Category: Other Page 57 of 178

I saw this thread on the AbsoluteWrite.com forum discussing my Newsweek article, and thought it was worth bookmarking here, along with capturing both some good points and some items worth responding to.

As forum threads so, it kind of wobbles all over the map, before apparently getting shut down by moderators for generating too much controversy.

One user there, Schaun, has a lot of strong arguments that I mostly agree with. He proposes there is one catch in my plan though, and foresees this as one of several outcomes:

Most other people can easily replicate his approach, in which case he’s going to see his market flooded and will have to put more and more time and effort into making less and less money, and may see the bottom drop out entirely once his very niche audience diminishes to only those who weren’t in it for the novelty effect alone.

I agree that anyone can do what I’m doing. The AI tools are accessible to all. I think however there are a few things I’m doing well, and a few other things that are somewhat unique in my approach.

Things I’m doing well:

• Consistent quality product – different people might have different opinions on whether that quality is good or bad, but the key thing is that it is consistent from book to book. What you get in one as far as a product offering is what you get more or less in another. If you like (or dislike) one, you will probably feel similarly about others in the series.
• Good tooling – Using Vellum for ebooks is awesome. It’s part of how I can get such consistent results in presentation. Though I’ve tried a lot of other combinations, I’m now also quite content with using Claude & Midjourney for producing text & images.
• Direct sales – I don’t sell on Amazon. I only sell direct through Gumroad, which means buyers are fully in control of the files they download from me, and they can use how they want (within applicable copyright law) the EPUB & MOBI files they get.
• The contents are cool – Some critics might disagree, but for readers into a very pulpy sci-fi aesthetic, and a lot of world-building, the contents of my books are genuinely cool, both in images and text. Some are better than others, for sure, but they are overall really fun.

Things I’m doing that are somewhat unique:

• Primarily focused on lore & world-building – There’s an oft-repeated dictum among writers that I think is over-used: “Show don’t tell.” As I’ve written about, telling is perfectly fine. Readers even – gasp! – like it. Don’t let people turn you off from paths that actually work.
• Networked narratives – My stories are good examples of networked narratives, and transmedia storytelling, where the classical narrative unities have by and large been dissolved. The stories and lore are split up among many volumes, and heavily cross-reference one another, letting users explore as many or as few rabbit holes as they want.
• Hyperreality angle – Seamlessly blending reality with fiction, conspiracy with sci-fi, and AI with human (Uncanny Valley)
• AI lets me scale up production – With AI, I can generate text and images very quickly to rapidly flesh out ideas, and then use Vellum & Gumroad to get them out the door and up for sale within hours rather than weeks or months.
• Format mixing images & text – It can be hard to sell books that are only text if you’re not a well-known author. Incorporating lots of good-looking images into a book brings a lot of added value that shouldn’t be overlooked. It also lets me get away with selling works that are shorter on the word count, and longer on the image count.

There’s probably more to add to both parts of that list, but that is enough of a trailhead for right now.

All of that is to say, I recognize that I have no real “moat” apart from the speed of production, the quality of my products, and the volume of items already on the market place. Anyone else can (and will) come along and do more, faster. Of that I have no doubt. But I have little fear that they will compete in my space, because the space I’ve carved out narratively is very well colonized. It’s a brand, a niche, and an established fan base. If people want my stuff, they will come to my channels to get it.

Even if other people start adopting a similar approach, that’s fine. It won’t impact the time it takes me to make the books, nor will it impact the amount of enjoyment I get from the process. My sales are small, but steady. So there’s not really any big cliff for them to drop off from.

Incidentally, later on someone in the thread named Chase proposes, regarding the bottom dropping out, “He’ll just make someone in the Philippines or Columbia or Nigeria do it for him.” This wouldn’t make any sense for my situation, because the process is a creative one that I love. If I farmed it out to someone else, it wouldn’t be fun anymore, and they wouldn’t be able to produce the quality I am able to produce.

Lastly, I don’t think there are probably any buyers in it for “the novelty effect alone,” because I get the impression most buyers didn’t come to my books because of my incorporation of AI technology. They came because the stories sound cool, and they come back because of the consistent quality of the product.

