If you’re like me and own a Kindle (in hindsight, I wish I'd never bought one), you've noticed the mountain of AI-slop books that crowded the platform like a whip-lash. It’s so bad that I’ve gone back to physical books, and that was before I jumped on the bandwagon of the rising analog movement.
These AI “authors” were publishing hundreds, if not thousands, of books in a single-frkn hour. In an hour, I can’t even get a single sentence written out while drafting my next Substack article, let alone a book.
Amazon quickly did their “damage control” and quietly stepped in. Though they did not ban these AI-slop publishers’ ability to publish AI-written brain rot, they just limited the number of books they can upload in a single day to three. And for that, thanks, Amazon. That solves everything.
I’m sure you also remember the late fiasco that happened to Shy Girl by Mia Ballard. Readers went on the witch hunt with her book, something like the modern-day Salem Witch Trials, though less devastating and violent, of course.
They were dissecting her book line by line. I only learned of it by binge-watching a three-hour video titled “I’m pretty sure this book is AI slop,” which amassed thousands of views within minutes.
“We are fucked” - says everyone with a brain
This brings me to this…we are indeed fucked. Readers and authors alike.
Bookstores are my home away from home, cafes too. All I need is a beautiful third space where I can sit for hours and binge-read with a nice side of an iced Americano. And lucky me that there’s a local cafe in my neighborhood that offers its library of books to customers. And I’m always there.
Pre-2020, when I went there with friends, I’d pick up any book and read the blurb. And if the summary of the book, of course, piqued my interest, I was reading it. I’d plop right down after having some nice small talk with the waiters and start diving headfirst into the book.
But now, after the Harry Potter-esque wizard Big Tech bros released all their wonderful AI tools—that we never asked for in the first place and never needed—they’re shoving them down our throats faster than my mom could get me to eat my broccoli as a defiant kid. And everyone, whether they admit it or not, is quietly offloading their writing and thinking ability to these “tools.”
Which, in large part, is birthing a new era of reader skepticism. Before I read the back cover or sample the first page of a book, I flip straight to the copyright page to check the publication year.
If it was published before 2020, I’m giving it a chance.
If it was published after, I’m going on a witch hunt. It’s not that I want to do this to current authors. But let’s be honest, it’s inevitable.
“We’re now meeting books with suspicoius and skeptical minds”
I’m almost apprehensive about reading books made in the post-generative-AI era. I want to know, with absolute certainty, that the book I took the effort to buy, read, and extract my time and energy from came from an authentic human mind pouring out their real human story, suffering, joy, and lived experience.
1. What this does for readers
Since the invention of paper and the scribe—which I imagine happened in a squalid cave up in some harrowing mountain from a grunting, fire-muttering caveman—there has always been a silent communication, a written contract, if you want to call it that, between the reader and the author. We, readers, traded our precious time with the author, and in return, they gave us a piece of their mind for us to both comprehend and gain from.
AI has now ripped that contract to shreds, stamped it out, and lit it on fire while it gleefully, deviously smiles from ear to ear. (I hate this thing, as you can tell. )
When AI can spit out hollow plot structures and monotone, sterile story lines in seconds, the reading experience changes. Instead of just sinking ourselves into the story, as we read, our brain is on alert mode:
Constant skepticism: Were these words and ideas completely written by a large language model or a human?
Eroded ability to comprehend: As we read the pages with skepticism, it hijacks our ability to even concentrate on what we read in the previous four to five sentences. By the end of the page, we don’t even know what the heck we read, feeling as though our comprehension is shot.
Algorithmic-esque vibes in the book: Is this book purely coming from an artistic, imaginative, human-lived experience, or is it playing into the same vomit-inducing algorithm, “I’ll-feed-you-what-you-want-to-read,” slop?
2. What this does for new and current authors
I’ve come across numerous authors on my social feed who are ripping their hair out trying to get their books out there, resorting to posting influencer-style social media content, even though they would rather choke on a handful of nails.
Retreating to pre-2020 classic books is not only reactionary among readers; it’s expected, but at the cost of talented and deserving authors.
In this shitty AI-era, there’s also the need for speed. Everyone in their own right is like Vin Diesel. “Fast and Furious for books, Fast and Furious for writing, Fast and Furious for reading. Everything is built around fast and cheap consumption nowadays.
So authors are rushed. They can’t build on their stories, take their time, and pour their full artistry into them. And worse, they’re now resorting to using these LLM tools themselves to speed things up, for editing, for ideas. But it’s drowning out their true essence, their tone, what makes them, them. And eventually they, too, will start writing like the LLM’s.
“"Because people always read what is new instead of the best of all times, authors remain in the narrow circle of the ideas of their age, and the age sinks deeper and deeper into its own mire." — Arthur Schopenhauer, "On Books and Reading"
In this case, the mire is AI, and the new-age ideas are what it scrapes, creating a reverberating cycle of writer’s-rot.
3. How we can hedge against this as both readers and authors
I know we hate this era. But we’re here, ladies and gents. And there’s no walking this back. We can argue all day long about whether it’s just a tool or a replacement for the arts, but that doesn’t undo the untold damage currently unfolding.
As readers, to support authors, and as authors to supply readers with beautifully written books, we have to change how we discover and support literature.
For authors, share your mess: I know most authors won’t want to, but share more behind the scenes. Most authors despise social media and would rather keep to themselves and let their books do the talking, but in this era of literature witch-hunting, showing the real person, their method of writing that goes into their books, is the only thing left to build trust.
For readers, take that chance: Intentionally support these authors by giving them breathing room to not sound too polished. We need more erratic, jagged, and unedited work to be allowed to slip through the cracks, or pages, of their books.
Where we go from here…
Yes, the world is “over-automated” obsessed. But we readers and writers shouldn’t just give in and collapse under its wreckage. We certainly shouldn’t implode on one another. Both go hand in hand; thus, we are an interwoven community.
Literature has always been our retreat, the intimate bridge between two human minds speaking to each other through a white-offcream colored page housed in a thick book. I may not know the author personally, but as a reader, they let me peer straight into their mind. And I don’t want that to be lost because AI intrudes on that experience.
So let’s give every book, every author, every reader some grace in an emerging anti-human system.
You don’t need a bajillion unavailable hours to be a reader again.
Obviously, we all aren’t allotted that much free time in this stressful world of today. But all it takes is 15 minutes.
Here is my challenge for us tonight:
Pick a book, any book, preferably one that’s been collecting dust, unread or half-read.
Set a timer for 15 minutes.
Leave your phone in a different room.
Let’s reclaim and heal our focus together.