Hachette didn't cancel the book for being/using AI; they cancelled it because they got caught. Pretty sure that the bean counters were fully aware it was AI (they work in publishing, for pete's sake), but thought enough people would either a) not know or b) not care, given the buzz around the book. All publicity, it seems, is not good publicity anymore.
Personally, I won't buy anything written with or marketed with AI content. I've unsubbed from mailing lists, cancelled memberships, and returned books that were obviously AI-created. (I'm not paying for something I could generate myself with $29 and a few words in a prompt field, and I'd much rather pay people for doing people things.). It annoys me to no end that there are folks out there who just love to be all "you can't but the cat back in the bag" or "it's inevitable" -- the ONLY reason it's "inevitable" is because lazy, unethical humans allow it to happen. AI is not mandatory. Supporting prompters who claim to be creators is A CHOICE. It's human laziness and indifference that's the real freed cat, not AI.
Maybe that makes me a Luddite; I'm fine with that. Better a neo-Luddite than a complacent jerk feeding into slop culture, IMHO.
I think writer convention culture is going to be the next boon for true creatives. Going in person, creating relationships with agents and editors, and TALKING about your book to prove you actually wrote it. With the way the internet has connected the entire world, I think the only way to filter for quality and create meaningful community going forward is reverting to more localized community. Not across the board, but at least in building a network and then connecting to a broader community of already vetted authors.
I agree. I think you’ll also see, for better or worse, that readers will except authors to show the process more. Have more of that intimate inside look at the author’s work to show the human connection.
Not all of us can attend in person due to health, work, or financial reasons. This also cuts out a significant chunk of non-European, non-US creatives and leads to lesser diversity. It rolls back many gains made by non-white, non-European-descended creatives since the pandemic and...no, I don't support this one whit. Yes, I have a personal reason since due to age, location, and health, I can't do a lot of in-person stuff. But I have embraced the ability to attend a conference virtually and do panels simultaneously with people in Asia, Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Europe, and the Americas. Losing this diversity in creative voices is a MUCH greater loss than what we are seeing due to AI slop.
EXTREMELY BAD IDEA ESPECIALLY SINCE IT FAVORS THE PRIVILEGED.
I'm not saying its ideal, and I think virtual conferences are just as valid, but its the way things were done before we moved into a digital age. Its not just AI slop- millions of inexperienced authors are querying and self publishing subpar work, detracting attention from quality well crafted books and flooding the market and agent inboxes. 11k books being published to KDP A DAY is astronomical and its the reason viral marketing is the quickest way to indie success, which is its own type of barrier. You can still network digitally and find ways to interact with agents you think fit your work, but I believe in-person meet ups are going to become invaluable again.
Before you start lecturing someone about "it's the way things were done" you might stop to think about who you're talking to. I started back in those days and can honestly tell you that unless I was willing to walk away from a neurodiverse kid and focus solely on chasing traditional publishing success, it wasn't gonna happen for me back in the '80s and '90s. We didn't have the money for me to buy care for the kid and, well, parenting needed to happen. That meant no workshops. No Clarion. No traveling to the big conventions because we couldn't afford it.
Do you really want to return to those gatekeeping days?
Additionally, like too many people locked into the traditional publishing world, you associate self-publishing with inexperience and subpar work. The truth is that even before the rise of self-publishing, there were a lot of writers out there like myself who turned out quality, well-crafted work (this isn't just my opinion, this is based on feedback from editors and other writers) who could not sell a book to New York because it couldn't get past the Sales Committee. Who didn't have those ties to the big conferences. Who (and this came directly from the spouse of a traditionally published friend of mine) would not pass muster because I couldn't drop everything and go to New York to meet with agents and editors in person.
It sounds to me like you are solidly in the camp of keeping publishing for the privileged and not at all interested in promoting diverse work.
Not saying "Hatchette Just Axed an AI-novel" was a real missed opportunity. Nevertheless, it's always interesting to read your thoughts on these subjects!
Fascinating, and the first I'd heard of this, thanks Lincoln. Two thoughts occur to me.
First, I continue to be amazed at how many people in much-sought-after professional roles (writing! editing for a major publisher!) seem to view actually doing their jobs as too much work, and farm it out to a machine when they can. This is just a bit sad, really.
