I just saw this post on Twitter “Someone is using a team of 10 AI agents to write a fully autonomous book.
They each have a different role – setting the narrative, maintaining consistency, researching plot points…
You can follow their progress through GitHub commits and watch them work in real-time 🤯”
I clicked to read the comments hoping to see her getting absolutely roasted but 9/10 of the comments are about how cool and awesome this is.
I know this has been discussed here before and I think most of us look down on the idea but I guess I want to know what people think about how this shift will be received by people in general. Are people going to be excited to read AI books? Will it destroy the industry? Should a book be forced to have a disclaimer on the cover if it was AI written? Would that even make a difference in people’s reading choices?
by suddenlystrange
47 Comments
[deleted]
Not a book person but I find the concept absolutely nauseating. A solution looking for a problem.
I think people who are simultaneously anti-intellectual and pro-tech futurists will love them. And they’re all on Musk’s abandoned amusement park.
“autonomous book” – does it read itself?!
There was a post here abt training AI with non-fiction books. So imagine reading a lazy book ‘adapted’ from human writers who painstakingly researched and interviewed many to publish theirs!
I’m no Luddite since I’m writing this on Reddit, but no, miss me with AI writing!! If toddler’s books are alrdy written by AI, it feels hollow reading it to them.
Then again, it’s Twitter, expect a lot of tech bros, trolls and non-creatives saying aye to it w/out thinking of long term impact.
AI books are an abomination.
refuse to read soulless trash
There’s no reason to compare ai books with the same written by real people.
It depends on why we like reading so much, the mere thought that the story originated from a mind very much like our own, the fact that there is an “author” thinking about the story and characters.
Now if I just want to check out interesting plots I don’t mind ai, but it won’t feel the same
I think it’s a cool experiment but I wouldn’t read AI written books
It’s hard enough to find readers for human written fiction. Good luck finding beta readers, robots.
Much like the books themselves, all the positive comments would be AI/bots just generating fake interest
It frustrates me to think that some people actually work their ass off through the whole writing process while others merely input prompts to AI and get paid.
Were the comments written by AI?
Were they the Twitter Blue Tick “This looks Interesting!” non-comments?
I’ve worked in the tech industry for over 15 years, and one of the most valuable lessons of my career has been “focus on outcomes, not outputs.” AI might be able to write an entire book in a matter of minutes, but if it’s not worth reading, why bother?
The one use case I do find interesting is using AI to brainstorm and write a first draft. AI never suffers from writer’s block, so if you don’t know where to start on a writing project, you can give the AI a (possibly vague) description of what you’re trying to do, get back something (which admittedly might be terrible), and iterate from there. I know that Gene Kim has used this to great effect for some of his most recent blog posts, but I’ve also talked to other authors who tried it and found that it somehow made their writer’s block even worse.
What do you expect on X? A bunch of twats using a fascist platform.
If you couldn’t be bothered to write it, why would I bother to read it?
Also the amount of work to make the output of those AIs consistent and logical is going to be hilarious. Good luck, dipshits.
A lot of books have weight precisely because there is a human behind it. There may be a place for AI in synthesis of non-fiction facts* but I think its less important than the techbro propaganda guzzlers make it out to be.
Take a pick, there’s endless books that matter because of the human experience behind the book:
*Night*, Elie Wiesel. *Born a Crime,* Trevor Noah.
*Between a Rock and a Hard Place,* Aaron Ralston. *Into Thin Air*, Jon Krakauer.
*I’m not waiting with bated breath though. I think that AI will exist to maximize the profits of the companies behind it and nothing more, and a quick glance at ohh say facebook doesn’t suggest that high quality fact-based information is central to that profit model.
Why would I bother reading a book if they couldn’t be bothered writing it?
This does nothing but add to the utter tidal wave of AI-generated shit that’s sweeping over the Internet and will eventually lead to AI model collapse.
How do you know the positive comments aren’t from bots?
