Welcome back to my TED talk on the dangers of AI in creative fields, a sporadic series that was not meant to be a series at all. But the news continues to report on “exciting and innovative developments in the field of AI” and people continue to be greedy, selfish, and simple, and here I am, preaching the death of humanity to an imaginary auditorium with about seven people in it. Thanks for being one of the seven; you’re a real one.
It seems, as of the writing of this, that Spotify and Amazon are locked in a battle for readers like majestic bucks whose antlers have gotten stuck together until they both die that way. Amazon has (controversially) introduced an AI “helper” that can answer questions about the text as you’re reading, and Spotify has introduced an AI-powered “recap” for audiobooks to summarize what’s happened in the book so far before you start listening again.
I won’t get into the myriad potential problems these AI tools present in terms of copyright, because I want to focus on what I think is a bigger and more insidious issue: all of this “innovation” serves only to keep people from thinking. Not even thinking critically, but thinking at all.
Books—real books, good books—are made to be thought about. They’re meant to be sat with, analyzed, talked about. They’re meant to absorb your attention and engage your imagination. They’re meant to be re-read, then re-read again, finding delightful new details every time. They’re meant to be interpreted and argued about, annotated and deconstructed and pondered.
AI doesn’t want you to do any of that. The tech bros who own AI want you to give up your autonomy and your memory and your imagination. They want you to outsource your ability to string thoughts together to a machine. You don’t need to spend ten seconds remembering who a character was, just ask AI! You don’t need to spare a minute to recall where you were in a story, just ask AI! You don’t need to wonder what the blue curtains might mean, just ask AI! Will it answer correctly? Doesn’t matter! After a while, you won’t know the difference!
They want all of this specifically so that when your memory resembles a colander, when jumping from one thought to another feels like running a marathon, when you can’t imagine anything that isn’t directly in front of you, they can sell all of that back to you and make you dependent on their product. (Literally, Sam Altman said this in an interview.)
But as much as I hate AI in the creative fields, it’s not wholly to blame here. We started forgetting that books were meant to be thought about years ago.
I’ve written before lamenting the rise of “fast fashion fiction,” those TikTok popular books meant to be skimmed, photographed, and forgotten. Scantily edited, quickly written, trends and tropes in a trenchcoat pretending to be a story. Everything is spelled out obviously; if you try to think about these books, they fall apart. (We read one of these for my book club recently, and the three of us ended up just staring at each other, because there was nothing to interpret, nothing to talk about, nothing to disagree over. The book just was what it was—simple, mindless, derivative—and we all agreed that while it had its moments, it mostly just sucked.)
These AI book “features” that Spotify and Amazon are rolling out are the next obvious step in this “fast fiction” direction. How do people read more books quicker? Not reading them at all! Getting AI summaries at every turn so they can move on to the next guiltlessly and speedily. Genius!
Because that’s ultimately what these AI “helpers” do: reading is no longer just you and the book, it’s you and the book and the robot you’ve outsourced your imagination and thoughts to. It’s you and the well-oiled content conveyor belt, you and the frictionless, mindless consumption of things you don’t really care about.
I’m largely not on social media, but a question that I frequently have for the particularly performative BookTok girlies and their 500 books a year that they skim and then turn into content, or the ones that rant about how many words are on the printed page of a YA novel, or now those that want to use these AI “tools” is: If you don’t like reading, why are you reading? There are so many other ways to spend your time.
If your experience of reading is just downloading the plot and content into your brain, you don’t like reading. If you don’t want to engage with the story or appreciate the way it’s written, you don’t like reading. If your plan is to just rely on AI summaries and badly answered questions, don’t even pick up the book, just go read the SparkNotes or some book blogger’s review, or watch the video of a BookTokker who actually did read and enjoy the book. I know that sounds harsh. But in an era of already struggling literacy, the content-ification and fast-fashion-ification of novels is ruining the publishing industry. Books from the Big 5 publishers are being churned out with gaping plot holes and typos, tropes held together solely by vibes and dollar signs, meant to appeal to influencers who don’t actually like to read.
If ChatGPT were up to par (and society accepted it), I’m fairly certain the Big 5 would cease to publish human writers at all and would simply make AI “authors” who cost them next to nothing and make them big bucks with their instantly-churned-out trendy trope-piles. And those performative BookTok girlies would eat it up.
The New York Times recently published a quiz that pitted a famous paragraph from literature against an AI-generated paragraph meant to mimic it, and asked readers which they preferred. As many on the internet have pointed out, this test is more of a novelty than any true, meaningful data point, because honestly, sentence-to-sentence, AI is fine. It’s in the long-form creation of meaning that it’s lacking (and always will be).
Though when a lot of recently published, human-written, fast-fashion books also lack this long-form creation of meaning, lack a point of view, a voice, any meaningful details… what does it matter?
I miss reading books that are meant to be thought about.
Surely, surely books with meaning and depth are still being published? Surely there are readers clamoring for them and loving them and not constantly running them through AI bots. Surely enough of society will shun AI’s insidious power grab, giving Sam Altman and his desire to sell our intelligence back to us a giant, socially-united middle finger. Right?
Because when we forget that books are meant to be thought about, we’re willingly, piece by piece, handing over our imaginations and critical thinking skills to tech bros who will sell it back to us at increasingly unaffordable prices until they are living in castles made of gold and children’s dreams, and we are mindless, laboring cogs in the machine we let them build around us.
Stop using generative AI. Keep it out of creative spaces. Stop outsourcing basic thoughts to ChatGPT. Read a book. And for the love of all things good and holy and human, use your precious and magnificent brain. You’ve only got the one.
Stay excellent,
Kristen
One way to combat AI slop is to seek out humans creating beautifully human things. My friend Lindsey recently published a substack about making princess crowns, and it’s adorable and you should go follow her: Paper Princess Hat and Cardboard Crown Tutorial.
More humans creating human things: The Lit Nerds continues to publish incredible stories, poems, and essays, which are worth a read.
The Lit Nerds also recently put out a call for bad poetry for a special Bad Poetry Day issue August 18th — which you should totally consider submitting to. Writing bad poetry is always a fun time. And creating anything is better than letting the robots take over.
One of my favorite bands put out an album last fall, and I’ve had it on repeat ever since. Go check out Jukebox the Ghost’s Phantasmagorical Vol. 1, and consider seeing them on tour! Or just supporting your own favorite bands. Concerts, especially smaller ones, are always a good vibe, highly recommend.
One of my friends also recently released his debut album (a very different vibe from Jukebox the Ghost), and you should totally give it a listen: Isolation by Prayers to the Void.
Earthbound, But Aspiring 