Second, what is the esoteric–mystical–Dickian significance of this author's surname being Ballard? The prophet of the effect of the machine on the desires and the psyche of human beings... his ghost invoked in this tawdry incident... I'm sure he'd have found it funny somehow.
This pops the top off a huge can of worms - the problems in publishing have been compounding for a while, and the pace and fixation on earnings have incentivized kicking this can down the road. I hope this situation catalyzes productive discussion (not just the usual internet boil over) and brings about some reform. To be fair, we’re kind of in the Wild West with AI innovations in this space, and the industry is whatever is the opposite of agile. But here’s to hoping we can figure out standards for how AI might be used well and only well. (Like you point out, disclosure is a big part of that.)
Absolutely agree. The genAI issues have kicked open a lot of the problems with traditional publishing. However, we also need to keep in mind that what we currently call "traditional publishing" came into shape in the early 20th century. Bennett Cerf and others changed the landscape of publishing in that era and...well, things change.
Self-publishing opened the world of books to many more diverse voices than I think a lot of people realize. Not just racial diversity but gender diversity. Traditional publishing started following some of those trends, but...the grifters are always with us. If not genAI/LLMs, they use book stuffing and other tricks and have for years. LLMs/genAI are just the latest variant for those scammers.
You cannot convince me that a single editor looked at Shy Girl before sending it off to print. I watched the Frankie’s Shelf video that you linked. I highly recommend it to everyone, because he details how bad writing is different from the long form prose that AI is (currently) capable of. The same adjectives and phrases repeating every other page; the plot having no build up and only kicking in within the last 10 pages; the sheer emptiness of it. There’s amateur writing, and there’s… whatever Shy Girl is.
So, who decided to pick it up by such a respected publisher? The book doesn’t even read like a first draft. Hachette would have to do an insane amount of developmental editing just to make it as readable as the average NaNoWriMo novel floating around in people’s hard drives. Not only are publishers not implementing any safeguards against AI, this situation makes it seem like they don’t even read the books that they acquire. And the amount of reviews it had as a self-pub does not justify the haste. Decent Goodreads reviews do not mean the same thing in 2026 as they did in 2015, or even 2021.
The Big 5 could become safe islands of literary quality. Or, they could keep trying to squeeze money out of slop. It might be the indie publishers and small presses that become more trustworthy. They already have less money and fame, so bad-faith authors may be less inclined to target them.
Truthfully, I have great hopes for the use of LLM to produce bespoke fiction. I think we're near the point at which I'll be able to pay some young would-be author $50 and receive a mediocre novella imitating Leigh Brackett or Edgar Rice Burroughs he and his computer have cranked out in a couple of hours. No, it won't be great, but for $50 the kid can make sure it's got a plot and is internally consistent. And since there haven't been ANY traditional SF Mars stories in 60 years--barring two SM Stirling pieces--I could find $50 a month to feed my addiction. All the "Never AI" people are also saying "buy what I prefer to write, and what the publishers think they can sell the most copies of, peasant: it's all you're ever going to get." If we can make t-shirts supporting every cause, and shoes for every size and shape of foot, what's the problem with someday making fiction for every taste?
These are big questions, truly, but I think one think to think about is the result. If we live in a future where people are spending their time consuming derivative versions of older work and never supporting new work, then, well, we live in a world without new art, stories, styles, etc. Things are bad enough in the reboot age where every franchise like Star Wars or Harry Potter just gets rebooted endlessly. Bespoke LLM could make that problem much worse. That said, I agree with you that people will seek out bespoke LLM stories in the future.
A fair point. Hard to imagine the problem could get "much" worse, though: I'll concede room for "somewhat." Plenty of self-indulgent derivative slop being turned out without the use of AI. Maybe there always has been. It's been, after all, nearly 40 years since the murder of Appin Dunganon, who "had written 22 Tatryn Runewind novels--or possibly one Tatryn Runewind novel 22 times." (Sharyn McCrumb, Bimbos of the Death Sun.)
Find me new and different pleasing to me, and I'll support it. Trust me, I've spent enough money already supporting new and different work which turned out to be pleasing to someone else, and sometimes I can't even get that.
