If you’re paying attention to current events in the publishing world, you’ll be familiar with the anecdotes of authors losing lucrative book deals over accusations of AI. While I am not trying to write a philosophical treatise on AI use in writing—at least not in the near future—I have thought a great deal on the matter, and I feel impelled to offer up some of my observations.
There is a great deal of extreme opposition to AI in the creative arts that seems to stem from the artist feeling threatened by the notion of LLMs being able to generate content that “passes” well enough to gain mass appeal. The logical fuzzy end of the lollipop that this allegedly hands to that artist is that allowing it to happen unchecked creates even less of a chance that they will gain recognition and compensation for their own human-generated work.
Strangely, at the same time, the quality of the work which those same artists have perceived as the threat is also deemed “slop.” So what is the artist communicating with their concern? Is it that they themselves can clearly identify the work as inferior, but that they do not trust the consumer of their art to have a discerning enough eye to sort out the “slop” from the more genuine, human narrative?
In that same vein, the consumers of AI-generated art seem to resent the notion that they may be “tricked” into connecting with a narrative that was artificially generated. But if, as a reader, I genuinely connect with a work such that I am emotionally moved or inspired by it, is that genuine response to the material invalidated because of the LLM’s role in generating it? Does it require some kind of psychological take-backsies? Why should it matter? To me that seems to amount to ego and hubris. Are we afraid that a machine might trigger a natural human response? Does that possibility warrant policy, or should we simply reflect upon what it may mean?
Despite my contrariness on the issue, I am not personally an advocate of using LLMs to generate narrative prose for human stories. I think that, in doing so, the writer does themselves a great disservice by prompting AI to write for them. Narrative is about the human experience and how it is filtered through a very specific consciousness. Why would any writer want to rob themselves of that communicative tool?
What it boils down to is that the witch hunting begins with readers and writers, and unfortunately that is us: our fear of generated content that “passes” or “tricks people” is mirrored in the publisher’s policy. The publisher then, in the pursuit of profit, attempts to prevent offending material from entering the marketplace through their privately owned channels. Inevitably, it gives the publisher even more ammunition to gatekeep against any and all content that they could potentially link to AI, and that results in policy that only ends up hurting us as writers and readers.
In my next post, I’ll walk through the free tools I use to document exactly how and when my own drafts were written—so if the witch hunt ever comes for your novel, you’ll have the receipts.