1
A few days ago I read a story about Harpercollins UK reaching a deal with Elevenlabs, an AI firm, to do do audio for books in its foreign languages departments. You can read the details here. It wasn’t surprising to read about, but it was disappointing. A deal like this is about a dollar, about saving money on personnel and generating profit. A publisher was always going to be drawn to that. It even helps that the deal is on the fringes of mainstream publishing. It helps bed in the idea that AI is perfectly acceptable to use within the arts community.
2
Before we go further, I want to say that I don’t hate AI. It has its uses, especially as a diagnostic tool in remote communities who struggle to access health care, for example. I don’t know that I subscribe to the ideas that AI spokespeople do when they say it will end human trafficking, or make the mining industry more efficient, but if I’m honest, nothing about the mining industry makes me happy, and I think anyone who claims they can end human trafficking is lying. Bonus points if they say they can stop the trafficking of children, please donate.
I’m mostly agnostic about AI until I see what’s being done. If someone says they’re training an AI on work they’ve stolen from artists so they can produce ‘new’ work, or claims that artists are just arrogant gatekeepers of their ideas and this will make everything equal, then I’m not real positive. In fact, I’ve got no time for it.
3
It’s a bit funny to watch people try and make art with AI, actually. I’m using art is the broadest sense of the word here, using it to include visual and text based work and everything between and around that. In the last year or so, I’ve watched AI people flood markets with their submissions, buy blue ticks and ads and other ways to boost their ‘creations’, all in the hope of making it big and making some cash. It all reeks of a grift, but it’s the dumbest fucking grift you’ve ever seen, like robbing a child’s lemonade stand for its fortune.
Generally speaking, there’s no money in the arts. There’s money, but it swirls around a few creators and mostly goes elsewhere within the company. For a writer, every book you sell might net you fifteen or twenty cents each after you’ve paid back your advance. Speaking of advances, you’re lucky if you get contract worth minimum wage from the publisher. And that’s the good stuff. Some industries have even smaller margins. For example, there’s no money in short stories. There’s no secret cabal of short story writers who sit in their underground bases and drink champagne and eat caviar while working for ten cents a word. In fact, the only people who earn less money than short story writers are poets. People take money off poets.
Whenever I see stories about magazines that had to shut because they got bombed by AI submissions, or something similar, I mostly marvel at how stupid it is to try and run a con in the arts. You can get away with it as an individual, but when there are thousands of people doing the same, it’s just kinda crazy. There’s simply not enough money in the market to sustain the output. You’re better off teaching your AI how to count cards, manage the stock market, or predict the lotto. Or teach it how to dig for gold. All those choices are more likely to bring you millions and billions than selling a short story in the arts will.
4
The real problem, however, is not with those who are trying to score a quick win, or even make something they might call art. They’re really just representative of the larger grift. As always, the real problem is with those who have the power within the industry. First, there are the people who make the AIs, and sell access to all the sad wannabes and who are, frankly, involved in nothing more than predatory behaviour. The truth is, if you use AI to make art, you’re not an artist, and you’ll never be an artist. You’re being taken advantage of if you think it’s true. Using a database to pull together an image or a paragraph or whatever doesn’t mean anything. An AI artist don’t have the skills that are required to make their art, they’re just stealing someone else’s, and thus, they’re just fake. There’s no comparison between the two. One does the work, trains themselves, educates themselves, and makes the sacrifice to the time that is required to produce the work. The other takes a database made up of the first and prompts that database without any understand of what has gone into the original work. The people who win at this point are the people who made the database and sold the lie.
They also profit from an industry that doesn’t respect its workers, much like the Harpercollins and Elevenlabs deal shows. Now, I don’t say this to be inflammatory, but the truth of the matter is a lot of art industries don’t respect their artists. Studios, labels, publishers, galleries… large portions of the industries are built up on taking advantage of artists, paying them poorly, not investing in them or their work, and so on and so forth. You’ll find exceptions, of course, and not everyone who works in these industries is out to take advantage a creator (in fact, I would say the individuals who set out to do that are in a minority), but large companies like Harpercollins don’t care about their creators. They showed that by disrespecting their performers who work in audio. Large companies only care about their profit margins and their investors and they will cut and cut like every other large company to get more.
5
My personal belief is that AI in the arts is not really sustainable.
It might seem otherwise at first. From a customer point of view, there will be a lot of people who don’t know about the ethical problems in AI, or don’t care, and a quick buck can be made there. But most of those people are only reading a few books a year, and maybe buying less. In comparison, I read around seventy books a year on average. I buy more than that. I personally know people who read more and buy more. But I would say that people like me make up a part of the base of the publishing market. But as a customer, I’m not going to buy AI books, no matter if their written or narrated by AI, and I’m not going to buy books with AI covers, either. I’m not going to stop buying books, though. I love literature. My habits will simply become more and more strongly associated with independent presses who don’t deal with AI. Those presses already exist, and as people like me go to them and talk about those books, more people are going to go to them. Those presses are, also, going to continue winning awards, pushing for market exposure, and so on and so forth, putting pressure on the publishers who take on AI.
I also think AI work is not very good, either, and isn’t likely to get hugely better. The work that exists is repetitive and lifeless and that’s really a product of how it’s made. To make it, you have to strip the life out of the original artist so you can cut it up and use it and the ten thousand other sources you have as well. It’s so obviously bad that, as a writer, I’m simply not worried about AI replacing me because AI can’t do what I do. Now, with that said, I do think it will take market opportunities away from me and from other artists, but I think the quality of the work will simply be found wanting in a long term situation. There will be a kind of reader who isn’t worried about that, but that reader already exists and isn’t terribly loyal to any writer or publisher beyond a price point anyhow.
Still, I might be wrong. I’m not worried about it though because I trust my abilities, but still, it might be that AI art replaces artists of all kinds in the market and continues to survive by devouring itself. It could happen. Everyone could be happy with that, as well. I mean, everyone but me. It’ll always be nothing more than a grift to me.
Ben
(Ben Peek is the author of eight books including The Godless, Twenty-Six Lies/One Truth, and Dead Americans and Other Stories. His ninth book will be The Red Labyrinth. His short fiction has appeared in Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, Nightmare, Polyphony, and Overland, as well as various Year’s Best Books. He’s the creator of the psychogeography ‘zine The Urban Sprawl Project. He also wrote an autobiographical comic called Nowhere Near Savannah, illustrated by Anna Brown. He lives in Sydney, Australia.)
Tbh I agree with everything you put here, but I do think on top of this is the fact that AI requires enormous amounts of computing power, at the level that wipes out savings from all sorts of environmental ventures.
There are maybe some successes in AI - you can ask ChatGPT and its ilk simple questions which, if you phrase them right, will get you helpful answers.
You can make funny pieces of visual "art" but you can't get storytelling out of it, and there'll always be little inconsistencies and giveaways.
And given this, the grift is so clear. Like NFTs and the rest of blockchain, it's a way for a small number of people to get rich and get out, and for some others to ride their coattails briefly, and a lot more to lose out big.
And worst of all, addressing climate change gets harder, yet again. Ugh.