Moving on to other topics…

I see a lot of probably wrong information on copyright in this thread. It’s not worth trying to correct all of it, but a few items do jump out at me.

Hickson writes:

I see it as an ethical deficit on the part of those who decided to scrape the internet without seeking permission.

I understand why people feel this way, but US Appeals Court in wherever decided that scraping the web is legal. I think if people want to more meaningfully engage in the “ethics” side of that (apart from legality), then it needs to be made more clear which code of ethics ought to apply.

Personally, I voluntarily try to follow more or less the AI ethical guidelines of the Alliance for Independent Authors – even though I am not a member. Their primary requirement simply seems to be disclosing the use of AI, which I do both within the books, and at the publisher/account level.

Again regarding copyright, user Helix writes:

It’s closer to sampling IMO in the sense of taking elements of other people’s work and using it elsewhere.

Here are my thoughts as to why is actually not like sampling at all. To recap them in brief, sampling makes use of whole cloth excerpts from the works of someone else. Generative AI does not. It instead measures attributes (dimensions) of data and relationships from many works in aggregate, and then uses that to develop entirely new works. There is no use of any other work’s specific contents that are identifiable in any of my books.

User CMBright states:

It has been mentioned repeatedly in other threads here that no one owns the rights to AI produced work.

This is wrong. My understanding is that the US Copyright Office, which is not a law-making body, made a statement that a single AI-generated image cannot be copyrighted (in its non-binding opinion), because it has no human author. I think even that is a probably flawed and wrong opinion which will certainly be legally challenged in the near term. They did, however, I believe state that the entire contents of the AI comic book at issue could be copyrighted, because of the unique arrangement of parts.

More importantly, my books are not copyrighted in the US. They are copyrighted in Canada. (Canada also has different rules around Fair Use btw, which is called here Fair Dealing.) People in the United States often mistakenly believe their country is the only one, and that its laws apply everywhere.

User Brigid writes:

I wonder when whatever program he used will be knocking on his door looking for a cut of the proceeds, seeing that it was co-written by whatever program.

In general, my understanding is that most of the services use to generate AI content do not claim ownership or exclusive rights over the contents generated. It varies a little from service to service how it is worded, but by and large their licenses permit these kinds of uses. So no, I don’t think this will be the case.

Dipping back out of the copyright questions again, a couple more bits I wanted to capture from Schaun’s replies. First, I think the comparison to synthesizer music is spot on:

I was saying the guy was producing something. He used a tool to do it. I don’t personally have a taste for the kind of thing he produces, but I’m not going to say it was wrong for him to produce it. I’m not saying synthesizer or any other music isn’t real music. I’m saying it is real music, even if I don’t personally prefer it. I’m saying the books the guy wrote are real books – not copying or stealing from other people – even if they aren’t books that I would personally enjoy reading.

Many people in that thread are bent out of shape that the ebooks are only 2-5k words in length. Not a single commenter anywhere or in the coverage I got, however, mentions the large image sets which go into these books to add value. Not to be overlooked from a marketing and from a sheer “fun-ness” perspective.

Schaun also brings up an excellent point here, regarding the better quality AI works we see popping up across the web:

Those remarkably good examples aren’t the product of just throwing a prompt into an AI. They’re the product of hours and hours – and probably days and days – of human intervention, reworking, and hand-editing. […]

When we see amazing results, we shouldn’t say “wow, a computer did that. ” We should say “wow, a computer plus an insane amount of human micromanagement and prompt massaging did that.”

Anyway, that’s enough beating of this particular horse. I’m happy to see people talking about the work, but I’d much prefer they talk about the actual contents & structure of the work, because to me that is about 1000x more interesting than all these secondary issues around the technology. But if this is the doorway to get people to talk about the work at all, then okay!

Futurism ran a response to my Newsweek article about my AI lore books. Notably, the title of the Futurism piece is: “Man Uses AI to Write 97 Terrible Books, Sells $2,000 Worth.“

It’s fine if that author didn’t like the 1 out of 97 (now 98) books that they gave a “quick read.” But I think it’s wrong to say that they all suck, because they didn’t like the one that they skimmed. It’s the equivalent of reading one or two paragraphs out of a 1,000 page book and deciding the whole thing is bad.

