I’m so tired of going on Facebook and hearing people talk on and on AND ON AND ON about AI. The endless stupid speculation on who might be using it for whatever is a pointless distraction from the genuine challenges we all now face in this constantly changing publishing environment.
YES, AI presents real and practical problems. Like fossil fuels, agriculture, etc. it is extremely damaging to the environment. It may even be worse than all of those things put together (science does not back that up; I’m just throwing it out there coz apparently that’s what we do now). It may also be able to come up with the solution for a lot of environmental problems caused by all of these things.
We don’t know yet.
I absolutely believe it has to be controlled and regulated. That happens through voting not witch hunts and screaming at each other on social media. VOTING for the candidates that support legislation and restrictions–whether or not they have a perfect record on every issue dear to your heart.
OR, yes, you can spend your time one-starring authors on Goodreads who you “have a feeling” might be using AI. Sure. That will save you. That will change the world.
Anyway, I get that a lot of the hysteria is based on genuine fear. I’m not saying it is wrong to be concerned, to be paying close attention. I’m saying the way people are manifesting that fear is unproductive.
Nobody asked, but I’m going to share a little bit from my notes on the talk I gave In July at the Working Draft Summer Camp in Chicago, Illinois. The topic was How to Build a Writing Career That Survives Success, Scandal, and Seismic Change.
Something I know a little about after…um…several years.
For the record, I don’t use AI to write my books. Because I’m a writer. Writing IS my superpower.
Also making alcohol-infused ice cream, but that’s neither here nor there.
But I’m not going to sign any cheesy pledge to that effect. Let alone PAY to sign a cheesy pledge. Anyone who can’t tell the difference between my writing and AI is not someone whose opinion I value. Also, I’m not going to engage in any public discussion on the topic because there’s no point. People just want to rant at it each other. I want to write books. I want to talk about writing. I want to talk to readers about my writing. I don’t want to hear a lot of pointless ranting and raving on a topic that MOST PEOPLE KNOW VERY LITTLE ABOUT.
I’m going to give good advice to the frightened worried writers out there who are smart enough to listen. That’s it. And this will be all I’m saying on the subject.
When we consider surviving seismic change, the obvious earthquake is AI.
AI is the current unavoidable example of seismic change.
Publishing has changed violently before, but this particular change affects the thing we all believed was safest—the actual production of text.
That’s different from word processors, ebooks, self-publishing, KU, ghostwriters, author conglomerates, review bot farms, social media, audiobooks, direct sales, etc. Those changed how books were written, sold, discovered, distributed, and monetized. AI potentially changes how books are made. That is why people are reacting so intensely (and, frankly, illogically).
So let me be blunt. AI is not going away. Do not kid yourself that because the current business model for artificial intelligence is not sustainable, AI is going to conveniently vanish from the work space – the publishing space. Do not comfort yourself with the lie that in a year or two our writing life will return to what it was in “the good old days.”
It is not going to happen.
And the people insisting that you need only HOLD ON are not doing you any favors.
You know how I know this? AI is global. And if you think the good old U.S. of A. is going to give up competing with the rest of the world, well, you’re clearly new here.
Now, I don’t know what will happen.
Maybe AI will become so expensive only corporations will be able to afford it. That wouldn’t be a good thing. If you think it wouldn’t occur to publishing conglomerates to eliminate the middleman, i.e. writers, from the equation, you’ve got a few things to learn about Capitalism.
Maybe AI will wipe us all out.
You don’t know. I don’t know. What I do know is that we are not going to return to the publishing norms of a few years ago. PLAN ACCORDINGLY.
When the market fills with faster, cheaper, more disposable content, the answer is not to become faster, cheaper, and more disposable yourself.
Every major publishing shift creates winners, losers, opportunists, grifters, Cassandras, evangelists, and exhausted working writers just trying to figure out whether they need a new newsletter provider. (Ahem.)
The default is to flail: publish faster, faster, FASTER, chase the new platform, copy the hot strategy from BookTok, copy Rachel Reid, write a romantasy novel, write a dark romantasy novel, write a queer dark romantasy novel, react to every frightening prediction, decide the old rules are dead, decide your career is dead, decide art is dead, etc.
The more useful response is:
What has actually changed?
What has not changed?
What can I control?
What do my readers still come to me for?
The last one is the most important one.
Well, they’re probably all important, but the last one is the important one to me. What can I deliver than no one else can?
With AI, the panic point is volume. If someone can produce enormous quantities of “content,” the anxious writer thinks, How can I possibly keep up?
YOU CANNOT.
YOU DO NOT NEED TO.
In fact, this is probably the time to slow down and hone your craft. Because craft and human connection are still your most effective tools.
(It’s tempting to digress here and rant about how many terrible–absolutely fucking terrible— human-written books I’ve read in the last month. Those writers are the most vulnerable because AI writing is 100% good enough to replace them.)
Thank God, Amazon has (belatedly) followed the lead of other platforms and moved to stem the tidal wave, but I don’t know that it will be enough. You cannot rely on that solving the problem we all face.
Lean into writing. Lean into craft. Lean into your very humanity.
I mean that in a practical sense: deeper emotional intelligence, sharper genre instincts, lived experience, voice, judgment, restraint, specificity, moral complexity, humor with timing, dialogue with subtext, romance with earned intimacy, mystery with actual structure.
As AI increases the amount of mediocre text in the world, reader trust becomes more valuable, not less.
A long-term writing career has always depended on reader trust. AI may make that trust even more important.
Promotion helps readers find you. Craft gives them a reason to stay.
In a flooded market, quality is not a luxury. It is a survival strategy.
Well-written books do not automatically win. We’ve already established there is no fairness clause in publishing. But if you’re choosing a long-term strategy, trying to compete with a machine is a losing game for most serious writers.
In short, I don’t think the best response to AI is joining the witch hunt or launching into panic-production. I think the better response is to become more unmistakably yourself: concentrate on becoming more skilled, more specific, more trustworthy, more attentive to the parts of fiction readers actually remember.