AI Imposition

AI-generated image, courtesy of Canva.

My two worlds of technology and literature feel increasingly on a collision course over the matter of Artificial Intelligence. It’s a moment in which the single biggest foreseeable sea change in both industries is the same thing: AI. But the perspective in each industry is completely different.

I attended my favorite writers’ conference, ThrillerFest, last week in New York City. During one of the panel discussions in which several top agents and publishers were describing the overwhelming crush of book submissions they receive, I asked if any of them had considered using AI to help with the problem. The answer across the board was no, with some more skeptical about the technology and others more open to it but only if it proved to be useful.

Of course, if this question was asked in a tech conference in San Francisco, the answers would have been a resounding and unanimous yes. Indeed, several AI tools already exist that are specifically designed for manuscript analysis, including Studio Vi, ProWritingAid, and Authors.ai. I haven’t personally used any of these and am not endorsing them, merely noting that many companies are trying to solve the problem. I doubt even these companies themselves would claim the technology can currently replace a human agent or editor, just as AI cannot replace a human author. Examining the human condition is the essential joy of reading great literature. And AI as it exists today is fundamentally derivative, not truly creative and inspirational.

That said, it seems inevitable that AI will find utility in the publishing world. It’s hard not to compare AI to past technologies that have changed publishing. We submit manuscripts by email or QueryTracker instead of the old SASE. We manage edits using Track Changes in Microsoft Word rather than a red pencil. We research topics, characters, and settings with Google searches and maps, not by traveling the world. We read books on Kindles and iPads, and listen to them on audiobook, not only the printed page. If past technology adoption curves are any indication, AI will eventually become widely used in all aspects of publishing—particularly at the rate the technology is evolving and the degree to which Big Tech companies are integrating AI into their offerings.

In many ways, it’s difficult to draw a clear line between “using AI” and not. If you compose emails in Outlook or Gmail and use the now-ubiquitous type ahead feature to complete a sentence, are you using AI? If Microsoft Copilot prompts you with its little double blue line that a word is repetitive, punctuation is incorrect, or sentence is too wordy, are you using AI? Even the dedicated novel-writing app, Scrivener, has hooks for AI-assisted writing.

Furthermore, do we have a choice not to use AI? Increasingly, it is being imposed on us. Within a matter of months, AI has been baked in by default to nearly every technology we use, from the aforementioned word processing, to Google searches which almost universally present “AI Overviews” at the top, to Apple Intelligence on our iPhones (or Gemini if you’re an Android user). Technology companies are diabolically good at driving technology adoption—integrating enhancements into their latest mandatory updates, burying changes to their practices in their terms of service that are a condition of usage, optimizing their user interface to get you to click on a new feature.

This tendency is particularly the case when the tech industry is in an arms race, as is the case with AI. To explain their motivation in simple terms, AI “learns” from feedback loops, so the more humans who use an AI algorithm for a particular use case, the faster it learns and the better it gets. Driving it all is the underlying existential paranoia held by every Big Tech company that if they fall behind in the AI arms race, they are doomed. This belief, that AI is a zero-sum game, has the largest tech companies investing billions in new AI infrastructure and offering $100-million comp packages to top AI engineers. Whether we like it or not, AI is being imposed on all of us.

So what is an author, agent, editor, or publisher to do? My sentiment, in a nutshell, is to let the technology run its course. Don’t believe the hype, and don’t fret the worst-case scenarios. AI won’t destroy the publishing industry, but it will definitely change the publishing industry, as have past technological changes. Be open to select uses of AI that offer you productivity gains (in addition to generating custom images, one of my new favorites is researching comp titles), but resist it where it is clearly an agent of evil and certain to fail (e.g. write me ten best sellers in the style of James Patterson). One of the most powerful yet pernicious aspects of technology is its inexorable march that can border on coercion. But if you stay even-keeled and open-minded, the benefits are usually worth the pain of change.