In the future, we won’t buy books. We will buy AI models trained on a specific author or series. These models will be branded and properly licensed, and will be capable of generating infinite numbers of books in a specific style.
Imagine you’re a long-haul space trucker. You’ve just gotten to the end of the last book in your favorite series – the final book of your favorite author. Instead of despairing, you simply prompt your Author™-branded AI to write the next book in the series.
In 2023, someone Used ChatGPT to Finish the Game of Thrones Book Series. While in this case, I’m sure it took a lot of work to get ChatGPT to put out exactly what the user wanted, and it probably required a lot of editing and human intervention to get the plot to carry through, they still did it.
That, of course, led to a desperate clawing of fear from a consortium of human authors who are slow to embrace the future. They are – maybe rightfully – angry that the model was trained on their original material without their consent.
Now imagine if this had been done with the author’s consent, perhaps as part of a lucrative licensing deal. Imagine if the model were trained around understanding what that author feels makes a good plot arc, and were finely tuned to output material that lived up to the standards of this specific human author.
While Grimes has been considered cutting-edge in her stance on embracing AI fakes of her music, she might have actually found the way forward for all types of creatives; embrace it or become irrelevant.
I, for one, welcome the future where a large language model can be trained and tuned well enough to output material that lives up to an author’s standards. And authors should also welcome a future where they can take a slice of the credit and royalties that will come along with it.