I had an thought-provoking discussion with a potential investor at Reflect Festival about AI generation of books. I'm extremely conflicted about it and it is something is keeping me up at night. The investor, already involved with publishers and IP properties, wants to use AI to generate new books, believing there’s a captive audience ready to buy anything new that comes out. That aside. It is something that we could facilitate with Literary Universe and I think given our system and people, eventually extremely well. But it gives me a serious pause for ethical concerns.

First of all I think this is not proper use of AI, at best this should be used to finish unfinished series where the author is deceased, but that is not the intention here. The intention here is to extend existing series indefinitely. For this particular investor legality would not be an issue as they can secure the rights to do what they want to do.

I could give a lecture on why that is a bad idea art wise, but that is not going to work on investors see established fan bases as a source of great revenue, aiming to replicate the success of franchises like Marvel.

My primary concern is the long-term impact on the industry and culture. Once the novelty of it wares of, we might might awaken to a cultural desert. AI generated books will increase the competition so that only the best of the best authors will be able to survive and even they will have to fully deploy AI to make it. After all, once the processes are established we might see new installment in a series every month and with further improvements that time is going to decrease (the great time being here due to editors having to look over the generated texts by the AI and developers to do adjustments to improve the models).

This will mean that new authors will have no chance to make a living in the industry. A niche will form for sure that will support authors, but there will be no way for anyone to make it beyond writing as a hobby. I doubt even the top authors will be able to keep up with the crash of price per book and the volume of books AI will generate.

Of course given how LLMs work in combination of novelty wearing off there is a good chance that AI will eventually return to rarity status, but I fear that we are going to loose at least a generation of writers. Still even that good scenario might not happen as the AI generated stories will be touched up and edited by humans. This can extend the life of this AI age and stagnate the culture for decades. That is until the talent to keep this up exists and the models don't spiral into nonsense, or myriad of other situations that will eventually happen to end this.

The process of finding, nurturing and getting writers from a hobbyist to professional is long and expensive with way too many ways on how to end in failure. Using existing successful properties and AI is a cheap with potential massive returns.

Now the big question is if we should try to go in this direction and pursue to the wishes of the investor or reject. After all if we take this on we can influence and direct things, if we don't then there is a certainty that someone else is going to do it.

I personally believe this is an inappropriate use of AI with potential industry and cultural impacts akin to the development of the nuclear bomb. Yet not moving forward and securing a potentially lucrative investment and trying to direct it opens doors to someone else who will not have any thoughts about the wider implications and impacts.

"I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes." - Joanna Maciejewska

Now then, what to do? What would you do?