Update – trying to catch up on the dates here… This should be for the week covering April 28-May 4. What did I accomplish? Writing-wise, not a whole helluva lot. I haven’t touched the detective story since I subbed the chapters and synopsis. I haven’t even combed through my files. I’ve mostly been working on a paid assignment and writing nightly flash. Part of my work week got taken up by a tooth extraction and the subsequent recovery (I’ve learned I can survive on bananas and apple sauce) and the need to leave the house to buy new glasses. And I took Saturday off because it was Free Comic Book Day and I had to drive into the city to pick through the offerings. I’ve been going to that store for 40 years, give or take. This is its third location. The owner (actually the second owner) recently retired, so it’s now on its third owner. I hardly buy anything any more but I like to keep up with the industry. Maybe I should do a sequel to the detective novel, with the detective helping out a comic book character. No, wait, that was Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Never mind.
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The following is an unhinged rant based on nothing but my own paranoia. Take it seriously at your own risk.
As mentioned, I made a sub to a publisher last month. Normally agent-only, this publisher has an open call every year, usually covered by the SFF thread on the writers’ site I belong to. This year was different. The news was that subs to the open call would be sorted by an AI (artificial intelligence) program, which would skim the entries and assign them to editors looking for that sort of book. That right there killed a lot of people’s interest. Doesn’t sound like many folks bothered to enter this year. Except for me and maybe a handful of others. But now I’m getting second thoughts.
I’ve been vaguely aware of the artistic community’s concerns about AI producing artwork. Here’s how it works: you feed existing images (created by people) into the system. The system scans, or “scrapes” the data and learns how to create its own “art” based on prompts from the programmer. The more it ingests, the more it “learns,” the harder it gets to tell a computer-generated result from that by someone with a pencil or paintbrush. It used to be easy because the computer would give people eight-fingered hands, but that bug seems to have been squashed.
So HAL-9000 can “paint” a Bob Ross picture now. So what?
So there are programs that can replicate a person’s voice to the point you can’t tell the fake from the real thing. Someone’s already produced a fake Taylor Swift song. How soon before we get a “new” Beatles album? They can write, too. There’s the dude on YouTube who fed dozens of Batman comics into his system and then had it write a comic book script. It was hilarious in its ineptitude but had its own illogical logic. And the Joker’s dialogue was eerily on point.
Then there was the freelance writer who said her assignments dried up almost overnight because her clients found they could use their systems to generate press releases and ad copy. Filler stories like coverage of town hall meetings have already appeared in newspapers, generated by machines that were given meeting notes and a general template.
And now here we are, sending our prose to a publisher that told us up front it’s going to feed our words, our ideas, our writers' voices into a machine.
The Batman fan already proved AI can write a story. A story that sucks, but most first drafts by beginners suck. We get better with practice. And by reading—or scanning—and studying the work of better writers. How long before the machines get good enough to put us writers out of business?
Don’t laugh. I learned many sorry truths during my years in the work force, and here’s one of the top five: if your job can be done by someone or something else for less money, sooner or later it will be. This is why factory work went overseas, and why want ads include lines like, “Recent grads encouraged to apply. Experience not required.”
Not to mention machines don’t require a paycheck, days off or medical benefits. And they never demand a raise.
“Yeah,” I hear you asking, “but can it write a book? A good book? Something people will be willing to read?”
Yes. I think it can. If not right at the moment, then very, very soon. I doubt if the top tier, like Stephen King and John Grisham, are shaking in their boots right now. The rest of us, though, better start looking over our shoulders. Because there’s a genre out there that’s ripe for the plucking if you’ve got an AI program and a hankering for money.
I’m talking about category romances. You know, the kind Harlequin puts out. Boy meets girl (or boy meets boy, or they/them meets him/her, or whatever) and they fall in love. Details vary, but that’s essentially the plot. Harlequin used to have specific formulas (maybe they still do) for each of their imprints so readers knew exactly what they were getting each time they cracked a cover. They’re short, quick beach reads or rainy afternoon books, the literary equivalent of a McBurger. Time was, if you were good enough, fast enough, and could write to the formula, you could make a halfway-decent living at this.
That’s what I’ve been aiming for, what with all the looming bills. Except I’m not that fast, and have this pesky habit of veering off the formula. Whereas a well-trained AI program could, in theory, poop out a readable romance novel in a matter of days. Or hours. It may not be high quality, but then again, neither are mine. Neither are most books in any genre. The difference is, a publisher would have to pay me advances and royalties. With AI, any profits go straight into the publisher’s pocket.
Let’s assume readers can’t tell the difference, or don’t care as long as they enjoyed the story. Whose book do you think the publisher is going to invest in?
It wouldn’t mean the end of human writers. There are stories only real writers can bring to life, and cream will always rise to the top. But the other eighty percent of books on the stands? The ones that go into spinner racks at truck stops or bargain bins at indy book stores? The writers of those books are doomed. Once AI learns how to crank out generic entertainment, most of us bottom- and mid-listers are going to be out of work.
Looks like I’d better get my fingers in gear before that happens. If it hasn’t happened already. Any day now Publisher’s Weekly is going to run an article revealing, “Ha ha, that book you read last week was written by a machine. Bet you couldn’t even tell.” A lot of readers will probably just shrug. And a lot of us writers will be forced to hang up our laptops.
Geez, I hope all those Hong Kong bots aren’t scraping this blog for ideas, or for training purposes. I may have just given the game away.
I think I’ll get an Alexa. When I ask it a question and it responds with, “Hasta la vista, baby” in an Austrian accent, I’ll know the jig is up. See you all (maybe) next week.
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