To thine own self be true

Imagine your best friend invites you over for lunch, you have a great meal, she’s made some of your favourites.
You get home and you realise that your friend, who has been taking credit and your compliments about her great cooking skills for years, has been lying to you.
That dessert you always like? That dal you take three helpings of? It has always been bought from a restaurant down the road.

That music concert you went for only to realise the singer you paid a lot of money for, can’t really sing. They need help, big tech, to sound the way they do.

That movie you watched with your friends? Plagiarised.

The painting your boss has on their wall, not painted by their child as they claimed, but an image created by an app (built by regurgitating real art created by real people over centuries).

The only thing these events have in common is that feeling of being duped. You thought you were experiencing someone’s talent and creativity, but what it was, was artifice. False advertising, if you will. And you know what, most of us don’t like it when someone claims false credit.

In the last few days, we’ve discussed the growing “AI situation in Publishing” with appalled readers and concerned journalists. It feels like something has started unspooling and nothing will be the same again.

Let’s go back to the start of this problem.

What does AI technically mean? “Even a calculator is better at adding than we are, but we don’t call it AI!” (The AI Con, by Emily Bender and Alex Hanna). Look behind the hype that surrounds AI. Most of what are applications for generative AI are a con game, built by those who know how FOMO works. And now they are talking about allowing AI-assisted/generated books to win literary prizes? What do we really hope to achieve by granting a prize for creativity to a tool that affects the environment, is built on uncredited, copyright protected work, and for all its costs, could be put to better use?

“All artists need is credit, consent and compensation” (Karla Ortiz, visual artist, quoted in The AI Con). To say a technological tool is as good as a human writer, is to devalue the human, while blocking the door for all well-meaning, truly talented writers. How is that okay? Let’s not be so eager to give away our unique life skills to machines who have other things they can do better and should!

There are people who absolutely don’t mind writers using AI, who would understand why someone would need to use support to create something that they find relevant. Be upfront, whether you are a first time or a bestselling writer, or a publisher who thinks this is the way of the new world, or an illustrator who genuinely feels AI is creating art — just own it. Declare it. Print it on the cover page. Do not hide it, don’t wait to admit it only when someone calls you out.

And there are those readers who did not sign up for an AI-assisted/generated book. Those readers hold out for artists who express emotions in the most true way possible, with introspection, observation, with skill and time they have invested in honing their craft. I don’t think it is necessary to use generative AI, that’s not just my personal opinion, that’s my considered opinion as an editor, librarian and bookseller. You can hire an illustrator to make illustrations, you can hire an editor to work on your manuscript with you, most importantly you can recognise your own limits as a writer, and try to grow. Work with a co-author, an editor, and give them credit and compensation!

I hear this argument often: what if the writer is a subject-matter expert but isn’t comfortable with writing in English? Agents, commissioning editors believe that this is a problem that can only be solved with AI.

Well, the problem has already been solved, it involves hiring a ghostwriter or co-author, and compensating them for their time and expertise. Except it would definitely not be as cheap as getting AI to do it. And therein lies the problem. In any other industry that is not built on a person’s creativity, using a tool to get the information they need in the cheapest quickest way is a call that they can make without qualms. But the publishing industry, built on the shoulders of giants, built on a few hundred years of valuing ideas and craft, to then decide that ethically it doesn’t matter if you use a technological tool that renders creative people obsolete, that is a problem. That doesn’t sound like art to me. It’s a business decision. Basically folks, AI is cheaper.

As a reader and a bookseller, I’d rather not pick up AI-generated books. We know the readers who invest time and money to keep their reading lives nurtured, and we believe that their faith is precious. This faith is worth more than a book that the author or publisher did not have faith in and needed to boost with the help of AI. If any book that we have on our shelves, turns out to be AI-created, we’d be glad to take it off, to make room for good writers who respect their craft, their voice.

Generative AI tools are ultimately exploitative and extractive. That prompt you send out, comes back riding on the back or stolen work made by real people, some of whom spent their lifetimes perfecting that character, that turn of phrase, that act of fluency that you will later claim as your own.

There is a reason why people turn to art, whether it is music, movies, paintings, poetry, or a book. We feel moved, we feel a connection with a mind similar, or wiser or different from our own. One mustn’t take this relationship lightly. The act of creating art, is way too instinctive for us. To dance, sing, spin a story, there’s no real problem it solves, no real evolutionary process it seems to be an essential part of, and yet, it is. It solves our own fears, it links us to each other, and we have thus evolved. Anyone who is today hoping to be a great writer, to have their books last the test of time, must respect the reader enough to let them make an informed choice.

Back to that lunch. Now picture this, you go over to your friend’s home for lunch, she’s made a couple of things or not, and then you order the dal and dessert from a restaurant. You have a great time together, with no doubt about who should take the credit for the great memories. The two of you, of course.