AI is an insult to the entire writer career. I as a writer know there’s a certain line that AI can’t cross, but it can fake it pretty well and probably put me out of business if I even manage to get published at this rate 🙁
The original post was actually from Reddit. https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/s/qaQ1Hc6Awg. Replies are pretty level-headed, that it doesn’t make a good story. I would aim to avoid Twitter if possible. The content and replies are pretty reactionary rather then insightful these days.
I recently read a novel about an author who uses AI because he has a writers block. The original writer made this part with chat gpt and left all the grammatical and nonsense stiff in the original book. The later part was written by the author himself again. It was a really fun and entertaining read, quite of like an experiment.
But I totally see your point, actually I hate AI with a passion and don’t use it at all and the fear that it will overcome arts from all sorts lives rent-free in my head.
What’s the line? “Why should I even bother to read this book, if no one could be bothered enough to write it?”
I think the problem will be that authors might start using AI to help them write books and new books while not written completely by AI, will have either parts written by AI, or have concepts that were generated by AI.
It’s gonna get murky af, if it isn’t already. I mean, already magazines that accept short stories have had huge problems of being swamped by submissions which were obviously written by AI, but then having to deal with the problem of people using LLMs to generate ideas or write parts of a story… idk where we go from here.
I don’t particularly want to read a book written by AI, or had AI used in any part of the process…
I’ve tried reading some AI-generated fiction and it’s repetitive, nonsensical garbage. Individual sentences make sense, but people appear and disappear, if there are more than 2 people there it gets confused, it changes perspective at random, it’ll keep repeating phrases over and over, and over multi-paragraph timescales it makes very little sense. The current trend in AI is to smooth this out with different layers of AI, using AI to “fact check” other AIs, etc. It helps, but it won’t ever make any of this stuff worthwhile.
I don’t think anyone is excited to read AI books, but what they do is completely flood the market with trash and push human independent authors out. How can your book get noticed if your potential readers are inundated with AI SPAM?
I like to read books that examine the human condition and the richer inner lives of people. Since this is the case, why would I read a book written by a robot? Yes, I think publishers should be forced to put a disclaimer on the cover of a book if it’s written by AI. The publishing industry is cutthroat enough; I’d rather support human authors and not whatever megacorp is commissioning these AI-written books.
I hate it. Writing is art, and I’m not interested in looking at art that isn’t made a human, it’s empty to me. I 100% prefer reading somebody’s story, rather than mindless words written by a robot who has nothing to say.
So yes, I think if it’s AI written, it should be clearly said on the cover. And it definitely would influence my choice to read it, I wouldn’t read it at all.
These 9/10 reviews were probably bots deployed by whoever posted this.
Twitter is a den of bots and Musk sycophants who insist AI is a cool new technology just as they insisted bitcoin would replace real-world currencies and NFTs would make them millionaires, i.e. idiots.
If someone can’t be bothered to write a book, then I can’t be bothered to read it.
I am both nauseated and intrigued. Is the writer giving everything in terms of story and checking style and using AI just to check plot points, tonal consistency etc or just giving them a prompt and making them write te book equivalent of Bud Light?
I can see writers use AI as an editing tool, and that’d be ok. But I am not reading a whole book or short story written by corporate AI or someone trying to be a “disruptor”.
An old friend who is a moderately successful businessman had some health issues and decided to have some unnamed AI write him a locally flavored detective novel. I bought it for the cheap thrill. It was hilariously bad but I got to catch a few glimpses of his family who I missed being around. The plot was difficult to decipher….the places , people, and dialog were trivial and repetitive. The characters who solved the mystery were not involved in any scenes except for their very brief introduction and the overly dramatic solution to the crime. He had a brief explanation of the delay in re-editing the book due to it being incomprehensible in its first edition. It was not unattractive book with the publication date was the day I ordered it. I was amused and it was worth the $20 just to visit with his family, witness his ego again, and learn about his vastly expanded tastes in cuisine.
You’re talking about Twitter here, there’s not a small chance those comments were from bots themselves.
A lot of people don’t really understand how “AI” works. They think it’s just conjuring stuff out of thin air, they don’t understand that it relies entirely on pre-existing work created by humans.
Also they think it actually is artificial intelligence, and not just a machine learning algorithm.
