AI slop’ tool churns out trilogies for $99
If you’ve ever dreamt of unleashing your inner JRR Tolkien, Hilary Mantel or Philip Pullman but lack the time to sit down and knock out a series of books, an AI tool is offering to create a trilogy at the click of a mouse.
For $99, TrilogyForge can churn out three books of 400 to 500 pages after guiding users through a ten-minute set-up process. It has been received with scorn by the publishing industry.
The service is the brainchild of Tyler Jensen, a software developer and frustrated author from Utah. He said: “I realised there are a lot of people who are not professional writers, who have ideas and characters that they love and they would love to see them on page. They either don’t have the time or maybe they don’t have the skillset, or even know where to start, and they want to see those ideas come to life. So that’s what we’re about.”
The AI tool is hosted on write3booksin24hours.com, where users are prompted to create an outline for the books in a few sentences and suggest some genuine books for a stylistic guide.
TrilogyForge then returns an outline for the novels: plot, genre, narrative style, characters, structure and an author’s pen name, all of which are editable. All that is left is to pay the fee and within hours, three books are delivered, formatted to be printed.
Jensen, who announced the website at the CES tech show in Las Vegas, said: “We don’t expect professional writers to use our service. In fact, some may not like it and that’s OK. They walk a road that is full of craft and hard work and pride and we honour that. The publishing industry is not going to suddenly contact me and say, ‘Hey, we’re dumping all of our authors because we can just replace them with you’.”
Dan Conway, the chief executive of the Publishers Association, said: “This and similar tools might be entertaining to dabble with, but the AI slop they generate can’t hold a candle to the readers’ experience of exploring genuine creativity, shaped by real life experiences, ideas and imagination.
“Of course, authors’ use of AI tools to support their creative process will develop, but wholesale AI-written content of this kind will not be the future of great literature. The enjoyment of reading comes from entering someone else’s imagination and thought processes, not from being led down an algorithmic pathway.”
Thad McIlroy, an analyst who writes about the impact of technology on publishing, said: “There are now a half a dozen start-ups that sell ‘create your own book with AI’ services, but this is certainly the first offering to create three at once. In theory that makes sense, because the key to success in genre writing is to have a series.
“They claim TrilogyForge is not a replacement for professional authors or the craft of writing itself, but of course that’s exactly what it is. But the company offices would be burnt to the ground if they admitted it.”
Jensen admitted that he cannot stop bad actors using his service to imitate real authors.
He said: “Honestly, we can’t. We encourage people to follow the law, learn what the requirements are of any publishing platform they’re going to use and follow those, like any other use of AI.”
He built TrilogyForge on ChatGPT, using custom prompts to create the output. OpenAI, which developed ChatGPT, is being sued for copyright infringement by authors and publishers who accuse the company of stealing their work to train the AI model.
Asked whether the service is in effect using other authors’ work without compensation for them, Jensen replied: “We’re in a new age. We’re trying to figure out how copyright law works. How does it apply to AIgenerated materials?”
Conway said the “AI market for content is broken” and called on tech companies to license content before they powered applications and for AI-written content to be labelled properly.
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