Human on the verge of a nervous breakdown

Ever since I’ve read the results of a BookBub survey about authors’ use of AI I’ve been low-key depressed and demotivated. 45% of the 1,200+ authors surveyed (I was one of them) have used AI in various ways – take a look at the survey to see what they’ve done with it. Some are pretty smug about it. Others, including me, are… I’m not sure. Fossils?

Write every day

(All the quotes used in this post come from the survey, unless indicated otherwise)

“It’s a great accelerator (I have two books in flight — I can probably get them both out in the time it previously took to write one).”

I am working on one book right now, Bloodbath & Beyond, the sequel to Why Odin Drinks (follow me on Bluesky for daily snippets – check out the #WhyOdinDrinks hashtag). I hope it will come out this year, with emphasis on ‘hope’. Still, I can’t imagine using generative AI to ‘accelerate’ my process. Even if it was any good at it, which it isn’t.

I think of myself as a sculptor; I have a vision of what I want to achieve, and I chop and chisel at the words until I get exactly where I want to be. I see no use for AI there at least until it learns telepathy. I know what I want to give my readers and I know when it’s not there yet. But…

“I’m in a Facebook group of authors using AI to create books monthly, weekly, and daily. I believe it will alienate a readership that already has a hard enough time sorting through the glut of available reading options.”

Daily. That’s not an author, that’s a factory.

That sure gives a new meaning to ‘write every day or you’re not a real author’. I can’t even point out how ableist and removed from many people’s real lives this piece of advice is. But AI, I suppose, introduces a certain sort of equality here: I’m pretty sure I would be able to produce (not ‘write’) every day if all I had to do was type in a prompt. I wouldn’t want my name on those books, though. And I’d have to live knowing I’m doing that.

Planned obsolescence

“I would like to be a purist and not use AI for images and editing if I could afford the human-based alternatives, but I don’t make enough money yet to be able to do that. I hope that I eventually will.”

But you won’t, because you’re putting yourself out of business.

By using AI, we (as in we, authors) are achieving various things. Some have to do either with making or saving money. Every time an author feeds text into a generative AI machine, the collective we take another step towards extinction. Because if ‘authors’ can use AI to produce their books, so can the readers.

AI’s rapid advances mean that at some point, sooner rather than later, the reader will be able to request a book from their Kindle OAIsis, filling in a short survey (‘mark your favourite tropes’) and clicking ‘Generate’. If that reader wants to be surprised, but within a certain genre, a large button labelled ‘Surprise me’ may await. If something goes wrong, there will be the option for a negative prompt, like with image generators: ‘Do not kill the MC on page 4.’

I’m not catastrophising. I’m being realistic. Why risk and spend money on something you might dislike when there is an option to produce infinite books catering to your tastes? In possibly unrelated news, Amazon has 1) been requiring a disclosure whether a book I am publishing has been aided by AI, 2) signed a deal with the New York Times to train its own generative AI on the NYT texts. Why would Amazon want to even have generative AI that produces text output if I’m wrong?

Maybe this is not your shit sandwich

“Honestly it’s no one’s business if I use AI. The stories are all me. I’m the director. I’m the storyteller. These language models don’t give great output if you don’t already know your craft. Just like many authors don’t disclose a ghostwriter.”

Now I’m going to quote Julie Ann Dawson, the founder and creator of a small publishing company Bards and Sages, which closed down because of endless AI-generated content submissions:

“These are people who think their ‘ideas’ are more important than the actual craft of writing, so they churn out all these ‘ideas’ and enter their idea prompts and think the output is a story. But they never bothered to learn the craft of writing. […] They are more enamored with the idea of being a writer than the process of being a writer.”

I once wanted to be a guitarist. I bought an electric guitar and an amp. I took some photos on which I looked cool with my new guitar. Then I discovered I didn’t want to practice. I didn’t really want to play a guitar. I wanted to be a guitarist who stands on the stage shredding and riffing and strumming.

Mark Manson came up with the phrase ‘shit sandwich’. Basically, a shit sandwich is something you’re willing to do even though it’s not fun and easy. For me, that’s writing. Children underwent 29 rewrites (I’m not good at what normal authors call revising/editing), some scenes – 40-50. Because that’s my shit sandwich. I am willing to put in the time and work that I wasn’t willing to put into learning to play guitar.

The ‘director’ who is a ‘storyteller’ doesn’t want to eat the shit sandwich. They don’t want to write. They don’t even want to have written. They want to be an author. And you bet they’ll plop their (pen) name on the covers of their products.

Another quote: “I disclose use in certain situations. E.g. blog post images without much human intervention, using digital narration for an audiobook.” – This is actually fine with me. I am not an anti-AI absolutist. I just don’t want it anywhere near my books, neither the ones I am writing nor ones I am paying for.

