Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.
There is one story in the world of books and reading right now: AI. And a recent piece in The New York Times is probably our most stark vision yet not of what AI could do, but is already doing.
It should come as no surprise that the first real exposé of a professional writer using AI at scale comes from the world of romance. This isn’t about ethics or art or anything, but two factors that have long driving romance writing: innovation and frequency. Romance has been at the forefront of most (all?) of the book trends of the last couple of decades: self-publishing, fan-fiction, ebooks, etc. And romance rewards publishing a lot of books quickly.
Generative AI sits right at that crossroads. From a purely market-fit point of view, romance would seem the most likely part of the book world to undertake serious, scaled experiments with AI.
Today In Books
Sign up to Today In Books to receive daily news and miscellany from the world of books.
And this The New York Times profile of Coral Hart shows exactly what that looks like. Dozens of books under multiple pen names. Books generated in less than 45 minutes. A proprietary romance-writing LLM and paid classes for other to learn the tricks of the new trade. “Imprints” that specialize in AI generated texts. As Carrie Fisher says in When Harry Met Sally: your basic nightmare.
Alter does a good job of tracking some of the hallmarks of AI-books (if you are reading the phrase “ragged prayer” you probably are reading an AI book), but these little tics probably won’t last for long. It is damn hard to tell if some kinds of writing are AI, especially trope and formula heavy kinds of writing, which some romance books can be.
This is the latest piece to clarify the single most important question about AI and book-writing: can LLMs write books, in any space, that can replace human-written books? It very much is starting to look like that the answer is yes.
It does nothing to help us with the second most important question: what in the hell is that going to do to books and reading as a culture? I tend to be a “there are trade-offs” kind of guy. I have been this way about ebooks and self-publishing and Amazon. There are some benefits and there are some downsides. My list of the former grows shorter and that of the latter grows longer.