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Notes -
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.
Freddie deBoer points out that:
but when you point out the obvious inference of the former two points (namely: that publishing more books by women and minorities means publishing fewer ones by white males, and consequently that it has never been harder for a white male novelist to get published), people tend to scoff and roll their eyes. It's just basic mathematics: if you don't increase the total number of books published (and there's no evidence that this has happened), then publishing more books by women and minorities logically entails publishing fewer books by white males.
Despite being a white male and an aspiring novelist, I am not completely opposed to the trend towards publishing more books by female novelists. Although the proportion of Americans who claim to have read a book in the past year has fallen dramatically over the past fifteen years, women have always read more than men, and this remains true today. All things being equal, I can imagine a female novelist having an easier time writing a novel which would appeal to female readers compared to a male novelist doing the same thing. It follows that the drive to publish more novels by female writers might be a fundamentally sound business decision. It's the same basic argument as to why I could never get too bent out of shape about female underrepresentation in video game development*: PC and console gamers are overwhelmingly male, and all things being equal I imagine a male developer would have an easier time designing a video game which would appeal to men than a female developer would. Note that this argument does not apply to the drive to publish more writers from ethnic minority backgrounds: white Americans read far more books than every other ethnic group (including Asians, to my surprise).
But my question is this. As with any affirmative action-adjacent argument, the drive to publish more books by women and minorities logically implies that, for the last ~decade, literary agents and publishing houses have been optimising for something other than literary quality and/or commercial viability**. Has this resulted in any concomitant decline in revenues? Are revenues from publishing meaningfully lower now than they were ten years ago, controlling for inflation? And consequently, is there a potential gap in the market for a new publishing house to announce "at $Publisher, we don't care about a writer's identity markers and only care about how good the book is?" Or is publishing such an effective oligopoly that this isn't a viable option?
*Not to mention another more, uh, prurient entertainment industry.
**Spare me your "always has beens": I'm not completely naïve. I don't think it's controversial to say that the publishing industry is loudly, conspicuously announcing its decision to optimise for something other than commercial viability for the last decade in a way it wasn't before.
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