Books & Horses & A.I.

On obsolescence, opportunities, and the grinding gears of history...and audio books.

Hey y’all, it’s KimBoo! I’m an author and a podcaster who is also a librarian, text technology historian, and former I.T. project manager. I write about a lot of interesting things, I hope you agree! Please consider supporting me (and my dog!) so I can keep throwing errata & etcetera into the Scriptorium!

NOTE: This article is not particularly pro- or anti-artificial intelligence technology, but is simply looking at what is happening and how the history of technological change can inform us on what is going to happen next.

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Still, industrial automation did not entirely abolish handicraft. It seems hyperbolic to claim that large language models will swallow up literature. … Mass production has always coexisted with, and enhanced the value of, older forms of craft. The old-fashioned and the newfangled have a tendency to commingle. The standardization of mediocrity does not necessarily lead to the death of excellence. It’s still possible to knit a sweater or write a sestina.

~ A.O. Scott, New York Times, 12/28/2023

One of the big misunderstandings about modern publishing is the belief that it is not equitable with mass production.

Sure, we may all decry and laugh at the worst examples of genre writing, but we do so secure in the knowledge that a human being wrote the treacle we are mocking. The exceptionalism of writing means we can make fun of the worst of it without impugning the elevated nature of literature itself.

Until it isn’t a human doing the writing, and then suddenly nothing makes sense anymore!!!

But…has anything really changed?

I assure you, from my weathered, worn tent located in the trenches of the romance genre industry, modern book publishing is definitely all about mass production. For people who still have an idealized concept of what it means to be “a published author,” there remains a sense of exceptionalism to writing in general. A human wrote a book! What an amazing accomplishment! No machine could do that!

But in reality, the publishing industry is just as focused on manufacturing as Toyota.

Deep in the heart of the smoky, drab 1970s, I lived in a smoky, drab working-class house with a mother who was slumming her path to destruction. She often looked for opportunities to elevate herself over her self-inflicted environment, and her love of fine literature was a great way, even an acceptable way, to do that.

There was a brief moment where she flirted with the idea of writing romance novels to make some extra money. How hard could it be, she reasoned?

My cousin Jimbo was visiting at the time, and I remember them looking at the Harlequin novels she had bought to study, and laughing uproariously at the genuinely terrible writing. I don’t remember much of my childhood (yay, trauma) but I remember that scene vividly: we were all in the kitchen, the books piled up on a counter, all of us sitting on bar stools looking them over. I don’t know who said what, but at some point there was a reference to how the character’s Formica kitchen counter color matched the curtains. It was a ham-fisted description and oddly out of place in the narrative. It had Mother and Jimbo howling with laughter.

(Mother never considered writing romance novels again.)

In the many years since, I have read many other truly terrible novels, or at least tried to. A few stand out in my memory, as they were popular and written by authors who have good reputations to this day. Those books sucked, make no mistake, but they had no effect on the value of great literature. They never do.

Great literature exists because people want it to, and it exists in spite of the rampant “mass production” of books.

The Past

I know writers who have driven themselves into permanent burnout trying to crank out 10,000 words five days a week so they can publish a whole damn novel every month. Shocking, I know, but here’s the real shocker: that is not new. That’s been going on for, literally, centuries.

The industrialization of publishing began in the early 1800s, and mass production of stories has been going strong since then. Society always complains about it, from dime novels to pulp fiction to comics to Harlequin Romance to self-publishing to, now, A.I., but that does nothing to stop it because readers are voracious.

We can argue about whether human-written books are always better than A.I. written books, but, look, I’ve read some damnably terrible books in my long life, okay? So it’s a tight race with a narrow lead that is closing faster than most people like to believe. Still, it’s an argument to be had, currently.

What A.I.-written books definitely, inarguably are, though, is here to stay.

So where does that leave human written stories?

The Now

That brings us back around to the conceit of the title for this essay: horses. Or, as A.O. Scott mentions, knitted sweaters and sestinas.

All of these beautiful things exist despite mass production. It really doesn’t matter what the form of that mass production takes, be it A.I. or stressed out authors churning through words to the point of damaging their mental health just so they can pay for health insurance and groceries.

What does change, though, is how those those beautiful things are perceived.

There was a time when horses were necessary. Not everyone owned them, but no one could escape their presence. Horses were for transportation, delivering necessities, and working (farming, mining, and, yes, factories). Not-so-slowly, every single reason horses were required for civilization was replaced by some form of automobile—cars, lorries, trucks, earth movers, and tractors.

Horses still exist, of course. They are even important to some people’s livelihoods, but their role in society at large is for leisure, sport, or investment. They have become high-end products, expensive to buy and keep and capitalize on.

Hand-knit sweaters have transitioned into being expensive luxury goods or precious, personalized gifts.

Like-wise, I envision a near future when “hand-written” books will become the elite of published work. Mass production will move to A.I., both for churning out massive amounts of stories and for “reader customization” (if you haven’t ever read a “Your Name” fanfic, well, you have no idea about the train that’s comin’ down the tracks).

A good way to explain this is using audio books, the production of which is being heavily impacted by AI narration (look up ElevenLabs if you haven’t already; many authors are already using their service to create audiobooks, and as I write this, EL has released their own ebook text-to-speech reader).

I said a couple years ago (!!!) that human narration would become an upsell. People are currently, today, right now listening to a lot of podcasts/vlogcasts which are AI narrated. You might not see much of that on, say, Spotify or podcast distributions apps, but if you are on YouTube (and tiktok, fwiw) they are everywhere.

The “training” to get listeners used to the concept of “generative digital narration” and listening anyway is well along, my friends. The end result is that people will spend a lot of time listening to AI voices, and will crave a human connection. It won’t matter, at that point, if AI can adequately replicate the tone/sound/art of human narration, because it will be more about listeners believing that “human is better.”

We’ll probably get a few scandals of authors/publishers claiming that an audiobook is human narrated when it isn’t, but on the whole, the needle is going to move from being a technical issue to a marketing one.

Human narration will be considered a high-end good, and priced accordingly (we’re already seeing that a bit, especially with celebrity-narrated projects). This will only become more common as voice replication services like ElevenLabs create mimics of actual humans.

My own experiments with replicating my own voice in ElevenLabs generated a voice that fooled my very best friend when I played it for her. She thought it was a recording of me and didn’t clue in until about 20 seconds into playback. In less than a year, the tech will advance so much that she might not clue in at all next time.

The Future

Continuing with the audio book example, my prediction is that audio books are going to fall into the same dichotomy as “paperback vs. Hardback.” AI narration will be common and cheap, and take up a huge percentage of sales. However, many people will also want human narrated books, and as with hand-knitted sweaters and show horses, they will pay a premium for them.

Audio “radio plays” of books with multiple human narrators/actors will be an even higher-level version, like hardcover books with gilded edging and embossed linen/leather covers.

Authors who have the resources are already using AI narration just to populate the “shelves” (so to speak), then investing in (or doing kickstarters for) human narrated versions, in order to market them with the same “upscale” vibe of fancy hardcover print versions.

The future for authors is going to be about building a recognizable brand, rather than churning out reams of middling content (you cannot out-middling AI, tbh). Some authors will be knowns for their amazingly produced audio books, and fans might get their instant gratification from AI narration/TTS but they will still crave hearing the stories as told by humans, and will pay premium for it.

For narrators, the same changes that affect authors are in play, and have been for a while. People already “follow” narrators across books/genres just because they like their voice. A friend of mine wants to get into narration and I’m pushing her to also do a podcast/vlogcast along with reading public domain books she loves on YouTube, with the goal of pulling listeners to her unique voice and talent. That will make her appeal to authors looking for narrators, as she will already have a following.

If something can be mass produced for profit, the capitalists will churn it into mud, AI or no AI. It feels odd to say this as we fly headfirst into the “age of Artificial Intelligence,” but we really must focus on doubling downon “being human.”

Our job is to focus on what makes us, and our work, individually unique and special.

The Downside

How many horses exist today? A fraction of the number which existed in 1900.

That is what many authors (and voice talent) are thinking about right now, and I don’t blame them for being scared about it. I’m one of them. The fact is that not everyone is going to “make it” with the new sorting that AI-driven tech is introducing into the publishing industry.

That kind of destruction is true for every big technological upheaval, and it’s a pretty damning consequence of so-called “progress,” IMHO.

That said, I have no person-sized solutions in hand to offer. We can fight the powers-that-be and speak up against injustice, but very few of us have the authority to change anything about is happening in publishing right now. The C-Suite bastards are laying off whole departments and shuttering storied magazines and imprints because they can, because they have always intended to replace human labor with machines in order to maximize profits. That was always the bargain being made over our heads.

The righteously humane answer to AI is universal basic income, rent control at the federal level, and world peace. *sighhhh*

I tend towards pragmatic optimism, though, so I think in the long run things will get better for all of us…or at least the ones who are still around. The trick is in learning how to stick around, and that is a work in progress.

Guess it’s time to get back to pulling those carts along while I still can.

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