Portrait of the artist as a young algorithm

As far as I'm concerned, we don't shame people enough for this.

“Look for book 4 in my series The Duskweaver’s Covenant, coming soon!”

Folks, we’re fighting a losing battle.

Well, that’s premature. It’s not losing yet. But it’s harder than it should be. Despite the tremendous amount of pushback from writers and readers alike, AI continues its slow, insidious encroachment into the publishing industry, both replacing writers and using their work as “training material” so that it can eventually replace even more writers.

As with a lot of bad decisions, using AI to generate blurbs, reports, articles, and even entire books comes down to we don’t want to pay people to do this anymore. AI doesn’t do it better, but it does do it cheaper and faster, and that’s all that matters. So you end up with hastily generated “summer reading lists,” half of which are books that don’t exist. Entertainment news sites like ScreenRant and Comic Book Resource appear to have replaced their entire writing staffs with AI-generated content, much of it posted without any indicator that anyone even looked at it before it was published. Is there a single human being working behind the scenes? It’s impossible to tell, though presumably there’s someone making money off of them, otherwise there’s no reason to continue existing.

Meanwhile, writing by actual humans is in danger of being used to train AI. If you’ve published a book, even if you only made $11 from it, it’s probably being used to make a computer program sound slightly more lifelike. What? You didn’t give your permission for that? Well, it’s a good thing that tech companies don’t need it. Why, according to this genius, requiring consent from writers before using their work for AI training would bring about the end of AI almost overnight, and (god forbid) a couple “disruptors” might lose some money.

Of course no one’s going to consent to their work being used to train A.I. That’s like being told that not only are you about to be fired, but you’ll have to train your replacement. It’s a real “are we the baddies?” situation when you have to hope that you’ll never be forced to require permission to use someone’s work in order to keep your industry afloat. Yet, at the same time we’re being told, constantly, that AI is about to be a major part of everyday life, whether we want it to be or not. It’s framed in a sinister, gaslight-y “You’ll be happy about it, you just don’t know it yet” sort of way, particularly when addressed to using AI to replace creatives, teachers, and even doctors.

This “it’s inevitable, so just lie back and let it happen” attitude is bad enough coming from tech companies, but far worse when it comes from other creatives. NaNoWriMo, once a hub for aspiring writers, folded this past year, not just because of accusations that a mod had been grooming underage people on another site, but because of its unexpectedly robust defense of using AI to make the 50,000 words written in one month goal. Defending cheating, in other words, if you considered NaNo to be a competition rather than just a tool for setting goals and improving self-discipline.

In its “do whatever it takes to reach 50,000, we don’t really care” statement, NaNo went one step further and claimed that criticisms of using AI to write a book were ableist, and that “not all brains have same abilities…there is a wealth of reasons why individuals can’t ‘see’ the issues in their writing without help.” Indeed, this is why writers have these things called “beta readers,” which up to this point were usually other human beings willing to read their writing and point out what works and what doesn’t. But I guess if you’re unwilling to take criticism, AI is a pretty good solution.

Worse than that are how many writers are regularly being exposed for relying on AI not just to tweak a sentence or two or check their grammar (which, fine, that’s reasonable), but to write the entire goddamn book for them. Some of them, as noted here, have been so bold and eager to get “their” work out there that they neglected to remove the AI prompts and interactions from the final edits. They’re in such a damn hurry that they don’t even proofread their own work, let alone have someone else take a look at it before hitting “publish.” I mean, holy shit.

The reaction to these kinds of things is disappointingly wishy-washy. Some call for the authors to concede that the work isn’t entirely their own (and in fact, was probably plagiarized to an extent, since that’s what AI does). Others just sort of shrug, point to the fact that AI is “inevitable” (is it though??), and that it’s just another tool to get books written and published both faster and cheaper. Because now, apparently, success as an author is measured according to how many books you “write” (and yeah, I am very deliberately putting that in quotes), regardless of the quality, and how fast you put them out. It’s not unusual to see “writers” nowadays claiming that they’ve “written” and published 10 books in a single year, either not knowing or not caring that writing shouldn’t be comparable to making sausage.

Writing is supposed to be work. It’s not a moneymaking scheme, where you use “hacks” and cut corners, and suddenly you’re the next Stephen King. You shouldn’t be focusing on getting a book done fast, you should be focusing on making sure that it’s good. I’ve been working on a book since the beginning of last year, and it’s nowhere near ready to be published yet. I would love it if it was, but I’m trying to be realistic here. It’s a process, and that process is hard, and takes a lot of time. No one should just be skipping over all that because they can’t be bothered with it.

If I sound judgmental, that’s on purpose. I am being very judgmental about this. If I see you announce that you’re about to publish book 12 in a series you just started last year, unless each of those books is only 30 pages long I’m going to assume it’s garbage you wrote mostly with a computer program. I’m not even judging the quality of the writing, I’m judging the entitlement, the idea that even if you have no natural writing ability (and no interest in learning how to develop it), you should be able to “write” books if you want to.

Maybe I’m just being overprotective. Writing is about the only thing I can do. I can’t draw, can’t sing, can’t play an instrument. It’s fine. Am I a little envious of those who can? Of course. Do I think I should be allowed to say I’m an artist if I want to? Well, I can say whatever the fuck I want, but it doesn’t make it true. I can say I’m a doctor, but “diagnosing” people by typing symptoms into Google doesn’t make me one. Telling an AI program “write me a romance novel involving a werewolf and a professional baseball player” doesn’t make you a writer.

Why would you want your success and talent to ride on half-assed computer-generated garbage? Why do you think your readers will be satisfied with that? AI can’t offer the heart and soul a novel needs to bring it to life. Would you want it to? I don’t know, man, that sounds pretty terrifying to me.