Don't Sleep on Readers

The people who will decide what survives the flood of A.I. writing are still human.

Last month, a short story “The Serpent in the Grove” was awarded a prize and published in the prestigious literary magazine, Granta. Within days screenshots of lines from the story started appearing on Substack and X accusing the author, Jamir Nazir, of using A.I. to write it. In response, Nazir told The Observer that because of health conditions, he writes using a speech-to-text function “followed by minimal keyboard editing.”

Did he use speech-to-text in an LLM interface? In Microsoft Word? Did he use some sort of generative A.I. to “clean up” the text, thereby spreading some A.I. gloss on it? Is he just lying his ass off?

For what it’s worth, I read the first half of his story, but it was so airy I couldn’t get through the whole thing. It took great pains for me to figure out what the fuck the story was describing and I found myself thinking, often: Okay, but you ain’t really saying shit. (To be fair, I’ve tried to read other–presumably human made–Granta stories in the past and thought the same thing…)

This particular incident of likely A.I. writing passed off as human writing comes a couple months after a self-published novel, Shy Girl, was set to be re-released by a major press and had its publication canceled because readers on sites like Goodreads, Reddit, and Amazon complained that it was obvious A.I. had been used to write it.

With each new A.I. cheating incident that rocks the literary world, the consternation among writers, who, if you don’t know, really love to consternate, has only increased. Perhaps things are even stronger this time around because it seems like an A.I. generated, or an A.I. influenced story seems to have penetrated a vaunted literary gate in Granta. In some ways, the fervor around this issue in the online writing community, particularly the obsession with Pangram hunting and making A.I. use accusations against writers left and right, is starting to give me 2014-2016 online cancellation vibes.

That is not to say that I’m dismissing the concern. I get it. I’m not excited about the prospect of more A.I. written slop out there. I see enough of it in my inbox, my social media feeds, and on Netflix. The idea of finding it in my books, too, drives me nuts (though, as I’ll get to, I don’t think that will be the case).

I also have real concerns about how the baffling decision by some writers to offload the part of the process that is actually the most fun and meaningful (you, know, fucking creating the thing?) will make it harder for the rest of us.

I have heard offhand from agents about the vast quantity of submissions they’re getting. It makes sense. All it takes is a few prompts on Claude to “write” a novel, gin up a query letter, a list of agents (real, human ones, for now…), and tell “agentic” agents (fake ones) to flood inboxes. This sucks for unknown writers writing for the right reasons and dreaming of breaking through a slush pile. Shit, it’ll likely make slush piles obsolete.

So yes, there are real concerns.

But, to be honest, I can’t say I feel all the doom and gloom I see being expressed by my writer colleagues. In fact, I think the last two A.I. writer scandals have a silver lining.

In both cases, real, attentive readers are encountering A.I. writing and saying: We don’t want this shit. Some of them are even going so far as to illuminate why they know it’s shit and doesn’t compare to human writing, doing the sort of line-level analysis that makes English professors horny.

That’s beautiful! That’s something to celebrate.

These negative sentiments from readers also line up with how most real people who don’t live in San Francisco feel about A.I, by the way.

A recent poll shows Gen Z overwhelmingly trusts work completed without A.I. (69%) versus work completed by A.I. alone (3%). Another recent poll asked a wide-swath of Americans about the words they use to describe books, movies, or TV shows created with A.I. and their top responses were: “Not real art,” “Fake,” “Controversial,” and “Soulless.” The same poll found that 75% of Americans still prefer human-generated content over A.I. content–a percentage which has increased each year since they started asking it in 2023.

But fuck polls. Just think about your real life. I know I’ve seen it first hand. Bring up A.I. in conversation and most people are tired of talking about it–even the people that find it useful for their jobs or general shit they might have asked Google in the past. Last month, I had to do a presentation about A.I. trends for my day job and I barely got through because we spent the hour arguing about how annoyingly pervasive A.I. is and how tired we are of hearing about it.

To be honest, I have met very, very few people in real life, okay, exactly one person (who I am kind of fascinated by as a character) who thinks A.I. is some great almighty thing that they want to run their lives and create the art they consume. For most people, it seems to be a strange, powerful, interesting but also pretty useless tool that they have had thrust onto them and have started to play around with but aren’t willing to pay for.

Now, will these same people one day prefer to watch A.I. movies over human-made ones? Will they prefer to read A.I.-written novels over human-written ones? Who knows, to be honest.

But so far, I think that if you look at cases like “Serpent in The Grove” and Shy Girl and the responses to both of those “works,” I wouldn’t bet on it.

Let’s say, though, for shits and giggles, a big readership emerges for A.I. written, stock books. Do you really imagine there’ll be a day where a reader is in your favorite local indie book store trying to decide between The Plumber Rings Twice by A.I. Author Hack and [insert whatever literary novel you think is amazing and not enough people read]? No, bro!

I think the people who need to be worried these days are the airport novelists. The James Pattersons and Danielle Steels of the world. I can see a world where A.I. can compete at that level pretty soon.

But if you’re a writer interested in writing literary fiction or thoughtful, nuanced non-fiction, or poetry, or something that requires a little bit of bleeding on the page, I suspect the threat to your audience will be minimal. It was hard to find readers for your work before A.I., and it will probably be just as hard now.

In fact, if you’ll allow me to go full optimist on you, thinking about the people I interact with daily, and looking at the data, and the visceral reactions from readers to A.I. writing, I wouldn’t be surprised if the opposite happened. In a world full of A.I. gobbledygook undercooked writing, perhaps readers will desperately crave work that feels unmistakably human. Writing that is so strange, specific, vulnerable, funny, obsessive, and alive that there is no way it could have been rinsed through a machine.

When younger writers ask me for advice these days, I tell them, ironically, the same thing I’ve been saying for years–even before ChatGPT hit the scene. Lean as hard as you fucking can into what makes you, you. Whatever you’re obsessed with. Whatever you’re scared of. Whatever makes you laugh. Whatever weird family hangups you bring to the table. Whatever you fucking got that makes you stand out as singular among the millions of other people out there with the same dream as you.

That is the sort of writing that makes me sit up as a reader, and that is the writing I will always aim to produce myself.

The machines are here, and it’s clear they’re going to be sticking around and writing their slop and trying to seduce you to stain your own writing with their slop.

It’s also becoming clear, I think, that the writers who are going to make it through this with their dignity intact and real readers who trust them are not going to be the writers focusing on how to “supercharge” their writing, or for that matter, spending all their time trying to root out which writers are “supercharging” their writing.

I think it’s going to be the writers who plan on doubling down on being human; on giving readers, and especially the readers they’re ultimately trying to reach, the sorts of reading experiences that they’ve been craving for a long time–and perhaps will crave even more going forward.

Peace,
Andrew