Late last year, I was notified that one or more of my novels might have been fed to an Anthropic large language model, because in a class-action suit the company had reached a copyright settlement with authors who’d never given an AI Goliath permission to gorge on their work. Sure enough, a website verified that 11 of my books had been used as silage for this insatiable digital leviathan. Each of the LLM’s tasty Shriver mouthfuls may merit compensation of about $3,000. But before I take out a loan against that $33,000 sure thing to buy myself a Chinese EV, I should read the fine print: ‘court-approved costs and fees’ will be deducted, meaning I may garner funds sufficient to buy a whole new packet of extra-fine felt-tips.
Fees or no, this is chump change for Anthropic. I’m exchanging two-thirds of my life’s work for a mess of pottage (one of the many biblical allusions that younger readers raised by secular parents will find incomprehensible). Worse, I’m being bought off, the better to assist in my own replacement. I’m helping ensure that teens in future can lie abed, prompt an LLM, ‘Write the first chapter of a novel about [insert pressing social issue] in the style of Lionel Shriver’, and get a plausible simulacrum of the book I haven’t started yet. OK, I flatter myself; most teens have never heard of me. But why should I bother to begin that next project myself when ChatGPT could write it for me?
For now, because I might get caught. Last year Hachette purchased a self-published horror novel called Shy Girl and released it in the UK. Numerous readers objected online that the prose displays all the hallmarks of AI. Earlier this year, the AI detection program Pangram assessed the text as 78 per cent AI–generated, a verdict the New York Times broadly verified with similar software. Hachette will discontinue the book in the UK and has cancelled plans for its American release. To be fair, the author claims to have hired an editor who apparently used AI – which sounds awfully like: ‘It wasn’t me, it was my imaginary friend.’
Does it matter if an insentient machine spits out fiction if readers still find the results entertaining? On Goodreads, Shy Girl racked up a respectable 3.5 stars. Most genres adhere to formulas, and one of the currently more profitable categories in fiction, ‘romantasy’ – The Hobbit meets Fifty Shades of Grey – could easily be produced more cheaply with a clued-up computer. Publishing has always been awash in human-generated slop. What’s the difference? Besides, even commercially anaemic literary fiction follows identifiable rules of storytelling. Maybe authors are edgy not only from fear of unemployment, but because LLMs have embarrassingly exposed the secretly plodding paint-by-numbers nature of what we ply as art.
For some readers, this is a truth-in–advertising issue, and AI prose should be labelled as such on the tin. Nevertheless, if LLMs learn to churn out novels indistinguishable from the kind that can take ten years rather than ten seconds to complete, why should readers be put off? After all, artificially generated text is characterised by better punctuation, more correct grammar and fewer typos than today’s average newspaper article. I’m not persuaded by the Ludditey labour protection argument, either. If fiction writers really aren’t necessary any longer, we should bow to the demands of increased efficiency and accept our P45s. Determining which authors have been cheating is a lesser concern than assessing whether the results of fiction-by-prompt do or don’t, well, suck.
What depresses me about the rise of AI fiction is the implication that the fictive imagination is exhausted
I’m still archaically attached to memories of diving into Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day or, yes, Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace – all of which have surely been fed to the digital beasts slouching towards our litter-strewn Bethlehem. The capacity of machines to fabricate a novel is purely facilitated by two-legged accomplishments in the form. AI didn’t invent novels. We did.
So what depresses me about the rise of AI fiction is the implication that the fictive imagination is officially exhausted. OK, say our inanimate replicants, we get the idea, so run along, we can take it from here. Is literature now a finite set of works that will feast on itself and spew out endless if minor variations on a closed and calcified western canon? The implication of AI fiction is that we’ve already achieved the achievable in storytelling with words.
More depressing still: AI text cropping up in fiction doesn’t matter that much because fiction no longer matters that much – especially the literary sort. There are no more Jonathan Franzens, whose newest novel was until recently a cultural sensation that anyone au courant acquired in hardback pronto. Jonathan Franzen himself isn’t Jonathan Franzen any more. At best, novels are stepping stones to Netflix. My mournfulness is self-interested; the status of my job and the viability of my livelihood have dropped. Yet I’m also sorrowful because, due less to AI than to a dwindling readership, many younger talents won’t explore gifts that make no money and will thus be denied a life and occupation that I have loved. As a reader myself, I regret being denied the books they’ll never craft. Why, we may soon raise generations who farm out their homework so completely to AI that they never learn how to write at all, or even how to read.
Look, literary fiction is a luxury good, and its cultural demotion isn’t the end of the world. But while narrative survives in visual media, stories on the page furnish the unique pleasures of language, even if those seem increasingly esoteric (e.g., isn’t ‘esoteric’ a delectable word?). In fiction, too, we don’t only watch characters do and say things; we can inhabit their thinking. Audiences for film and television look at characters. By capturing the sense of being inside a consciousness looking out, the medium of fiction may best express the experience of being human. Which makes AI fiction especially ironic.
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