I always dreamed of being a writer. And – in part thanks to you, dear reader – I am. You who have read – hopefully with pleasure – my plaintive missives about the fall of man, my séance with the techno-apocalypse, are the sustenance of my daily commune with the modern spectacle of life. I thank you for it from the bottom of my heart.

I am not alone in my dream. The writer’s art has long been venerated by our society. From the rockstar modernists of 19th century Paris to the mid-list masters who now populate the Top 100 with bodice-rippers, Sci-Fi fancies, and dead Scandinavian girls – we still all love to sit down with a good book. Millions of writers worldwide dream of getting their book on the shelf and, if the growth of the market and the advance of distribution channels is anything to go by, it’s never been a better time.

The book industry was at one time seen to be a failing giant, as false prophets said interest in books was waning. Now it is recording stupendous growth year-after year. Video didn’t kill the folio star, despite the claims of the 90s doomsayers. Online fandoms grew to huge sizes over the last decade and gave authors (particularly superstars of the Young Adult genre like Sarah J Mass, Rebecca Yarros, and Rebecca Ross) 8-digit sales figures and 9-digit incomes. It’s a good time to be an author, and an even better time to be a publisher.

So, why the creeping fear? What’s the source of lamentations that fill the halls of the internet? It’s simple, because the one thing this era-defining AI tech is already incredibly good at is writing. Writing is AI’s first purpose and proving-ground. They’re called large language models after all. Swathes of my PR and copywriter friends have already been brutally culled by news outlets and companies looking to cut costs. It’s tough out there for non-fiction writers, and many believe the novelists are next (they probably aren’t, but more on that later).

Book publishers, the New York Times Best Seller kind, are already desperate to introduce and profit from AI. If you can get rid of the pesky author royalties after all, the path to increased shareholder value is clear. Profit is all that ultimately matters in life, right? HarperCollins has come out and confirmed it is in the process of batch-selling submissions and current on-royalty authors to a tech company to help train their model to write fiction. A dataset of nearly 193,000 books has already been fed to the AI woodchipper by Meta and Bloomberg and to teach it the delicate art of writing novels. Penguin Random House – scared of the implications – is already expressly publishing copyright notices that forbid using its novels for AI-training.

This is a war over copyright, ultimately. Novels are just advanced training data, and training data is valuable. Why get published in the hope of getting read when you could instead sell the organic data points of your carbon brainmatter to the machine? Publishers are moving from the literary publication business to the AI training business – if you believe the worst doomsayers. They’re not far wrong. Intellectual property is just another type of data, and your precious work is just a stepping stone to making WiLLM Shakespeare, Botrix Potter, or A.I. Milne. 

Some publishers just want to get AI to produce bestsellers and call it a day. Culture and human connection be damned. Some AI-only publishing companies have already launched, with Spines securing $16 million in seed funding and a promise to publish 8000 books next year – some even in hardback. Ultimately, they think, rather than go to a bookstore, readers will just ask the AI for a “YA Cyberpunk Romance with Lots of Guns and Zero Sex” (tweak to your taste) and boom, there’s your Saturday morning coffee for the next month. Don’t like it? Well, buy another token off GollanczBot or whichever publisher you like, and ask it for another. You’ll find one you like eventually.

Somehow, I don’t find this argument compelling, nor this vision likely. I’m biased: I write novels all the time. Although I admire the faux artisanal weavings of the predictor-bots, and although I lean towards the philosophical belief that language is a form of cognition, and LLMs therefore have at least an element of sentient thought, I still can’t quite fathom my soul panging with a trill of enjoyment reading an AI novel – even if it’s really, really good. The joy of good writing is the joy of watching the artist at their work. To know they really worked for it. The sweat poured and the marathon ran. It’s not about ‘creativity’ – AIs can be incredibly creative – it’s about endeavour: creation itself, not the end product. Shakespeare is most enjoyable when you realize so much of his plays are average at best and dire at worst. It makes the good stuff really sink in.

Perhaps the publishing industry becomes like the furniture industry: you pay more for a table hewn by a master carpenter than for a factory identikit. An organic premium paid out of recognition of the skill it took to make. A marvel at the imperfections of the human mind and the force-of-will required to create. A chance to connect with another brain through the choir of culture. A chance to meet another soul across the divide of experience. Novels don’t need to be sacred, or the author’s role revered, for them to be valuable. Tales of the book market’s death have been greatly exaggerated, but that’s not to say everything won’t change – but in the era of mass-produced content, the light of organic consciousness will burn the brightest it ever has.

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