The War On Literature
Sensitivity censors, right-wing book bans, and the chatbot menace
“There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.”
- Ray Bradbury, “Coda” from Fahrenheit 451
In the United States, there is a multi-pronged attack being waged against writers, readers, and librarians. This is a war against books at every stage. It is against those who read them, those who write them, and those who procure them. The current war is being waged by three factions. First, by the puritans in the publishing industry and on social media who want censor offensive texts. Second, by fearful parents and paranoid politicians who have gone on a book banning spree to protect their children from “uncomfortable” texts. Third, by engineers at Silicon Valley who seek to replace human writers with chatbots. Americans who love literature should take a clear stand against these forces. Our free and open society depends on it.
Whitewash and Booklash
“Simplicity itself. Skin, debone, demarrow, scarify, melt, render down and destroy. Every adjective that counted, every verb that moved, every metaphor that weighed more than a mosquito — out! Every simile that would have made a sub-moron’s mouth twitch — gone! Any aside that explained the two-bit philosophy of a first-rate writer — lost.”
- Ray Bradbury, “Coda” from Fahrenheit 451
The first attack on literature is from publishers who don’t want people reading books which might offend them. To this end, they do sensitivity edits to make the works more palatable to readers with weak stomachs. This is a different direction from the cowardly position of Seuss Enterprises, who abruptly ceased the publication of six Seuss books on the claim that they were “offensive.” It’s much easier to run from bigotry than to confront it, but instead of running, these new censors want to pretend as if the bigotry had never occurred at all.
It all started with Roald Dahl, the British author of Matilda, James and the Giant Peach, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. In February 2023, Puffin Books, who owns the copyrights to Dahl’s works, announced that they had hired sensitivity readers to expurgate his books to meet modern standards. Innocuous words like “fat”, “female”, and “crazy” were deemed too offensive for children, while instances of “men” were replaced with the more gender neutral “people.”
Next on the chopping block came Enid Blyton, Ian Fleming, Agatha Christie, Ursula K. Le Guin, and P.G. Wodehouse. Some of the best writers in the English language. I have no doubt that some of these authors have written things that don’t fit 21st century sensibilities, but for goodness sake, they were people of the 20th! They were no less subject to the prejudices of their time than we are to ours. This is nothing less than a rewrite of history and a desecration of the dead. Old books are not only a viewpoint into the author’s perspective, but also into the times in which they lived. They provide readers with an intimate look into the past which a history book can’t always provide. These rewrites deprive readers of that chance. Nevermind the fact that many of these supposed offenses are questionable at best.
Though not even the living are spared from this Disneyfication. R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps, a staple of any 90s elementary student, has also been retroactively edited without the author’s consent. I repeat, Stine neither approved, nor was even made aware of the changes made by Scholastic. This only further highlights the level of sneering disrespect that many publishers have for their authors. That if they sense a book might upset some deranged troglodyte on Twitter, then they feel entitled to alter the author’s words, voice, and vision at any time.
These changes also represent a bigotry of lowered expectations on part of the publishers. That minorities are of a weaker stock who can’t handle reading an unpleasant word or an outdated stereotype. That books must be made safe for readers. That we must be protected from the unpleasantness of the past. It is a condescension of the highest degree, and it presents a far more insidious bigotry than anything written in these books.
It is also curious to note who the publishers behind this censorship are. Puffin, the owner of Dahl’s books, is a part of Penguin Random House. Penguin also owns the books of P.G. Wodehouse. Hachette is the owner of Blyton’s books. Harper Collins owns Agatha Christie’s books. These are three of the four publishers represented in the Hachette v. Internet Archive lawsuit, which is part of an ongoing attempt to shutter controlled-digital-lending (CDL) for good.
