I'm still gonna write
Coping with Al stealing all the books
Meta Al gobbled up my books. Just like it did Jodi's. Just like it did Simon’s. Just like it did other writer friends who sent their screenshots to me in a rage one afternoon, just like it did....probably everyone's. I didn't go looking for this - I was planning a fun post about how I write new characters! So when the news broke that Meta had pirated a bazillion books to train its Ai, I read the article in the Atlantic just like everyone else who’d ever written a book, but stopped short of searching the database to see if my books were among the ones fed to the beast. I figured I didn't need to chase it down. Didn't need to know. Ai is gonna do what Ai does - be annoying - I knew this. Why let it aggravate me? But a writer friend who was so appalled at the whole thing ended up searching my titles and sent me this screen shot.
6 titles.
Cool.
Cool cool cool cool.
No wonder that with piracy at this magnitude, writer’s aren’t taking it lying down. Class action lawsuits and the like. I really hope they find success with these efforts. But in March of 2025, I'm having a hard time being optimistic about artist protections. The western world is obsessed with the idea of beating the globe to total ai domination and are willing to sacrifice any creativity, art, expression, humanity, to its rank and slobbering maw.
But I'm not defeated…
No really, I’m not.
I’m gonna write.
Because I’m confident that stories, books, art will overcome.
Thing is, all these LLMs were created by efficiency obsessed tech ghouls (God, is there a worse word in the English language than efficiency at this point?). Books, to their mind, are inefficient - so many words! - and need to be optimized, hacked and skimmed - hoover up the gist and consider the tome DOMINATED. HELL YEAH, MOVE FAST, BRO. They want the book’s secrets, they want them fast they want them now. And this fundamentally misunderstand the point of a good book - they can't conceive of the benefits of being immersed in language, chewing on and turning over ideas, disappearing into other worlds. Reducing reading to skimming would be like....watching movies on fast forward. What's the point?
The point of a good book is to experience it. Even non-fiction is crafted with a thesis, a journey, its revelations and new understandings offered in a carefully constructed frame. It's the journey that keeps us reading books. Because it's through the experience we connect with ideas, characters and people, we embrace human experience and learn about the world and ourselves.
And that’s why even if these LLMs are used to pump out cheap imitations of books, I'm not worried about it. I mean, I am, but not enough to stop writing. Even if u can push a button and skip the writing part, there are plenty more hurdles on the post-writing side that are waiting to make any grifters cry uncle - bad reviews, audience rejection, endless marketing efforts. I just feel like the whole journey of birthing a story into the world is inherently inefficient. Books are pages seasoned with a writer’s blood sweat and tears. And I think readers can feel that - and connect to it. There’s just no hack or that. Not really.
So I'll keep writing. Even if the ghouls believe their bots can pump out books faster than people, they will be hollow empty things. Because a book is a journey, it is carved through the creative wilderness by the writer, before the reader sets out on the path.
Doodle
I decided the drawing at the beginning of the post with the little digital dude is too cute to accurately represent what happened here. So, I started to draw soemthing the more accurately represented my feelings…haven’t had time to finish so here’s the rough sketch.
What I'm Working On
I’m on a tight deadline for a new project I am excited about, so I’m writing as fast as I can! Not much time for anything else, but I hope to be back at scribbling monsters soon.
What I'm reading
just dropped another great read that offers an inside look at the history of the Disney Method!My Murder: A Novel by Katie Williams - this one was recommended to me by my dear friend and genius writer, Ainslie. I checked out the sample and was hooked so I’ve ordered it!
And that’s it!
WE KEEP WRITING!! ART WILL OVERCOME!!
The most absurd thing about it - what problem is it trying to solve? You would think we have a problem of there being not enough books. Lol, there are enough books. There are enough human writers writing books. That is NOT the problem. If anything, we need more readers. So I don't know what these AI bros think they will achieve with their slop. People don't want to buy good quality amazing books, so they think they will buy their slop ?