I got caught short-booked on a trip last week and trudged uphill on a bad ankle to B&N. Ten mass market mysteries in a row had interchangeable (female, college-educated, amateur) POV detectives with identical world views and politics, and every character speaking with the same vocabulary and sentence structure. I don't think any of them were an AI product: they were manufactured by interchangeable English departments and writers' workshops, and passed through interchangeable editors. Ever read Boulle's Planet of the Apes? The part that never makes it into the movies is that the apes took over when the humans lost the capacity for innovation. If all we do is imitate, the apes could do it better. Boulle may have been on to something.
Yes I agree its bad already. I suppose the big question for me is where the money goes. If all the money in the arts goes to tech companies (e.g. people paying for LLM access) and artists are not able to make a living, well, for me there are lots of bad effects there. But, we shall all see how it plays out...
Gee, Robert, maybe you should bother to look at independently published works instead of Barnes and Noble traditionally published stuff. Not every self-published writer is turning out derivative slop--as those mass market mysteries you point out illustrate. One could easily point to Agatha Christie and A. Conan Doyle (amongst others) who started that trend LONG before genAI and created the appetite for this kind of stuff.
But, people like you can't be bothered to look at writers like myself, who DON'T write derivative stuff, but who can't sell New York on their ideas, so are self-publishing as a result. I have...a cyberpunk series with skiing, politics, and corporate scheming. A science fiction/contemporary Western/family saga/multiverse series with multiple subseries. A fantasy featuring a healer's rise to power, along with her daughter. Assorted standalones. But--most of my books feature women with agency and have Pacific Northwest-type settings, so...New York isn't interested in them at all.
(And no new Mars books in 50 years? Really? Kim Stanley Robinson and Andy Weir--amongst others--don't exist in your world? And you'd pay someone to general AI slop to recreate Burroughs and Brackett? I don't think you are in a position to sneer at the mystery writers. I know at least one writer in that genre, and she focuses on mysteries set in a particular location. She sells most of her books in print at fairs and events close to those locations, and gets deluged with requests to set her next book either in their town or a town they know and love. Valid.)
Yes, as I wrote, many things which make other people happy. And I'm actually overbooked on professional women in the Pacific Northwest. (One moment to count) Five Krentz, four Lowells and one Hambly without scanning the kindle, nine of them in hard covers. So evidently New York can sometimes work up an interest. (PNW is roughly on a par with California and Ohio on the shelves, though behind London and New York--and most of the New York and London material is a generation or more old. )
And you missed the adjective. I wrote "traditional" Mars, the great home of adventure--canals, dead sea bottoms, lost cities and beautiful loyal women. All done away with by Mariner, of course. But if I ever want a fictional history of committee meetings, I'll certainly give Robinson another try. As for Weir, I didn't find Robinson Crusoe on Mars very engaging in 1964 when it was (sort of) original.
I am very far from sneering as mystery writers as such. My complaint was of the uniformity of the sample. Jane Haddam (Orania Papazoglou) who always paid attention to multiple sides of an issue and knew that people thought and spoke differently, has only been dead seven years, but she feels like another era. And she was being squeezed toward ideological conformity at the end, so publishers have to take some of the blame.
I couldn't even give you a good count of self-published on the kindle. Over 30 titles, I should think. Possibly nearer 50. It gets hazy when a publisher adopts them later. Where I'm with you, though, is that I could certainly use a sorting mechanism good enough to find me new stuff I might enjoy. You'd think the cybernetic age would be good at that. No such thing so far.
PNW was not a big thing when I was delusionally trying to get into self-pub. I also do not recognize any of those names. While they may be from the PNW, are their settings in the PNW? Because I’m sure not seeing it.
Try Elizabeth Lowell's "Donovans" books--Amber Beach, Jade Island, Pearl Cove and--same people but operating elsewhere--Midnight on Ruby Bayou. The family compound and corporate HQ are Seattle and the stories are mostly within a day's drive. As for Jayne Ann Krentz, Hidden Talents (Seattle and an outpost of feral hippies further into the mountains) Sharp Edges (Frog Cove Island "an artistic haven near Seattle") Trust Me (never leaves Seattle) Soft Focus (Seattle and a film festival a few hours' drive into the mountains) and Absolutely Positively (Seattle and environs.) There's at least one more PNW Krentz I don't have in paper, with a title I can't remember off-hand. Barbara Hambly's Ishmael is hard to describe--Hambly often is--but I'll follow Hambly almost everywhere, and it's defnitely set largely in Seattle. Lowell and Krentz are or were certainly long-term residents. Hambly is California with some years in New Orleans. But I was only counting PNW settings. And since I haven't read all of either Lowell or Krentz, I doubt either list is exhaustive. The whole lot are so close in time, location and social level that the Lowell and Krentz characters surely attend (or in one case cater) the same charitible functions, and do business with one another.
