There are always at least a few salient episodes of magic that occur while I’m writing a novel. Sure, they sometimes happen during a short story and, yes, during a script as well. But within the expanse of a novel where there’s so much space often filled with “me doing the work,” the ground is rendered fertile for those instances of transcendence, that ego-death, where I feel I’ve tapped into a power greater than myself and my physical form has vanished, turned into a vessel for whatever empyrean energies are at work, and when I wake up, there’s a beautiful thing in front of me that wasn’t there before.
I’ve long stayed silent on the AI thing, in part because, despite the noise, a lot of smart things have already been said by people smarter than me, and I didn’t think I had anything particularly noteworthy to add, given my position. I’m not an editor having to deal with an inundation of AI-authored submissions. I’m not a musician or vocalist whose voice might be mimicked.1 And I’m certainly not a visual artist dealing with the prospect of having to compete with Mr. Sinister DALL-E creating mutant chimeras of our favorite painters or even of us.
I mean, you can tell ChatGPT or whatever to make a “Nabokov-type beat” and maybe you or a particularly gullible and/or venal editor is seduced by the result, but I think a lot of tech-evangelism, when oriented towards rendering an entire class of workers obsolete, stems from a cavernous insecurity. Because of the way probabilities are set up, a bot can surely, at least once, generate lyrical felicity and maybe, in that bit of serendipity, the confidence game can give you a passage of literature that replicates the thaumaturgy literature can perform wherein the reader is moved or feels seen or is introduced to new members of Roy G. Biv’s extended family. At the end of the day, though, I think the TechBro™ is jealous.
We writers get to experience the magic that attends the act of creation and they, the money-men incapable of actually building a thing but believing themselves Medicis because they threw bands at it, do not. From atop the pesos pyramid they mistake for a Mount Olympus, they see us touching the face of God for pennies and know that they will, in just about every strand of the multiverse, never feel that feeling. Maybe some of them actually believe that a day will come where they can claim they were the proximate cause for whatever future Pale Fire or Absalom, Absalom or Beloved comes our way, but I think the more clear-sighted among them know better. It’s never been about actually producing anything that isn’t directly correlated to the enterprise of generating more money more quickly. Art isn’t efficient the way we’ve defined efficiency since perhaps the Industrial Revolution, and it and the acts that create it persist, even in the aftermath of catastrophes like the “pivot to video.” It’s about making money, dassit. What’s the difference between an AI novelist and a human novelist? You don’t have to pay a chatbot any money.2 Old-school industrialists, at least, built a university and put their name on it; these folks are too blinkered to even bother with that genre of immortality.
It should go without saying that I’m not talking about AI’s impact on standardized tests3 or book reports or whatever. I’m talking about some 400-page factory-made bildungsroman set somewhere in the American Midwest circa the 1920s or 1930s that lands on an editor’s desk that’s all John Dos Passos without the pathos. Or a turn-of-the-millennium racial satire set in the meatpacking/Hollywood/publishing industry. R.F. Kuang’s Yellowface but the final boss is a billionaire Harvard dropout.4 I doubt the poor editor that has to deal with the ensuing fallout of having purchased or even offered on the first major AI-generated book submitted for publication will actively try to pick something they don’t like or can’t back—the book may actually be good, whatever your interpretation is of the word “good” in this context—but I do suspect an efficiency-adjacent impulse will have reared its head. The ever-present specter of the Bottom Line. Because a bot-generated book is probably going to be cheaper to acquire than a lot of books that came from a human-generated Scrivener or Microsoft Word file.5 Heck, maybe an imprint or publishing house puts a Bot Maintainer on their payroll and cuts agents and authors out completely, making their own books. Marketing and promoting that Bot book…well, novelty can only sell you so many copies.
As I get older, it’s become easier for me to admit my sentimentalist strain, so I do believe there is something of the intangible that gets communicated from human to human through a book, whether that second human is an acquiring editor or a wandering customer in a Barnes & Noble. And you can never fully Uncanny Valley your way into that. Polyurethane has many applications, but on a human skull, it’ll always be burlesque.
We’ve seen what venture capitalists did to Toys R’ Us, so the fear is reasonable that money aimed at hollowing out creative industries will vulture its innards and push artists deeper toward the back of the Struggle Bus, some of us hanging off the rear bumper while most others are left far behind. But, like, money’s already doing that.6 And in the not-even-grand scheme of things, the attention span of a lot of folks in Tech is notoriously short.
Because I occasionally write sci-fi, I’m sometimes prone to prediction, so here’s one (+ some addenda): It’s going to be too difficult to render artists obsolete for them to render artists obsolete. But what will and is already happening is that the lives of these artists are being made much more difficult because of this effort. Tech is like cocaine. It doesn’t turn you into a different person. It renders you in italics. A lot of the already-extant socio-economic dynamics of art production will be accentuated, the way that money has always accentuated them. Artists from marginalized communities and the intersections thereof will have a harder time getting paid their worth (if they manage to succeed at all) while more privileged folks will be in a position to take advantage of the innovation should they choose to.7 Legal matters will proliferate, as in the case(s) of tattoos-in-video-games. And human beings will still, as they have since the beginning of time, seek meaning and meaningfulness in art.