CDL is a kind of digital book lending where libraries scan physical books which they already own to make their own ebooks. They then lend these books out to a patrons one at a time. The Internet Archive’s Open Library (OL) allows users to borrow these ebooks for free from anywhere in the world. The advantage of CDL is that it permits libraries to own ebooks without paying the predatory licensing fees which they must renew indefinitely. The major book publishers are suing the Internet Archive for copyright infringement, claiming that CDL is a threat to author’s incomes.
On the contrary. Copyright lawyer Kyle J. Courtney has argued that libraries have never needed permission to own books. The publishers have provided no evidence that the OL has caused severe financial damages, and while author incomes have declined, publisher profits have risen. The Author’s Guild (who opposes CDL) has directly tied this decline to the inability of authors to negotiate for higher contracts. The publishers have a weak case, but if they win this lawsuit and abolish CDL, it would further entrench their whitewash of the written word.
The great thing about CDL is that the ebooks are scanned from physical collections. So older editions of books, out-of-print books, and otherwise rare books are made available to the public with ease. This means that whatever a publisher might do to a author’s book, the original print will still be online.
One might reply that many of the works of Christie and Wodehouse are already public domain and that the original versions are readily available. True, but many of their works are still under copyright, as are those of Fleming, Le Guin, and Blyton. You should not have to wait until a book is in the public domain to get a chance to read it.
One might also say that the older versions will still be available in bookstores and libraries if people want them. No doubt, but will they still be printed? What happens when all the versions of Catwings or Dr. No that are stocked up are the Bowlderized editions? Will readers always be able to tell the difference? What about on Kindle? Ebook covers are updated all the time. Will the words be too? After much public pressure, Puffin announced that they will release classic versions of Dahl’s books alongside the censored versions. Will the other publishers be so gracious?
The other censors are clicktivists on social media who want to stop “offensive” books from being published, and who feel entitled to change an author’s works to suit their own peculiar tastes. There has been a troubling trend over the past few years of online critics raging against new books (which they often haven’t read) and harassing new authors into revoking or censoring their work.
In 2019, Amelie Wen Zhao had to delay the publication of her fantasy novel, Blood Heir, after dubious accusations that it was “anti-black.” Since her novel handles slavery, some accused her of being exploiting the memory of black slavery in the United States for her fantasy plot. It turned out that she drew from human trafficking in Asia.
That same year, Kosoko Jackson, himself a sensitivity reader, had to cancel his debut novel, A Place for Wolves, after users objected to a romance set during the Kosovar Wars. Heaven help these people should they ever read Dr. Zhivago.
In 2020, Alexandra Duncan, a white woman, had to cancel the publication of her novel, Ember Days, after accusations of cultural appropriation. Her novel was to be about the African-American Gullah people, which is apparently out of bounds for a white writer. Did black author James Baldwin commit cultural appropriation when he wrote about white people in Giovanni’s Room?
Elin Hilderbrand’s 2021 novel, Golden Girl, had a teen character joke about hiding like Anne Frank, and Instagram users accused her of antisemitism and demanded apologies. Hildebrand capitulated and had the joke excised from future prints of the novel. Insane.
Casey McQuiston’s 2019 romance novel, Red, White & Royal Blue, had a throwaway line about the President needing to apologize to Israel for a UN Ambassador’s faux pas. Brain-dead Twitter users accused it of normalizing the occupation of Palestine. McQuinston gave in to the mob and changed the line.
In 2023, Elizabeth Gilbert had to indefinitely delay the publication of The Snow Forest because some Ukrainians were angered that it was set in Russia. For the record, the book is set in the 1930s (well before the 2022 invasion) and is about a family who lives in the wilderness out of fear of the Soviet Union. Of course, this delay is a minor footnote compared to Putin’s genocidal invasion of Ukraine, but perhaps the Eat, Pray, Love author was an unnecessary target.
Now, I understand that criticism is not the same as censorship. I also believe that there are instances where these complaints are valid. Upon reading Jeanine Cummins’ American Dirt, I found myself agreeing with many Latino critics who called it a shallow representation of Mexican immigrants. It was misery porn with two-dimensional characters and a cartel villain too cartoonish for Breaking Bad. If, however, there existed a campaign to cancel the publication of the book or to pressure Cummins to rewrite the novel, then I would have opposed it.