If you didn't recognize Jane Haddam, you have a treat in store. The Pay McKennas are mostly New York and fairly light-hearted. The Gregor Demarkians are nominally Philadelphia, but I think she researched more than she experienced the locations. And she commented herself that they got darker after her husband (William DeAndrea, another mystery writer) died.
I'm also concerned about the lack of a shared experience. If people are generating bespoke versions of stories that fit their taste, no one is reading the same books, no one is experiencing the same story, and there's no one to talk about it with. We become even more isolated.
I do think that’s where this is already landing. Disney is now licensing its content to OpenAI to create such derivative works and it really follows the pattern we’ve seen in movies of endless remakes. Art will remain, but it’s going to be an even tinier sliver of the content people consume. It will also continue to be incredibly expensive compared to machine generated slop.
We’ve already seen academic journals move from banning AI to licensing that work for training. Lit Publishers will likely follow that pattern once they see money.
10 years from now, it’s entirely possible we’ll be in a flipped scenario where artists use process tracking or other validation techniques to prove their work is their own and self publish it because they refuse to sign with publishers that license their words to AI companies.
I just think you would have more fun writing it for yourself! The thing I have realized about some of this AI slop is how hard it is to read. And the prose never settles down. It’s so effortful to read it, you just want to give up. Your imagination will be much better than whatever slop $50 gets you.
Sadly, my longest (and only) published fiction was six pages long. The Great Martian Adventure Story exists only in fragments on my hard drive, and at my present rate of progress, I expect to have been dead ten to fifteen years before I have an acceptable first draft. Remember "A Piece of the Action?" "As an automobile driver, you are an excellent starship commander." As a novelist, I turn out to be a highly competent order of battle analyst.
It would be a dull world if we all had the same skills. Probably a poor one, too.
This is a very good summary of everything. I'll add that because the author, Ballard, was shown to have used an unauthorized image created by Whyn Lewis on her original self-published cover, and therefore had received bad publicity for this, it is odd that Hachette didn't question the manuscript more after that infringement problem. Instead, they seemingly slapped a new cover and made no substantive edits.
If the book was copyedited, then it was not done competently. A competent copyeditor would flag this kind of suspicious stuff. If that was done, and it was ignored up the food chain, that is a different matter. It seems more likely to me that the book was just run through a spellcheck and put into production asap for the reasons you have set out above.
I'm not sure they're even running it through spellcheck these days. Copyediting seems mostly to be farmed out to lowest bidder, with predictable results.
It's interesting to think about what can be done about this (other than just mercilessly shaming authors who use AI). I suppose editors can get better at flagging AI writing. Maybe large publishers will start hiring people explicitly for this (perhaps I should market that service myself...). But since there's no way to "prove" it one way or the other, it does open a can of worms. What if accusations came after an author with more resources, who could bring a lawsuit to the publisher? They need to start figuring these things out before they ever offer a contract.
Culture shapes human identity and at the same time sets us apart from anyone — and anything — else. I believe the magic of truly quality literary work won't be replicated by AI anytime soon, but based on this article, we can justifiably fear that AI will produce sufficiently above-average (and most likely genre) texts that make it all the way to print. And then we'll hear the sound of hundreds of thousands of aspiring writers cracking apart...
It’s interesting to watch how opinion is evolving around AI use in books. Also interesting that I don’t like reading blog or Substack articles if I feel they’ve been written with AI—it’s a breach of trust between author and reader, and I think that’s what people are beginning to recognize. I so appreciate your writing. 🙌🏼
Your piece on the Hachette cancellation really nails the chilling reality of the 'flood of slop' and how it impacts the integrity of publishing. It feels like a visceral battle for authenticity now, where the struggle to create truly original work becomes even more burdensome. It does feel also like a witch hunt at times.
Unpopular opinion: blurbers should also read the books they blurb!
Yes! I promise if you see my blurb on a book, I read it.
Lowkey serves them right for blurbing a book they didn’t read 😭🤣
Hachette didn't cancel the book for being/using AI; they cancelled it because they got caught. Pretty sure that the bean counters were fully aware it was AI (they work in publishing, for pete's sake), but thought enough people would either a) not know or b) not care, given the buzz around the book. All publicity, it seems, is not good publicity anymore.
