Sonya Szech

Ioan Marc Jones

AI writing is God-awful. It appears intelligent at first glance, empty at second. It possesses the insufferable buoyancy of a holiday rep. It offers little by way of humour, nothing by way of originality. But its fatal flaw is the absence of vulnerability. A writer is a person and a person is a mess and, as readers, as people, as messes, we identify with the mess.

Despite its flaws, AI writing is spreading. Literary agents, drowning in submissions, have resorted to disclaimers discouraging AI writing. Literary magazines have done the same. Amazon, meanwhile, has struggled to stem the tide of AI-generated books.

Authors are finding that, soon after their work hits the shelves, sloppy imitations emerge. Fake books do real harm. On a small scale, uninformed readers might avoid real authors in the future...

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Publishing houses need to fight back. Stamps should not declare what is human-created; they should expose the machine-made. Litigation disincentivises lying. Publishers could include clauses in contracts prohibiting the use of AI, with appropriate use defined in absolute terms. These clauses should dictate that AI was not used for generating, editing or rewriting any part of the text, providing consumers with legally backed guarantees.

Such absolutism might seem extreme. Writers, however, are unlikely to push back, considering that 10,000 of them protested against AI in a so-called ’empty book’ distributed at the London Book Fair in March. And, if writers do not sign such clauses, their books should advertise their AI credentials. Publishing houses should be happy to draw the distinction. It is the human, after all, that provides a competitive advantage. If AI writing improves and saturates the industry, publishers will suffer. Why buy a book when you can write a prompt?