Laziness for the win

Why the em-dash will never catch me out

Photo by Leo Bayard on Unsplash

I really didn’t want to have to write about this but since it’s the topic that won’t go away, here I am talking about AI again…

The big news of the last couple of weeks in the publishing world has been the tragic tale of a debut crime writer who received offers for his novel of over $2m (in a two book deal) only to subsequently be accused of using AI to write it. These accusations since led his agent to withdraw the novel and drop him. This Guardian article outlines the main sequence of events as they were known last week. Which is basically that a ton of agents and editors read the novel and loved it, until one editor decided to feed it into an ‘AI detector’. Goodbye multi million dollar book deal, on the say-so of a piece of tech that, by several accounts, has also accused the long dead Mary Shelley of using AI.

A theme of our present society seems to be the love of a good witch hunt, and at the moment it seems to be writers under the spotlight. If you dare to use an em-dash or grammar that is too correct, if you use well-known techniques such as the rule of three, then you must have used AI. Which, when you consider that AI has learned by being fed reams of published works, often stolen, of course it has our techniques down pat. AI has copied the writers, and yet now we can’t even write in the way we always have. AI has stolen our skills and left us unable to use them without risking accusation. Madness!

Luckily, I am too lazy to use em-dashes (or en-dashes). I rely on hyphens that hopefully some lovely copy-editor will fix for me later. When I have time to write, I’m just hammering out words, not looking to interrupt the flow by trying to remember how to insert correct symbols on my MacBook Air keypad. Might this be what saves me from the accusations? I don’t know what it was about Jerry Falade’s $2m dollar to zero novel that made someone sit up and feed it into a detector. Maybe nothing, as I fear that the industry is starting to go down the road of feeding in work on spec in order to save issues later on.

My own literary agency came out this week to say that they’ve invested in Pangram, which I assume they will use on new submissions. I hope the sheer number of drafts I force my poor agent to read will be enough proof to her that my writing is my own! No need for her to request examples of my writing process. She has it all in her emails! But how terrifying. Having spent the past couple of years trying to stop tech companies from feeding our work into the AI beast illegally, now our own people are volunteering to do it.

Another terrifying development is that the past few big stories about authors and AI have uncovered an unwelcome trend: all the authors are of colour. This article was published today in The Bookseller and is an interesting read. Basically, the conclusion is that it’s too soon to tell what’s going on here. Falade himself has identified a couple of potential issues. One being that Black authors are being questioned more than white writers, something that does seem to fit with the anti-DEI narrative that’s being pushed ever harder these days. The other is that Black authors may draw from different storytelling traditions. If the AI detector has been taught based on traditional white narratives, perhaps it sees in Black stories something unusual.

One thing I do know is that I’d love to read Jerry Falade’s book and make up my own mind. Is it ‘genius’ as his former agent claimed, or full of ‘clunky prose’ as one editor said. Perhaps both! Sadly, it seems we might never know.