Personally, I won't buy anything written with or marketed with AI content. I've unsubbed from mailing lists, cancelled memberships, and returned books that were obviously AI-created. (I'm not paying for something I could generate myself with $29 and a few words in a prompt field, and I'd much rather pay people for doing people things.). It annoys me to no end that there are folks out there who just love to be all "you can't but the cat back in the bag" or "it's inevitable" -- the ONLY reason it's "inevitable" is because lazy, unethical humans allow it to happen. AI is not mandatory. Supporting prompters who claim to be creators is A CHOICE. It's human laziness and indifference that's the real freed cat, not AI.
Maybe that makes me a Luddite; I'm fine with that. Better a neo-Luddite than a complacent jerk feeding into slop culture, IMHO.
I joined your cult. 😈
Good point about Hachette's motivation and I'm 100% behind you on the rest!
I think writer convention culture is going to be the next boon for true creatives. Going in person, creating relationships with agents and editors, and TALKING about your book to prove you actually wrote it. With the way the internet has connected the entire world, I think the only way to filter for quality and create meaningful community going forward is reverting to more localized community. Not across the board, but at least in building a network and then connecting to a broader community of already vetted authors.
I agree. I think you’ll also see, for better or worse, that readers will except authors to show the process more. Have more of that intimate inside look at the author’s work to show the human connection.
Not all of us can attend in person due to health, work, or financial reasons. This also cuts out a significant chunk of non-European, non-US creatives and leads to lesser diversity. It rolls back many gains made by non-white, non-European-descended creatives since the pandemic and...no, I don't support this one whit. Yes, I have a personal reason since due to age, location, and health, I can't do a lot of in-person stuff. But I have embraced the ability to attend a conference virtually and do panels simultaneously with people in Asia, Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Europe, and the Americas. Losing this diversity in creative voices is a MUCH greater loss than what we are seeing due to AI slop.
EXTREMELY BAD IDEA ESPECIALLY SINCE IT FAVORS THE PRIVILEGED.
I'm not saying its ideal, and I think virtual conferences are just as valid, but its the way things were done before we moved into a digital age. Its not just AI slop- millions of inexperienced authors are querying and self publishing subpar work, detracting attention from quality well crafted books and flooding the market and agent inboxes. 11k books being published to KDP A DAY is astronomical and its the reason viral marketing is the quickest way to indie success, which is its own type of barrier. You can still network digitally and find ways to interact with agents you think fit your work, but I believe in-person meet ups are going to become invaluable again.
Before you start lecturing someone about "it's the way things were done" you might stop to think about who you're talking to. I started back in those days and can honestly tell you that unless I was willing to walk away from a neurodiverse kid and focus solely on chasing traditional publishing success, it wasn't gonna happen for me back in the '80s and '90s. We didn't have the money for me to buy care for the kid and, well, parenting needed to happen. That meant no workshops. No Clarion. No traveling to the big conventions because we couldn't afford it.
Do you really want to return to those gatekeeping days?
Additionally, like too many people locked into the traditional publishing world, you associate self-publishing with inexperience and subpar work. The truth is that even before the rise of self-publishing, there were a lot of writers out there like myself who turned out quality, well-crafted work (this isn't just my opinion, this is based on feedback from editors and other writers) who could not sell a book to New York because it couldn't get past the Sales Committee. Who didn't have those ties to the big conferences. Who (and this came directly from the spouse of a traditionally published friend of mine) would not pass muster because I couldn't drop everything and go to New York to meet with agents and editors in person.
It sounds to me like you are solidly in the camp of keeping publishing for the privileged and not at all interested in promoting diverse work.
Not saying "Hatchette Just Axed an AI-novel" was a real missed opportunity. Nevertheless, it's always interesting to read your thoughts on these subjects!
I get what you're going for, but it's not pronounced "HATCH-et." It's "hash-ETTE."
Fascinating, and the first I'd heard of this, thanks Lincoln. Two thoughts occur to me.
First, I continue to be amazed at how many people in much-sought-after professional roles (writing! editing for a major publisher!) seem to view actually doing their jobs as too much work, and farm it out to a machine when they can. This is just a bit sad, really.
