Does this book mean the end of authors?
A new crime novel has polarised readers. On the one hand, Malcolm Gladwell thinks Death of an Author by Aidan Marchine is “a thrilling literary experiment that heralds the dawn of a new era in the creative landscape”.
On the other hand, Dwight Garner writes that the novel is “clever, for sure, but it left me feeling hollow, as if I’d made a meal out of red herrings”.
Why such different opinions? The key is that Death of an Author is written by a bot. Well, almost. The author is Stephen Marche, a real person, but he used three programs (ChatGPT, Sudowrite and Cohere) and through a series of prompts created a story he says is 95 per cent machine-generated.
This book was written by artificial intellgence.Credit:
Many authors have been dreading such news ever since the prospect of an AI-written book first reared its metal head. While writers such as Gladwell see this as an exciting revolution in literature, others fear it could threaten their livelihood, the future of books and even the whole concept of writing as a human endeavour.
For some time now, AI-generated books have been flooding Amazon: that’s not surprising when it’s possible to create a book in a day. Some of these spam books are being sold online under high-profile authors’ names. Most of the fiction is laughably bad. Death of an Author, however, is a perfectly readable story. I’ve read an extract, which comes across as a slightly clunky Dan Brown-style adventure.
“If you squint, you can convince yourself you’re reading a real novel,” Garner writes in his New York Times review. It has humour and “metafictional zest”.
Authors are fighting back. One of the reasons the Writers Guild of America is on strike is over the potential use of AI to write scripts. The US Authors Guild has drawn up a clause that bans copyright works from being used for machine learning without permission.
Malcolm Gladwell thinks the book written by artificial intellignce is “a thrilling literary experiment”.Credit: Getty/iStock
The Australian Society of Authors says such clauses haven’t been adopted here yet, but “the complications that AI presents are on the radar of Australian publishers”. It has produced a set of guidelines for authors: the key advice is “Be vigilant.”
Clearly we need to be vigilant, but how? It’s not just that the technology is moving very fast; it’s also very difficult to know where things will go next. The internet is awash with predictions of a rosy or a dire future for literature: take your pick.
One writer, John Matthew Fox, founder of Bookfox (“I help authors write better fiction”), imagines a near future when publishing houses don’t use any writers at all. Instead, they will employ a team of editors who review AI-written novels and then select and edit the best ones.
They could publish a book a week. And in time, computers may advance to the stage when they can write a book on their own that’s better than what 95 per cent of humans could write. “I know,” he adds. “The hackles of every writer just rose.”
Most writers and publishers don’t foresee such a future, however. The general consensus is there’s no need to declare the author dead: we will always need the human touch.
Looking at Death of an Author, writer Tom Comitta thinks the human behind it is still in charge and the programs he uses are his tools. He writes in Wired that these large language models (LLMs) will be used in all sorts of creative ways we can’t yet predict.
And a new challenge has emerged, Comitta says. “At a time when voice and style can so easily be mimicked, why not try to write something a machine could never do?”
Janesullivan.sullivan9@gmail.com
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