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A good friend of mine published their debut novel earlier this week. I was very proud of them, so in my naivety, I decided to break my usual rules against using social media, and look for some early reviews online to see how it was being received.
Mostly I just found banal comments along the lines of "I liked it" here and there, but on Twitter I came across a screed alleging that my friend was a hack and that the novel was completely AI written for absolutely inane reasons.
Honestly, it's been ruining my whole day and I'm not quite sure why; objectively it was probably just some LLM or third world engagement farmer trying to ragebait and get views. Yet, it does feel like we've lost something as a society where incentives to drive engagement are so deeply a race to the bottom that the semantic meaning of writing only matters insofar as much as it evokes emotion and generates clicks, and where it's so easy to counterfeit human effort.
I suppose that on an intellectual level that this was something I always knew was happening to the world, but it does feel worse when it's directly about someone that's close to you.
I kinda get it.
Starting around January 2025, AI writing hit publishing like an atomic bomb. Publishers got deluged with generated submissions, and their entire system collapsed under the strain. Major publishers stopped taking open submissions for months while they were trying to figure it out.
At the same time, the publishers started seeing various court cases around ownership and copywrite of generated works, and now they're scared shitless about what happens if they publish one. (@ToaKraka recently had some links about this)
On the author side, a lot of writers are pissed about it. I mean fucking incandescent. For a long time, it's been a joke that everybody thinks they could be a brilliant author if they just sat down and applied themselves, because they gave such fantastic ideas. The thing is, those ideas are usually half baked, and actually fleshing them out takes a level of bloody-minded effort that few people possess. We call that small group of people "authors". Everybody's gangsta until it's time to do gangsta shit, and everybody's an author until it's time to do author shit. Generative AI let a disturbing number of people play-act at being authors without actually having to put in the time. The thing is, generating passable text with an LLM takes effort too, and it's rare that somebody who won't put in the work to be a human author will put in the work to be a robot herder. They sure will say they're an author though. Good God, they will fucking say it.
At the same time, the publishing industry has swallowed so much of their own bullshit that they're stuck. Publishing has pretty much been captured by what people call "woke" around here. Getting published is wildly easier if you are some form of favored minority. It's reached the point where I have taken to publishing under my partner's name, because it has quintupled my acceptance rate. This is not bullshit. I track it in submission grinder and the numbers are ugly.
The reason this matters is because a lot of the LLM writers are custom tailoring identities and prompt outputs to be "too good to check".
https://www.bona-books.com/news/we-bought-an-ai-story
It's a perfect storm. The industry has backed itself into a corner. The technology is literally designed to barf out content faster than any human can process it. A significant population thinks they can get away with throwing generated content over the wall for money and adulation, and in the short term they're probably right.
The entire community is jumping at shadows and seeing secret robots everywhere. I've gotten it a few times myself because I tend to have a lot of discursive sentences with a shitload of nested clauses. (1)
It sucks for your friend. It sucks for you. It sucks for me. It sucks for the industry. All I can suggest for now is that she develop a thick skin until new norms sort themselves out. I hope it doesn't hurt her too much in the meantime.
Discussion
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Novels just aren't very valuable anymore. There are so many of them, it takes exceptional skill and/or luck to stand out.
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It's not weird to be upset about it. It sounds like potential libel to me and it could, if it went viral, cause your friend serious reputational damage. The yellow journalism era had exactly the same incentives and produced exactly the same problems.
Yeah, you're right.
Luckily, the post wasn't very popular, but these are the inevitable consequences of a world where the wrong post going viral at the wrong time can ruin the lives of people who did nothing wrong. I don't envy those who need to be publically on the internet for their careers at all.
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