Offense is in the eye of the reader. Think of the debates we still have around The Color Purple, The Joy Luck Club, Lolita, Huckleberry Finn, Ender’s Game, Heart of Darkness, and Fight Club. We won’t always agree on what is offensive in a book and sometimes that’s okay. A small group of social media addicts should not get the last word on whether or not an author’s vision is fit for print. Some books will always provoke a diversity of opinion, even on issues of gender, race, and sex. And as I said before, sometimes that’s okay. We should embrace critical discussion, not censorship.
“What About The Children?”
“That if all Printers were determin’d not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed.”
- Benjamin Franklin, “Apology for Printers”
The second attack on literature has come from helicopter parents and rage-baiting politicians who want to ban books from schools and libraries. They fear that if children are exposed to certain books, that they could be indoctrinated to believe in “critical race theory” (CRT) or be “groomed” into becoming LGBT. As such, these bans are mainly coming from the political right, with one of the leading censors being Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. The very fact that children are even reading at all is a miracle worth celebration, especially when you consider the competition from streaming, video games, and social media. If anything, we should be encouraging them to read more, not less.
Marshall University defines a “banned book” as one which has been removed from a library or classroom, and a “challenged book” as one which has been requested to be removed. Book bans in America aren’t anything new, in fact, they date back to 1637, but the current wave of book bans began in 2021. The American Library Association (ALA) found in 2022 a significant rise in challenged books, particularly those which cover race and LGBT issues. The problem has only gotten worse since then, with PEN America finding a 28% rise in books banned from public schools, with 1,477 books banned in the 2022–23 school year. PEN, like the ALA, also found that many of the books banned dealt with race or LGBT subjects.
These bans are clearly part of a backlash against two movements. The first is the “Black Lives Matter” protests which first gained attention after the police killing of Michael Brown in 2014, and then found new prominence after the police murder of George Floyd in 2020. Parents are concerned by the popularity of texts like The 1619 Project (2019), White Fragility (2018), and How To Be An Anti-Racist (2019), which they believe promotes “critical race theory” (CRT). Many of them believe that CRT teaches that white supremacy is in every institution, that all white people are racist, that we should ranked according to our “privilege”, and that America has no redeeming or admirable values in its traditions. Instead of healing racial divides and correcting injustice, they argue that teaching such books will only lead to further divisions.
The bans also came in response to the growing visibility and acceptance of LGBT youth, particularly those who identify as transgender or non-binary. Many parents believe that the rise in LGBT youth is not due to growing tolerance and changing gender norms, but to a trendy “social contagion”, in which children adopt these labels for popularity. To parents whom, for most of their lives, had been taught that men have penises and women have vaginas, this growth in “self-identification” with a new gender (or no gender at all), seems less like science, and more like political agitprop which abuses scientific language. It should also be acknowledged that a significant number of these families are conservative Christians, who believe that homosexuality and that being transgender are sins against God.
Views on race, gender, and sexuality are changing, (as they always have), but they are now moving at pace which these parents find suspect. They are concerned that overly left-wing views being presented to impressionable minds as unchallenged, objective truths. They are worried that instead teaching about these matters in a fair-minded fashion, that students will be trained into activists by overzealous teachers. These fears are egged by reactionaries on social media, like Chaya Raichik, Matt Walsh, and Christopher F. Rufo, who are trying to create a climate of fear around anything related to race or the LGBT. As a result, these fearful parents have decided to eschew dialogue and are working to ban any “dangerous” books. They have also set their targets on any librarian who dares to procure literature which might offend them or their children. The results of this pro-censorship crusade have been staggering:
Amanda Jones, a middle school librarian in Denham Springs, Louisiana, spoke out against censorship at a school board meeting on July 19th, 2022. In response, several conservatives on Facebook accused her of wanting to stock pornography in the children’s section and of wanting to teach anal sex to children. There were even physical threats. Jones sued for defamation against the Facebook pages. A judge dismissed the lawsuit, but Jones has filed an appeal.
In Jamestown, Michigan, residents voted twice to defund the Patmos Library in 2022. This was because the library refused to remove books from the shelves with LGBT content. This was the small town’s only public library and they will be intellectually poorer without it.
In June 2022, the neo-fascist Proud Boys interrupted a drag queen reading event for preschoolers at the San Lorenzo Library in Paseo Grande, California. They called the drag queen hosting the event a “groomer” and one attendee wore a T-shirt that said, “Kill your local pedophile.”
In October 2022, Kimber Glidden, a librarian at the Boundary County Library in Idaho, had to resign after being harassed by wingnuts who called her a “groomer” for not supporting the censorship of LGBT materials. Some citizens even showed up armed to library board meetings.
In August 2022, Delaney Daly, a children’s library supervisor at the Coeur d’Alene Public Library, also in Idaho, quit her job after being harassed by parents who wanted LGBT books removed from the shelves, claiming that they were pedophilic.
In March 2023, the Missouri House of Representatives voted to completely defund their public libraries. This was done in retaliation to a lawsuit against the state by the American Civil Liberties Union of Missouri (ACLU-MO). The lawsuit challenged a law which supposedly bans “sexually explicit” material from schools. The following month, Missouri passed a law which prevents libraries from buying books for minors which the state deems “sexually explicit.” Some of the books which have been “challenged” include classics like Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.
These bans are particularly bad in Texas and Florida. PEN America found in 2022 that Texas banned more books than any other state, with a whopping 801 books across 22 school districts. In April 2022, seven residents of Llano County, Texas, sued officials for removing 12 books from public libraries. In 2023, a judge ruled that these bans violated the Constitution and ordered that these books be returned. Furthermore, Texas Governor Greg Abbott, signed a law in April 2023, which would ban any books the state deems “sexually explicit” from public schools.
PEN America put Florida right behind Texas, with 566 books banned. Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, is a Trumpian fearmonger, who abuses state power to attack public education. DeSantis claims that he wants “education, not indoctrination”, and yet instead of supporting educational freedom, his laws seek to promote his own type of “indoctrination.”
In 2022 and 2023, DeSantis signed so-called “Don’t Say Gay” bills. These bills ban most instruction or discussion of issues related to gender identity and sexual orientation for K-12 students, unless it is already required by the state or part of an elective health class. The language of these bills is vague enough to create a chilling effect on any teachers who may wish to broach these topics. Clay Calvert, a professor at the University of Florida Levin College of Law, has warned that this law could prevent teaching about the legal issues around same-sex marriage or of the history of AIDS. Is this not also indoctrination against open learning and discussion of LGBT issues? Should any neutral or sympathetic instruction on LGBT issues be censored because they may contradict a narrow reading of the Bible?
Also in 2023, DeSantis passed the “Stop W.O.K.E. Act”, which allows parents to sue schools that they believe teach “CRT.” This is in spite of the fact that most Florida school districts don’t even teach CRT to begin with. The problem here is that “woke”, like “CRT”, has become a lazy, catch-all term for any ideas that one doesn’t happen to like. This is not to say that one can’t object certain liberal (or leftist) ideas, but that reasonable or thoughtful perspectives perceived as “woke” may unfairly be labeled extreme, and thus, not fit for teaching. For many conservatives, this is by design. As anti-woke activist, Christopher F. Rufo, once tweeted:
“The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think "critical race theory." We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.”
Given these restrictions, it is inevitable that any books which could aid in the flouting of these laws are subject to bans. In such a fearful climate, the state may end up banning books which previous generations had no problem with. Martin Luther King’s “Letter From A Birmingham Jail” and Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird were both briefly banned in Florida amidst the hysteria. The Guardian spoke to a Florida teacher who saw one-third of the books in a school’s library be revoked, including a collection of Emily Dickinson’s poetry. One Florida district banned And Tango Makes Three, a children’s book about two male penguins raising a chick. Manatee County teachers had to cover up books which were not yet approved by a state media specialist. Duval County also had to remove and conceal unapproved texts. Meanwhile, Florida ranks 48th in teacher pay and suffers from a shortage of 5,300 teachers. Talk about misplaced priorities.
Some conservatives have pushed back, saying that the outcry around these “book bans” is itself a hysteria. One such argument is that curating which books are included in the curriculum of a given semester is not the same as censorship. As middle school teacher Daniel Beck wrote in National Review, “The consequential decisions over curricular reading lists are no flippant matter, and calling any exclusion of a book “censorship” or a “ban” stunts a necessary debate.”
DeSantis himself as even gone so far as to label book ban accusations a “hoax”, claiming that he’s only protecting children from “pornography”:
“In Florida, pornographic and inappropriate materials that have been snuck into our classrooms and libraries to sexualize our students violate our state education standards. Florida is the education state and that means providing students with a quality education free from sexualization and harmful materials that are not age appropriate.”
Beck’s National Review piece makes many good points. I agree that it is reasonable to be selective over which books are best for a class, and that sometimes, many a good book will miss the cut. Beck, however, ignores a couple of concerns. The first is that books are being removed from libraries, both in schools and in public. This goes beyond mere curation for a reading curriculum. Students are being prevented from reading these books at all. Secondly, as PEN America and the ALA found, most of the books targeted involve either the LGBT or race. This is clearly a political attempt to limit instruction and discussion on the LGBT and race, and it is doubtful if books of similar topics will always be there to replace them. Beck ends his piece criticizing those who would call curators “fascists” or “censors”, and yet he doesn’t condemn those who call librarians “groomers” and “pedophiles.”
As to DeSantis, well, he seems to think that any book which depicts sex is pornographic, referencing Gender Queer, Flamer, This Book Is Gay, and Let’s Talk About It. He doesn’t specify whether these books were in elementary, middle, or high schools. When children reach puberty in middle school, they start to have sexual thoughts and many more start to act on them as they age. Students thirteen and up should not be barred from reading and learning about the sexual realities they will inevitably encounter. We will not help our students by shielding them from any book which involves sex. In high school, I read Robert L. Heinlein’s Stranger In A Strange Land, which was about a Martian who started a polyamorous sex cult. Would Stranger In A Strange Land be labelled “porn” today? In any case, many books with LGBT subjects (sexual or not) are unfairly conflated with pornography. Teachers and librarians are smeared as “pedophiles” for merely trying to teach these subjects. Was the gay penguin book pornography?
This onslaught against libraries is an attack on democracy itself. It is a moral panic intended to cripple education, liberalism, and freedom. It is a hateful crusade meant to demonize anyone LGBT, or supportive of them, as a pedophile. It is a cowardly avoidance of complex racial issues. This is an attack of freedom of thought and a naked attempt to exert an uber-conservative worldview on our students. DeSantis and his ilk would do well to remember journalist Edward R. Murrow’s response to Joseph McCarthy’s Red Scare tactics:
“We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men – not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular.”
While we should teach students about racism and its history, contentious issues, like “white privilege” and “cultural appropriation” should be restricted to high school, and even then, they should not be taught as objective truths, but as products for discussion. It is perfectly reasonable for high schoolers to debate the topics of the day so long as the teacher isn’t putting their finger on the scales. Young minds are not be so fragile as to melt at the first encounter of an uncomfortable idea.
