This post is not supernatural or steampunk ‘dark’ in the manner of many other posts here. But I think this topic has ‘dark’ real-world implications, and it’s something that’s been on my mind lately.

“Move fast and break things.” – Mark Zuckerberg

“Yes, why not? What is the worst that could happen?” – Cloacina

Thus spake Cloacina, the sentient AI protagonist of my new risqué sci-fi novella CLOACINA MAXIMA (written under my Gerhard Dennis pseudonym), in a classic example of the fox guarding the henhouse.

But indeed, why not move fast and break things? People have often tended to fear radical technological advances (especially when their jobs are endangered by them), from Gutenberg’s printing press to the Industrial Revolution to, most recently, generative artificial intelligence; but historically, the positives have generally outweighed the negatives. Granted, these developments have had socioeconomic consequences, but in the long run people have ended up adapting and generally benefitting from the new technologies.

In the same vein, I think the advances now being made in AI and robotics will ultimately benefit humankind, and perhaps in ways we haven’t yet imagined. Wouldn’t you like to have devices like the Jetsons’ Rosie the Robot to take the drudgery out of your life and give you time for more worthwhile pursuits? I know I would. Yes, there’s potential for corporate and governmental abuse, and there are problems such as innate biases, inaccuracies, and disinformation that will need to be overcome; but efforts are already underway to sensibly regulate this technology in order to hopefully prevent those issues from getting out of hand.

And not to worry – despite the alarmist prognostications of the ‘AI Doomers’ (Bill Gates, et al.; and despite the shenanigans that my Cloacina gets up to), ‘The Singularity’ has not arrived and it’s highly unlikely that AI will magically become sentient and take over the world. As Marc Andreessen (the Netscape/Mosaic dude) recently stated, “AI doesn’t want, it doesn’t have goals, and it doesn’t want to kill you, because it’s not alive. AI is a machine – it’s not going to come alive any more than your toaster will” (or the toilet bot in my novella series). Human scientists still don’t fully understand how our own brains work, and we may never know enough about it to imbue an artificial construct with human-like consciousness. It’s fun and can be thought-provoking when we writers try to imagine how such a thing might occur and what the consequences of that happening might be – but it’s fiction.

In any event, there’s the inconvenient truth that when an idea’s time has come, someone somewhere will make it happen whether we like it or not. And speaking of writing, generative AI will indeed cause repercussions in job markets (and is already starting to), as did the Industrial Revolution and factory automation – including some in our chosen profession (or hobby, as the case may be). Some pundits maintain that AI will ultimately create more jobs than it will replace. But meanwhile, professional copy writers in many walks of business life are already being impacted by AIs like ChatGPT; artwork and videos generated by AI programs like DALL-E and Synthesys will threaten the livelihood of human artists (including book cover artists and book trailer creators); AI audiobook narration (available now at Apple Books and elsewhere) will be much cheaper than hiring human producers; and AI programs like Sudowrite will soon be able to write complete stories and even entire novels based on prompts from the ‘author’.

In all of these cases, there are looming issues of copyright infringement, privacy protection, and fair remuneration for human creators, as generative AI programs are ‘trained’ by ‘scraping’ ream upon ream of human-generated output on the Web for source material that can be ‘sampled’ to compile ‘new’ works. In the world of text, practically everything that’s ever been written is fair game for this, including my books and yours as well (and even these blog posts). As we speak, they are being scraped without our permission and with no remuneration for us, despite our publications being copyrighted materials. Money issues aside, many feel that this amounts to plagiarism, which is another developing AI problem that will need to be addressed.

Whether we think generative AI is good or bad, it exists and it will advance. AI-written books have already started to appear on Amazon; but until recently, they’ve been mostly children’s books. This didn’t surprise me, as my own experiments with generative AI (hey, I was curious!) produced text that read like it had been written by a middle-grade student. But lately, more sophisticated (albeit still short) books have begun to appear; however, the ones I’ve heard of still read like lifeless, cliche-ridden robotic prose – which again doesn’t surprise me, because how could these books have any ‘soul’ when they’re being created by soulless machines? These AIs don’t have original thoughts or writing styles; they are merely machines that recycle snippets of existing text and ideas through mathematical language modeling.

Nevertheless, I think there will unfortunately be a market for these AI ‘creations’, and that may turn out to be the biggest existential threat that generative AI will pose to us fiction writers. The latest version of Sudowrite in particular puts me in mind of the venerable ‘penny dreadful’. Penny dreadfuls, and their cousins the ‘dime novels’ and ‘story papers’, were cheap, mass-produced, sensationalist serial fiction popular in the 1700s and 1800s. They were targeted at young working-class readers and were generally poorly written, but entertaining. They later gave rise to the popular pulp and mass-market fiction of the 1900s; and then of course the advent of self-publishing in this century, beginning with Amazon’s Kindle innovation, kept the tradition alive.

There have always been, and probably always will be, readers who are satisfied with prurient material that has little intrinsic artistic or social value; and these seekers of ‘cheap thrills’ will likely also be happy with what I think will be the next incarnation of the ‘penny dreadful’, i.e. the output of programs like Sudowrite. Thus I think the main threat to us human fiction writers is most likely to come in the form of yet more competition due to further flooding of the indie book market by people using these AIs to churn out product, which they will be able to do faster than we ourselves can.

So what are we to do? Well, I suppose we’ll either adapt or perish – again, as has happened before with other technological advances. How will we adapt? That’s the million-dollar question, and I think it will mostly have to do with marketing – something that most of us don’t excel at, to put it mildly. How will we manage to learn how to market our books well enough to stand out from the crowd of AI-generated New Penny Dreadfuls? If you figure that out, let me know – because as I imagine is true for most of us, I don’t yet have a clue.