Artificial intelligence poses a danger to the livelihood of many authors as well as the concept of creativity itself. This summer, more than 10,000 of them signed on to an open letter from the Authors Guild that AI businesses refrain from using copyrighted works without authorization or payment.
AI is a topic worth discussing, and not just in science fiction anymore.
For an increasing number of novelists and short story writers, AI has entered the narrative and is as present in the imagination as politics, the epidemic, or climate change. These authors simply need to follow the news to picture a world that has been upended.
Helen Phillips, whose upcoming novel Hum is about a woman and mother who loses her work to AI, says she is both attracted and terrified by the technology. Inherent fear of being supplanted by artificial intelligence coexists with the yearning for divine wisdom and the consolidation of all knowledge.
The editorial director and vice president of Celadon Books, Ryan Doherty, continues, “We’ve been seeing more and more about AI in book proposals.”
The book Sike, written by Fred Lunzker and starring an AI psychiatrist, was just signed by the publishing house.
“At the moment, it’s the zeitgeist. And whatever is prevalent in culture now filters into literature, according to Doherty.“
Jeffrey Siger, a crime writer best known for his suspense novels set in modern-day Greece, is currently working on a book that touches on AI and the metaverse as a result of “constantly on the lookout for what’s percolating on the edge of societal change,” he says.
In order to answer the most humane of issues, authors are turning to AI.
The eponymous character in Sierra Greer’s novel Annie Bot is an AI companion created for a male human. The book served as a vehicle for Greer to examine the “urgent desire to please” of her character. She continues, “I was able to explore love, respect, and longing in ways that seemed extremely fresh and foreign to me with a robot partner.”
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The inspiration for Amy Shearn’s book Animal Instinct came from both the epidemic and her own experiences—she had just divorced and had started using dating apps.
She believes it’s strange how using apps can make you feel like you’re window shopping for dates. And I pondered, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could really pick out the best qualities from all of the people you meet and sort of piece them together to create your ideal person?”
Naturally, she continues, “I don’t think anyone genuinely understands what their ideal partner is, since so much of what attracts us to partners is the unexpected, the ways in which individuals surprise us. Nevertheless, it felt like an intriguing starting point for a book.
Some authors actively use AI in their work as well as writing about it.
Journalist Stephen Marche utilized AI to create the novella Death of an Author earlier this year, drawing inspiration from authors ranging from Haruki Murakami to Raymond Chandler.
I am Code, a thriller in poetry that was created by the AI software “code-davinci-002,” was written by screenwriter and comedian Simon Rich in collaboration with Brent Katz and Josh Morgenthau. Werner Herzog reads the novel aloud in the audiobook version.
Sean Michaels‘ Do You Remember Being Born?, in which a poet decides to work for an AI poetry firm, and Bryan Van Dyke’s In Our Likeness, about a bureaucrat and a fact-checking software with the capacity to modify facts, are two more AI-themed books anticipated in the next two years.
In honor of author Marianne Moore, Michaels’ latest book is centered around Marian, a poet, and Charlotte, an AI. The novel, according to him, is about parenting, work, community, as well as “the implications of this technology for art, language, and our sense of identity.”
Do You Remember Being Born’s ethos being true? he created a program that would produce prose and poetry, and he employs an alternate format throughout the book so readers can tell when he’s employing AI. asked for the inclusion of true AI content.
Marian is discussing some of her work with Charlotte in one chapter.
“The previous day’s labor consisted of a number of glass churches. I worriedly read it again. Turns of phrase that I had previously regarded as lovely but now found to be incomprehensible,” Michaels says.
“Charlotte had merely shocked me; I would suggest a line or a section of a line, and what the system spat back would have me think differently. This surprise had me in its grip.
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