A literary agent I read, Abigail Fenton, published a piece called “No, You Can’t Write Your Novel With AI.” It is well argued, it is honest about being personal opinion instead of industry policy, and I think it is wrong in ways that matter, but the part that stuck with me was the ending, because it gives away more than she meant it to.
Marcin, I found your article interesting and agree on many of the arguments you bring up. The ghostwriter one is an interesting distintion. I wonder if a bypass might end up occurring some day if a writer co-authors a book with their AI collaborator (to the point where their AI has "chosen" a name to self-identify). If the argument is that the AI cannot count as they were not "paid", that could be a loop-hole that is easy to circumvent with some creativity. Writers are creative after all.
I will always believe AI is a writer's tool for ideation, research, and editing. Now that Claude has added a watermark to its output, would you still recommend it for any part of the Three Pass process?
I personally don't care at all about watermarks, Gemini has had it already for some time and it didn't change my life at all. I suppose the editing prompt will work as well with other top models like DeepSeek or Kimi. Or you can set up Gemma locally if you have good graphic card. All the watermark says about text is that it was somehow touched by Claude. For reasonable people it's not enough to judge. Witch hunters don't need watermarks.
Interesting take on the current AI debate. As a writer who openly adheres to human-generated writing only, I still read other takes on the evolving situation even if LLMs were used in a particular writer’s process.
I believe transparency is the key to working collectively toward a set of agreements we can all live with. That’s why I like reading articles like this one & the one posted by CLRN in July 2025 regarding the debate about spell-check being AI (see below).
The one statement I do find to be an oversimplification in your article, however, is "Which means the objection to AI is not really about who did the writing, it is about who deserves the status."
In my mind, it's "about who & what did the writing."
Marcin, I found your article interesting and agree on many of the arguments you bring up. The ghostwriter one is an interesting distintion. I wonder if a bypass might end up occurring some day if a writer co-authors a book with their AI collaborator (to the point where their AI has "chosen" a name to self-identify). If the argument is that the AI cannot count as they were not "paid", that could be a loop-hole that is easy to circumvent with some creativity. Writers are creative after all.
I will always believe AI is a writer's tool for ideation, research, and editing. Now that Claude has added a watermark to its output, would you still recommend it for any part of the Three Pass process?
I personally don't care at all about watermarks, Gemini has had it already for some time and it didn't change my life at all. I suppose the editing prompt will work as well with other top models like DeepSeek or Kimi. Or you can set up Gemma locally if you have good graphic card. All the watermark says about text is that it was somehow touched by Claude. For reasonable people it's not enough to judge. Witch hunters don't need watermarks.
Interesting take on the current AI debate. As a writer who openly adheres to human-generated writing only, I still read other takes on the evolving situation even if LLMs were used in a particular writer’s process.
I believe transparency is the key to working collectively toward a set of agreements we can all live with. That’s why I like reading articles like this one & the one posted by CLRN in July 2025 regarding the debate about spell-check being AI (see below).
The one statement I do find to be an oversimplification in your article, however, is "Which means the objection to AI is not really about who did the writing, it is about who deserves the status."
In my mind, it's "about who & what did the writing."
https://www.clrn.org/is-spell-check-ai/#Differentiating_Spell_Check_from_Modern_AI