Value your reader and AI decisions get a whole lot easier

Valuing yourself is even more powerful

Do you remember the days of yore, when DVD shops were on every corner? Man, it was exciting stuff! The outer walls of the shop were lined with the latest blockbusters (and when I say latest, I mean the movies had finally arrived in store after many months of no longer being in the cinemas). And then the inner shelves, filled with single, precious copies of older, cheaper titles – where you’d always keep your fingers crossed that the one you wanted was actually there, otherwise you’d reserve it, go home, and wait a week until it got returned.

I remember those shops with fondness. But do I miss them? Not often. The streamers have brought excellence, convenience and a lot of quality storytelling, even if choice overwhelm and the regularly increasing pricing are less desirable.

Technology evolves. We adapt. And in the end, we often don’t look back.

You might think you know where I’m going with this in regard to AI. Change is inevitable, no one ever likes it, technological progress has been going on since humans began evolving – back through the first televisions, radio, steam train, printing press, the wheel! In other words, now AI is here we should accept it. Everyone from the tech bros to Reese Witherspoon is telling us that, ‘If you don’t use it you’ll get left behind.’

Yes, I understand all that. And yet.

Many of us sense AI is different. That, unless we’re very careful, it could ultimately take more than it gives. At present, there are different camps as to whether AI will help us or hurt us, and every day another story sees us siloed and squabbling, fatigued and sidetracked. The latest drama on my radar has been the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, where the recent winner was immediately denounced as using AI. I haven’t read the full story involved, but I’ve seen examples of the prose that’s left me not only profoundly disappointed in the writer, but also wondering what the judges were thinking, because the quality of the writing seems so obviously questionable.

I want to stay aware of the AI conversations like these – they are vital as our industry reshapes itself – but I don’t want to end up permanently distracted or demoralised by them. And I’ve realised that many of the things I read about AI each day begin with writers: the threat to our livelihood, our creative independence, our authenticity. But what about the readers? What was the Commonwealth Short Story Prize-winner hoping that the reader would take away from an AI-generated work? Had he even thought about his reader, or was it all about winning the prize?

The answer appears obvious, unless I’m missing something?

So let’s take off our writer’s hat for a moment, so we can think as readers. What do you want from the writers you love?

• I’d like the writers I read to be pushing themselves creatively: from plot logistics, to scene descriptions, to complex characters and narrative structure. I love reading something that feels fresh and different to anything I’ve read before.

• I’d like my writers to have a deep interest in or connection to the story they’ve produced.

• I don’t want my writers’ top priority to be trying to make a quick buck from me by using AI to generate stories.

• I don’t want to read the same writer all the time.

• I’ll happily pay the RRP to read a compelling story. A book permanently offered at a crazy discount (unless it’s a time sensitive offer) makes me suspicious.

• I’ll seek to actively financially support the writers I care about and trust, who are putting the work in.

• Theoretically, I have no problem in writers using AI for marketing strategies and technical research because I’d love more readers to find their books and I understand their time pressures (I do this myself, because of the ease and speed of access to certain information). But I’m still concerned about the lack of regulation and the environmental cost of AI right now, which makes me uneasy about our collective usage and dependence.

• I also want to support innovation and new, dangerous, wild ideas, and although AI can generate, it can only innovate to the extent of every human thought and word it’s been trained on. Using AI to create appears closer to regurgitating than innovating.

• Finally, I want all the writers I love to look after themselves, because I care, and I want more of your writing. Please, please safeguard your creativity, because to write well and go deep depends entirely on the breadth and quality of our imaginations.

The initial results of AI – its on screen answers, its suggestions and innovations – shouldn’t be the full stop of our conversations around this life-altering technology. The bigger questions must focus on the cumulation of real-world impact in every aspect of our lives. In the case of the Commonwealth Writers Prize, I saw one article that suggested three of the five finalists were flagged for AI usage. This means the prize went from author competing with author, to Claude competing with either itself or other AIs like Chat GPT. It is absurd, and it’s happening so fast.

In a heavily oversaturated book market, we’re now not only at the precipice of an overwhelming production of story, but of the dehumanising of storytelling, which could slowly degrade and devalue the meaning we have always found in stories. What happens when humans stop trusting stories as a vehicle of meaning; when they no longer turn to the human written word to escape or to find themselves? What are the point of our stories if a reader can ask an AI to generate any story they want? What does our reader need from us then?

Do the strategizing on AI. Do the research. But please always remember that if you give too much ground to machines built by unfeeling engines of commerce, who are trained to parody so well that they present themselves in human voice, as a friend, then you might be slowly losing an irreplaceable part of yourself to the mimic. Your AI will never know what it was like to stand in the middle of a DVD shop and gaze around at the breadth of filmmaking talent – or to visit a library and marvel at this access to other people’s brains and imaginations. Your AI will never stand at the summit of a mountain hike and absorb the pride of the journey, or truly marvel at the timeless landscape before them. And in the end, no one will get to experience such reverence if that view becomes an endless sprawl of data centres.

At this moment, it’s vital to think of our reader and what they need from us. And this begins with trusting ourselves, and what we know, and our own creative abilities to reach one another. We must keep up with the times – yes, we must – but moreover we must always value the parts of us that go far beyond the mimicry of the most sophisticated and alluring of machines.

An article in The Conversation goes further into the scandal around the Commonwealth Short Story Prize:

The story also includes, to put it charitably, a few choice sentences you’d have to hope were written by a robot.

As Booker Prize winning author Marlon James put it on Facebook:

Forget AI for a minute. A story won an International Competition with a line like this: “The girl smiled like sunrise over a sink.”

Sigh. The full article - entitled, What do the Commonwealth Prize AI Allegations Mean for Prizes and Short Stories - is well worth reading..

Meanwhile, this beautiful article is another reminder about what we might lose by using AI:

Please Use AI

I’m also reading a lot about the novel of the moment, Yesteryear - Caro Burke might not have won everyone over, but she’s certainly got everyone talking! A couple of really interesting takes here:

Yesteryear Is Not A Novel

Why Are We All Talking About Yesteryear?

Have you read it yet? I’m listening at the moment but can’t comment until I’ve finished.

I’m away in Busselton at the moment, partly for a short family break but also for work as I’ll be visiting the Busselton Jetty volunteers later this week to talk about writing at a private event. I’ll be sharing why I set my crime suspense When She Was Gone in this local area, and also talking about another of my books, Shallow Breath, which recreates the Atlantis Marine Park, which many Perth locals visited in the eighties, and touches on lots of different conservation themes.

You can also now watch me chatting with Rachael Johns Author (author of The Lucky Sisters) and Anthea Hodgson Author (author of the newly released The Palace of Lost Virtue) on their Reading Between Deadlines podcast, where we discuss my favourite Maggie O’Farrell book, The Hand that First Held Mine. Find out if they decided to kiss, marry or kill the book - and if' we’re all still friends after their decision!

PAID SUBSCRIPTIONS

The post for paid subscribers in May included a video where I outline my plans and focus for Resilient Author. You should be able to watch this one below, although the accompanying article about resetting creative joy is partly paywalled.

If you’d like to join the paid community, you’ll get:

• An extra post each month and a downloadable PDF on a craft, mindset or industry topic.

• Access to all the previous paid articles in my archive.

• And for annual subscribers, a downloadable ebook of my evergreen collected essays (volume two is coming this year!)

• This year I’m also doing quarterly videos and some live calls to connect writers and discuss pain points and possibilities.

Paid subscriptions this year are $65AUD or $7AUD for monthly subscribers.

---

MY AI REPORT: Nothing in this post was written by AI.