It’s the Burning Times All Over Again

Hundreds of years ago, Europe was swept up in the madness of the burning times, or witch trials. If you were any kind of outlier, you were in trouble. If you didn’t want to play by the rules of the powerful, you became an outlier.

And we’re here again… but this time, the target isn’t anyone suspected of witchcraft.

It’s anyone suspected of AI-craft.

Disclaimer: I want to be abundantly clear: I write my stories; AI does not. I coach writers; I do not use AI to do so.

First, they came for our em dashes

Don’t use em dashes, they said — that’s an indicator of AI.

Don’t use lists. Listed items, ordered items, items presented in a parallel structure: an indicator of AI.

Don’t use figurative language. Writing similes is like screaming “I’m a robot!”. In order to not be a robot, write flat.

It’s getting ridiculous, and friends, I’m angry.

I was going to make a reel about this but I’m too angry to speak about it right now. The whole AI slop debate used to be about easy ways to show you were a human… but now LLMs have pirated enough content to make writing like a human highly suspicious.

So to prove we’re not robots, we’re supposed to write like robots. This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard of. The fact that publishing professionals — publishers and editors at Big 5 houses and literary agents — are now using unreliable AI detectors to detect AI writing (or ignore it, give the writer a contract, and then pull the book when the internet protests like with Shy Girl) is so ridiculous.

First of all, if Shy Girl was AI-written, why the hell didn’t they catch it sooner? It’s literally their job, their professional purpose in the publishing industry, to be gate keepers.

And before anyone can give me “oh but they’re so overwhelmed”, I have a solution: How about the heads of these massive corporations take smaller salaries/bonuses so they can appropriately pay and hire the necessary workforce? Just a thought.

Top executives at Penguin Random House can make somewhere in the neighborhood of $700k per year (and as we learned from the attempted merger with Simon & Schuster a handful of years ago, they don’t even understand what makes a book successful).

AI Cannot Understand the Zeitgeist

For one thing, it’s not human.

For quite another, it’s trained on (often pirated) texts that were already published. It’s trained on data from the past. So how could a robot possibly understand the present zeitgeist or even predict a future one?

It’s not only lazy to leave it to machines to judge human creativity, but it’s going to prove to be a system of diminishing returns where eventually books published this way move neither hearts nor minds.

Art may imitate life to a degree, but life also imitates art. They move together, in a cyclical pattern. To introduce AI in this way is going to lead to flat, greige-style books (like all the houses that are so boring inside and out).

What Can We Do?

First of all, we’ve got to speak up about it. Or write about it, as in my case because I’m almost done writing this and am still so irate about it that I couldn’t imagine actually speaking right now.

Second of all, we need to protect ourselves as writers. I’m going to draft all my work by hand going forward. Is it a pain to then have to transcribe it? Yes. But, thought of one way, that’s another round of revision opportunity. Is it slow? Oh goodness yes. But sometimes, that leads to even better drafting — even if a draft is a mess. And, I’m reclaiming em dashes, damnit. I’m keeping figurative language. I am a human writer and I’m going to keep writing like a human.

And… for my own part, for my own books, I’m going to stay indie. I had thought I might try pitching this next book I’m working on when it’s someday ready, but if this is how the Big 5 are going to behave, then I won’t submit my work to them. Is indie publishing hard? Yes. Is it sometimes costly? Always — either in time or money. But my work is worth it to me to not have it reprocessed to read like it was actually spit out by a machine that uses melodrama to attempt to manipulate reader emotion instead of inviting the reader on an immersive journey without melodrama and manipulation.

Finally, we can let ourselves get angry about this. I’m so angry my hands are shaking a bit still, even after typing this. I hope that it’s understandable. I could wait until tomorrow, refine it, publish it then… but sometimes it’s important to let the text embody the emotion.

We, as an industry, need to be better than this, and if it’s up to us indie authors to hold the line, then so be it.