In actual fact, the volume they didn’t like, Inside the Hypogeum, is actually one of my favorites. Along the way, with the many discoveries I have made, that book was a turning point, because it proved that I could indeed effectively use AI to write good quality lore that fits into the canon of my universe quite neatly (never mind all the awesome art in that book and all the others). And then it is of course very dear, because of the centrality of the Hypogeum to the greater Quatrian mythos. If you don’t already Helmoquinth, Anthuor! though, I can see that the whole thing is probably confusing and strange.

They also included in the Futurism piece a predictable criticism of that book as being, “a meandering explainer of the fictional locale and legends — but no discernible plot or developed characters to sustain reader interest.” Obviously, they missed the bullet point that this is world-building; that’s literally how this genre works. It is, as I like to say, lorecore.

Leveling this criticism at literally any of these nearly 100 AI Lore books is like saying “Appendix F of the Lord of the Rings is really boring.” And you know what, without any other context, or reading the work it comments on and fills out (in my case, that would be The Lost Direction), Appendix F on its own may very well be boring. But when you take it as it was meant to be taken, among all the other voluminous writings of Tolkien, it takes on a numinous quality. (And actually, when I look it up, LOTR Appendix F really is awesome!)

Realistically, I guess you could say that my main innovation here is that all my books are essentially appendices of one another. And that is by design. It is not for everybody, but for those people who like it, they REALLY like it.

Originally, in the Futurism article’s first published version, they included the blatantly wrong line:

Boucher claims he’s had repeat readers who loved his books, but there’s little evidence of that.

I wrote to them asking for a correction, and showed them proof of sales, with buyer identities redacted.

Without responding to my email, they since pulled that line and added the cryptic qualifier: “Updated to remove speculation about the existence of repeat buyers.“

For future reference, I eyeballed a sales spreadsheet and came up with this break down of repeat buyers.

• 27 people bought 2 titles
• 4 people bought 3
• 2 people bought 4
• 2 people bought 6
• 2 bought 7
• 4 bought 8
• 1 person each bought 10, 12, 14, 15, 16 & 20 titles
• 1 person bought 39!!

My math might be wrong, but my back of the envelope calculation then suggests that about 8-9% of buyers bought multiple books. And those repeat buyers comprise about 40% of my total unit sales. Amazing!

That’s a pretty significant proportion of all my buyers being repeat buyers who know what the content is, know what they’re getting into, and come back for more again and again – because they love it! All with no advertising, no social media promotion, and no overhead…

The thing is though, Futurism never reached out to me for comment or additional information before or after publishing. I could have easily given them this information.

I wasn’t able to find any policies regarding editorial ethics on Futurism’s site – so I can’t speak to what standards they believe themselves to be bound by – but I do happen to know that the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics does include a variation on the well-established journalistic practice of a right of reply. SPJ’s code states that ethical reporting should:

Diligently seek subjects of news coverage to allow them to respond to criticism or allegations of wrongdoing.

I have no idea what Futurism’s official policy is, but I can say that they did not follow this guideline in the case of their reporting on my books.

(Nerd Tangent Incoming: This notion of a right of reply seems to have roots in Roman law, by way of the Latin legal maxim, Audi alteram partem – “let the other side be heard as well.”)

Anyway, putting all that aside, and putting aside the fact that they didn’t like the 1 out of 100 books they looked at (to each their own), the criticism contained in the piece seems to follow the common shape I saw in comments elsewhere on the Newsweek post:

• AI writing is easy
• Because it’s “easy” the quality must be bad
• Because it’s so easy, he should be making more money off it

But none of those actually hold up to scrutiny.

If it’s so easy, why doesn’t everyone have hundreds of AI books they published? Hint: because it’s not actually that easy to get consistent results of a decent quality. Doing what I’ve done took a hell of a lot of work, and a hell of a lot of trial, error, and discovery along the way.

