This turned into a really long post but I'm angry about this and I need to articulate why. And it needs to be long because I have a specific criticism of a tool that is being debated in such a way that flinches from nuance.
Ignore the environmental concerns of AI for the moment, because those are actually the environmental concerns of all technology and it's not enough to draw the line at AI. That is a problem of greed, and it is relevant to a broader discussion, but not this one.
Ignore the copyright concerns of AI for the moment, because copyright is bullshit. That is a problem of society wanting to experience art without feeling it worthy of being compensated, which is a problem that goes beyond AI, and it's not relevant to this discussion.
This post is about the act of replacing thinking and having conversations with people with accepting information from AI as an objective truth.
The act of summarising and paraphrasing is an act of transformative work. You choose what to include and what to omit. This is not a neutral act! And AI does it from a position of authority. It has citations now. Academia is a conversation and AI presents it as a lecture.
Google is rolling the feature below out. Kindle already has, and you can't opt out, and no one is talking about it because there's nothing we can do and on a percentage basis I would say at least 60% of my sales are through Amazon so it's like. Okay. There are other fights I guess. Outrage is fatiguing. Thank you Google for at least giving me the option to not have this turned on.
I have ADHD. I forget what I've read sometimes. I can see the appeal of this. Sometimes books are confusing! I absolutely require help to read some books because I don't have the context for them or whatever. The problem that this is attempting to solve is a genuine use case, I won't pretend it's not.
But here's the thing: people think that AI provides THE answer. If you can, without leaving your ebook app, ask the book what it's about, you would pretty reasonably expect that to be a correct representation of what the book is about. You probably would expect it to be a summary that would be in line with the author's intentions, because after all it is inside the published book.
And look, it could be accurate. That's not really the point.
The point is that this shuts down conversation and presents one version of interpretation as correct. If I feel like a book I'm reading has a deeper theme that I'm not picking up on, me going to Reddit and reading a bunch of people discussing it is an inherently different experience to me getting a cohesive summary of what those people think about it, and both of those things are different to having a conversation with someone and comparing our thoughts, which is also a different thing from asking the author specifically.
Here's what Google's Notebook LM has to say about the magic system in my novel:
It goes into a bit of extra detail, it picks up on the fact that it being passed down to "legitimate" descendants of the colonising Empress is a point of political conflict, and it's detailed enough that you could read this and be satisfied that this is all there is to it.
And this isn't supposed to be something you get on first glance, it's something that I hope you get if you interrogate what appears to be a pretty surface level romantasy. The politics are not supposed to look complex. It's supposed to look like there are clear good guys and clear bad guys. That's what the world looks like when viewed from the eyes of a king.
The act of having magic is inherently colonial in this book, but the point of view character is a king with magic powers who has no way of understanding this.
The antagonists' solution is to attempt to give magic to all people. It's an act of "democratising" power in the same way that tech bros are selling AI as a way of "democratising" knowledge. It doesn't make the magic a good thing just because all people have it. Magic would still be way more effective for the people who can access education about it, there is still inequality central to this solution. The people who it advantages are the people claiming that they're doing it for the people who don't even want it in the first place.
When a woman who styles herself Empress, who believes fantasy!Australia was made for her and who disregards the First Nations people who were already there speaks, the world changes to fit her desires. She gives that power to all her descendants if they are produced through unions that have been legally recognised.
Okay, Notebook LM. What does that imply about the Australian setting?
And now we have something that's a reasonable interpretation of what I've written being presented as the objective truth. It's not a conversation, it's a statement. It's feasible.
And it's in complete conflict with my intentions.
Notebook LM might have access to information about the impact of colonisation on Australia, but it probably doesn't prioritise the voices of First Nations people. After all, when they're recorded (which is rare), they're outnumbered by sources that large tech companies probably regard as more legitimate.
First Nations people lived in partnership with Australia before it was colonised. Country was of equal status to people. They benefited each other. Agriculture and hunting was not in conflict with this, it was in service of this. (Yes, they had agriculture. It was sophisticated.)
What place does "I say a word and my environment obeys" have within this context? It's a fucking imposition is what it is. It's practically violence.
Oh, it can be used for good. Magic is beautiful in this story. Magic is used to heal and delight and to make broken things whole. But it's not neutral. It's entitled.
And it's given to legitimate descendants in an empire where it wasn't legal to marry First Nations people for centuries after colonisation. Marriage is not a neutral institution and the concept of legitimacy is incredibly political.
Someone who is forced to say words in front of one of the Empire's priests, who is forced to have children with the person who stood next to them, they might pass the entitlement of magic powers to those children. A couple who are in deep and committed love might not.
This isn't surface level stuff, it isn't meaning that I expect the average reader to get from the book, but when you have the power to ask the book what something means and the book TELLS you, why the fuck would you think any deeper about it?
This is I think the first time I've talked about this aspect of my magic system online. It's also a fantasy romance, and traditionally speaking I've seen some real surface level politics in those.
There's no reason to trust that when I write a bad guy that cackles and taunts and seems to be in favour of revolution that I'm doing so intentionally, that I'm saying something about the appeal of simple solutions, that I am condemning the cult not because it claims it wants equality (and come on, this is how you get people on your side, maybe don't believe everything in the sales pitch?) but because its objective is to force a colonial power onto an entire population, including those who have been victims of that power.
You can read my book and enjoy it without thinking deeply about it. I encourage that! It is a cute romance with fun sibling dynamics and the trauma the main character has is cathartic without being too confronting. It doesn't have to be that deep, you can leave it at that if you like.
But if you get the feeling that there are larger themes at play, yeah, there are. I worked on this for five years. I read widely, I had conversations with First Nations people, I considered the current implications of modern Australia and they informed every aspect of the world this book inhabits.
The fact that my book can be read as you kick your feet and smile is intentional. The fact that I don't expect it to be analysed is fine by me. Books like mine don't get articles written about them. This in itself is political. Romance is often considered to be at odds with depth. The fact that I put it in anyway is for me. I like the fact that maybe other people will pick up on it, but I have never considered that to be an essential component to this book.
I turned this feature off because I don't want AI to make claims on my behalf about what my book is about. I don't trust it with the themes. I know they're subtle to the point of almost being obfuscated.
I don't really give a shit if people misinterpret me, but I despise the idea that someone is putting technology inside books that could misrepresent me. It's inside the book. It has authority, and note the fucking root of the word. I do not want to cede my authorial voice to something trained on an internet that would be surprised to learn that First Nations Australians weren't hunter gatherers.
I don't give a shit if someone uses AI to write a boiler plate email, but it is an affront for it to speak on my behalf about my art when it doesn't know fuck all about my culture or the culture of the people around me.
Also, I'm not immune to flattery but I'm not delusional. A book with 40 ratings on Goodreads is not a significant addition to anything and no one will consider any romantasy a vital voice in the current misogynistic landscape. Add onto that that it's self-published and you'd look like a fucking fool if you tried to claim this in a book review.
This is my point. It doesn't say objectively false things. It can back itself up. But the choices it makes are choices and they're not neutral ones.
Please dear god don't take it at its word.
Much more importantly, attribute its word to IT, and not to anyone else. No matter how many citations it has.