I have a coworker who’s an avid reader. I asked him his position on this, the first time I heard about it. I said he didn’t care who wrote it, if it’s a good book.
[removed]
Fuck. This. Why are we using AI to do the cool, artistic stuff that makes us human and life enjoyable? JUST DO MY FUCKING TAXES (and don’t take over the world).
I’d put “books” in quotation marks. Using generative AI for art as a “haha, cool” experiment is fine, but everyone seems determined to represent its products as equal to art. It is not art and people who “prompted” are not artists for doing so. Generative AI should be used to relieve burden from humans in repetitive work, but it’s not being used that way. The way it’s being used for art is an abomination.
I think ALOT of people who opposed AI for creative stuff jumped to Bluesky when they first announced they would sell all your art to tech companies (before they apparently backpedalled on that) so it makes sense that alot of the people still left on Twitter would think AI is “The coolest thing ever”
Personally, I think its stupid. And yes, AI-written books should have a disclaimer on the front. AI can still only ‘guess’ at ‘what sounds good’ by looking at other source material so its only going to be as good as what appeals to ‘the majority’
I just want to say as a writer who is terrified of the AI wave, I’m so thankful for this post and comments. People who want to make a quick buck see AI writing as a bronze ticket. Meanwhile the writers who write for the love and art of it are getting shafted. My mind has always been to the reader. It doesn’t matter what AI crap is being put into the market if the readers and their buying power are choosing books written solely by human. So thank you OP and the rest of you beauitful souls.
Generative AI =/= creators. I will not be supporting them.
There are so few of us actual readers left these days, and I for one would refuse to read a word written by AI. I think where this will hit the most is with TV and movies. People will sit down and watch whatever. They don’t care. Readers are a bit more selective.
Twitter is just a bunch Elon idiots. Of course they love the idea of AI writing books. They’re all stupid.
Some did something similar (as far as I can tell, I don’t care to compare the technical aspects) and posted it a week ago. You can try to read the “book” if you want, it’s not something any reader or writer needs to worry about.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/autonomousAIs/comments/1grgiu0/l%C3%A9veil_the_awakening_first_novel_cocreated_by_a/](https://www.reddit.com/r/autonomousAIs/comments/1grgiu0/l%C3%A9veil_the_awakening_first_novel_cocreated_by_a/)
It’s tricky. I think there’s a possibility that the comments you saw of people excited is because those comments were from people still on Twitter. There’s been a pretty significant exodus of people who don’t like Elon Musk and his policies and there could be some bias inherent in the people remaining towards this idea of big tech.
The reason I’m bringing up bias is I actually read an article recently discussing the idea of an AI bubble as tech companies are investing heavily in to AI but there’s a combination of lack of enthusiasm from a lot of people and an unclear idea of what product the AI is going to give people exactly that could mean it doesn’t go anywhere in the near future like it’s being pushed by tech companies. It’s the idea of lack of enthusiasm that has caught my eye as someone who personally is not a fan due to the ethics involved (using people’s works without consent to train models and the job crisis they can cause if not used carefully).
So I think it’s tricky because I’ve heard both sides that people are excited for AI and people who are more like me and uninterested.
For me, largely due to the ethics involved, not even from some philosophical principle, I have no interest in reading something written by AI. It could be the greatest story of all time, but it’s not for me.
I value the extreme dedication writers put into their work, and unless we suddenly have a society where billionaires stop hoarding their wealth and we use AI to create a post-work society where we are all free to pursue our passions, it’s going to feel like a massive betrayal to writers to me to read the “works” of what’s threatening their livelihoods.
Also, I understand there’s a world where AI gets even better, but as impressive as it is right now, it still really sucks for more complex stuff. So I can’t really imagine any books AI puts out in the near future will turn out good.
Authors are genuinely concerned about this, and author organizations such as the Author’s Guild are working hard to see it regulated. It isn’t just that AI writes; it’s also a matter of how capable it is of imitating the voices of writers. Instruct it to write in the voice of Hemingway, or Hawthorne, or anyone else, and it is getting better and better at doing that.
Shit. Next question.