The world changes so quickly. When I was in second grade, I wrote my first story in pencil on newsprint handwriting paper. I was sent to the principal to read it to him. I can’t even remember what it was about, and I’m sure I don’t have a copy. Fast forward thirty-five years, and the landscape of writing has changed. I went from pencils to pens to typewriters to word processors. I wrote one of my first failed novels on a palm pilot and collapsible keyboard while I was stripping on Guam. My biggest concern with that tech was losing my writing and file conversion. My second was with a lenovo yoga, which dropped letters as I handwrote on a glossy screen. Frustrating, but exciting. Now I use an iPad with amazing handwriting recognition and edit with a mix of notion for on-the-go rough drafts and gdocs for involved later-stage editing. Spellcheck graduated to grammar checking. Writing has gotten so easy, thanks to technology. But it’s always felt like writing. Then came AI (which has ironically made gdoc’s grammar check useless… anyone else notice it keeps trying to make EVERYTHING past tense?).
AI is problematic in so many ways. I don’t think I need to go into them because others have done it more passionately and with greater articulation than I will.
What I do want to talk about is how AI is changing the landscape for writers who WANT to write and publish the way we always have — with our ideas and our words. We’re in a weird churn where AI work cannot be reliably detected and several AI works have gotten accepted by publishers. The publishers are scrambling for ways to deal with increased submissions and the possibility of them losing reputation by accepting AI work, and writers are almost just waiting for the moment they will be accused of using AI. (FWIW, I got my first accusation. For the images in a book that was published in 2020, years before AI image generation became publicly available. It sucked. Because I spent weeks creating those images to fit my book along with my friend/co-worker). There’s a bit of panic, a bit of a witch hunt, and also a lot of justified frustration and unease. Honestly, I’m freaked out about how this will affect the publishing landscape. Five years ago it was already difficult to get published, let alone read. Now the market is flooded with AI work, and publishing resources are stretched even thinner. It doesn’t look great for writers.
One of the questions I’ve seen floating around among writers is: how can we prove our writing is free-range, human writing? Solutions have included: software that timestamps and verifies drafts, AI detection software, organizations where authors can get yearly certification, interviews with the authors about their work, and the submission of rough drafts for comparison. Each of these solutions is problematic in a different way. Software demands users modify their writing flow to use compatible programs. AI detection potentially feeds writing back into the slop machine. Organizations can only vet writers, not each work they produce. Some writers don’t love talking about their work or… simply can’t express themselves verbally the way they can through writing. But I want to talk about one that I’ve seen floated around a lot, with very little pushback: sharing old drafts.
Do Drafts Even Assure No AI Usage?
First, there’s the issue of whether or not past drafts can prove there was no AI usage. I’m not really sure what people mean when they are suggesting submitting drafts or working documents will prove no AI usage. Are we talking about track changes through the entire draft, and then the editors having to watch how the entire document is built? I doubt editors will have that capacity. Are we checking that there is no pasting into the document? Because I know I often switch back to handwriting for problematic passages, then just copy/paste the converted text into my word processor. Or are we just looking for “messy human writing that becomes more cohesive each draft”? I’m really not sure, and I think while we bat around the idea of sharing drafts, we need to think about how we would determine the origin of those drafts.
The Commodification of the Process
First, go watch this Instagram post from ellyzkart. It details how the Internet, which was supposed to help artists reach their audiences, has become a place that commodifies not the artwork, but the process of making art. She talks about how artists have to invest in software, learn video skills, get manicures and do their makeup, and create process videos to engage their audience and prove they aren’t AI. She speaks about a wider problem than just AI, with the social media companies capitalizing on the need for artists to be accessible and relatable, but mentions how the advance of AI makes it even worse and almost impossible to avoid. It’s a powerful video and I recommend watching it until the end.
While visual artists have it particularly bad in social media, I can’t help but think about all the ways writers have already commodified our own processes. From posting one-liners from our WIP to the rise of aesthetic boards to unboxing our books… authors have been trying to find ways to get engagement on social media for years, and it’s only gotten harder — more work, fewer returns, and less community. While some authors love social media, others find it a chore, and I’d hate to have the expectation become even more access to the writing process.
But Koji, we’re talking about submitting drafts to our publishers, not on social media. Sure. For now. But what about proving to readers we aren’t using AI? What about when some authors find an aesthetically interesting way to make process videos (since they have to anyway) and begin sharing them, and then that becomes the expectation within the indie world — that readers will have access not to the finished product, but to the process that creates it. What happens when our process becomes our product? If we are going to have to find ways to document the process, chances are, writers will find ways to use that documentation as social media content and eventually it will become part of the expected access readers have to a writer’s life. (I want to be clear, not blaming writers who share on social media… instead pointing out the world we live in and the stranglehold social media has on art).
Yes, I can choose to just not do it. In general, I’ve backed way off social media and concentrated more on reading and writing this past year. But I’m definitely there will come a time when there is an expectation of public access to drafts. And using drafts to prove no AI usage can become a slippery slope in commodifying the writing process.
Writing as Discovery, Publication as Presentation
But with all of that — I have a very selfish reason why I don’t want rough drafts to be the standard for proving human authorship: my rough drafts are messy.
I don’t mean they are grammatically incorrect and riddled with trite symbolism and two thousand mentions of rolling eyes and clenching stomachs. They are, and I wouldn’t want them to get around for those reasons, but I could also handle if my poor writing skills leaked. We all have ’embarrassing’ first drafts. But sometimes drafting goes beyond poor language. Sometimes the very ideas in the drafting are embarrassing or even harmful. This is especially true when a writer is covering sensitive topics.
My writing often deals with sensitive subject matter ranging from sexual assault, self harm, and mental health issues to parenting difficulties and alternative relationship styles. I pride myself in thorough, honest explorations of these topics that are based in my own experiences. I’d like to think that along with the honesty, my final craft has a certain amount of ethics regarding the complexity of these issues. However, my rough drafts often do not have the nuance my final drafts have. Sometimes they are too graphic. Sometimes they are written from a place of pain or confusion and lack the context of the final narrative. A lot the times my rough drafts are simply me processing things and, in later drafts, I take into consideration the wider conversation around these topics. In these situations, exposing my early drafts to an editor isn’t just embarrassing. It can be painful. I don’t want the editors I work with to see my trauma laid bare.
Ending Thoughts
I have let this sit on my computer for about a month now. It felt too rough. Not ready to finish and put out there. Then I got the latest email from ellipses, which included the writing journey feature and the Public Version History. Honestly, I’m a bit squeamish on the public version history, for all of the reasons listed above. As we begin to package our process, the art becomes not the book, not the writing, but the process. While I love the verb art — the doing of art — I do not think that needs to be how readers experience our books. I am jealous of that experience. I want it to be mine.
If I want to share my process, I’ll write about it.
The writing journey feature, which records how much time you spend typing, broken out over sessions, seems less intrusive and, honestly like a great way to get some social media graphics. As soon as I thought that, I sighed, because that’s not really the life I want, either. I don’t want to be excited that I’ll finally have something visual to share on social media and can, maybe, start posting again. It all goes back to feeling that we have to share in a visual medium to be relevant and gain exposure when we’re writers. We should be able to write books and stories and that should be enough.
