Over the weekend, I read a book that Iām 95% sure was AI-written. Iāve listened to people talk about how itās done: you brainstorm characters and a plot with AI, prompt it for an outline, adjust the outline, prompt it to create character and setting guidesā¦ 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: āMain Character had accomplished XY and Z. Tomorrow, heād have to tackle AB and C. But for today: job well done.ā And I do mean every chapter. At first I thought āmaybe the authorās serializing this and needs to remind readers about what just happenedā but when itās doing overviews of what happens in the chapter at the end, itās weird.
All the places give you a āmovie setā feeling of being wooden facades. Likeā¦ āthereās a baker. He makes bread.ā Nothing else. Only bread is mentioned. Not even the kind of bread. Thereās a weird lack of specificity to everything. The baker always has a ābasket of breadā. 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 thatās it. No idea what else the blacksmith does for the town.
Then thereās suddenly spates of specificity. āI have these exotic spices that sound like a list generated for game inventory.ā These specific things are never mentioned again.
The technobabble sounds like stuff Claude gives me as placeholders. āMana structure efficiency at 45%. Suboptimal but holding.ā
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: āIt tasted of cinnamon and regret.ā āThe tavern smelled of old ale and worry.ā 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 theyāre programmed NPCs. Celebrating an achievement? āWe go to this exact same tavern, every time.ā Ā Checking up on the main character? āYou need food and rest.ā (I canāt 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 protagonistās friend based on a single interaction, and this backstory, while mentioned in subsequent chapters, causes no friction, for instance. Itās as if every character was created in isolation and the author canāt 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 āwrite to marketā advice that treat books as widgets with āstory beatsā and ācharacter arcsā that can be abstracted into formulas, you shouldnāt be surprised when books start to sound alike. They already were, prior to AI, itās 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: āYes, itās good enough.ā Did the author confess to AI-writing it? No. Maybe he didnāt! But my guess is that he did.
Do I care about this? Not really. I didnāt enjoy reading it because it gave me the same feeling social media scrolling does, that Iāve eaten empty calorie food thatās 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 donāt write like this because Iām weird. I am constitutionally incapable of the āwrite to marketā formulaic approach (which is why Iām 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 Iām one of those capital-A artists that indies like to sneer at, and Iām happy that way. I canāt even do that right: Iām an Arteeste who doesnāt care if youāre 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.
