My Thoughts on the Future of AI and Fiction Writing

It's hard to be optimistic about the state of book publishing these days. AI-generated slop is everywhere on Amazon. It's unclear how a new author can stand out in the face of the sheer volume of texts that are being uploaded every day.

But while optimism is perhaps too strong a word for how I feel, I'm not sounding the death knell for the book industry either. I'm actually quite hopeful that things will work out in a way that favors creators.

For the first stop in my reasoning, I wonder if you remember the early days of the Google and Apple app stores for mobile phones? It's okay if you don't. It only lasted a minute.

Apple and especially Google were eager to fill their stores up with new apps and games, but it didn't take long before shady developers and get-rich-quick schemers filled them up with low-quality apps, clones and even malware disguised as useful software. Anyone could upload anything, and the app stores did not anticipate the scale of the problem.

The stores had good reason to put up guardrails. All those crappy apps had a cost to the platform owners. Some of that was bandwidth and storage. The larger cost was in their reputation, and in customer trust in the app stores and the devices the apps were meant to run on.

So friction was added to the process of uploading apps. The app stores still wanted content, but they also needed to disincentivize junk. They added developer fees, a review process, quality checks, security requirements and limits on the number of uploads in a day or week.

This is also the way Amazon and other online bookstores are dealing with low quality ebooks.

Amazon is limiting the number of uploads, tightening quality controls, removing reoffending authors from their platform, and requiring disclosure of AI content. Draft2Digital is charging an activation fee fee for accounts and additional fees for accounts with books that make less than $100 a year.

I predict the fees will increase until the number of AI-generated fluff books reaches a level that is less expensive for these companies to manage. It may be less than optimal for struggling creators, but from the perspective of the sales platforms, if you want to sell your book, you should believe in it enough to invest some money in it.

And then there are the AI companies themselves.

They've been throwing AI at the general population at great cost to themselves in order to increase adoption of their models. Anyone can click to ChatGPT today and ask it to write them a story, and boom, there it is, free of charge. It won't be great, but if you really don't care about the output, it's good enough.

But that crappy story costs OpenAI real money to generate. It costs electricity, GPU utilization, storage, bandwidth and a myriad of associated fees.

Currently, AI companies are like the drug dealer offering new users a sample for free to get them hooked.

At some point in the very near future, they will pivot from their current "free sample" model to charging fees upfront. When these costs rise, it will no longer be profitable for mass-market spam producers to generate entire books, especially when the thin margins of their business model cannot survive a single refund from an unsatisfied customer. Eventually, the economics of creating AI-generated fluff will simply collapse.

I don't see sunshine and rainbows at the end of the day for small publishers and self-published authors, however.

Because of the current flood of slop, new guardrails around what was a once a quite open publishing ecosystem will appear.

There will inevitably be higher costs for listing titles in online bookstores that will hurt some independent publishers and self-published authors.

As the book retailing platforms introduce stricter guardrails, a two-tier ecosystem will emerge: one that heavily favors titles from established publishers and/or prioritizes content curated by trustworthy sources.

While this will help some good creators rise to the top, it will stifle many others who do not have the influence or money to push their way to the top tier of content.

I don't know how bad this eventual result will be for authors trying to break through without the backing of a publisher, and I don't know if it's fixable without creating more gaps for bad actors to exploit.

But to end this on a positive note, I will point out that those who are using AI to do their thinking and writing for them will eventually be priced out of the ecosystem, and given the corrosive power of AI on human creativity and problem-solving, won't likely be returning to writing the old-fashioned way.

If you're playing the long game, put down the keyboard, leave your phone behind, grab a pen and notebook, and head outside to write. Writing and storytelling was never meant to be effortless; everything truly worthwhile demands you work for it. By embracing the challenge, you sharpen the very skills that so many others are currently losing to the AI machine.

In an automated world, the skills you hone and the perseverance you are capable of will be what makes your work uniquely valuable.