What’s the point of an AI novel?

{"text":[[{"start":5.43,"text":"Last week, I went on a mission, and it was vital I didn’t get caught. That was the feeling, as I made my way to a shopping centre in Canary Wharf, and suppressed an apology at the till. I was in one of the few Waterstones in London that had a copy of the horror novel Shy Girl in stock. The book was technically not available for sale, having been pulled by its publisher after allegations that it was written using AI. But there was still the odd bookshop yet to remove the title from its shelves. "}],[{"start":40.93,"text":"The clandestine nature of my trip was inevitable — earlier in the month I had been a signatory of Don’t Steal This Book, a book printed with around 10,000 authors’ names, in a copyright campaign against AI being “built on stolen work”, without “permission or payment”. Reading a book because it was written by artificial intelligence was not a message I wanted to convey, not without the context."}],[{"start":68.12,"text":"My aversion to AI being used to write novels began as theoretical but it turns out it’s also personal. I’m one of many whose work has been absorbed into AI training machines without permission — my novels are in LibGen, the database Meta used to train AI, which consists of pirated books. (And that’s just what I know about.) My assumption before I started reading Shy Girl was that AI fiction would lack structure or pulse, would be unable to sustain story or build tension, and could not achieve genuine beauty . . . well, you know what they say about assumptions. Except, in this instance, forget what they say, because it’s all true. Shy Girl is desperately dull. Human choice sounds like surprise, diversion — instead, you can hear AI’s metronome. The prose smacks of mechanical process. (The novel is shaped by AI but the semantics are disputed: the author, Mia Ballard, denies using AI herself — she told the New York Times that someone she hired to edit the novel, when it was originally self-published, had used AI.) "}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":140.51,"text":"It’s difficult to detect AI when it overlaps with bad writing but, with knowledge of the cause, I can read the novel and see the metallic gleam, the robotic tightness. The book is wrought by formula and is actively hard to read as a result. This is present in the structure, and in its severe lack of narrative tension, but it’s there at sentence level too. Turn to any page and you’ll find at least one three-example list. Two pages at random: her hair is “wild, spiraling, unpredictable”; her dinner is “a roasted chicken breast, a half-cup of steamed broccoli, and a neat, compact mound of white rice”. In isolation, inoffensive; in the context of its relentlessness, fatiguing. Even a bad writer would eventually make a different decision — it is tiring to make the same choice again and again. AI doesn’t tire: adjective, synonym, synonym. Repeat. "}],[{"start":204.89999999999998,"text":"Is this me locating the influence of AI, or my own innate snobbery? I will say that, after Shy Girl, I experimentally turned to romantasy author Sarah J Maas, reading the first few pages of one of her novels. In contrast to Shy Girl, here I found relief. It was paced by a human. Or at least, that was how it seemed to me. One of the peculiarities of reading is that the role of the author in the reader’s mind is an element of the experience."}],[{"start":241.23999999999998,"text":"What’s the point of an AI novel? For the prospective author, it’s clear, although I don’t empathise: monetise the mundane fruits of an AI tool. But for the reader, the thrill of a gimmick won’t endure when you actually start reading. You can’t program AI to write a good book. The answer, for example, to how to structure a novel varies infinitely and is determined by the intricacies of plot, theme, tone, character, whim. Then there’s the why of it all, the author’s intentions and the particularity of their perspective. A valuable novelistic choice isn’t objective: it might be the ruin of a different novel."}],[{"start":285.94,"text":"Writing is an oddball’s pursuit. There is nothing straightforward about it. One of the draws of reading is experiencing the results — you’re animating somebody else’s carefully wrought imagination. With good writing, you begin to believe. Not always literally — although some readers do assume the work is confessional simply because it appears real to them — but knowing the creator exists in turn validates the investment. Where does that go with AI? It can be an extraordinary feeling, to be captivated by a story and know that it is the result of the eccentricities of one person’s mind and their dedication to an idea. Even that simplifies the experience. It’s tangibly important in non-fiction. The upset around Raynor Winn and The Salt Path was the betrayal of contract between reader and writer. The memoir relied on the investment in reality; without it, the story wasn’t worth the reader’s time."}],[{"start":351.09000000000003,"text":"We tend to see creative work as the “product” it has become, but the layers are embedded within. I have no interest in a tool that skips the process. Even when I’m not writing, something is happening, background activity that continues to infuse the pot when I return. (That’s probably the right metaphor: a slowly matured sauce versus a few ingredients served up half-cooked.) The interest in AI writing novels is just another illustration of our efficiency-loving, conveyor-belt society. The threat of AI taking novelists’ jobs is not really about the prospect of it cracking how to write fiction. It is the danger that we stop caring about good writing at all."}],[{"start":401.22,"text":"Rebecca Watson is a commissioning editor and writer for FT Weekend and author of the novels ‘I Will Crash’ and ‘little scratch’"}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":410.96000000000004,"text":"Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram, Bluesky and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning"}],[{"start":429.90000000000003,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1775350880_9664.mp3"}