Paying Ais to Read My Books
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The author discusses the idea that AIs are becoming the primary audience for written works, and authors should optimize their writing for AI ingestion, sparking controversy and debate among commenters about the ethics of AI companies using copyrighted material without compensation.
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And the entire linked piece is written in this propaganda style. That no longer works except as a morale booster for "AI" cultists who feel that their funding will disappear soon.
[...]
> The value of an author’s work will not just be in how well it sells among humans, but how deep it has been included within the foundational knowledge of these intelligent memory-based systems. That potency will be what is boasted about. That will be an author’s legacy.
The fact that nominally "sane" humans with sizeable followings can publish megalomaniac articles like these and present them as anything other than descriptions of a dystopian hellscape makes me quite pessimistic about our future.
What even is the point anymore? They want flesh and blood robots to feed the algorithm overlords. They don't even seem to realise they're basically killing their profession/passion in doing so, although I doubt any writer with an ounce of self respect, passion and skill would perceive llms as anything other than repulsive monstrosities
That's quite an uninformed position to take. I suggest talking to more writers.
SIMON: I don't think AI can remotely challenge what writers do at a fundamentally creative level.
SHAPIRO: But if you're trying to transition from scene five to scene six, and you're stuck with that transition, you could imagine plugging that portion of the script into an AI and say, give me 10 ideas for how to transition this.
SIMON: I'd rather put a gun in my mouth.
https://www.npr.org/2023/05/19/1177194215/tv-writer-david-si...
Stephen King: https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2023/08/stephen-ki...
Robin Sloan: https://www.robinsloan.com/lab/at-home-in-high-dimensional-s...
Hugh Howey (Silo): https://hughhowey.com/ai-training-permission/
Joanna Penn (J.F. Penn): https://www.thecreativepenn.com/2023/05/05/ai-assisted-artis...
Ken Liu: https://bigthink.com/high-culture/ken-liu-ai-art/
Jeanette Winterson: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/mar/12/jeanette-winte...
Debbie Urbanski: https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a46025901/debbie...
James Frey: https://www.vanityfair.com/style/story/james-frey-new-book
Technologists have an obvious conflict of interest, as for fiction it's not really what I'm interested in, it's like asking marlboro about the benefits of cigarettes.
Stephen King: never talks about using LLMs to write
Robin Sloan: training sets
Hugh Howey (Silo): training sets
Joanna Penn (J.F. Penn): "Write the books only you can write"
Ken Liu: "Much as the printing press changed the way we consume books, AI will change the way we consume text". A writer who talks about books as something to be "consumed" already tells you everything you need to know about them imho, aside from that they seem to say 'it's shit but who knows it might become better in the future", you'll notice even tech bros always talks about the future that never materialize. I don't see anything about writers using LLMs to write books.
Jeanette Winterson: "Humans will always want to read what other humans have to say, but like it or not, humans will be living around non-biological entities.", she already gave up as it seems
Debbie Urbanski: The only one who seem to actually use LLMs to write, I'l lgive you that
James Frey: “I use artificial intelligence because I want to write the best book possible.”, really, do I even have to say anything ?
"They don't even seem to realise they're basically killing their profession/passion in doing so, although I doubt any writer with an ounce of self respect, passion and skill would perceive llms as anything other than repulsive monstrosities"
The authors I referenced here all seemed not to perceive LLMs as "repulsive monstrosities".
I write a lot myself and I don't let LLMs write for me (beyond the occasional auto-complete to spell a word correctly - and some API documentation the other day, which was a big break from the norm for me.)
I think not letting LLMs put words in your mouth is a sensible policy for professional writers. Good writing involves caring about every word.
I love LLMs as a thesaurus though, because they help me get to the right word so much quicker!
But yeah, feel free to be honoured that some company can profit from your work without recompensing you in any way.
Authors who make money primarily by creating art and selling it, and who do not wish to monetize their work through selling their persona, might have more of reason to be upset by the blatant violation of their legal rights by Sam Altman and his friends.
::slow clap:: Congratulations everybody. This is the future of pedagogy, learning, creativity, and appreciating things that we’ve bestowed upon humanity. I’ll bet our mamas are proud. Hopefully, now that writing, visual art and music are solved problems, we can clap the dust off of our hands and tackle life’s true inefficiencies that we’re clearly worse at than computers — eating a crisp apple off of the tree in autumn, falling in love, seeing a breathtaking summer sunrise over some Atlantic sand dunes… all that garbage that we couldn’t possibly pay the same amount of attention to or munge it up and share it with others nearly as efficiently as a computer could. That’s right. Let’s get to work on making the lean, productive life something that everybody has to want to aspire to, lest those troglodytes get left behind! I want the hyper-efficient Soylent version of making love to someone I just fell in love with so I can get back to work and make computer magic happen.
This argument makes far less sense for memoir and fiction. The goal of these forms of writing is to induce specific emotional states in the reader. Having them regurgitated or summarized via a LLM does nothing to achieve their goal.
OTOH, don't underestimate how different other people's values might be.
I suspect people who do this do it for status. Just like having a bookshelf full of books they have never read, this is a cheap 80:20 optimization to appear well-read without putting in the time.
Bonus points if you can get ChatGPT to insert casual references to your work into the books it generates for other authors. Today it generates references to palantíri, sandworms, and the Priory of Sion, but tomorrow it could generate references to the Four Orbs, if you play your cards right!
(Mind you, this plan sounds impracticable to me — I don't think it's possible to mastermind this kind of purposeful LLM-infection with regard to a crappy novel. But I can absolutely imagine a fiction writer having this as a goal, and therefore wanting to ensure LLMs are trained on their work.)
"Against the power of Mordor there can be no victory. We must join with him, Gandalf. We must join with Sauron. It would be wise, my friend."
Fifteen years after a copypasta about a basilisk and people are still making “I celebrate the impending blessed birth of my big beautiful binary boy!” posts
It's a shame so many people have trusted his other advice to such a degree if he's openly claiming himself to be this blithely stupid.
This entire article is a monstrosity of terrible notions painted as something that's just fine.