AI Is Eroding the Trust Between Writers and Readers

The year is 2110, and two human writing powerhouses are pitched against each other in mortal confrontation. In Alexandria, Egypt, there's Writers' Street, where both seasoned and aspiring novelists type stories at street cafes, using self-invented codes in chromatic scales that they pluck on their guitars, in front of tourists and ubiquitous survtech that unwillingly--or not so much--witness. Others simply sing their tales. Not for the faint of hearing.

Off the shore of Italy, in Montecristo, the Benedictines have regained full control of the island. No Internet or AIs are allowed there, but their hospitality business rents mechanical typewriters by the hour. More than once, a famous writer has jumped from the island's cliffs, unable to bear the shame of being accused of using AI to produce their magnum opus.

For the unwashed masses, AI-produced literature is free and abundant. The discerning, however, have gotten a taste for manually bound tomes exclusively inked with the output of human brains.

"AI is forcing a re-configuration of the ways trust is established between writers and readers" --> there, I fixed the title

There are many ways that I think what we are currently referring to as "AI" is disrupting existing relationships in society.

To the extent that that disruption is forced by external, pointed, injection of capital (e.g. russian bot farms, heritage foundation bots, etc.), it's pernicious. It has undoubtedly made those bad actors more powerful.

But, to the extent that that disruption is the result of asymmetrical power relationships (e.g. the outsized influence that publishers have), I think it's welcome.

I know who writes the things I read (because almost everything I read is over a thousand years old! but, that's beside the point...) because it's important to me to know who I am connecting to through the written word. I doubt my relationship to writing will ever be disrupted by AI because it's so important to me to know the history of the people whose ideas I'm consuming.

GenAI that imitates human art is the definition of an anti-invention. If an invention is a new innovation that improves something for the human experience, an anti-invention is a new innovation that makes life worse.

This is just one of several areas where GenAI has been harmful and should start getting regulated like digital drugs.

> Amazon spends a lot of time and effort trying to prevent these [fake] books from getting posted,” Mary Rasenberger, the CEO of the Authors Guild, told me, “but it’s always a game of catch-up.”

Do they really? They take a cut; they have incentives to let people get scammed.

> Amazon lets individuals upload a maximum of six books a week, allowing for endless churn.

That's a book a day (give or take), per account. No human author is publishing a book per day.[0]

It's interesting to me how little the incumbent platforms for digital content seemingly have been able to do in combating the tidal, exponential shift in submissions.

I just spent a month developing a Shopify App, on the side, for fun. When I launched it a couple of weeks ago, I discovered an app doing the same thing as mine with an identical name had also been approved and released a week prior.

How do people think that distribution will change now that supply has increased (at least) tenfold? If the consensus on X.com is to be believed, it's all about personal brand. This used to be the case, but perhaps 80% of it. Is conventional discovery dead now?

[0] - If this includes organisations, like publishing houses, then fair enough. But realistically we should be able to distinguish actual authors.

Scams aren't even the worst problem for trust between readers and writers.

LLMs allow "writers" to generate prose faster than readers can read it. This is a fundamental break in the bargain between readers and writers: However long it takes someone to consume a piece of writing, it almost certainly took the author longer to write it. Even if the prose is crap or the premise awful, the author had to think it was worth sinking real time into making it.

My colleagues and I have implemented a little guideline, which is that you should spend more time writing something than you expect the audience to spend reading it. Anything less is disrespectful.

Pre-2023 writing is the low-background steel of culture.