If the quality is so bad, why did one person alone buy 39 different titles, and dozens of other people bought multiple copies?

If AI writing is so easy and so bad, wouldn’t it more logically follow that I shouldn’t actually be able to make any money off it at all? Why then does the implied or expess expectation of this kind of commentary always seem to point to some notion that I should actually be making more off this?

Shaming me for not making enough money in the short term is lame. Especially since this is a long game. This is literally long tail book sales. One person in comments somewhere suggested with the time I’ve put in, that I’m only making somewhere in the ballpark of $3 an hour (btw this is not my full time job). But that ignores how these products will compound over time. I can potentially sell these for the rest of my life, and beyond. What will my sales figures look like after I reach 500 interconnected books – or 1K – and how big will this get if I keep getting MSM press coverage (even occasional bad coverage like this)?

It’s also funny that Futurism chose to conclude their article by mocking my good reviews on a book I wrote prior to using AI (but the subject of which is entirely about AI, and how it will control our lives), Conspiratopia. I’m not sure what they think that proves. If they did their homework, then they’d see that it got even better reviews on Goodreads!

In the end, my sales figures seem to question the validity of the assumption that purely human-generated content is somehow better or more preferable to audiences. Can it really be worse than a human author who hasn’t done their diligence in composing an article?

Also, the subtitle of their article, “Human writers probably shouldn’t be too concerned… yet,” misses something important: I am an early mover in this space. Yeah, my moves are many and imperfect – but I don’t hide that. While other people are still busy debating the validity of using the technology, I have generated 100 books with it, gained a ton of experience, developed a dedicated fan base & sales channel that I control with little outside interference. As the progress of the tech continues to explode, this is going to put me extremely far ahead of the pack.

Oh, and by the way, just for fun, I ran Futurism’s article through ZeroGPT, a supposed AI-content checker, and it suggested their piece was 12.87% AI written. True or false? Unfortunately, there’s no way to be sure.

Tales from the House of Life is the 98th book in the AI Lore books series, by Lost Books, a Canadian AI publisher, recently chronicled in Newsweek & CNN.

This one is noteworthy especially in terms of technique. As I mentioned in a previous post, Anthropic’s Claude LLM recently expanded its context window, to 100,000 tokens, or what I’ve read amounts to approximately 75K words. This was roughly the length of my first (non-AI) novel, The Lost Direction.

Claude has been my preferred tool for generating the flash fiction slice of life pieces which compose the last 8 or 10 books in this series, so I thought I would give it a try.

I don’t know if the tool was just having a bad day when I used it, or if it’s just slow af, but it took quite a while for Claude to process the text. And it seemed that whenever I did a query/prompt against it in the same conversation, it would then choke on it, having to go back and apparently parse the whole thing again.

It was not an ideal experience hitting those processing wait times again and again. But the results speak for themselves, especially for fans of The Lost Direction, and Quatriana in general. I had Claude generate a bunch of story suggestions based on the text – side stories based on lore mentioned in the main book. And it performed that task admirably, as well as the task of actually fleshing out the chosen stories.

Some of what it generated just made no sense relative to the details I input via my novel dump. In one notable case, it mixed up attributes of two main characters, resulting in unusable tales. In a few cases, they were just lackluster for the characters and topics represented, etc. But by and large, it did a pretty good job, and in some cases I think some of these tales probably rise to the level of “canonical” Quatria lore for my tastes (like the one about the training of a young augur, for instance). But the rest are absolutely good quasi-canon & apocrypha that once again does a great job fleshing out this massive legendarium that I am building.

Here’s some of the art, all done in Midjourney v5.1:

I’m following with some interest – and more than a little humor – the comments as they unfold on the Newsweek article about my AI Lore books.

I’ll start off by saying I’m just not that interested in the copyright/plagiarism conversations around AI art & text. My philosophy here is: let people who are better informed and care more about those make the proper arguments. Same thing for the questions around how humans learn to do x versus how AIs “learn.” I’ve personally got other fish to fry than those.

