{"id":311631,"date":"2025-08-02T10:03:15","date_gmt":"2025-08-02T10:03:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/311631\/"},"modified":"2025-08-02T10:03:15","modified_gmt":"2025-08-02T10:03:15","slug":"will-ai-put-fiction-writers-out-of-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/311631\/","title":{"rendered":"Will AI put fiction writers out of work?"},"content":{"rendered":"

It was a statement that had the British book world clutching its pearls. \u201cAI \u2018likely\u2019 to produce bestseller by 2030,\u201d read a headline in The Bookseller in June. The story in the parish newsletter of Britain\u2019s book industry reported a speech at a publishing conference by Philip Stone of Nielsen, a company that compiles book sales data in the UK. <\/p>\n

The reaction in the normally sedate bookish corners of social media was swift and harsh. Stone\u2019s prediction was, variously, \u201cpropaganda\u201d, or \u201cnonsense on stilts\u201d, or \u201cthe NFT grift all over again\u201d. The reaction may have been a solid-gold case of shooting the messenger, but it reflected the importance people place on books \u2014 novels, stories, non-fiction narratives \u2014 as human artefacts.<\/p>\n

People thought \u201cI was going to put Lee Child out of a job\u201d, says Stone. \u201cI definitely didn\u2019t say that.\u201d He hadn\u2019t actually said anything about novels at all. \u201cI made what I thought was quite a casual comment [\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.] for example, could AI produce an adult colouring book? Or a book of \u2018dad jokes\u2019 that could sell well enough in that single week before Father\u2019s day to sneak into the top 10.\u201d Only in that sense did Stone \u201cfind it likely that AI could produce a bestseller by 2030\u201d.<\/p>\n

But the overreaction to his words does show just what a hot and spiky topic artificial intelligence is in publishing right now, for two reasons. The first is that most authors have found that their past works have been ingested by the large language models (LLMs) of AI companies \u2014 OpenAI\u2019s ChatGPT is the best-known example \u2014 in order to train them to produce text that reads as though it comes from a human brain. The second is that such AI-generated content could supplant human work \u2014 and the livelihoods of human writers. <\/p>\n

The book world is not the only creative field feeling threatened. Music, art and design are all scrambling to find responses to a technology that can already generate illustrations within seconds or produce cloned voice-a-likes of superstar musicians. Technological developments have always driven fears of human obsolescence. Often these have been overblown. But maybe this time will be different? Big-name artists such as Sir Paul McCartney, Sir Elton John<\/a> and Dua Lipa certainly think so and have backed high-profile campaigns to restrain AI. <\/p>\n

In the literary world, many American authors are suing AI companies, arguing that using their works in this way, without compensation or consent, is a breach of their copyright. In one case in June, the authors lost the argument, with a judge ruling that Meta\u2019s use of millions of books to train its AI systems constituted \u201cfair use\u201d. <\/p>\n

\n

That Data Bill is toothless. \u2018Data\u2019 suggests that this is not art, and it is art, and there\u2019s an ownership aspect to it<\/p>\n

Sarah Hall<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not just frustrating, it\u2019s enraging,\u201d says British novelist Sarah Hall, whose highly acclaimed books, such as Madame Zero<\/a> and The Electric Michelangelo, have won numerous awards. \u201cIt\u2019s not about tools that we\u2019re using \u2014 we use technology as writers. It\u2019s about the shift in the balance of trade. Who is going to be getting the money from AI-generated works?\u201d The numbers are not trivial: publishing contributed \u00a311bn to the UK economy in 2024.<\/p>\n

Hall is despairing of the British government\u2019s approach to regulating AI companies, and what she sees as its failure to protect the rights of authors. The UK\u2019s Data (Use and Access) Bill \u2014 which was finally passed in June after months of parliamentary wrangling \u2014 proposes that AI companies should have access to all creative content unless the creator opts out. <\/p>\n

\u201cYour books are borrowed from the library and you get a fairly decent royalty from that,\u201d says Hall. \u201cIt recognises that this is the vocation and the living of a writer. That Data Bill is toothless. \u2018Data\u2019 suggests that this is not art, and it is art, and there\u2019s an ownership aspect to it.\u201d <\/p>\n

\"AFrom left: Sarah Hall, Naomi Alderman and Curtis Sittenfeld \u00a9 Getty Images; The New Yorker<\/p>\n