Lincoln Michel in his newsletter Counter Craft puts it succinctly:
These “A.I.” art and writing programs are being pitched as egalitarian and democratic. A way for every person to be an artist or writer. The results are likely to be the opposite. The rich tech elite getting richer and the gates getting higher while everything gets harder for everyone else.
In the end, I’m not worried about my job. One reason is the privilege of having already published and made a small name for myself doing so. Another is that a chunk of my work is guild-covered, and if recent news has told us anything it’s that my guild is some fighters. And yet another reason is that if mf’ers here wanna play, I’m still licensed to practice law in the State of New York, so, thanks to Mom’s wisdom, I’ll always have a fall-back job. On top of that? This is going to pass.
Money will be made and once the easy money is gone, the money-hunters will search out new lands, new industries to attempt to cannibalize.
Part of my confidence in this sequence of outcomes is that, despite the Profit Phantom that haunts every creative enterprise, too many stakeholders are invested in the human mystique of literature. The idea that anybody with a bot and Dostoyevsky’s bibliography can produce another Crime and Punishment is bad business. Just imagine the scandal that would erupt should the Prix Goncourt be awarded to a bot. “The Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay goes to the Team of ScriptBot and BookBot” is, I imagine, a sentence no presenter on the planet hopes ever to utter.8 Sometimes, advances get decided and paid out on nothing more than vibes, which is kind of a trite way of saying human connection or magic or sonzai-kan. Books written by humans got that sonzai-kan. But books written by bots engineered by humans, well, there’s this concept in photography called Generation Loss. It’s the depreciation in quality between subsequent copies or transcodes of data. It’s what gives Deep-Fried Memes their charm. But it’s also why a photocopy of a photocopy of a photo is not ideal for literally any purpose.
Panic is a quintessentially human response, so I don’t begrudge anyone for it. Some Doom-mongering is healthy, but you can’t keep skipping Leg Day. Rest assured, though, that no jetpack is strong enough to get you to Heaven. The people who buy and sell books know this. As do the people who write them.
I return to that last bit Michel wrote. “A way for every person to be an artist or writer.”
In conversations about art, so much talk focuses on the product. The painting, the novel, the song or even just its bridge. A not-so-little part of me dies every single time I hear a book referred to as IP. The thing is, so much of art lives in the process.9 The happiest, most fulfilling moment for me in the lifecycle of a novel is not when it lands on a shelf. It's not when it secures a much-sought-after nomination for a prize. The happiest, most fulfilling moment happens when I'm writing it. No technology can take that away from me. It can make products, sure. But it can only assist my process (as evinced by the laptop I'm typing this on and the platform I'm typing this in). Still, whether I'm writing by hand or by computer, I'm writing. I'm questing after the celestial. Whether or not the thing gets published, I will always have that.
Those who write, write.
And those who don’t…well, they don’t.
Currently reading: The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine - Ben Ehrenreich
Currently listening: Frozen (Firebox DML Remix) - Madonna, Sickick
Anyone who lived through the days of Napster lawsuits is probably not too worried about fake music getting out of hand. Though a lot of us were a long time in forgiving Metallica for what they did, we saw, as we did anytime one of us got one of those RIAA notices while poring over tracks in our dorm room, that music lawyers are not to be f’ed with. At all. They’re like the Falk character from Air but, like, on meth.
I see you in the back with the Harvard Business School North Face vest raising your hand to say something about licensing fees and I kindly ask that you put your f’ing hand down.
If a robot can pass the Bar Exam, then that’s the Bar Exam’s fault and maybe MAYBE the legal profession should conjure up a better, more meaningful way of turning prospective lawyers into practicing ones.
What’s funny to me is that I haven’t yet come across any handwringing about AI pumping out formulaic thrillers in the style of Robert Ludlum or Brad Thor, which seems like a MUCH easier task than trying to displace, say, Ocean Vuong. But people seem to get a lot more excited about a bot playing GO than a bot getting their ass beat by a pre-teen at Connect Four.
A debatable point as the #PublishingPaidMe effort has made abundantly clear.
See Warner Bros. Discovery, lol/crying face emoji
Lmao at when AI clauses start popping up in contracts.
Imagine, even, that you’re in the Press Room at the Dolby Theatre after the ceremony and you have to field questions on how an algorithm wrote 75-80% of your Academy Award-winning script. Tell me you wouldn’t melt into a puddle on the floor.
Throw a stone and hit a writer who complains about process, but we love it. The last word in “It hurts so good” is “good.”