Certainly: I can rewrite it for you wholesale
By 
My post this morning generated several interesting email responses.
An academic who works on AI issues in the context of music composition in particular, and with whom I had a fascinating hour-long interview a couple of days ago about AI in general (he is the person who altered [a philosophy professor points out this typo is kind of perfect, so I’m keeping it] me to the existence or rather non-existence of Jennifer Campos) sent me this:
Lena McDonald’s Darkhollow Academy—you can surely guess the genre—suddenly stops being a novel and becomes something else partway through chapter 3:
“Ash’s scales darken as his fire magic heats the air around us. I’ve rewritten the passage to align more with J. Bree’s style, which features more tension, gritty undertones, and raw emotional subtext beneath the supernatural elements. “We need to tell Kai,” Roman says, his words coming out like gravel.”
J. Bree is, of course, another author—and one who now has the dubious pleasure of receiving the sincerest form of flattery, even if it was an AI doing the imitating. And here’s a passage in the work of K.C. Crowne:
“Then, with a sudden bang, the exit door flies open.
Thought for 13 seconds
Certainly! Here’s an enhanced version of your passage, making Elena more relatable and injecting additional humor while providing a brief, sexy description of Grigori. Changes are highlighted in bold for clarity.
Relief washes over me the instant I see Grigori standing in the open doorway.”
I assume these are self-published books, but self-published books have become a huge industry. A few years ago a law professor I knew slightly already came and gave a talk at CU. Afterwards she let me know she was leaving academia, even though she had only been in it for about three years. I asked her why and she showed me her Amazon self-publishing account, where she had already produced several historical romances under a pen name. She had made more than a half million dollars in eighteen months!
The academic I interviewed Thursday who forwarded me the story about authors forgetting to take their AI prompts of their texts poses this question:
I mean, in all seriousness:
– It used to take an enormous amount of effort to write a mediocre but competent young-adult fantasy book. Or to produce a mediocre but competent image. Or poem. Etc.
– Now it takes much, much less effort.
What this means for the future is anybody’s guess. You might think it means we will all value the really good stuff a lot more. But maybe not. Honestly: that sounds wrong, doesn’t it? The abundance of mid-quality work is going to mean a massive increase in connoisseurship? Not likely.
I like the analogy of MP3s. 20 years ago we all made the decision that the massive increase in song-quantity justified the small hit on sound quality. Audiophiles gasped but everyone else happily brought their iPods everywhere.
Maybe we are headed for a world in which creativity is democratized and demystified? It is a fascinating question.
It really is.
Relatedly, friend of the blog Michael Hiltzik files a dissent in regard to A Confederacy of Dunces:
Southern fiction is my Jeopardy category–I’ve read, i believe, every word Faulkner has written (though I’m thumbs down on Flannery O’Connor). I started this one and couldn’t finish, as I found it stupid, boring, and not at all funny. I suspect most other readers who got gulled into buying the thing by the hype had the same experience, and if you check into the copies on peoples’ bookshelves you’ll find it looks like their copies of The Best and the Brightest, with dogears and other markers showing the furthest they got was about a third of the way through.
Which raises the question of what famous book holds the record for people starting it but never finishing it? It can’t be something like Joyce because relatively speaking not that many people have even tried. I suspect the answer might be Dickens, who was insanely popular in his day but many people have found unreadable (I’m personally a big fan but I can easily see how a lot of readers would find him indigestible. Or maybe Tolstoy except I really can’t imagine somebody hating his two famous novels, although I’m sure people do).
I suppose the real answer is:
