AN ANALYSIS
c/o snarkybites.com
NOBODY KNOWS for certain what the artistic future will look like, including in the literary realm, given the approaching flood of AI-generated “art”. But we can make an accurate guess.
A.) The most massive part of the book market will be imitative tomes generated by chatbots. They’ll come from all directions, as they’re already coming from all directions. From hapless writer-wannabes who want the accomplishment of creating a novel or collection of poems or stories without doing any of the work. From content mills in faraway places creating thousands upon thousands of ebooks, as well as the print version, to generate income based on sheer volume. From new tech publishing outfits eager to get in on the AI game, presenting at least the pretense of quality but for whom the goal remains the same: generating income based on volume. Increasingly, much volume will come from the Big Five established conglomerate publishers themselves, who’ve begun recruiting tech people to work in the AI field.
B.) A small number of actual writers with some talent will try to push the envelope of what an AI chatbot can produce– hoping to thereby create innovative new literature (it’s no more than a hope). They’ll find themselves also swamped by the AI deluge, and more, perhaps carrying the same AI brand of aesthetic inferiority and artistic theft.
C.) The current self-publishing/fan fic/genre crowd, whose massive numbers have already congested the book market. Many will turn to AI (many already have) to produce more books faster, which will be self-defeating.
D.) The small press litmag community. For most of them (like ourselves, in part) their steadfast efforts are a labor of love. Survival, though, will become more difficult– unless they find ways to stand out. Which means going beyond either the literary or subliterary templates which permeate their underground realms.
E.) Holding up the tottery fort of the literary present-morphing-swiftly-into-past– especially in New York– will be the literary status quo. While storms rage outside, they’ll cling to their canonical high modern postmodern writings, as if perpetuating an ancient dead language. Like Essenes, they’ll continue to write inscrutable papers about unreadable texts, and hold events– in halls of cloistered academia, or high-brow venues in upscale gentrified neighborhoods– going through the motions of an archaic cult. Shuffling monks in robes, reciting properly approved words, affirming in gesture and invocation their artistic belief system. If asked why, they’ll stare blankly. No one will know.
F.) THEN there will be an alternative. The rebellion. A counterculture positively fighting the inhuman deluge of botbooks and other fake AI-generated crap. Those embracing human creativity and making it new, by returning to our cultural roots– to our forebears; our ancestors– and there finding inspiration. Drawing upon our most human abilities. Not just our underused natural brains– ours, not a machine’s– but especially upon our hearts and our souls. Emotion. Compassion. PASSION. New writing which screams, vibrates, and lives. It won’t be easy: to rediscover ourselves and find artistic purpose and humanity while existing in a soulless artificial world. But we’ll do it.
-Karl Wenclas
