Today, I want to talk about something that used to be a really big deal but has somehow become less of a big deal over the last year. That is AI in writing.
This issue of AI and creative work is one that’s going to plague us for a long time. However, a lot of the hubbub around it has just evaporated. Over the last year, we have seen AI move from this incredibly big, important thing to just sort of nothing. That’s not to say that AI doesn’t exist, and it’s not still being used for all sorts of creative work. It’s just that it doesn’t seem to be in the public consciousness as much.
So, I wanted to talk about it a little bit. I think in the life of any issue, the best time to talk about it is after the initial hubbub has died down, and you see what it’s actually being used for. Because it’s not gone away. In fact, if anything, it’s gotten worse. It’s gotten more insidious, and it’s gotten harder to detect.
But not all the news is bad. There are companies that are taking a stand against using generative AI for creative work. In fact, I really like what Amazon has done, where they’ve required people to check a box in order to alert them if AI was used in the generation of the product. While that applies specifically to stories or to books, it’s still a great step in the right direction.
However, on the art front, AI is still decimating the industry. And so rather than dismiss it out of hand, I thought it would be a great idea to talk about what AI is doing in the writing space. The good news is that very few people have lost their jobs because of AI, at least as writers. There are some people who are in the copywriting space who are having more trouble because they haven’t adapted to using AI in order to generate copy.
While other people are making even more money because the thing that AI can’t do is a distinct voice. Or at least it can’t do it well enough in order to compete with a human writer. And that’s sort of the saving grace on the novel front. There just aren’t AI tools that can write a novel as well as a human can write a novel.
And the relative amount of time it takes you to write a novel with AI versus the amount of time it takes you to write a novel if you’re just really good at writing novels quickly is so small that it’s just not worth it to use the tool. You might as well just write the novel. And because of this, AI has not made as many inroads into my space as people thought it would.
Additionally, while the technology is really cool, it’s just not quite there yet. Now, that hasn’t stopped Audible from pushing their AI voice program heavily. And that is where, in my opinion, the real danger lies.
We’ve learned through Brandon Sanderson’s blog that Audible is going to be making some changes to the structure of how their royalties work. And as I said in a previous video, there’s some tricky language in the way they’re announcing this that makes me fear their update isn’t going to be quite as positive as they want to make it seem.
Now, don’t get me wrong. Any change in a positive direction, in a direction that puts more money in the hands of the creators rather than the platform, is a good change. And it’s pretty incredible that Sanderson and his team, and really anybody, has been able to negotiate with Amazon at all, considering the stranglehold that Audible has on the audiobook market.
But at the same time they’re doing this, they’re doing something else as well. They’re continuing to push audiobook narration by AI as a viable alternative to paying an actual narrator. And so this leads me to believe, maybe rather cynically, that what’s happening with Audible in the public eye—that is, their announcement through Sanderson that they’re going to be making positive changes to royalties—is just going to get undercut by the fact that they are going to be taking a bigger share with more books that are narrated via AI, using those to flood the platform.
Now, I don’t know how this is going to turn out. AI voice narration isn’t quite there yet. It’s just not quite up to snuff. But for someone who doesn’t have cash to lay out to get their book narrated, it might not matter. They might think this is good enough.
And the fact is that these AI voices are getting better and better and better, especially since they have been scraping existing voices and using them to model their AI voices. Every once in a while, I’ll run across a video on YouTube that is clearly AI narrated. But then there are other times when I run across a video on YouTube and I can’t actually tell, and it’s those ones that I’m worried about.
There are voices that are getting better and better and better, and Audible is at the forefront of that. Which means that we may well see an entire piece of the audiobook market just removed. After all, if you can get a human-sounding AI narrator for next to no money, and it’s able to produce the audiobook in a fraction of the time, you’re going to find a huge number of authors choosing that option.
Whether they should or not ethically is a completely different question. And so what we’re seeing here is Audible covering themselves on one hand by generating goodwill with the community, announcing that they’re going to be improving things, while on the other hand, sending out emails like the one I got, inviting me for the second time to be part of a beta program to test these voices.
And you can believe me when I say, if I’m getting the email, a lot of other people are getting the email too. And not only are they getting the email, but some of them are probably testing. Some of them are probably checking it out to see if it works for them.
So even if we were to get better royalties from Audible, which again, is still up in the air, we’re likely facing a glut on the market from a huge number of books that are currently on Amazon but do not have an audiobook flooding into the market on Audible. Which is likely going to just erase any increase in royalty that Audible is giving.
So while I don’t think AI is a problem in the novel writing space, at least yet, it’s certainly a problem when it comes to narration. And it’s only going to continue being a problem because Audible is investing heavily in the technology.
As I said in a comment on the video about Brandon Sanderson, if I was going to ask Audible for something, it would be a commitment to using human narrators. I would take that above an increase in royalties. I think the damage that will be done to the writing community if human narrators are erased from the picture is going to be significantly higher than the benefit of having a few more dollars in our pocket.
YouTube Video Link: https://youtu.be/M8aQtK7PDQE
Thanks for reading and watching.
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