After running a lit mag for two years and reading hundreds and hundreds of submissions, I’ve realized that there’s one thing I value in writing above everything else: a unique voice. A voice that doesn’t sound like all the other voices out there, using the same dead metaphors and basic sentence structures and cookie cutter plots and characters and conflicts. A voice that tries things, that has personality.
All of my favorite authors—Salinger, Kerouac, Pratchett, Austen—have unmistakable voices. Blindfold me and spin me around and within a couple paragraphs I could still easily identify their work. Of course all the other craft things matter as well, but a technically proficient story without a unique voice is unremarkable, unmemorable, and ultimately uninteresting.
These technically fine, voiceless stories, though, are the publishing industry’s bread and butter.
My family has a running criticism of movie sequels: If a fart joke is funny in the first movie, it’s gotta be doubly funny in the second movie…right? Movie producers seem to think so. If something works in the first movie, it’s included multiple times in the second movie, often in the same ways, entirely missing the context of what made it work the first time.
This is what the publishing industry is betting on, too. This romantasy is popular on TikTok? Better hurry up and publish eighty more with a slightly different flavor of the same fighty female protagonist and shadow daddy love interest. You like this fun beach read? Here are forty more with the same setting and same character dynamics and same conflicts and banter and pacing and plot points, but instead of a coffee shop, this protagonist runs an ice cream shop. You’ll love it! The covers are getting on board, too, each one blending into the last with the same bland, blocky character depictions and unremarkable dark florals. Titles, too. It’s a Mess of Mediocrity and Homogeneity™.
There are so many factors bleeding into this issue—from trend cycles to evil corporate profit monsters to lacking education to consumer-culture-driven deadlines to TikTok and beyond—I could probably write an entire dissertation on that alone. But at the moment I’m less interested in the cause and more in the effect.
Recently, there was a small bit of buzz around an LLM that “wrote” a short story. The specific model of ChatGPT used to “write” this story is not yet released to the public—most likely because of copyright issues; the released story straight up takes a line from Nabokov—but authors and bloggers and tech bros have been weighing in on its quality, with the chief executive of OpenAI saying he was “really struck” by the story and calling the model “good at creative writing.”
(Pardon me if I don’t take seriously the literary criticism of a tech bro who doesn’t capitalize his i’s.)
This story is bad. There’s really no argument to be made to the contrary. But the ways in which people are praising it provide an interesting look at how our culture has come to interact with stories.
“This is the first time I have been really struck by something written by AI. […] It got the vibe of metafiction so right.”
– Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI
“What is beautiful and moving about this story is its understanding of its lack of understanding. Its reflection on its limits.”
– Jeanette Winterson, author
“I got into it, but I’m not going so far as to say I found it moving. I guess my short answer is “No,” and my long answer is “There’s some stuff in here to think about.” There were a few sentences that struck me.”
– Ezra D. Feldman, lecturer at Williams College
“…by the third sentence of the story, I had stopped reading it as someone examining a text to see how far AI has come in mimicking human creativity, and was simply enjoying it, as a short story.”
– Kamila Shamsie, author
The reigning sentiment here and among other discourse around this story has been: “it’s better than I thought it would be.” Followed closely by: “the conceit and certain turns of phrase are actually kind of cool.”
Most Goodreads reviews of popular books, when the memes and exclamation points have been stripped away, boil down to the same thing: I liked the idea of it and the vibe of it and the tropes in it, it’s better than other things like it, and there were a couple cool quotable lines.
A few years ago, some friends and I tried a writing exercise, creating exquisite corpse metaphors. The first half of the metaphor was written on one side of a folded piece of paper and the second half was written blindly on the other. Most of them were nonsensical. Some were actually interesting—not because they were, in the traditional sense, “well-written,” but because our human brains were able to fill in the blanks and imagine cool things from the words placed haphazardly next to each other.
One of the most interesting conversations about this AI story was a Twitter exchange in which a reader said his favorite part of the story was a detail he had pulled from the story and extrapolated into a deeper meaning, without realizing he was doing that. Nothing about what he liked was actually in the story.
One of the strengths of the popular generic-voiced novels is this ability to project meaning onto something that doesn’t actually have it. Bland main character? Easy reader self-insert. Basic, surface-level setting details? Sounds just like the reader’s hometown! Minimal description of a love interest? Obviously he’s whatever you think is hot. Next to no fantasy worldbuilding? It can work however you understand it. To some extent, it’s a calculated choice to keep the personality out of these novels. (To a larger extent, it’s thoughtlessness and bad writing. But we’ll give the benefit of the doubt here.)
I worry about AI taking over the publishing industry not because it will ever be capable of writing good books, but because it’ll soon be capable of writing good enough books.