Am I nothing but a decel?

“AI is here to stay. Times are changing and we as authors need to adapt to stay ahead of the game. As long as we create quality products that readers love, that’s what matters.”

I tend to stay away from authors who refer to their books as ‘products’. But I am not an average reader. Most people, when searching for new reads, reach for what’s popular – bestsellers are called that because they sell best. Agents and traditional publishing actively avoid things that are unusual and different. LLMs (Large Language Models) can’t create anything new, because they do not have thoughts or imagination. They’re software that speaks in first person. They do not think, imagine, wonder, make strange and amazing associations. They’re trained on existing material and this is where their abilities end.

“We need more deep curiosity and to question the premise that only some people deserve to be “good” or “real” artists or only the “good” and “real” artists should experience abundance.”

I believe this ‘premise’ is a strawman. There is no body of judges that determines whether you deserve to be named a ‘good’ or ‘real’ artist. (Check if not a publication that only ever reviews traditionally published books.) When I spend months chiseling at the text, I am not ‘deserving’ anything, I am working on it. I’m learning my craft. The result might appeal to people or not. Hopefully, it awakens emotions inside them. That is art.

Are ‘real authors’ doomed?

I refuse to call someone who generates books daily an author, real or good or not – I don’t think they even have time to read those products. But what about someone who uses AI for research? (Big mistakes. Huge.) For marketing images? For, I don’t know, a summary? To create a list of characters? Is there a specific boundary that, once crossed, removes the author from the ‘good and real’ list? If yes, then where?

‘Free’ is very tempting, of course. I’ve spent thousands of dollars on my books so that I would deliver the highest quality I could. It would be much easier, less time-consuming, and definitely cheaper to run it past Copilot+ or whatever it is that people do. But I want my readers to get the best I can deliver, not the fastest. This might be a folly.

Am I working on my own extinction here? I will be honest: in 2025, my sales have been steadily dropping. There already are millions of books out in the world. Mass-produced AI slop achieves a few things: it lowers the chance of readers discovering my books, for one, because they simply drown in the swamp; it also makes the AI slop readers believe that all self-published books are like that.

A few days ago, an author announced their retirement on Bluesky, because they could no longer keep spending money on all the writing-related stuff – you know, that stuff the director and storyteller ‘outsources’ to AI. At some point, I might be forced to make the choice of either also stopping, or getting off my principled high horse and learning to love ChatGPT’s editing capabilities. But – once I embrace our new artificial overlords, I might be able to finish The Ten Worlds by the end of the week. I have so many ideas that AI doesn’t, until I feed them to the plagiarism machine, and then it will.

Is this a good moment to mention that Meta’s AI, which now tries to force itself into my consciousness every time I type / in a chat on Messenger, has been trained on a gigantic database of stolen books including all of mine? Needless to say, I have neither permitted that, nor been paid a single cent.

I compared myself to a sculptor earlier. Sculptors are not in particular demand in today’s market. There are few who can make a good living out of their work. That work ends up having to be its own reward. But while the materials I use (my laptop) don’t cost me as much as repeatedly ordering slabs of marble hoping to get closer to my vision, I need an editor and a proofreader. I design my covers myself.

What even is art at this point?

I’d love to buy Cathedra. I will never be able to. I could probably get a very large poster. It will never be the same thing. It will never give me the same feeling. But, you know, there are lots of posters of all sorts available. Even in Ikea. They’re not all that expensive. And it’s even cheaper to make my own… using generative AI. Maybe it was even trained on Barnett Newman’s work? Wouldn’t that be super handy? It would be one of a kind, too. And I would sort of be the artist.

“AI is eventually going to put writers, graphic artists, and narrators out of business. I do not want to assist the AI developers in doing this.” Neither do I. They steal my stuff anyway and don’t even pretend to hide it. I’m going to remain a Luddite here for as long as I can. Bearing in mind that, ultimately, the Luddites lost every battle against progress. OpenAI, the company that develops ChatGPT, is searching for a trillion dollars in funding. I’d love to get ten thousand dollars. It would allow me to keep creating for a few years without worrying about the costs.

But why would I deserve to experience this abundance, to paraphrase an earlier quote? I’m just an artist. And who am I to say I’m a good or a real one? After all, “I don’t disclose how the sausage is made because I don’t think it’s helpful for readers […] Would readers really want to know all of that? I think they just want a good story to read.” I can’t argue with that. And if ChatGPT can’t write a better story than I do yet, it might become capable of that by the time you read this post.

Which I have redrafted at least eight times and did not use generative AI in its creation, except for the ChatGPT screenshot that serves as an illustration.