Over the weekend, I read a book that I’m 95% sure was AI-written. I’ve listened to people talk about how it’s done: you brainstorm characters and a plot with AI, prompt it for an outline, adjust the outline, prompt it to create character and setting guides… attach all that to your project, then tell it to write the first chapter. You adjust the chapter, add it to the project, then tell it to write the second, etc, until you get to the end. Then you tidy the whole thing and publish. The "rapid release" people either love this (because you can release a book in a day or two and do it again immediately) or hate it (because they can't keep up with people using this strategy with unaugmented human brains). But it's clearly a thing that's happening, and few people who do it are admitting it.

Reasons I thought this book was AI:

• Every chapter ends with a weird wrap-up style: “Main Character had accomplished XY and Z. Tomorrow, he’d have to tackle AB and C. But for today: job well done.” And I do mean every chapter. At first I thought ‘maybe the author’s serializing this and needs to remind readers about what just happened” but when it’s doing overviews of what happens in the chapter at the end, it’s weird.

• All the places give you a “movie set” feeling of being wooden facades. Like… ‘there’s a baker. He makes bread.’ Nothing else. Only bread is mentioned. Not even the kind of bread. There’s a weird lack of specificity to everything. The baker always has a ‘basket of bread’. Or occasionally, a basket of pastries. (No word on what kind.) Likewise, there is a blacksmith. We know he can make hammers, because the apprentice made one. But that’s it. No idea what else the blacksmith does for the town.

• Then there’s suddenly spates of specificity. “I have these exotic spices that sound like a list generated for game inventory.” These specific things are never mentioned again.

• The technobabble sounds like stuff Claude gives me as placeholders. “Mana structure efficiency at 45%. Suboptimal but holding.”

• Similarly there are some odd verbal tics that repeat throughout the text, and they are suspiciously clever ones, like analogies that rely on an abstract and a concrete noun: “It tasted of cinnamon and regret.” “The tavern smelled of old ale and worry.” Even the title uses this phrasing. Authors can have verbal tics, of course, but I associate a lot of these with AI.

• The supporting characters do the exact same things, as if they’re programmed NPCs. Celebrating an achievement? ‘We go to this exact same tavern, every time.’  Checking up on the main character? “You need food and rest.” (I can’t count the number of times this character suggested everyone have food and rest, in exactly those words. No variation.)

• This one is hard to describe, but the characters have believable backstories that suggest depth, but these backstories do not inform how they interact with other characters. The nemesis becomes the protagonist’s friend based on a single interaction, and this backstory, while mentioned in subsequent chapters, causes no friction, for instance. It’s as if every character was created in isolation and the author can’t figure out how to make them combine.

Could this all be the work of an inexperienced author? Sure. But that tells me that we have trained AI to work off story templates that inexperienced authors also rely on. If you have decades of “write to market” advice that treat books as widgets with “story beats” and “character arcs” that can be abstracted into formulas, you shouldn’t be surprised when books start to sound alike. They already were, prior to AI, it’s just that AI makes creating them faster.

Did people like the AI-generated book? Well, it has over a hundred reviews and a 4.5 star average rating, and even on Goodreads, it's doing well, so the answer is: “Yes, it’s good enough.” Did the author confess to AI-writing it? No. Maybe he didn’t! But my guess is that he did.

Do I care about this? Not really. I didn’t enjoy reading it because it gave me the same feeling social media scrolling does, that I’ve eaten empty calorie food that’s programming my brain to repeat basic and uncreative patterns. But humans have always riffed off bad things to make better things and I can totally see someone using AI to generate a draft like this, and then completely overhauling it into something enjoyable.

I don’t write like this because I’m weird. I am constitutionally incapable of the ‘write to market’ formulaic approach (which is why I’m not on a yacht sailing to my property on the Riviera). Even my attempts at romance and litrpg novels veer off into directions that make them too odd (yes, I managed to make both these genres unprofitable). But I’m one of those capital-A artists that indies like to sneer at, and I’m happy that way. I can’t even do that right: I’m an Arteeste who doesn’t care if you’re using AI!

My audience was always going to be the weirdos who want to learn my conlangs and vanish into alien cultures so completely they leave no traces. That's you all! You're awesome.

But yeah, AI-written books. You might have already read one and not realized it. The name of this one, if you want to check it out, is below, and yes I paywalled it because I don't want to bother with drama.

Red Honey has wrapped up! I’m not sure what I’m going to serialize next, but I figured I’d take a breather for the rest of the year since there’s so little of it left. We’ll continue to have Back-in-Time Tuesdays every week, but Fridays will be a hodgepodge of whatever’s on my mind. And what’s on my mind today is the Jokka game, which my Discord crowd has convinced me to just call JOKKA! (I think with exclamation point. With exclamation point, right, you all?)

I think I last seriously wrote about this around my birthday so it’s been almost two months. A lot happens in two months when you’re directing AI to code for you.

The foremost thing I’ve learned is that I am perfectly positioned to take advantage of AI for coding, because I have these things going for me:

• I used to write technical documentation for software

• I can do project management

• I can draw

• I can write and have written many novels' worth of material for background

• I have done some light coding work

• I like gaming and have played many games mindfully, noting what I hate and what I enjoy

But the number one thing that makes this easy for me is: