How artificial intelligence could rewrite book world

A study has found that many authors believe AI will displace their work. Annabel Nugent asks if that means writing by humans will eventually become a preserve of the rich

- Annabel Nugent

If you’re thinking, well that sounds a lot like the opening sentence of a new Ian McEwan novel, you would be half-right. Rather it is a sentence written in the style of Ian McEwan, as generated by a free-to-use artificial intelligence platform. Admittedly, the prose is a little too florid for an author who wields his pen more like a scalpel. And yet on the surface and to your average reader, it’s a passable approximation of his work.

You can understand why, according to a new study by Cambridge University, more than half of published novelists in the UK agree that it’s likely AI will displace their work entirely. This isn’t anything new: for months if not years, novelists have expressed their growing unease about the speed and scale of Al’s trespass into the literary world. Plug in a prompt for any author with a back catalogue and you'll get a sort-of satisfactory imitation of their writing: Margaret Atwood, Stephen King, Sarah J Maas, Haruki Murakami, etc, etc. Not only does this happen in a matter of seconds, but it’s completely free. A whole book, 10 books, 100 books, 1,000 books for a grand total of £0.

Obviously, there are myriad problems with this — not least the financial repercussions on authors and the theft of their intellectual property — but one particularly troubling question was raised by Dr Clementine Collett, the lead researcher and author of the Cambridge report and a novelist herself: Could the prevalence of Al-generated novels create a two-tier system in the literary world? “That is a real concern from literary creatives,” she said on Thursday’s episode of Radio 4’s Today programme. “Where human-written work will be a more expensive luxury item, and Al-generated content will be cheap or free.”