AI, Writing, and Publishing

I’m not looking forward to AI getting a bad reputation among publishers, but now that the tech has advanced enough that anyone can generate entire stories in seconds, it seems we’re at an inflection point.

This is a short, human-written essay on how to handle what’s next in the worlds of writing and publishing.

What is Generative AI?

“Here’s a plot; generate me a story” is probably the simplest/easiest way to look at generative AI. It’s fast and easy to use — and feels a little like magic. There are many other ways AI is being used, but since ChatGPT has made generative AI so popular lately, that’s what I’m going to focus on here.

“Generative” AI does what it sounds like: give it a prompt and it’ll generate text for you. Give it a plot and it can give you a story. Give it some characters and it can give you a scene.

In other words, it writes whatever you tell it to write.

And it does it eerily well — arguably at a level comparable to some human writers — and only getting better.

So what happens to the writing industry — specifically to publishers — when anyone can almost instantly generate entire stories?

That’s a great question.

In this essay, we’ll look at three very important factors that AI will influence in the context of writing quality and publishing.

1. Lower Quality Bound

We writers put our heart and soul into our stories and don’t want anyone to see them until they’re ready. There’s inherently a quality floor to what gets submitted to publishers: we only want them to see what is representative of our skill as an author.

With AI, people that aren’t necessarily “writers” suddenly now have the ability to generate stories of a comparable lower bound of quality.

In other words, low-quality AI-generated stories will be comparable to low-quality human-generated stories.

Until now, they’ve been worse. Way worse.

These lower-quality AI-generated stories finally reaching comparable quality levels to that of a human writer for the first time ever is a harbinger of backlash about to explode in the publishing community.

Why? Surprisingly, it’s not just because they’re just low quality.

It’s already cliché to say, but it’s that darned lack of human connection.

Not to the story contents itself (that’s another story), but to the publishing ecosystem itself. In short: people are going to submit far more low-quality stories to publishers en masse — starting NOW.

The logical disconnect between “I wrote this” and “an AI wrote this” removes that “but what if it’s not good enough” restraint we all feel when querying.

These are the AI-generated stories you’ll be hearing writers and publishers complain about. And they’ll be right to complain.

There’s a storm coming.

Most publishers don’t have the systems in place to handle their submission volume suddenly increasing by an order of magnitude or more — especially when a large % of these submissions are just AI-generated chaff from people unfamiliar with the profession.

So if these AI-generated submissions are inevitable (they are), the natural question is: what can we do?

Well, a lot. This list probably deserves its own essay sometime.

In the meantime, the simplest yet probably most provocative solution is to just fight fire with fire:

The weight AI removes from would-be writers’ workflows is inherently passed on to acquisitions editors and other humans down the line.

I know many editors are selfless people who happily sacrifice a lot for a good story, but they can use AI tools to help lighten their load too.

If you’re a publisher struggling with AI submissions already, please do reach out! I’ve been working on tools like Notebook.ai for almost a decade and I’m passionate about responsibly empowering authors with powerful tech.

I’d love to help publishers in the same way.

But let’s jump back to our original topic: the three factors to consider when it comes to evaluating AI’s place in writing and publishing.

We talked about the submitted quality floor and how AI will probably end up lowering that even further.

Now let’s talk about the positives.

2. Upper Quality Bound

Think about the best of the best, the masters of the craft. Wordsmiths who can bend a plot to their will and sculpt worlds into something truly remarkable.

These authors will probably get the least benefit from AI, yet are still exciting to think about.

What do you get when you give the best artist you know a new kind of paint? Or give a master architect a new building material? Or hand the most innovative chef a new ingredient?

AI, to greatly simplify, isn’t just a better version of an older tool.

It’s something entirely new.

When you expand the possibilities available to an expert, you inevitably see their creativity soaring to new heights and new, interesting innovations that defy expectations.

You get something brand new that pushes the boundaries of what was previously imagined possible.

I’m certainly no master wordsmith and don’t want to oversell AI here so I’ll stick to just dreaming of the possibilities, but I’m extremely excited to see what the next generation of authors make possible when properly utilizing AI as just another tool in their writer’s toolkit.

And finally, that brings us to the third and, arguably, most important factor to consider when evaluating AI’s potential place among the writing and publishing world:

What can the average writer expect from all these fancy new AI tools?

3. Quality Average

Here’s the tweet: when you consider that AI is just another tool that a writer can use to better translate the story in their head into words and not a replacement for writing, there’s no doubt that AI will improve the average quality across all writing.

Yes, AI will enable those who wouldn’t otherwise have been able to even write a story to, well, “write” a story. It might not be an objectively good story (however you measure that) but it’s a story that wouldn’t otherwise have been written.

AI is making writing more accessible.

From the bottom to the top, the bar of quality is being moved up with AI.

Those who can’t even write a story can now.
Those who struggle with characters don’t need to.
Those who struggle with verbiage don’t need to.
Those who struggle with plot don’t need to.

Although AI can do a little of everything in writing, it doesn’t have to (and shouldn’t!) do everything.

Instead, AI can, should, and will be used to let writers focus on the storytelling elements they’re best at — character development, worldbuilding, narrative structure, etc.

For everything else, AI tools can provide invaluable support and assistance in areas that would otherwise bring down the overall quality of the story they’re trying to tell.

Writers can focus on their strengths and utilize AI to enhance their weaknesses — all while producing more (and better) stories.

As AI continues to evolve and improve (and we see more and more new tools using AI to help writers in new ways), we can expect those boosts in quality to rise even further.

I’m extremely excited for the future of storytelling.

There will be some bumps and some systematic changes along the way, but AI is here to stay and will continue to revolutionize the ways people create stories. It’s up to us to choose how we use it.

As we move forward into a new technical era of writing tools, it’s important to remember that AI is a tool, not a replacement, for writers.

We all have stories we want to tell, but we don’t all have the skills necessary to tell them well.

But that’s exactly what tools are for.