Second, what is the esoteric–mystical–Dickian significance of this author's surname being Ballard? The prophet of the effect of the machine on the desires and the psyche of human beings... his ghost invoked in this tawdry incident... I'm sure he'd have found it funny somehow.
This pops the top off a huge can of worms - the problems in publishing have been compounding for a while, and the pace and fixation on earnings have incentivized kicking this can down the road. I hope this situation catalyzes productive discussion (not just the usual internet boil over) and brings about some reform. To be fair, we’re kind of in the Wild West with AI innovations in this space, and the industry is whatever is the opposite of agile. But here’s to hoping we can figure out standards for how AI might be used well and only well. (Like you point out, disclosure is a big part of that.)
Absolutely agree. The genAI issues have kicked open a lot of the problems with traditional publishing. However, we also need to keep in mind that what we currently call "traditional publishing" came into shape in the early 20th century. Bennett Cerf and others changed the landscape of publishing in that era and...well, things change.
Self-publishing opened the world of books to many more diverse voices than I think a lot of people realize. Not just racial diversity but gender diversity. Traditional publishing started following some of those trends, but...the grifters are always with us. If not genAI/LLMs, they use book stuffing and other tricks and have for years. LLMs/genAI are just the latest variant for those scammers.
You cannot convince me that a single editor looked at Shy Girl before sending it off to print. I watched the Frankie’s Shelf video that you linked. I highly recommend it to everyone, because he details how bad writing is different from the long form prose that AI is (currently) capable of. The same adjectives and phrases repeating every other page; the plot having no build up and only kicking in within the last 10 pages; the sheer emptiness of it. There’s amateur writing, and there’s… whatever Shy Girl is.
So, who decided to pick it up by such a respected publisher? The book doesn’t even read like a first draft. Hachette would have to do an insane amount of developmental editing just to make it as readable as the average NaNoWriMo novel floating around in people’s hard drives. Not only are publishers not implementing any safeguards against AI, this situation makes it seem like they don’t even read the books that they acquire. And the amount of reviews it had as a self-pub does not justify the haste. Decent Goodreads reviews do not mean the same thing in 2026 as they did in 2015, or even 2021.
The Big 5 could become safe islands of literary quality. Or, they could keep trying to squeeze money out of slop. It might be the indie publishers and small presses that become more trustworthy. They already have less money and fame, so bad-faith authors may be less inclined to target them.
Truthfully, I have great hopes for the use of LLM to produce bespoke fiction. I think we're near the point at which I'll be able to pay some young would-be author $50 and receive a mediocre novella imitating Leigh Brackett or Edgar Rice Burroughs he and his computer have cranked out in a couple of hours. No, it won't be great, but for $50 the kid can make sure it's got a plot and is internally consistent. And since there haven't been ANY traditional SF Mars stories in 60 years--barring two SM Stirling pieces--I could find $50 a month to feed my addiction. All the "Never AI" people are also saying "buy what I prefer to write, and what the publishers think they can sell the most copies of, peasant: it's all you're ever going to get." If we can make t-shirts supporting every cause, and shoes for every size and shape of foot, what's the problem with someday making fiction for every taste?
These are big questions, truly, but I think one think to think about is the result. If we live in a future where people are spending their time consuming derivative versions of older work and never supporting new work, then, well, we live in a world without new art, stories, styles, etc. Things are bad enough in the reboot age where every franchise like Star Wars or Harry Potter just gets rebooted endlessly. Bespoke LLM could make that problem much worse. That said, I agree with you that people will seek out bespoke LLM stories in the future.
A fair point. Hard to imagine the problem could get "much" worse, though: I'll concede room for "somewhat." Plenty of self-indulgent derivative slop being turned out without the use of AI. Maybe there always has been. It's been, after all, nearly 40 years since the murder of Appin Dunganon, who "had written 22 Tatryn Runewind novels--or possibly one Tatryn Runewind novel 22 times." (Sharyn McCrumb, Bimbos of the Death Sun.)
Find me new and different pleasing to me, and I'll support it. Trust me, I've spent enough money already supporting new and different work which turned out to be pleasing to someone else, and sometimes I can't even get that.
