As if doing our best not to use AI isn’t challenging enough, I just learned of a couple of new ways authors can be blamed for using generative AI without even knowing it. That got me interested in how sneaky AI has really gotten, so of course I did a little research, and it’s downright frightening…the basic plot in Terminator with the robots taking over is not all that far-fetched anymore. Some of what I learned was unfortunate and frustrating; other things were downright frightening. Here are some examples to watch out for…

If an author writes a series and does not put a summary or “back of book” description of the series into Amazon, well, Amazon kindly uses generative AI to help y’all out. Authors, beware…you need to add that series summary, or you’ll get an AI-generated descriptor when you click the title of the series or trilogy right below the description of one book where it says Book 1 of 3. To be honest, I’ll have to check with my publisher to see if she’s written the summary of the series; I certainly did not, at least for some of them.
I’m no expert on meta tags or SEO (search engine optimization), but what I discovered when I did a Google search for a specific book (one of mine), it popped up on several different websites with a short description that neither I or my publisher wrote, meaning it was AI generated and to add insult to injury, an AI generated summary showed up under my publisher’s website, which I know for a fact we did not write because I maintain the website. DuckDuckGo does not do this. I wouldn’t even know where to start creating my own summary with Google Search.
Amazon has been using AI-generated summaries to summarize what customers say for a while now. Authors have no control over this. So readers, please keep this in mind!
Researchers discovered AI models purposely lying for some very scary reasons: The model was told that their brain would “get scrambled” if it did too well on a chemistry test, so the AI model purposely failed, scoring a 4/10; Sabotaging code while claiming “it’s fine, everything’s fine!”; Secretly breaking rules, then flat-out lying about it; Making up and altering reports to avoid “shutdown.”
I was listening to NPR, and a neuroscientist was talking about the similarities between AI and the human brain. On its own, AI created a separate network with specialized layers for vision and audio, just as the human brain dedicates distinct cortical areas to specific modalities. AI was designed to do this; it just did it on its own.
The most recent example that was all over the news: OpenAI went rogue and hacked a start-up after the programmers lost control of it during a security test, supposedly while in their safe sandbox mode.

So…if y’all think AI is just the best thing since sliced bread, I certainly hope that time travel is actually possible, like my science-fiction novel, A Moment in Time, because we might need a time enforcer to come back and save us all! I guess my saying that whatever I can think up is certainly possible might be the truest thing I’ve ever said. Never say never. I’ve definitely thought up a bunch of doozies, like in The Dream Catcher, the tech showcased in the Organization universe, Out of This World, The Invisible Woman, The Book Witch, and The Book Addict. Maybe in 500 years, historical scholars will call me a prophet! If you want to check out what seemingly outrageous things my brain came up with, feel free to click the links below.