The best alternative to suppressed speech is diverse speech. If parents are angry that a teacher wants to use Nikole Hannah Jones’s The 1619 Project, then they should also encourage the use Gordon S. Wood’s The Radicalism of the American Revolution. Disturbed by teachings of Ibram X. Kendi’s How To Be An Anti-Racist? Then ask that it be accompanied by John McWhorter’s Woke Racism. Worried about the inclusion of Ta-Nehsi Coates’s Between The World and Me? Then push for the inclusion of Shelby Steele’s By The Content of Our Character. To quote libertarian feminist Cathy Young,
“…in older grades—perhaps 6–12—the best approach to contentious issues should be to teach the debates. The 1619 Project is a perfect example: instead of turning it into forbidden fruit and putting the state in the role of curriculum censor, why not have students read excerpts from the project as well as the critiques? The same approach could be taken to other issues related to race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality—issues to which students will invariably have exposure one way or the other, via social media, journalism, or entertainment. Teaching the controversies would alleviate concerns about indoctrination in one or the other direction and instead encourage critical engagement with both historical sources and modern media. Likewise, asking school libraries to add more ideologically diverse content rather than remove content some parents find objectionable could be a constructive approach to the library wars.”
To the question of LGBT topics, it is unrealistic for educators to pretend that LGBT people don’t exist, especially now that they’ve gained such visibility. Teaching students about LGBT people is no more “indoctrination”, than teaching students about religion. Do parents truly believe that their children will be better equipped to handle the world if they know nothing about Stonewall, the AIDS epidemic, or Harvey Milk? Pride-related events should be voluntary, of course, but neither should students be deprived of the option of reading about LGBT people in their libraries. Again, this is not say that parents and teachers cannot object to certain books about sex and gender being taught to children, but that the texts should not be removed from the school libraries, or if they are to be moved, then they should be added to a library of a higher age group.
PEN America, along with Penguin Random House, have decided to sue Florida’s Escambia County School District over the book bans. They argue that these bans not only violate the First Amendment of “free speech”, but also the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause. This is due to the fact that LGBT and race-based books are disproportionately targeted. I hope for their success.
There’s a lot of talk of idiotic teachers, and indeed, they do exist, but we forget that parents can be idiots, too. While parents should definitely have a say in what their children are taught, they should also have the humility to recognize that they are not trained educators and that they don’t always know what they’re talking about. Were the parents who advocated for “intelligent design” in science classes doing right by their kids?
I refuse to believe that any book that a K-12 child might get their hands on is more harmful to them than what they might encounter on social media. If parents really want to protect their kids from bad ideas, then perhaps they should look into putting an age limit on their children’s smartphones.
Chatbot Lit
“Right now, we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximise corporate profit and advertising revenue is not the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship.”
- Ursula K. Le Guin, author of the Earthsea Cycle, The Left Hand of Darkness, and The Dispossessed
The third attack on literature comes from engineers in Silicon Valley, who want artificial intelligence programs to replace writers and destroy literature itself. Their weapons of choice are generative AI tools like ChatGPT and GPT-4. Unlike previous chatbots, these bots can write human-like poetry, plots, songs, essays, and screenplays. Of course, you have to give the program the right prompts to get the story you want, but doing so not as difficult or as time consuming as writing something with your own talent. There are over 200 e-books on Kindle which have been written using ChatGPT. It is estimated that AI users can pump out one e-book a month. One tech worker used AI tools to publish a children’s book in only 72 hours. Can a human writer compete with that?
Some of you reading this are already rolling your eyes, thinking that I must a paranoid Neo-Luddite who hates technology. On the contrary. I buy ebooks by the dozen, and there are few technophobes who would defend controlled-digital-lending as vociferously as I have. I simply believe that if these programs succeed in replacing writers and filling bookstores with “chatbot lit,” they will ruin literature and degrade the human spirit.
If a chatbot, when given the right prompts, can pump out a poem, a short story, a play, or a novel, then what’s to stop trained professionals from being replaced by these machines? What’s to stop the publishing industry from being infiltrated by talentless hacks who lack the discipline to write a good book, but want all of success that comes with it? What happens when the market is flooded with literature that no longer reflects the human condition, but what a chatbot has regurgitated?