I got caught short-booked on a trip last week and trudged uphill on a bad ankle to B&N. Ten mass market mysteries in a row had interchangeable (female, college-educated, amateur) POV detectives with identical world views and politics, and every character speaking with the same vocabulary and sentence structure. I don't think any of them were an AI product: they were manufactured by interchangeable English departments and writers' workshops, and passed through interchangeable editors. Ever read Boulle's Planet of the Apes? The part that never makes it into the movies is that the apes took over when the humans lost the capacity for innovation. If all we do is imitate, the apes could do it better. Boulle may have been on to something.
Yes I agree its bad already. I suppose the big question for me is where the money goes. If all the money in the arts goes to tech companies (e.g. people paying for LLM access) and artists are not able to make a living, well, for me there are lots of bad effects there. But, we shall all see how it plays out...
Gee, Robert, maybe you should bother to look at independently published works instead of Barnes and Noble traditionally published stuff. Not every self-published writer is turning out derivative slop--as those mass market mysteries you point out illustrate. One could easily point to Agatha Christie and A. Conan Doyle (amongst others) who started that trend LONG before genAI and created the appetite for this kind of stuff.
But, people like you can't be bothered to look at writers like myself, who DON'T write derivative stuff, but who can't sell New York on their ideas, so are self-publishing as a result. I have...a cyberpunk series with skiing, politics, and corporate scheming. A science fiction/contemporary Western/family saga/multiverse series with multiple subseries. A fantasy featuring a healer's rise to power, along with her daughter. Assorted standalones. But--most of my books feature women with agency and have Pacific Northwest-type settings, so...New York isn't interested in them at all.
(And no new Mars books in 50 years? Really? Kim Stanley Robinson and Andy Weir--amongst others--don't exist in your world? And you'd pay someone to general AI slop to recreate Burroughs and Brackett? I don't think you are in a position to sneer at the mystery writers. I know at least one writer in that genre, and she focuses on mysteries set in a particular location. She sells most of her books in print at fairs and events close to those locations, and gets deluged with requests to set her next book either in their town or a town they know and love. Valid.)
Yes, as I wrote, many things which make other people happy. And I'm actually overbooked on professional women in the Pacific Northwest. (One moment to count) Five Krentz, four Lowells and one Hambly without scanning the kindle, nine of them in hard covers. So evidently New York can sometimes work up an interest. (PNW is roughly on a par with California and Ohio on the shelves, though behind London and New York--and most of the New York and London material is a generation or more old. )
And you missed the adjective. I wrote "traditional" Mars, the great home of adventure--canals, dead sea bottoms, lost cities and beautiful loyal women. All done away with by Mariner, of course. But if I ever want a fictional history of committee meetings, I'll certainly give Robinson another try. As for Weir, I didn't find Robinson Crusoe on Mars very engaging in 1964 when it was (sort of) original.
I am very far from sneering as mystery writers as such. My complaint was of the uniformity of the sample. Jane Haddam (Orania Papazoglou) who always paid attention to multiple sides of an issue and knew that people thought and spoke differently, has only been dead seven years, but she feels like another era. And she was being squeezed toward ideological conformity at the end, so publishers have to take some of the blame.
I couldn't even give you a good count of self-published on the kindle. Over 30 titles, I should think. Possibly nearer 50. It gets hazy when a publisher adopts them later. Where I'm with you, though, is that I could certainly use a sorting mechanism good enough to find me new stuff I might enjoy. You'd think the cybernetic age would be good at that. No such thing so far.
PNW was not a big thing when I was delusionally trying to get into self-pub. I also do not recognize any of those names. While they may be from the PNW, are their settings in the PNW? Because I’m sure not seeing it.
Try Elizabeth Lowell's "Donovans" books--Amber Beach, Jade Island, Pearl Cove and--same people but operating elsewhere--Midnight on Ruby Bayou. The family compound and corporate HQ are Seattle and the stories are mostly within a day's drive. As for Jayne Ann Krentz, Hidden Talents (Seattle and an outpost of feral hippies further into the mountains) Sharp Edges (Frog Cove Island "an artistic haven near Seattle") Trust Me (never leaves Seattle) Soft Focus (Seattle and a film festival a few hours' drive into the mountains) and Absolutely Positively (Seattle and environs.) There's at least one more PNW Krentz I don't have in paper, with a title I can't remember off-hand. Barbara Hambly's Ishmael is hard to describe--Hambly often is--but I'll follow Hambly almost everywhere, and it's defnitely set largely in Seattle. Lowell and Krentz are or were certainly long-term residents. Hambly is California with some years in New Orleans. But I was only counting PNW settings. And since I haven't read all of either Lowell or Krentz, I doubt either list is exhaustive. The whole lot are so close in time, location and social level that the Lowell and Krentz characters surely attend (or in one case cater) the same charitible functions, and do business with one another.
