Good afterevenmorn (whenever you’re reading this!)

I’d like to talk about AI. I can hear your collective groans. I’m quite annoyed by the subject, too, but perhaps for different reasons. Still, let’s talk AI from the perspective of an actual writer (struggling, but still a writer).

The news has been filled with nothing but discussions of AI in creative spaces… or, at least, that’s what my news feed has been full of. It’s as if all of the various algorithms are doing their darnedest to keep me as depressed as possible… stupid AI, but I digress. I’m sure you’re all quite familiar with the chime of the bells of doom that creatives have been ringing since AI reared its head in our spaces. There is considerable debate raging all over the internet about where AI fits, where it doesn’t and why or why not. Many authors are feeling threatened, and not without reason. There are a myriad of reasons why. Let’s explore just a couple.

Use of the Author’s Name

We all know that we can now plug a prompt into a computer and it’ll spit out what we ask for these days. When it comes to novels, currently, what the computer spits out is usually sub-par nonsense that can only barely be considered to have all the aspects of a novel. For now, authors are relatively safe. Or are we?

I watched a YouTube video a little while ago (I think it might have been Philip de Franco, but I could very well be mistaken. My brain is cluttered with made-up things and the real world kinda blends together into a nondescript blob sometimes) that talked of at least one writer who had a bunch of books using her author name pop up on Amazon — books she didn’t write. Books she’s pretty sure were written by AI. Jame Friedman was not impressed by what those books offered to the world in her name:

The books are just bloviating garbage. It was repetitive, like a really bad student essay [and] didn’t have anything really meaningful in it.

-From the CBC article Author says ‘AI-generated’ books were published under her name. Amazon wouldn’t take them down, August 2023.

On one hand, clearly AI isn’t yet nearly as good at writing as writers (whew!). Yet. That’s not the problem here. The problem is using AI to churn out tonnes of content, which is sold — people pay — under a known author’s name (in order to generate those sales0 and it turns out to be absolute dreck. It doesn’t matter that the author didn’t write that nonsense. Their name is now associated with that churned-out muck.

That’s not the fault of the AI, I hear folks say. That is the fraudulent twit who is uploading the stuff to Amazon. Technically correct, yes. But that kind of fraud was much more labour intensive before AI, so much so that this kind of fraud was virtually unheard of before. It takes time to write something, even if that something is sub-par, repetitive, meaningless drivel. The effort it takes to write something even patently awful was too much for this kind of fraud. Not so now.

Easily combatted, comes the counter. The buyer need simply check the author’s website to ensure they wrote it. Yeah. Sure, sure. How many people are actually going to do that, though? How many emails complaining about the subpar product bearing their name would an author have to field from those who didn’t know, or think to go check the author’s actual bibliography?

Yeah. Exactly.

Drowning an Already Saturated Market

If you’ll excuse the self-pitying whine for just a moment, getting discovered and read is already incredibly difficult as a writer. I’ve been at it for… a long time, and have gotten almost nowhere. That’s on me, true. I’m really bad at marketing. But even if I were a whizz, it’s still obscenely difficult to get seen.

Times are also tough. People have very limited means to spend on books. The plethora of AI generated content, churned out in a matter of moments rather than months or years it may take an actual person, will have made it that much more difficult to have anyone find one’s works and, even if they do, well, that month’s budget has been spent on books already. And sure, AI books will, for now, be less than great, they can also be sold much more cheaply. There is already a hideous problem of devaluing the real work that goes into book production, and the dismissing of the very real value a book can bring to a person (and the world, if I can get a bit grandiose).

Selling AI books for cheap creates a lot of downward pressure for authors trying to make a living with their art. In order to compete, they’ll also have to lower their already ridiculously low prices. Then what? They already can’t afford to eat off the back of their labour. So they take on more ‘real’ work, and have less time for writing. Less time for writing means fewer books get written. AI fills that gap and then soon there simply isn’t room anywhere for a writer that isn’t already established.

Let’s not talk about all the spare time for marketing the folks who only have to write one sentence in order to get a novel will be able to do that writers doing the work of writing simply have not.

I can already hear a chorus of ‘so what’s’ from the AI crowd. ‘Adapt or perish.’ And yeah. Authors will have to hustle even more than we already are. And that’s a problem. We’re already working insanely hard trying to be seen. Having many someones churn out a book every week will be nigh impossible to compete with. No cries of ‘if it’s good enough…’ will ever convince anyone who has been through the grind of being published and trying to be seen that luck doesn’t play a pretty major role in what books get seen and catch on. Hard work and talent don’t guarantee success in this industry. Some incredibly talented, hard-working writers will perish forever in obscurity. Maybe they’ll get lucky and be posthumously popular.

Platforms requiring AI-written books to be labelled as such to permit consumer choice is a good step towards helping writers along.

Sure, authors can rest easy-ish that AI can’t actually write very well… yet. But to quote Philip de Franco, this is the worst AI will ever be. It will only improve from here on. As such, it does, as much as people want to hand wave it away, pose an existential threat to the lives and livelihoods of writers. And that threat isn’t some hazy thing in the far future. It’s right on our laps. And writers are uneasy. Scared, even.

Strange how instead of turning AI to things that would help free up time for people to sit down and write (and now we will have to address how such implementation would affect the earning power of these menial tasks that AI is particularly suited for; not a consideration extended to artists, I’ll note), the powers that be have decided instead to try and replace the writers (and other artists) altogether.

I can get the appeal. Really, I do. How cool would it be to have an idea, and then have something else do all the hard work of bringing that idea to life? You get to chill on the couch and watch Netflix. Excellent! Congrats! You’re a writer.

(Note here that I’m not talking about writing assistance. I’m talking about inputting a sentence and having 100,000 words you had barely anything to do with spat back out at you)

Except that you’re not. You’re the benefactor of a ghost writer you do not have to pay. You are no more a writer than a person who commissions a very specific piece of art from someone else is an artist. You just commissioned the art from a computer instead of a person.

Writing is a craft. It’s an art. It takes discipline and practice. Part of it are the artistic choices a writer makes in order to execute their vision – from writing in the voices and perspectives of different characters, or turning tropes on their head (or not), specific word choice, all intended to paint with words, to evoke emotions, realize a vision, and to transport people into other worlds. We often agonize over a single word for hours, even days at a time because we want to get it right.

Writers don’t always hit the mark, it’s true. But that’s part of the practice bit. And the discipline part. It’s a lot of work to be a writer; and that’s just the writing part. Never mind everything else that it takes to be successful at it.

AI has a ton of potential to make the world a better place, but it can also make it a thousand times harder for those already struggling. Authors know that AI isn’t going anywhere. We know we’re going to have to adapt to a drastically changed artistic landscape. What already felt hard is now going to feel impossible. And in all the discussions about AI art and writing, I sometimes feel like the artist and the writer is forgotten.

Anyway, that’s what has been on my mind of late. Well, one of many things, to be frank. I’m almost dreading the comments, but sound off below. This will surely be an interesting discussion.

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When S.M. Carrière isn’t brutally killing your favorite characters, she spends her time teaching martial arts, live streaming video games, and cuddling her cat. In other words, she spends her time teaching others to kill, streaming her digital kills, and a cuddling furry murderer. Her most recent titles include Daughters of Britain, Skylark and Human.