going into detail about the two years your character lived on a beach in New Zealand if that experience didn't play a role in who they are at the start of the story. It just becomes useless information that serves no purpose and clutters up the story for the reader.

Or "Here's why this trope is boring and overdone and why you should remove it"

Advice about tropes and cliches are often opinion-based, because for every person who says "love triangles are dumb and here's why you shouldn't do them" you'll find people who say "I only read books featuring love triangles."

The key thing to remember with tropes is that when you read they're tired and overdone (which makes them cliches), it's fine to use them, just find a way to put a new spin on them. Find out how the trope is typically used and do something different.

And now I just feel awful. I feel like the entire premise of my story is just complete trash and I need to scrap it and start over. I feel like I need to remove everything that I actually want in a story so that it's "correct".

You definitely don't need to do that. Again, take random internet advice with a grain of salt. If it's something you're really concerned about, try to verify it on multiple reliable sites. If you can't, you're probably fine. If you can, those sites will probably also offer alternatives or ways you can fix the problem.

I'm self publishing, does it actually matter?

YES. FULL STOP.

If you are planning to self-publish but are not going to take the time to make sure you're putting the best book out there you can, you are only hurting legitimate self-published authors who do put in the effort to make sure they're putting out their best work.

Having said that...

Will people really read my story and go, "Oh dear, these characters didn't just pop into existence as soon as the plot started! They actually existed and did things before the story takes place!?

No, probably not, but that's because this is a really dramatic interpretation of the advice that backstory should be relevant.

Again, the reader doesn't give two shits that your character spent a year backpacking through the Alps unless that experience played a role in who they are when the story begins. If they had good or bad experiences during that trip, learned things, met people who matter later, etc., then that becomes plot relevant. But, if you can remove this bit of backstory from the story completely and it has no impact on who the character is or the reader's understanding of the character, then it doesn't belong there. Period. Again, the reader doesn't want to have their time wasted, so they don't want to read story after story of your character's time in the Alps if it doesn't matter.

Or "Look, and now they're having a silly conversation and talking to each to her about things unrelated to the plot! And that guy has a pet cat that's never used for anything! This is awful, poorly written trash!"

Again, this is an overly dramatic interpretation of the very solid advice that dialogue needs to matter.

That doesn't mean that every single word uttered needs to be blatantly plot-relevant, but truly, broadly-speaking, readers don't want to read an eight-paragraph argument about which pizza place has better pizza in your character's town unless this argument is in some way relevant to the story. You may be an exception to that rule... you may love to read stories that meander and have a lot of fluffy dialogue and pointless scenes, but you're in the minority, and in that case, you might be better off posting your work to someplace like your blog or Wattpad where you can use tags to find the small segment of other readers who like to read original fiction fluff.

But... the bottom line is that I don't think your story is in as bad of shape (broadly-speaking) as you think it is. Writing advice can feel very, very personal, especially when we see it from randos in internet threads who can't tell the difference between fact and opinion. So, don't take it to heart. Do some research on reliable sites, and if you can't find a bit of advice mentioned, it's probably nothing to worry about. If it is mentioned, they're probably going to tell you how to fix it without scrapping everything you've already written.

Truly, no worries! ♥

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I’ve been writing seriously for over 30 years and love to share what I’ve learned. Have a writing question? My inbox is always open!

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