I’m also just not interested in the “but is it art?” questions, because those to me are a moot point. I think it is what it is. A lot of work goes into it, but your mileage may vary as to whether you “like” it or think it’s “art.” I’ll leave people to form their own opinions on that.

While I appreciate to no end Newsweek running the story, it’s unfortunate that the framing of it comes off as a “look how much money I’m making,” because to me that’s neither the most interesting nor important point of my experiment in AI world-building. And frankly, I’m not making that much money. But from what I’ve seen of sales in other types of “normal” fiction I’ve tried, these books are blowing those all away. And I also get that this framing drives feelings of urgency and provokes people into having conversations to think through all these related issues. So I support that in the end. It’s just not what I’m after.

I also disagree with comments I saw somewhere I forget now about AI writing flooding markets or taking away something from human writers. The things I’m offering are so weird and niche and unique and of such a specific vibe and quality that I’m pretty sure nobody else is offering. It’s just something that wouldn’t exist otherwise.

There is one particular comment over on Newsweek that I want to address specifically though, because it touches on many things that are closer to my heart & within the space of my intent. Username “whosonfirst” writes:

Back in the 50’s there were short story sci-fi magazines in abundance. They were longer than comic books and shorter than novels. The magazines typically had a set of stories for the cost of a small book. A lot of the science fiction writers got their start in them. Heinlein for one.

I’m thinking he is reviving a niche market for small collections of stories that the book publishers eventually found not viable economically. Delivery as e-books cuts down the dead tree costs and the cost of the type setting.

The trick will be getting around the supplier wanting a cut that pushes the price past what someone might pay to read over a cup of coffee or a glass of wine before bed.

I’m actually reading Stranger in a Strange Land, and enjoying it very much so far (about 2/3 of the way through), so I appreciate the Heinlein call-out. I believe some other writers in this category might have been Asimov, Bradbury, Vonnegut, and Philip K. Dick, never mind tons of others.

One might argue, okay but they were WRITERS not “prompters” or whatever I am (curators/provacateurs). But then look at somebody like (no relation) Anthony Boucher (which oddly was a chosen pen name, though I haven’t determined why he landed on Boucher – see also Bouchercon). He was a writer of some renown himself, but he also edited many of those old magazines that ‘golden era’ sci-fi writers appeared in. Is there not a great deal of art in that too?

Further, I appreciate this reader is tapping into the pulp sci-fi roots and context I want to draw from in my AI Lore books series. The types of stories I want to tell. The kinds of imagery and tropes I’m employing. The types of winding, loosely connected stories spread out across many volumes. There’s still space and still appetite for these kinds of works. My sales are not insane compared to “regular famous writers,” but considering I’m basically a nobody, with no marketing, and next to no social media presence, they are absolutely proof of a nascent product-market fit, as they say in tech.

Yes, I look at it to some degree as an art experiment, but I also look at these as products. They may not be perfect or be what every random person wants, but they most definitely must meet my standards of quality and “publishability.” And they are consistent from volumes to volume as a product. And they all hang together quite well and in interesting and intricate ways when taken as an entire set.

I’ve probably said this somewhere, but ironically as a mostly but not only ebook publisher, I don’t actually consume ebooks myself. I don’t have a smart phone, and never use my iPad Pro because the battery life is so shitty. Reading books on a desktop makes me feel like a jerk. So I really only read books as printed matter.

From a sales perspective though, ebooks are where it’s at because it costs you basically nothing. Canadians can get free ISBNs, but since I don’t publish on Amazon, I don’t even bother to do that. And using Vellum for ebooks makes the chore of design/type so simple that I barely even notice it anymore. It’s what I mean by no overhead. Newsweek also cut this part of the original piece, but Gumroad just takes a flat 10% of sales. So it’s not that onerous there either.

Lastly, my unit price of generally $1.99 to $3.99, adequately drives the cost down to something which as this reader said makes it an acceptably-priced diversion to look at while you drink a cup of wine or coffee, or want to look at some cool AI pictures and read a couple of weird stories when you’re high. If these books can land right in the sweet spot of all that, I don’t really care if anybody thinks its “Art” with a capital A or not.