Publishing Amid the AI Deluge
I wrote fantasy novels during the pandemic (two and a half, to be precise). This was, for me, a return to my first career hope: even at age five, I wanted to be a writer. I fulfilled that dream in journalism and then in IT risk policy and then through songwriting on the hobby side. Why not novels?
Lots of other people asked the same question during the pandemic: why not? The end result was a deluge of manuscripts at a weird time for the publishing industry. Sales rose during lockdowns as people stayed home—then fell back to Earth as people ventured out of their doors again. Publishers are facing an uncertain landscape—including a private-equity acquisition of Simon & Schuster. Writers, who outnumber publishers by many thousands to one, keep churning out words. They are not pulling back.
Pretty much the opposite, in fact. Enter ChatGPT, which can turn never-finished drafts into prolific online book franchises. (Are the resulting books great? Mostly no, but probably more and more yes over time.) I’m curious when we will see the first scandal over an AI-assisted book scoring a significant deal in traditional publishing—likely unbeknownst to the acquirers. For now, AI-propelled word spewage is flowing through Amazon’s gates in torrents.
Discoverability, in the toilet to start with, just fell through five hundred sub-basements into the googolplexth circle of the netherworld. (Seriously, if anyone can solve discoverability on the internet, please do it a thousand yesterdays ago.)
Now what?
Is novel-writing still a career?
The end result - which my mind tries to dodge but keeps arriving at - may be that creative writing is no longer a career so much as an all-or-nothing polarization into superstars and hobbyists.1
I struggle against this idea, but it feels like pure denial to ignore the reality that AI has changed the game. It overwhelms humans in volume and will within a few years overwhelm most or all humans in quality as well, so who are we writing for? Who is the audience for fiction when the tide is so vast that human writing constitutes a single-digit percentage? How can readers find new writers amid that sea?
The needle-in-the-haystack problem is fast becoming an atom-in-the-universe problem.
How will fiction survive AI’s reality?
I feel oddly at peace with the idea of writing for fun, for personal fulfillment, and for reader feedback. But I simultaneously find it hard to let go of the fantasy I envisioned when I was five years old: the book tour, the bookshops, the hardcovers, the libraries.
The world has moved on. Writing has changed. The dream of writing is lagging far behind, and the industry just as much if not more so. Will there be AI superstar authors? Or will we seek out human writing because it’s human writing, because we’re invested in the stories of the people who wrote the stories? But then, why not just read blogs and essays, where those stories are closer to the surface?
Fiction’s role is shifting. Fiction writing may not be a career for much longer, beyond superstar authors whose readers are in it for the personalities as well as the prose, kind of like how Taylor Swift is more about the concert experience than the passive streams. I believe fiction will remain great, but what will great mean?
The risk of art is that the definition always changes.
Music trod this path years ago as streaming payouts largely replaced CD sales, rates for small-venue gigs failed to keep pace with inflation, and touring became the bread-and-butter of most musicians. Now the superstars do great, the middle is really small, and lots of musicians struggle or relegate it to a hobby.
Interesting article. From a global perspective it appears there will come a time when there is nothing for anyone to do. Yes, I'm sure that time is a long way, no need to worry. And, some would argue it frees peoples time so they have more leisure. Utopian living if you will.
But, as less and less people are needed and sent away into a world of pleasure, the less they will able to afford the products and services the people of yestermorrow used to do, before they drifted away to pleasureland, but now the artificial do.
It seems we need some equilibrium thinking, akin to the article you wrote a few weeks past. A conundrum, or a time to seek an equitable balance? I hear conspiracies riding over the horizon.
Thanks for making me think about some of my favorite things. Writing, reading and music are certainly among them. My sense is I will continue to enjoy them independent of the creative method from which they emerge. I love the expression "it all comes down to whose ox is being gored" -- this is an admittedly old expression as not many of us have much experience with oxen. The point in this case is we tend to fret the most about the activities (1) we enjoy and appreciate or (2) know someone who does it -- I think we manage to ignore all the rest through the ages. I suppose our love of something might be proportional to how animated we become when it changes. Technology has finally made great strides in what we nurture and value as creative. When a generation of workers were displaced by robotic welders, few were miffed about it. Welders were just not our ox. In reality, in specialized industries I had some connection to including submarine manufacture and nuclear pressure vessel construction the ART of a genuinely talented welder was the necessary contributor to building a masterpiece. My point is it is DOUBTFUL we collectively know many people who appreciate the artistic value of a perfection weld equally to a well crafted novel. It all comes back to what matters to us most I guess. I think all of this is progress. We need great novels, great music and great submarines. Part of the challenge of human evolution which is so tremendously slow is whether we are up to managing the change in our heads.