So many BookTok-hyped bestsellers are twelve tropes in a trench coat calling itself a story. There’s (sometimes) a very basic knowledge of story structure. The voice is the same basic, easily digestible telling voice that every other bestseller is written in. If AI can’t already “write” this, it will be able to very soon. (And it honestly might even “write” better than some of the indie Amazon authors out there.) That’s what the publishing executives want. I imagine bigwigs in the Big Five boardrooms reading this AI-generated story as cartoon dollar signs pop up in their eyes and cash registers ding faintly in the distance. The question will then be: Is that what readers want?
At the moment, signs point to yes.
Publishers continue to churn out bland, underripe, forgettable stories because readers are devouring them in a day or two and clamoring for the next. Self-published authors regularly publish upwards of four books a year, betting on quantity over quality, and readers eat it up. Book clubs and forums and Bookstagram discourse focus almost exclusively on vibes and tropes and feelings, and I’ve yet to read an author interview from a newer popular author who can actually articulate the finer points of their craft and identify why anything in their book actually works. The ones who manage to write well seem to have lucked into it with good instincts.
I feel like a buzzkill, a negative Nancy, a Debbie Downer, shitting on the rise of bookstores and book clubs and readers in general. But the writing’s on the wall, and I don’t see these trends ending well for our current zeitgeist.
I love unique voices, especially in well-crafted books, but those voices are getting drowned out by the insidious machinations of the publishing industry and the incessant bleating of taste-making BookTokkers with the reading comprehensions of eight-year-olds.
I know I’m not alone here. Many people chimed in to say that the AI-generated story was cliché, derivative, empty, unintelligible, repetitive, nonsensical, aimless, etc.; and even in casual reader circles, I’ve noticed murmurs of discontent about the current literary offering—nothing so specific, but a general desire for something “more” from the stories they’re consuming. That “more” they’re looking for? Good writing craft. Unique voices. Details that matter and characters with depth. Time and effort and skill.
Since I’ve already gone full doomsday prophet, I might as well finish out my vision of the literary future: I think a renaissance is coming, a countercultural push against the current popular opinion. Those come around cyclically, and we seem overdue. The current literary movements seem to be autofiction and fast fashion fiction, which, while vastly different from one another, share an aversion to literary criticism. Both are meant to be read, absorbed, and not thought about too deeply. To apply any sort of literary criticism to someone’s slightly fictionalized life story would be just as absurd and offensive as applying it to a fun, bingeable story about dragons, sex, and gratuitous miscommunication. I don’t know what this subcultural movement will look like exactly—perhaps an emphasis on subtlety and symbolism, maybe a simplicity of form and paring back of filler, hopefully something interesting and unpredictable and lousy with personality and voice—but I highly suspect that this renaissance will originate outside of the traditional publishing channels, and I have my doubts that social media will even be involved. Maybe the renaissance has already started and I just haven’t heard about it yet. There’s a lovely thought.
Either way, I’m doing my part to fill the world with stories that don’t sound like all the others, that provide hope and happiness, that entertain without sacrificing craft or quality. (Obligatory reminder to go read The Lit Nerds.)
I don’t think AI will ever generate good books, though I do believe it will soon take the place of hobbyist writers who are just okay at their jobs, putting out a slightly better structured story with slightly less interesting ideas, in the same generic, voiceless style. It feels callous of me to say, but I don’t necessarily think this is a bad thing. If people want to read mass-produced slop or trash with a good vibe, let AI write it. Save us from influencers with no education and slew of incorrect opinions putting out ten books a year. But as the general quality of literature degrades, hopefully a vacuum will be created, and out of that will spill the next generation of beats, Romantics, postmodernists, transcendentalists, and all manner of countercultural voices with something to say and a unique way of saying it.
I hope to be one of them. Join me, won’t you?
Stay excellent,
Kristen
In order to try to get away from the incessant industry marketing push toward sameness, I’ve been using Internet Archive’s Open Library Browse > Random Book feature to find books that would have otherwise slipped under my radar.
I don’t love the copyright lawsuits that have been leveled against them, so I don’t use the site to read books, simply find them. As far as I can tell, there’s no corporate algorithm pushing books (like on Goodreads) and it’s one of the largest collections of titles available. If anyone has a better, more altogether ethical option for achieving this, though, please let me know!
In order to help other people avoid the sameness, I also plan to start publishing short book reviews soon—no theme, just books I loved and would unequivocally recommend. Keep an eye out for that!
My friend Lindsey recently published the most adorable comic on her Substack, and you should be following her.
The Counter Craft newsletter on writing craft from Lincoln Michel is one that I always enjoy. Here’s one of his latest on this ChatGPT story (and where I discovered the twitter exchange about the story).
I finally caved and downloaded the Dunkin app and have been recently obsessed with this iced coffee order:
Medium Iced Coffee
3 Creams
1 French Vanilla Swirl
1 Caramel Swirl
1 Coconut Flavor
It’s not overly sweet and tastes just like the coffee version of Girl Scouts Samoas cookies. (Add an extra pump of each syrup if you like your coffee sweet.) 100% recommend.
Featured image by Ajeet Mestry on Unsplash with added text
Earthbound, But Aspiring 