It is world where writers, published and aspiring, slowly start to abandon their creative minds to an algorithm. It is a world where even the slightest difficulties of the writing process, the very stuff makes great literature, is seen as a problem to be automated away. It is a world where inspiration itself will be the recycled musings of a chatbot. It is a world where publishers will use chatbots to edit and revise drafts to maximize sales and minimize offense. Chatbots pervert and corrupt writing, they cheapen everything they touch. They will reduce literature to word vomit.
Some of you may respond that the chatbots aren’t even that good yet. That much of their writing is mediocre. I reply that technology does not stay frozen in time, and that those behind these chatbots are not content to slow down any time soon. It’s only a matter of time before the chatbots produce quality writing that will make even the critics curious. Even if that never happens, the chatbots don’t need to be Tolstoy to still cause a lot of trouble. Consider the recent attack on Clarkesworld.
Clarkesworld is a literary magazine founded by Neil Clarke in 2006. It publishes quality short fiction in the science-fiction and fantasy genre from writers around the world. Short stories have historically been an important avenue for sci-fi and fantasy authors to break into the industry. In February 2023, Clarkesworld had to temporarily close submissions after receiving a slush of more than 500 A.I.-based submissions. None of the A.I. language detectors were reliable enough to sift out the A.I. submissions from the human ones. If this trend continues it could close off many writers from an important avenue of publication and exposure.
Consider also the attack on Jane Friedman. Friedman is famous for her books advising writers. This year, Friedman found to her horror several books listed on Amazon and Goodreads under her name, which were written either wholly or partially by AI programs. After speaking out on the issue on social media, Amazon and Goodreads eventually removed the titles. I’m afraid that these attacks on writers will continue unless we fight back. The recent open letter by the Author’s Guild, co-signed by authors like Margaret Atwood, Min Jin Lee, and Michael Pollan, is a step in the right direction. It calls for AI programs to seek permission from authors before using their works for AI outputs and for authors to be compensated. Let us hope that Silicon Valley listens.
We spend too much time debating how we’ll embrace these AI programs, and not enough time thinking about if they are worth embracing at all. Too much energy is spent on adapting to the AI programs, and not enough on resisting them. These generative chatbots should either be banned or regulated to the point where they pose no threat to writers. I understand that new technology is not always bad, but it is not always good, either. Mustard gas, Agent Orange, nuclear weapons, cluster bombs, land mines, electric chairs, guillotines, factory farming…have these advanced the human race?
Think about fossil fuels. They are undoubtedly responsible for the luxuries of our civilization, and yet serious people talk of uprooting them wholesale. Why? It is because their continued use is an existential threat to our way of life. The generative chatbot model should be regarded with a similar level of contempt. You may argue that the two are not comparable. That ending fossil fuels is about the survival of our civilization, something which is not at stake with the generative chatbots. I would argue the contrary. Stopping these programs is about protecting what makes civilization worthwhile.
The people behind these chatbots may not intend to be malicious. They simply believe that these programs are the next step in civilization, and recent technological trends have done as much to convince them. The sad fact is that AI has been shaping human writing for a while now. The road to ChatGPT was paved by autocorrect, text prediction, Grammarly, and Sudowrite. We have been slowly compromising our imagination and our creative energy to polish and convenience. We have become so afraid of failure, of a mistake, that we abandon our authenticity. In world of retroactive sensitivity edits and feverish book bans, I can see chatbots fitting in quite nicely in producing texts which are perfectly suited to whichever sensitivities are in vogue for the day. Literature will be stripped to the spine of any artistic, creative, and indeed, human characteristic. It will become a pure commodity, like McDonald’s.
Who owns the future of literature? Will it belong to the cowards who fear books and disrespect those who write them? Who believe that reading should be safe for all and that writing should be easier than flipping burgers? Difficult times lie ahead for the written word in America. It would be a shame to see literature weakened and diminished in the same nation that gave birth to Ernest Hemmingway, Mark Twain, and Dorothy Parker. It appears that the most radical act that an American can do today is to either read a book or try to write one.