Naomi Alderman, whose dystopian 2016 novel The Power<\/a> was adapted for an Amazon TV series, agrees. \u201cI\u2019m not angry about the development of a new and interesting technology. I\u2019m angry about the enclosure aspect, that you\u2019re using everybody\u2019s stuff that belongs to everybody\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009and you get all the money. Now this belongs to these enormous tech corporations, and enormous tech corporations are not good stewards.\u201d<\/p>\n

On paper, copyright protection remains strong on both sides of the Atlantic \u2014 in the US, creators and their estates are protected for 95 years from the first publication of a work, while in Europe and the UK copyright lasts for 70 years after the death of the author. But for some in the technology industry, copyright, like privacy, is a passing phase. And this is not the only fundamental mismatch between how tech corporations and creators view their work. <\/p>\n

Alderman recalls the words of disgraced crypto entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried: \u201cIf you wrote a book, you fucked up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post.\u201d This suggests that tech bosses such as Bankman-Fried, or Mark Zuckerberg, or Elon Musk, don\u2019t really understand that books of the kind written by Hall and Alderman and read by millions are not just vectors for information. They are creative expressions, forms of communication, ways of seeing and thinking.<\/p>\n

\n

It hasn\u2019t produced any work that I would have wanted to publish under my own name, because it\u2019s not good enough<\/p>\n

Naomi Alderman<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Which takes us to the second objection that many authors have: that AI-generated books will make them redundant. Why pay an author to write a book when a machine can do it instead? Is this indeed likely, or was Philip Stone right to exclude fiction and narrative non-fiction from his bestseller-by-2030 prediction?<\/p>\n

Alderman has tried it. She has long been interested in technology, and writes video games as well as novels and TV series. \u201cIt\u2019s almost taboo among writers to say, \u2018I am interested in finding out what a person could do with this technology.\u2019\u201d Yet her experiments have not been fruitful. \u201cIt hasn\u2019t produced any work that I would have wanted to publish under my own name, because it\u2019s not good enough.\u201d<\/p>\n

One of Alderman\u2019s creative outlets is writing scripts for the video game Zombies, Run!, and she tried using AI. \u201cIt was so bad!\u201d How? \u201cIt doesn\u2019t understand character. It can mimic scene structure, with escalating tension. But we\u2019ve got really deep characterisation, you make a real connection with these audio drama characters. It\u2019s got a heart to it, and AI can\u2019t do the heart.\u201d<\/p>\n

US novelist Curtis Sittenfeld, author of American Wife and Rodham<\/a>, had a similar experience when she published a story generated by AI and intended to be in the style of her own work. As she later told The New York Times, she found the results \u201cboring\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009clich\u00e9d, and also shallow in sentiment\u201d.<\/p>\n

Anyway, Alderman adds: \u201cDo people want to read novels written by an AI? Is [the purpose of fiction] not to make contact with other humans and to feel less alone?\u201d<\/p>\n

This may not be the only reason people read fiction \u2014 pure entertainment is a clear purpose \u2014 but it is key to the limitations of AI-generated fiction. Hall\u2019s new novel Helm is about the Helm wind in Cumbria, north-west England. \u201cIt\u2019s about nature and human interaction and it\u2019s very sensual,\u201d she says. It\u2019s a book that could not be written by AI because it draws on individual human experience. \u201cI have felt the Helm wind. AI has not felt the Helm wind.\u201d<\/p>\n

The LLMs, by definition, can only synthesise from existing texts; they cannot originate. Bestsellers and prize-winners tend to come from nowhere, not from everywhere. An AI could never have produced Bonnie Garmus\u2019s blockbuster bestseller Lessons in Chemistry, or Shehan Karunatilaka\u2019s Booker<\/a> Prize-winning The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida<\/a>, because nobody was asking for those books to be written. They required human ingenuity.<\/p>\n

\n

I\u2019m not 100 per cent certain that if I was given that story by a student, that I would have been able to spot it as AI<\/p>\n

Novelist and former creative writing tutor Richard Beard<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yet clearly AI companies would not be putting so much money \u2014 and so many of other people\u2019s words \u2014 into their LLMs if they didn\u2019t think them capable of writing narrative prose. Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI, this year proudly unveiled a short story written by ChatGPT. Notably, it didn\u2019t seek to represent a human experience, being written from an AI machine\u2019s viewpoint. The story was widely dismissed, occasionally praised \u2014 for example by novelist Jeanette Winterson \u2014 and turned out to have lifted its only interesting phrase (\u201ca democracy of ghosts\u201d) wholesale from Vladimir Nabokov\u2019s novel Pnin. <\/p>\n

