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AI Robot Getty.jpg

If You’re Using AI To Help Write Your Books, You Are Not a Writer

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Miscellaneous | February 7, 2024 |

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Miscellaneous | February 7, 2024 |


AI Robot Getty.jpg

A piece on The Verge from 2022 recently went viral. Written by Josh Dzeiza, the article delved into the then-novel practice of writers using AI tools to ‘help’ write their books. One such user was Jennifer Lepp, who has self-published dozens of paranormal and cozy mystery titles on Amazon. At the time of The Verge piece, she admitted to using a variety of subscription aids to push out one book every 49 days. Sites like Sudowrite were, she said, helpful as an ‘extended thesaurus’ and allowed her to outsource the less exciting parts of her job to the point where she had become reliant on them. She said, ‘I don’t particularly care what that looks like other than that there’s two big fish tanks with tons of fish and it’s high-end. My time is better spent on the important aspects of the mystery and the story than sitting there for 10 minutes trying to come up with the description of the lobby.’

Despite the age of the piece, its dystopian view of creativity under the thumb of capitalistic ‘disruption’ and productivity demands has only gotten more relevant. Over the past several months, AI has become the most beloved get-out-of-labor-free tool of tech bro creeps who lost all their savings in NFTs and have moved on to the next grift. Many websites have openly admitted that AI is their future, with former cultural stalwarts like the AV Club now shadows of their former selves and overloaded with derivative robot copy-paste paragraphs. As layoffs in media and journalism reach depressingly new heights, AI has been brought in to fill the gaps, a way to churn out as much #content as possible without having to pay people for the privilege.

Amazon’s Kindle store is already overloaded with cheaply produced titles that practically reek of the stench of AI. Jennifer Lepp has a full list of the various AI tools she uses on her website, as well as links to ‘classes’ on how to become an ‘AI-assisted author.’ Her Instagram page is full of tacky AI art and zero comments on dozens of posts. It’s hard to make people care about something you didn’t care about when you ‘made’ it. Meanwhile, multiple authors are suing AI companies for stealing their work, all while their publishers look for ways to optimize profit over humanity.

It was only a matter of time before AI started to dominate publishing, traditional or otherwise. Major publishers have been caught out using AI for cover designs. Last September, Markus Dohle, former CEO of Penguin Random House, spoke of AI’s ‘huge opportunities’ in his field, and how they ‘outweigh by far the potential challenges and threats we have to meet.’ The new CEO, Nihar Malaviya, said that AI will be crucial to the company selling more books because, as the New York Times said, it’ll make it ‘easier to publish more titles without hiring ever more employees.’

I take a resolutely firm stance on this. If you use AI tools to ‘help’ you create books or paintings or music, you’re not an artist. You’re just not. If you are so defeated by the very process of creation, so uninterested in bettering your skills, then stop doing it. Just stop. AI is not a helper elf or intern: it’s a plagiarism machine. Your laziness is aided by the theft of other people’s work, the words of authors who dedicated their time and talent to telling the kind of stories you’ll never be able to. You are not an author or an artist or anything of merit: you are a content creator in the nastiest sense of the term.

The issue is not just about individuals like Jennifer Lepp, so startlingly incurious and arrogant that they believe corner-cutting and theft is a job requirement. It’s about a societal shift in the upper echelons of power and influence that have led to the precious act of artistic creation being reduced to a sellable trick. For all the talk of AI being an aid, I’ve yet to see it offered as a such in creative circles in a way that doesn’t lead to mass layoffs or a ton of lawsuits. Never mind that there doesn’t even seem to be an organic or enthusiastic audience for this crap. As I wrote previously, there’s no contingent of online readers who love pop culture, for instance, who want all their favourite entertainment sites to strip away their unique voices in favour of Chat GPT-generated listicles. The only supporters of creepy AI art, with all its extra fingers and dead eyes, are those who care more about it as a tool than a source of true creativity (so many Musk supporters.)

It’s not merely the corporate desire to churn out content without human involvement: it’s the endless hunger to make more, more, more. In her recent piece for LitHub on the ‘Bulletpointization of Books’, Maris Kreizman noted that ‘there is a fundamental discrepancy between the way readers interact with books and the way the hack-your-brain tech community does. A wide swath of the ruling class sees books as data-intake vehicles for optimizing knowledge rather than, you know, things to intellectually engage with.’ This reminded me of the AI problem, this mass reduction of centuries of ideas and ambition into a formula that anyone can use for the right price. Silicon Valley’s takeover of every industry, from health to journalism to food and so on, is built on ‘disrupting’ that which doesn’t need to be remade. They see art as broken because not everyone can do it without a second thought. The same goes for writing.

And at the heart of this is a fundamental disdain for not merely the process but the product. They don’t respect literature or art or music or criticism. They don’t think it’s a worthwhile craft. It baffles them that so many people find joy in something that doesn’t exist solely to make money. Novelist Isle McElroy, quoted in the LitHub piece, succinctly said, ‘Novels are questions. question after question after question.’ The best art doesn’t and cannot be summed up by an AI prompt. Books should leave you with more than answers. A great piece of art lingers in the imagination long after your eyes first gazed upon it. The best songs are ingrained on our brains forever. Stripping away all of that makes us stupider, less curious. It probably makes it easier to sell us sh*t too, which is the real endgame here.

It’s disheartening to see how art and criticism in all their beautiful forms are viewed by the powers-that-be as soulless foundations for endless growth and content creation. I’m not sure the vast majority of people will ever accept this, at least not if they’re aware of it, but we’re also generally savvy enough to spot the uncanny valley when confronted. At the end of this road is more layoffs, worse work, and entire industries in ruin, the same as it ever was when we went through ‘pivot to video.’ I’m sure more people will follow in the footsteps of Lepp, hungry to cash in on who they see as an audience undeserving of better. It doesn’t make them writers. Even a robot could tell you that.