Hack “Writers” Fuming After ChatGPT Starts Refusing Prompts to Copy a Specific Author’s Style

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It only took them three and a half years, but the powers that be at OpenAI have apparently directed ChatGPT to start refusing requests to copy a specific author’s style, Ars Technica reports. And it’s causing an absolute meltdown among “writers” who had grown accustomed to using the chatbot to churn out stories.

Word spread quickly on the r/WritingWithAI subreddit, where one person using ChatGPT to write an entire novel made a post fuming that the chatbot is “not letting you emulate specific authors anymore.”

“Now Ms. GPT says she can’t generate content in the style of specific authors,” the user complained, using what appears to be an eyebrow-raising nickname for the chatbot. “My prompts were soooo specific and I got exactly what I wanted out of them. For example, ‘rewrite in the literary style of ‘author here’ with abundant dialogue and detail avoiding staccato prose.’”

“I have no idea how to get around this,” they added, “other than maybe feed it prose I already edited that’s technically mine? F**k.”

The thread, posted last week, has generated quite a bit of discussion by the subreddit’s standards, racking up over a hundred comments. Evidently, some of it was pretty heated, with dozens of replies removed by moderators. (“If you disagree with a post or the whole subreddit, be constructive to make it a nice place for all its members, including you,” a mod replied to some of the removed posts.)

Some shared their own workarounds for the AI’s refusals — which included just using another model, like Claude or Gemini.

Other more noble-minded AI writers pushed back on the idea of using the tech to mimic famous creatives.

“But why emulate any single author? Or a group for that matter. Why not understand the prose you want to achieve and use that?” one wrote.

“Try writing your own words,” read a heavily downvoted comment which apparently survived the moderator purge. “People have been copying styles for centuries without AI.”

Using AI to write is already controversial, and asking it to mimic authors even more so, given that the models were trained on millions of books without permission from the copyrightholders in the first place. Last year, the romance novelist Lena McDonald sparked a wave of backlash after readers noticed she accidentally left in an AI prompt asking it to crib the style of J. Bree, a popular author working in the same genre.

According to Ars, ChatGPT is now refusing style requests for both living and deceased authors. Now, the AI suggests users to capture an author’s “feeling” by integrating some of the hallmarks of their stories.

Given the backdrop of lawsuits the company is facing, it’s an important distinction, the reporting notes. Currently, copyright law doesn’t explicitly protect an artist’s “style,” which is nebulous and hard to define, but AI outputs generated with the explicit intent of mimic style could potentially cross the line into becoming more blatant theft. At least one proposed act would make an artist’s style copyrightable, ostensibly to protect them against AI.

More on AI: AI Companies Are Buying Antique Books, Ingesting Their Contents to Train Models, and Then Destroying Them at Incredible Scale

The post Hack “Writers” Fuming After ChatGPT Starts Refusing Prompts to Copy a Specific Author’s Style appeared first on Futurism.

IN the summer of 2019, I was seated in the wine cellar of a walled Medieval town high above the Dordogne Valley of France, not far from Sarlat-la-Canéda, making phone calls, writing reports. I have given this story in other places and it appears as though you’re about to hear it again. Rob Skiba is a name you that you might be familiar with. Though he had made a name for himself as a Nephilim researcher, more recently Rob had taken a dive into the deep end of the pool via flat earth research. The recorded interviews I conducted between he and Rick Hummer, a fellow flat earth investigator and close friend of his, was published while still occupying that very wine cellar. Read all about it. Chicago Is Not a Mirage.

Word quickly spread. Within a few short weeks, dozens of flat earth researchers began accepting my invite for a private interview, if not a series of interviews. From a 17th-century tower built by King Louis XIV, and with a stunning view of the Alps, I sat down with Robbie Davidson, founder of the Flat Earth International Conferences, conducting multiple sessions. While staying in Dumfries, Scotland, David Weiss agreed to take part in the interviews, as did Bob Knodel of Globebusters. There were others. But when I asked the interviewees to discuss the moments that shaped their lives, among the many PSYOPs, false flag attacks, and hoaxes that were discussed, only these men committed commentary to the false 9/11 narrative.

The resulting recordings ballooned into The Unexpected Cosmology, a book which became a website and was even intended as an anthology. And of course, the following discourse was originally a chapter. It was Walt Disney who stated, “Disneyland will never be completed. It will continue to grow as long as there is imagination left in the world.” Those sentiments remain applicable here as well. American Sensationalism: The 9/11 Interviews was always intended to be expanded upon with the inclusion of new researchers. So I’m sorry to say the project became stagnant during the Covid-19 psychodrama. I took a break to tackle other projects. We lost Rob Skiba. Rob offered hours of private conversation regarding his life but we never got around to the big one. 9/11. It was in the cards. Sadly, Bob Knodel died soon afterwards. Voices are being squeezed from an entire generation. Gnosis passes with them.

In the aftermath, the FE community became fractured. People began going their separate ways. Robbie Davidson, among a noted few others who were interviewed for the project, got up and left the movement altogether. It is not my intent to erase his or the contributions of others if only brief. They came, they went, their testimonies remain.

The original vision may have hit roadblocks but it is not forgotten. I expanded this paper a few years later to include testimony from author Pauly Hart, a dear friend of mine. I had wanted to continue that trend every year thereafter but you know how it goes. For the 25th anniversary of the attack I have redirected my efforts to its first large scale expansion, including Andrew Hoy and Darrin Geisinger into the mix. Perhaps others will lend their experiences to the recorder in time.

The following is their report.

Read the 9/11 Interviews

Watch the Interviews