It has been a difficult few weeks as an author, to the point that I’m not sure what ‘being an author’ means any more. 

There are ideas to explore and words to write. I am still thrilled that my third book, Beast, is being published at the end of July. I am still excited about book number four, currently 35k words in. So, that part is sorted. But as an increasingly poorly paid and insecure profession, I just don’t know.

Our culture has a horrible relationship to creators in any field. It is a relationship that at once elevates and diminishes. Makers in the arts are seen as having some savant connection to ‘creativity’ that allows them to do this thing that requires imagination and skill, making something to enjoy or sharpen intellect or emotional intelligence against, or simply to ease boredom, fill time. These makers have a key that confers a special but apparently worthless status – because it is the key, not the holder, that makes the magic. 

Many who come to author events are hoping they will be shown where to find their own key so they can take part in the magic, publish a book. So, it’s kind of a great thing to do, but anyone who finds the key can do it. No one is happy when you tell them that the key is work. Then more work.

This is explicitly not saying  that only certain people can do this, it is to disavow the idea that there is anything mysterious or special about it. It is to say it is all work. 

With the gormless advances of AI we are in the middle of the most sweeping erasure of the value of that work. It feels personal. The publisher of my first two books has gone into liquidation and reformed as a new entity that feels no obligation to pay the authors royalties they are owed – though they may make some ‘goodwill’ payments in time. Some are owed many thousands. I am owed enough to miss as a part of my scratchy income. 

Almost worse than that, they have brought in someone to ‘turn it around’ whose other project include using AI to create a tool to ‘help’ authors. I heard a talk in which he said that you can keep track of the number of minutes you have been working. 

Minutes.

Fuck you, man. 

But given the nature of the previously discussed elevation, clearly for some people there is a cache to having written a book. There are people who want to write a book as a way of accessing that cache, just as in younger days when I knew many who wanted to be rock stars, without necessarily being obsessed with music. Good for them. Why wouldn’t they? It’s just that it is a poor starting place for good art.

If you can write a shonky outline, press a few buttons, steal the voice of any author whose work has been rinsed without permission by the big AI models, and lo, produce a book with your name on the cover, what happens to that cache? It will be as glamorous as operating a photocopier. 

I have heard people claim AI is going to ‘democratise’ the arts. This is bullshit. It’s already democratic (the gatekeeping is another matter that will in any case not be addressed by making it all push-button easy.) It’s already democratic, it’s just an awfully huge amount of work. And it’s not usually very rewarding. No one is stopping you, wanna-be-author dude! Go ahead, write a damn book – without stealing someone else’s work and producing the carbon emissions of a medium to large city. Is any new book important enough to chew even further into scarce planetary resources? 

It feels bleak. I presume that small rewards will get smaller. And I presume that people will make the assumption that AI has been part of the process, regardless. People will never know I didn’t cheat and I will never know how many books have been churned out in minutes, trained on work that took me years. 

There are great companies like Bluemoose, the publishers of Beast, who explicitly will have nothing to do with AI. And then there are others, who are grabbing at the amazing, vital, wonderful world of books and squeezing the living tits off it all for the dank equivalent of a photocopied report. Yay, it only took minutes to produce. 

Who will be left with the magic?