West News Wire: Artificial intelligence poses a threat to the livelihood of many authors of books 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.
“I’m frightened by artificial intelligence, but also fascinated by it. There’s a hope for divine understanding, for the accumulation of all knowledge, but at the same time there’s an inherent terror in being replaced by non-human intelligence,” said Helen Phillips, whose upcoming novel “Hum” tells of a wife and mother who loses her job to AI.
“We’ve been seeing more and more about AI in book proposals,” said Ryan Doherty, vice president and editorial director at Celadon Books, which recently signed Fred Lunzker’s novel “Sike,” featuring an AI psychiatrist.
“It’s the zeitgeist right now. And whatever is in the cultural zeitgeist seeps into fiction,” Doherty said.
Other AI-themed novels expected in the next two years include Sean Michaels’ “Do You Remember Being Born?”, in which a poet agrees to collaborate with an AI poetry company; Bryan Van Dyke’s “In Our Likeness,” about a bureaucrat and a fact-checking program with the power to change facts; and A.E. Osworth’s “Awakened,” about a gay witch and her titanic clash with AI.
Crime writer Jeffrey Diger, known for his thrillers set in contemporary Greece, is working on a novel touching upon AI and the metaverse, the outgrowth of being “continually on the lookout for what’s percolating on the edge of societal change,” he said.
Authors are invoking AI to address the most human questions.
In Sierra Greer’s “Annie Bot,” the title name is an AI mate designed for a human male. For Greer, the novel was a way to explore her character’s “urgent desire to please,” adding that a robot girlfriend enabled her “to explore desire, respect, and longing in ways that felt very new and strange to me.”
Amy Shearn’s “Animal Instinct” was inspired by the pandemic as well as her personal experience with utilising dating apps after being divorced lately.
She remarked, “It’s so strange how using apps, you start to feel like you’re going person-shopping. 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 continued, “I don’t think anyone really understands what their ideal partner is, because 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 aren’t just writing about AI, but openly working with it.
Earlier this year, journalist Stephen Marche used AI to write the novella “Death of An Author,” for which he drew upon everyone from Raymond Chandler to Haruki Murakami. Screenwriter and humorist Simon Rich collaborated with Brent Katz and Josh Morgenthau for “I Am Code,” a thriller in verse that came out this month and was generated by the AI program “code-davinci-002.” (Filmmaker Werner Herzog reads the audiobook edition).
