What are we all doing here?

I'm sitting in a room with two walls of heavy, dark stained book shelves absolutely full of books. It would take me too long to count them, and it took me three full days of unpacking them and putting them away once the study was finally done being built out. Not a single one of the books in this room, including my own, were written with artificial intelligence.

These books about heroes and heroines, villains and anti-villains, great adventures and terrible journeys into darkness, that I adore enough to hold onto so that my children can stumble upon them, and fall into the stories and the worlds they hold for themselves one day. These books written with a pulse behind them; care, dutifulness, attention, love, obsession, and maybe a little madness.

I write this now having seen another person say that AI is the future, that we're all being left in the dust like withered corpses in a long forgotten tomb. Amazon and other online retailers, I'm sure, have adjusted their algorithms to support books formulated with AI. We're told that our books aren't hitting the algorithm because we don't use AI, don't market with AI, don't pay for AI bots to review our books and boost the ratings. We're being made obsolete by machines and the people who use them.

Neither the AI users nor the machines care that they've effectively murdered a profession. They want to write a book they think will make them lots of money. They want to call themselves an author. They had an idea for a story but didn't have the patience to actually do the work to learn the craft. They don't even find their own voice. I learned recently that part of the prompts they use is to "write a book in the voice of XYZ Author". Not only are they using technology that steals prose and dialog from books that have been fed into the machine, they're stealing the style and voice of other authors to use as their own.

It's easy to formulate a best selling novel when you've Frankenstein-ed together pieces of a hundred other successful novels, and stolen the style of someone successful. It's going to Walmart, buying a cake, scraping the icing off of the sides, and saying that you made it yourself.

No, you didn't. You're lazy and you're a fraud, and using AI to "write" books makes you a thief, as well.

Some of these Borg people are proud, too. They'll tell you they use AI to write their books, boast that they don't care that it's stolen from you and other authors like you, and then laugh as they tell you to get over it. There is no integrity, there is no shame, and they will never stop.

This will never stop. These big tech companies are too well funded, and in turn fund political campaigns that promise to keep them well funded. No legislature is going to come about that turns AI into a simple editing tool for work already done. Some people say they use it that way, but anything that AI touches is suspect to those of us who are being burned by it.

Maybe we are just casting shadows at the future. Maybe we're the dial-up to the new high speed data connection. I know that some of us are bitter, and some of us, myself included, try not to be. We try to keep pushing on in spite of it, and try not to let the entirety of it drag at us. And maybe we're all feeling a little like what once made us special--our ability to sit down to a blank page and create a world with our own two hands--has been taken from us by people who have cheapened that.

Most of us are dreamers who were picked on for loving books and having our heads in the clouds, and now it feels as though the people who picked on us are doing it again. "Oh, you're an author? Well, anybody can be an author now. Loser."

I learned about something today that was shocking, and then I saw a video of the process and I felt like the Library of Alexandria was burning all over again. There are companies that are buying up books by the thousands, rare books with only one or very few copies in existence, and they're cutting the spines off. They run the book through a scanner onto their system, and then they pulp the books, destroying them. The only copies that exist in the world will be on their system for them to extort.

What are we doing here?

There are authors who are talking about walking away from the industry altogether. Popular writers who made thousands of dollars a month from sales and page reads are barely earning enough to cover groceries. New authors just debuting their first novels aren't being seen because the algorithm swallows their promotional posts, and yet a new "AI Author" can put out three books in a month and the algorithm puts them front and center. Artists who created cover and character art aren't being commissioned because people are just having AI do it for them.

Authors who have never used AI a day in their lives are being accused of it because AI writes like us, not the other way around. It stole our souls, and projects back a poor imitation. Artists are having their art flagged on Instagram and other sites as being AI when they're not, and AI art is pushed without getting the AI label.

Bookstore employees are sick of seeing AI covers and AI books being sold on shelves in their stores. I've spoken to two in particular recently and they're disgusted that they're stocked there, but they don't have any control over it. The companies order copies to sell, and so they have to put them out.

Until the last author who writes with their own passion, time, investment, and grit writes the last word on the last page of the last manuscript we will keep going. We'll keep writing books we love, hoping that others will find them somehow and love them, too.

But it's hard some days, like today, when it seems like we're all running straight towards the gates of Mordor not to wonder what are we doing here?