But within its own limited parameters, the story did its job. Richard Beard, novelist and former creative writing lecturer, tells me: \u201cI\u2019m not 100 per cent certain that if I was given that story by a student, that I would have been able to spot it [as AI].\u201d <\/p>\n

Beard believes that if AI does come to replace human-written fiction, \u201cthe more formulaic genre novels are going to be the first in the line of fire. A police procedural \u2014 you could pretty much feed in [the elements] to ChatGPT. I\u2019ve seen this done: you get a few characters, you feed them in. The thing that I found amusing was it comes back and goes, \u2018What quirks would you like your characters to have?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Beard, an innovative writer throughout his career, has one plan for how writers can fight back against AI. His new project, the Universal Turing Machine, is an online memoir that he is inviting the public to contribute to. \u201cPeople remembering their own unique lives\u201d is \u201cthe stuff AI can\u2019t replicate,\u201d he says. \u201cWith memory, the basic material is not available online.\u201d<\/p>\n

As readers, he says, \u201cwe like surprises. We like insights we haven\u2019t seen before.\u201d Memoirs can produce this, whereas LLMs are simply statistical models, turning out what they think is a logical and likely form of words. Memoir \u201cremains intensely human, because it doesn\u2019t tend towards the mean\u201d.<\/p>\n

For Hall, frustration at the UK government\u2019s approach to AI has led to her own innovation. \u201cThe Society of Authors campaigned for AI-generated work to be labelled, but now it\u2019s not going to be.\u201d Earlier this year its US counterpart, the Authors Guild launched a \u201chuman authorship mark\u201d. So, Hall says, \u201cNow it\u2019s on us to assert our humanity.\u201d Helm will be published with what she calls a \u201cmaker\u2019s mark\u201d on the cover: a small circle containing the words \u201cHUMAN WRITTEN\u201d. \u201cIt will assert the craftwork that\u2019s gone into it, the human quality \u2014 provenance, authenticity, integrity.\u201d <\/p>\n

But if Alderman\u2019s experience with using AI is representative, it may be obvious anyway when a work is AI-generated. \u201cTo start out with, I was incredibly impressed with AI-generated images. And then quite quickly, you start to be able to tell what the AI look is. And I think the same has happened with writing,\u201d she says. \u201cIt\u2019s got that quality of an auto-correct, where it doesn\u2019t bring you to a conclusion \u2014 it just stops. After a while, you stop going. \u2018Oh my god, it can do everything\u2019, and you go, \u2018Oh, it can do about nine things!\u2019\u201d <\/p>\n

AI novels, then, are not with us just yet, but experiments are already under way. This month brings the publication in English of Japanese author Rie Qudan\u2019s novel Sympathy Tower Tokyo, about 5 per cent of which Qudan says was generated by ChatGPT. And, says Nielsen\u2019s Stone: \u201cI think to a certain extent, AI has created books already. When the pope recently passed away, you could go on Amazon within a couple of days and find biographies you could download that were basically scraped from Wikipedia.\u201d<\/p>\n

Recommended<\/p>\n

\"Books<\/a><\/p>\n

Rather than professionally published books being generated by AI, a more likely near-term prospect could be user-generated books that are bespoke to the individual reader. \u201cThere might be a system,\u201d suggests Hall, \u201cwhere you say \u2018I want a book about this, this and this\u2019 and you get it.\u201d <\/p>\n

\u201cThe idea of having words that are written just for you is powerful,\u201d says Alderman. \u201cIt can create a very coherent world just for you. But that\u2019s not what novels are for. Novels are for everyone to read, and then we talk about what we see in common or what\u2019s different.\u201d<\/p>\n

Are there bright sides to all of this for authors? On the subject of works \u2014 including his own \u2014 being harvested for AI models, Beard suggests one silver lining. \u201cIn some ways, writers should feel very pleased with themselves. We always feel we\u2019re doing something important, despite the [lack of] cultural appreciation and financial appreciation.\u201d He laughs. \u201cAnd now look! It turns out to be really important, because this is how they train them, this is how they think life works.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"Summer Books 2025<\/p>\n

The best titles of the year so far. From politics, economics and history to art, food and, of course, fiction \u2014 FT writers choose their favourite reads of the year so far<\/a><\/p>\n

Join our online book group on Facebook at FT Books Caf\u00e9<\/a> and follow FT Weekend on Instagram<\/a>, Bluesky<\/a> and\u00a0X<\/a><\/p>\n