Another Way AI Screws over Creatives and How Creatives Can Survive It

I’ve warned at length against the bad bargain when indies rely on algorithmic advertising to make their work widely known: soon they’ll be priced out of the market entirely, and the algorithms will divert potential consumers to a decreasing range of works.

But that is just about making finished products known. It presumes that the problem is marketing a work that is creative, unique, and valuable in itself.

Indies were able to break free of corporate calculations about what was worth the investment. They could specialize in, even generate new subgenres and find readers. The most wealthy and successful indies are those who have written high-volume series with lots of new titles every year, amassing loyal fans who unfailingly buy the next installment in the series. Also, because such readers are so voracious (“whale readers” as they’re sometimes called), it can only benefit writers in the same genre to form partnerships and introduce their readers to each other.

However, here too there are some serious problems.

The first has to do with setting the price for the ebook too low, a problem I’ve noted before. There’s nothing wrong with a freemium model—first in series free, the rest at full price—but a novel that costs 99 cents turns a very tiny profit for the author. You need a truly massive fan base to live off that.

Second, the quick and easy digestibility of such books matched with the demand of the readers sooner or later puts an incredible strain on the writer. Some genre writers can crank out a book a month—some even every two weeks. Obviously, these are not aspiring to be the next *Wuthering Heights* or *War and Peace.* And it obviously suits some personalities more than others. But for the vast majority of authors, it’s unsustainable. And if you betray your readers’ well-trained expectations, they may lose interest and wander off to the next cranker-of-novels.

Third is the problem of AI. Genre novels turned out with that kind of speed are, needless to say, by definition formulaic. That isn’t necessarily a criticism—if you like a formula, why not? I’ve read every single one of Agatha Christie’s novels, and after awhile you cotton on to the formula. No surprise; at the height of her career she was writing at least two novels a year, plus short stories and plays. Yet she endlessly innovated within the tight constraints of the puzzle mystery.

But, at some point, AI is going to catch up. It may almost be there already, to be honest. AI has plundered the innumerable hours that translators and interpreters have put into fluency in two or more languages. We don’t even realize it, much less pay for it, when we use DeepL or Google Translate (guilty as charged). If AI can figure out how to move from one grammatical and syntactical system to another as well as it already does, you better believe it’s going to figure out how to assemble genre plots and then sub out one set of details for another.

My guess is that you’ll still always need an editor. AI will never know down to every last detail what is plausible or natural for human behavior. But it’s a much different business model to edit an AI-generated formulaic novel than to compose one, and the time factor, even for the fastest of genre writers, will be orders of magnitude more efficient.

Automation took away manual jobs; internet communication reduced, removed, or relocated a lot of service jobs; AI is going to make serious inroads on creative jobs.

To a degree. AI is never going to be able to create anything new, because you actually need a human mind and body to do that. AI only creates a pastiche of what people have already put into it. It doesn’t actually offer up newness of any kind. It might accidentally generate juxtapositions that inspire human brains in new ways, but it will be just that—an accident. And the raw materials will always be what people put into it. But they probably won’t be paid for it.

This is a warning to those who make their living this way. But it’s also an invitation. You can do the fast and self-annihilating marketing through algorithmic ads, or you can slowly create real human communication. In the same way, you can spit out fast art and hope for a fast return on investment. Or you can slow down, dig into the deep humanity of your artform, and innovate something soulful and valuable.

In the end, you probably won’t have a choice anyway. The robots will beat all of us at the formulaic stuff. Only we can beat them at the human stuff.