If you didn't recognize Jane Haddam, you have a treat in store. The Pay McKennas are mostly New York and fairly light-hearted. The Gregor Demarkians are nominally Philadelphia, but I think she researched more than she experienced the locations. And she commented herself that they got darker after her husband (William DeAndrea, another mystery writer) died.
I'm also concerned about the lack of a shared experience. If people are generating bespoke versions of stories that fit their taste, no one is reading the same books, no one is experiencing the same story, and there's no one to talk about it with. We become even more isolated.
I do think that’s where this is already landing. Disney is now licensing its content to OpenAI to create such derivative works and it really follows the pattern we’ve seen in movies of endless remakes. Art will remain, but it’s going to be an even tinier sliver of the content people consume. It will also continue to be incredibly expensive compared to machine generated slop.
We’ve already seen academic journals move from banning AI to licensing that work for training. Lit Publishers will likely follow that pattern once they see money.
10 years from now, it’s entirely possible we’ll be in a flipped scenario where artists use process tracking or other validation techniques to prove their work is their own and self publish it because they refuse to sign with publishers that license their words to AI companies.
Whenever someone says "bespoke LLM stories" all I can think of is stuff like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCr0_38xlzo
I just think you would have more fun writing it for yourself! The thing I have realized about some of this AI slop is how hard it is to read. And the prose never settles down. It’s so effortful to read it, you just want to give up. Your imagination will be much better than whatever slop $50 gets you.
Sadly, my longest (and only) published fiction was six pages long. The Great Martian Adventure Story exists only in fragments on my hard drive, and at my present rate of progress, I expect to have been dead ten to fifteen years before I have an acceptable first draft. Remember "A Piece of the Action?" "As an automobile driver, you are an excellent starship commander." As a novelist, I turn out to be a highly competent order of battle analyst.
It would be a dull world if we all had the same skills. Probably a poor one, too.
This is a very good summary of everything. I'll add that because the author, Ballard, was shown to have used an unauthorized image created by Whyn Lewis on her original self-published cover, and therefore had received bad publicity for this, it is odd that Hachette didn't question the manuscript more after that infringement problem. Instead, they seemingly slapped a new cover and made no substantive edits.
If the book was copyedited, then it was not done competently. A competent copyeditor would flag this kind of suspicious stuff. If that was done, and it was ignored up the food chain, that is a different matter. It seems more likely to me that the book was just run through a spellcheck and put into production asap for the reasons you have set out above.
Agreed.
I'm not sure they're even running it through spellcheck these days. Copyediting seems mostly to be farmed out to lowest bidder, with predictable results.
It's interesting to think about what can be done about this (other than just mercilessly shaming authors who use AI). I suppose editors can get better at flagging AI writing. Maybe large publishers will start hiring people explicitly for this (perhaps I should market that service myself...). But since there's no way to "prove" it one way or the other, it does open a can of worms. What if accusations came after an author with more resources, who could bring a lawsuit to the publisher? They need to start figuring these things out before they ever offer a contract.
Let's use AI for blurbs only. Actually, let's ONLY use AI for blurbs.
Culture shapes human identity and at the same time sets us apart from anyone — and anything — else. I believe the magic of truly quality literary work won't be replicated by AI anytime soon, but based on this article, we can justifiably fear that AI will produce sufficiently above-average (and most likely genre) texts that make it all the way to print. And then we'll hear the sound of hundreds of thousands of aspiring writers cracking apart...
Grateful my first books came out before AI because it provides evidence I can write without it. But still... This is difficult publishing territory.
It’s interesting to watch how opinion is evolving around AI use in books. Also interesting that I don’t like reading blog or Substack articles if I feel they’ve been written with AI—it’s a breach of trust between author and reader, and I think that’s what people are beginning to recognize. I so appreciate your writing. 🙌🏼
Your piece on the Hachette cancellation really nails the chilling reality of the 'flood of slop' and how it impacts the integrity of publishing. It feels like a visceral battle for authenticity now, where the struggle to create truly original work becomes even more burdensome. It does feel also like a witch hunt at times.