It’s fascinating to me that, in the same week we watched that incredible Bad Bunny performance at the Super Bowl, we also had an article in the NY Times about a romance author, Coral Hart, “writing” 200 books a year with the help of GenAI.
The former showed us what a true artistry is: honing your skills, being unique, staying true to your values, creating emotions with your art and bringing people together.
The latter is about a business model pretending to be art while its supporters whine that they aren’t taken seriously by both readers and the industry.
Artist vs. Generative AI. Which side are you on?
Below I discuss why there is concern among Indie authors, publishers and readers alike about Generative AI and why it’s justified, that we shouldn’t panic just yet, and why the publishing industry needs to get organized to fight Generative AI.
But first, let’s be clear about books generated by Generative AI.
I don’t care how you frame it, writing books with Generative Ai has nothing to do with writing or being an author.
It’s a business model designed to trick the system so that by flooding the platforms, you can make a lot of money every year. And so that you can make even more money, you now sell your “tricks” to others so that they can repeat the con. It’s the model used b the coaching industry and now by the copywriting industry too.
But the only thing this is, is a con.
It’s pretending that you are a writer without doing the work and then tricking readers into believing that this is original work.
And original it is not.
Why?
Because Generative AI is based on the works of others. Millions of books were ingested by AI platforms to build models.
What is regurgitated is not art. It’s automatic writing designed with prompts. It has nothing to do with imagination or using your brain to create a work of art. Unless you consider prompt writing a form of art.
So what can we do as authors to combat it?
I’ve seen a lot of authors, mainly in the Romance genre because this is where it is more prevalent, worry about what it will do to genuine authors. They fear new authors will be unable to be heard because of the volume of books produced.
It’s already the case. We’re all fighting to be seen by trying to play the algorithm, be it on the publishing platforms or on social networks.
These books will encounter the same issues. Without any promotion, they get published and die.
Yes, it will. Just like low content books killed low content books.
It’s easy to see why. Amazon currently allows authors to publish six books a day. Now multiply this by 365 days, and that’s 2,190 books published a year per author. You may think that’s impossible but I’m sure someone will attempt that if it hasn’t happened already.
But, as I just said, very few of these books will generate any money, if at all.
Which means that Amazon and other platforms will find themselves with thousands of books collecting dust on their servers. And that costs money. And once a book is published, you cannot remove it. It’s there, on the platform forever.
Let’s be honest here, quality is already an issue. It’s clear in the article that to make a half-decent novel using AI, you need a lot of prompts and coaxing. And then, if I understand correctly, you need to edit to make it yours.
This is all very well for the authors using Ai, who have a modicum of pride about their work and will read and check before publishing.
But how many people thinking this is a quick-rich scheme will just plug the prompts into and AI’s platform and take it as the finished product? This is not a joke; it happened last year when a couple of writers left prompts in their finished manuscripts.
Which leads me to the fact that, as this becomes more widespread, people will use the same prompts to generate books where the only difference will be the name of the characters or where it’s based. The story will be exactly the same and I suspect, there will come a point where readers will complain. Platforms don’t like that because t make them look bad.
And wait before one AI author starts accusing another of plagiarism.
So yes, AI slop will kill AI slop.
A few people, the first to adopt this business model, will make the most money by selling their books and their courses. Then this will trickle down. You’ll see more and more courses telling you that you’ll make a fortune by releasing so many AI books a year and people will buy it. Because greed sells.
But few will make money. If the author named in the article only saw 50,000 downloads of 200 books, that’s 250 sales per book. It doesn’t make a bestseller and you can assume that whoever comes after her, using her prompts, will do even less. And it will get worse as the number of Ai-generated books increases and their quality decreases.
Some of the writers in the article complain that they would make even more money if their work wasn’t label generated with AI tools.
That’s a definite “no” from me.
If you write with AI, you are an AI author and should be labeled as such.
It’s unfair to the rest of us who write our own books that we get lumped with writers who don’t put the same amount of effort into their work as we do. So no. The label should stay.
You don’t want the label, then don’t use AI. Simple as that.
It’s also concerning that none of the big 5 publishers have spoken publicly against AI. Why? When major players in other industries (music for example) have sided with their artists to protect their copyrights.
So it is possible to fight this as long as this industry comes together.
If you want an example of an industry that fought against something that everyone said was lost from the start, look no further than the music industry. In the ’90s, when file-sharing platforms were all the rage, the music industry decided to fight because otherwise not only were they becoming irrelevant but they were about to lose most of their income as none of these platforms were paying royalties to artists and songwriters via Performance Collection organizations (think BMI, ASCAP or the PRS in the UK) and also to record labels and publishers.
There was more at stake than just royalties (licensing money was also a big reason because it generates billions in revenue each year) and the music industry was already better organized than the publishing industry is because of its structure and the collective power of the majors.
But that doesn’t mean that the publishing industry shouldn’t get better organized. It will need to if it wants to fight toe-to-toe with these companies.
Someone somewhere will need to start a collective organization that can fight these AI companies for the good of authors and publishers alike. I don’t know when it’ll happen but I believe it will.
