It always offers an intriguing insight into our world when I read news items about what we do from outlets that don't usually cover literary or creative stories. So I found it a real eye-opener to take a deep dive into Wired's long piece on the new generation of indie writers (and I realize many reading this will want to put “writers” in inverted commas) using AI for storytelling. And not just because it offers a very different perspective from the one we're used to.
ALLi News Editor Dan Holloway
But because it opens the curtains on how readers increasingly think and behave, which can be very different from the outrage that has swept through the creative and publishing communities in the wake both of AI use allegations against peers and fears about the future of pay and even culture itself. As the article put it, recounting the claims of Melanie Walsh, an assistant professor at the University of Washington Information School in a recent paper she co-authored:
“But the commotion has distracted from the behavior of readers, Walsh and her colleagues argue, and what it might signal about the appetite for AI fiction.”
The Solipsistic Reader-Writer
The paper is called “AI in the Wild” and it starts with an intriguing question: Are readers generating their own fiction using AI? And for me it's the most interesting of all the recent papers on AI and writing because what it suggests is a potential complete transformation of our world. As the authors put it, “we argue that AI technologies may lead to a shift in the conventional relationship between the author and reader, potentially producing what we call a solipsistic reader-writer, who both generates and consumes fiction within a closed conversational loop, interacting with a machine rather than a human other.”
What Readers Are Generating
When it comes to what those readers are using AI (and they are using it: 500,000 prompts were examined as part of the research) to do, there is even more of interest. As the title of the Wired piece, “I Like My Big Rat Wife,” suggests, there is a real lean into highly niche erotic-adjacent material. Which is probably as handy (if not surprising) a piece of marketplace analytics as you could hope for. The real danger, if one thinks of it that way, is that each reader can specify their niche exactly, whereas as writers we can only write one niche at a time and hope to draw as many readers as possible. A final observation on the type of book people are after comes again from the abstract:
“users…are broadly drawn to generic forms, repetition, immediacy, and niche combinations of story element.”
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