Do you see AI as a blessing or a curse for you as a writer?
For the past decade I have built up a small but robust editing
business focusing on crime fiction. It employs one person – me.
I have a background in newspaper and magazine journalism,
specialising in subediting, and a master’s degree in creative writing. My
business is called The Lone Wolf Writing and Manuscript Appraisal Company. The
name sounded dramatic, and it made me laugh. I think writers are like lone
wolves, roaming majestically in our imaginations, happy to be left alone.
A writer pays me around $3000 for a copy edit of a full-length
draft novel. It takes me about a week to do a job that size. I correct grammar,
punctuation, and other bits and pieces, enhancing the clarity of the work.
$3000 is a lot of money.
Soon, if not already, writers such as my clients will be
able to use cheap AI to obtain the service I’ve been offering.
That's going to remove a large part of my business. However, AI won’t remove a certain part, which is probably the bit I like the most - working on the structural edit.
Writers crave human interaction. Most of us like having our
work edited. We enjoy conversations that unpick the seams of our writing, we
like hearing other people’s ideas on how we might deftly sew it back together
so it’s even better. A genuine, constructive discussion about your writing is a
wonderful experience. It can be confronting and raw, but it is often validating,
inspiring and exciting to hear someone respond honestly to your work. I give feedback
on structure, themes, characters, list other similar books I’ve loved, and help
brainstorm ideas. My clients love the sincerity of this process, the depth of
my engagement with their work, the conversations conducted over a series of emails,
phone, zoom or in person conversations. Likewise, when I need feedback on my own
work, I select who I share it with to get the specific nuanced opinions I
desire.
Lone wolves don’t want to be alone all the time!
AI will not provide that service.
Regarding my work as a novelist, there are different
considerations.
In January, Meta (Facebook) used a pirated database of more than 7 million books and 81 million academic papers to train its Meta AI model. My two novels, Vanishing Falls and Bay of Fires, were among them.
I’m no expert on AI law, but from what I understand, once
your work is stolen, it’s gone. I can’t see how we can try to stop it.
What will happen next is a generation of wannabe-writers
will ask AI to pump out any book they wished they wrote. People will type into
a search engine something like: Karin Slaughter plot, set in Sydney in the
1980s, Lisa Unger complex relationships, Megan Miranda twists. No different to
me typing in ingredients for a casserole and getting a recipe online - a sausage-factory
spitting out AI-generated novels.
Personally, I buy books based on knowing a little bit about
the author. Yellowface by RF Kuang and Erasure by Percival Everett wouldn’t be
as interesting if they were written by AI. Eli Cranor’s novels crackle with emotional
intensity because he has a personal connection to the Arkansas setting. I devour
the work of David Joy who writes about small rural communities in the Appalachian
Mountains where he lives. I crave to know what that experience is like, how the
specific and intimate experiences of that life shapes people like the author. I
know David Joy is real because I follow him on Instagram and see photos of him fishing,
hunting, cooking squirrel stew, and worrying about the things that his
characters worry about in his books. What he is selling is authenticity and
people are lining up to buy that.
My current work-in-progress is set in the Tasmanian ski
resort of Ben Lomond. A few hundred people skied there from the 1950s to
present. I set the novel in 1994, during the alpine resort’s halcyon days, when
my family spent every winter weekend skiing there. To my knowledge, no one has
written about this era, which happens to be the final years in which
homosexuality was illegal in Tasmania. I was in high school then; it was a controversial
hot topic. Readers of this book are guaranteed a very personal story.
I suspect most readers aren’t that interested in the
backstory of an author, they just want to be entertained. That’s ok. However,
it does mean that a glut of mass-produced novels will soon flood the market.
When the AI-novel-sausage-factory gets going, what does it mean
for me, personally, as a writer?
Nothing, really.
I’ll keep on writing. Even if I knew no one would ever read
my work, I would continue to write. I like it. From the enormous challenge of
trying to write a novel and hang it all together, to fiddling with sentences and
word choice on a micro level, it’s my favourite thing to do.
No comments:
Post a Comment