I find myself stuck in a mental wasteland.
Two Times Murder is completely done and rolls on toward publication. I have just finished the copyediting on E________ for my UK publisher (which mostly involved removing all the American grammar. I can only imagine what my US publishers are going to do with that!), so nothing to do there. And as for YAP, well YAP is with the estimable Brady for feedback.
Writing wise, I have nothing to do.
Aaaaargh!
Normally, what I’d be doing now is mulling over ideas for the next MS. The problem, though, is that I don’t have any. As I write this, my creative landscape is a barren desert. Ideas will come — they always do — but in the meantime, I can’t help feeling a mild sense of panic. It’s at times like this that the robotic allure of AI is at its most intense, a mechanical guide to lead me to the nearest oasis.
There was an article in The Guardian last month that cited a study claiming that AI prompts can actually boost writer creativity. Apparently, people reading stories generated in this way rated them as 8.1% more novel and 9% more useful than stories generated by good old fashioned gray matter.
The kicker, though, was this. The writers who benefited from all this electronic assistance were those who were the least creative. Creative types got no meaningful benefit at all! So the prospect of electronic rescue for yours truly is, like so many things in this particular desert, nothing more than a mirage.
Unless, of course, I’m not as creative as I like to think. Or I’m tapped out . . .
No! We are not going down that particular rabbit hole.
AI, while pointless for me, would be extremely useful for those who are not particularly creative but are still cursed with the desire to write and publish stories. It could open a door that has been locked to them, much to their frustration. If so, more power to you! Knock yourself out.
Now, I’m aware that some of you out there might be a little surprised by what I’ve just said. It’s more competition for “naturally talented” writers after all. Why not condemn it as unfair competition?
Well, for starters, I’m a sci-fi writer. I don’t see much point in railing against the future. If tech can make creating stories easier for certain people, those people will use it and there’s not much point in people like me whining about it.
Secondly, though, I’m also a crime writer. You can’t spend a lot of time in that community without coming across a whole lot of grumbling about celebrity writers: people who are famous for something else and have leveraged that celebrity into a book deal they would never have got otherwise. The complaint isn’t simply that these are people who haven’t paid their dues (whatever that means) but that some of them can’t actually write and have benefitted either from ghostwriters or a level of editorial support that would never have been afforded to a “normal” manuscript. If that subset of celebrity writers who can’t actually write get to benefit from the human intelligence of those who can, why can’t people who aren’t celebrities benefit from intelligence of the artificial variety? If ghostwriting is OK in the publishing industry, there is no logical reason why AI should be viewed as somehow beyond the pale.
Finally, and most importantly, I am a reader. At the end of the day publishers exist, authors exist, because there are readers who wish to read, to be entertained or informed or both. If an AI assisted author can produce something that a reader will enjoy, who am I to stand in their way? If books written by celebrities had somehow been magically banned at the get go, we would never have had the benefit of Richard Osman’s incredible Thursday Murder Club, for instance, and the world would have been all the poorer for it.
So there it is. I don’t know how much AI will affect the future of publishing. But I have no doubt that it will have some part to play.
Bring it on.