- Ajay Chowdhury has admitted using ChatGPT to help write his latest novel
- The author says he uses AI to generate story ideas and ‘jazz’ up his prose
The world’s best-loved authors will be using AI to help write their novels ‘within a few years’, says a leading crime writer.
Ajay Chowdhury admits he has already turned to the technology to help his hero escape in the latest thriller in his detective series.
He also employed ChatGPT for speeding up research and generating story ideas, while AI editing software was used to improve the pacing and ‘jazz’ up his prose.
The process reduced the time it took to get a ‘decent draft’ to his publisher by a third, he estimated.
His confession comes as thousands of authors are fighting against the tech, which they claim is using their work without consent or credit.
An open letter signed by authors including Margaret Atwood and Philip Pullman called on the firms behind the AI to fairly compensate them.
In contrast, however, former tech entrepreneur Mr Chowdhury has embraced it – and says he believes that bestselling authors will soon do the same.
He said it was ‘great to bounce ideas off’ and ‘unleash creativity’, acting as a ‘super-editor’ to structure ideas and brainstorm more effectively.
He said: ‘I would be amazed if in three to four years the majority of authors weren’t using it in some form.
‘We’ve gone from writing by hand, to using spellcheckers, and word processing. This is just another tool in the arsenal.’
The author has written an interactive eBook for commuters called ‘The Invitation’, which includes puzzles and AI-generated graphics, in partnership with Google for the launch of its new Pixel Fold.
The murder mystery was designed to be read in around 30 minutes, the average journey time to work, with research finding one in three people turn to crime fiction to pass the time on the tube.
In his previous career, Mr Chowdhury was chairman of the song-recognising app Shazam, which was sold to Apple for over £300million in 2018.
His first crime novel, The Waiter, was published in 2021. He has since published two follow-ups in quick succession, but it was for the fourth instalment called The Spy, due to be published next year, that he turned to AI.
For one storyline, he asked the chatbot how his hero detective, who was trapped in a shed with a bag of fertiliser and a spade, could escape when the villain pulls open the door and points a gun.
‘ChatGPT then gave me a bunch of ideas – for example make a bomb, distract him and then hit him etc. Nothing hugely novel but it helped me put a few ideas together and come up with a third,’ he said.
The author also told how he used an AI tool called Midjourney, which creates images based on a user’s written description. He used the platform to generate a story board of ideas to help visualise what might happen next.
Mr Chowdhury further used an editing tool called ProWritingAid, which used AI to suggest improvements to style and grammar. This was employed, he said, to ‘examine pacing in the book and jazzing up slow paced chapters’.
Mr Chowdhury, who emphasised however that AI was not doing the writing for him, believes that AI would prove most useful as a co-pilot or ‘editor on demand’ for genre writers in crime, science fiction, and romance – as long as it was used ‘judiciously’, he warned.
‘Authors like Wilbur Smith and Stieg Larsson have passed away but they still have books coming out, they’re just written in the same style by younger writers.
‘Some are very good. I can see AI doing something similar in a few years time – and doing a very good job that will keep fans happy.’
But while it might give genre authors a run for their money, it would not replace the very best because ‘ultimately a good book is about the reader’s empathy with the characters and I don’t believe AI is good at that’.
The technology had been trained to imitate, to serve up a replica, rather than create something new, he said.
