Not that anyone can tell too closely from my library (which is sorted in what I call ‘autobiographical order’), but I have a marked preference for the works of Anthony Trollope over those of Charles Dickens. I am pretty sure that I have read all of his novels and most of his short stories, although I have probably read just about all of Dickens’ stuff as well.
There were many similarities between the two men. Both were sons of failed barristers who were unable to maintain the genteel lifestyles to which they were accustomed. Both reversed the family misfortunes through their talents as writers. And both were able to write witty and prescient characterisations of deadbeat spongers – in the case of Trollope, the character of Sowerby in Framley Parsonage, and Dickens the character of Skimpole in Bleak House.
Trollope’s reputation faded towards the end of his life due to his honesty. He wrote an autobiography where he gleefully admitted to the joy he got from all the money he earned from his novels, and what he could buy with it, and how he would write a certain number of pages every morning whether or not he felt inspired.
Dickens loved the money even more than Trollope, but never fessed up to it quite so publicly. As he was paid by the word, a lot of his novels (eg David Copperfield and Bleak House) are far longer than they need to be, and the language is unnecessarily verbose as to spoil one’s enjoyment of them.
Dickens also was a sanctimonious prig, as you can tell from reading Hard Times. Skimpole aside (I do love Skimpole, as I have met various deadbeats and spongers in the course of my life), he was also incapable of developing convincing characterisations of the people in his novels.
But for all I can can fault Dickens (and there is a lot as the only few of his books that I have enjoyed are The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, A Christmas Carol, and A Tale Of Two Cities), I can never fault his work ethic, which was every bit as strong as that of Anthony Trollope.
Both wrote every one of their words themselves.
Compare that to Alexandre Dumas, who used a factory of ghost writers to produce most of the works which bear his name. I believe that Dumas created the business model followed in more recent times by those publishers who (a bit like the producers for late rapper Tupac Shakur) keep coming up with new works vaguely attributed to such authors as Tom Clancy or Virginia Andrews.
But now we get to the present day, and the advent of Artificial Intelligence.
Many people believe that Artificial Intelligence is going to end in some sort of apocalyptic nightmare like in the Terminator or Matrix films, where the machines murder or enslave us. I must admit that the idea of a killer robot does leave me rather apprehensive about such advances.
However, most of what AI has achieved so far is to stultify the content of a large part of the internet.
For example, Facebook runs mostly on AI, which polices its rules very arbitrarily, and without room for appeal (try talking to a machine).
It also contains much AI generated content, which mostly consists of stories stolen from actual Reddit forums where the AI creates a monotonous voice which recites a distorted version of those real stories, usually with several key phrases thrown in (common ones I have noticed are ‘my mother says I am tearing the family apart’, ‘I not only survived but thrived’, ‘strap in, this is going to be a roller coaster’, and ‘this led to a whirlwind of emotions’). Such short videos are monetised with lots of ads of course, which is what motivates those people.
Then we get to Amazon, which publishes all sorts of novels electronically on its Kindle platform.
I was a fan of CS Forester’s Horatio Hornblower series, although I never got around to following it up with Patrick O’Brien’s Jack Aubrey series. I did recently finish Julian Stockwin’s more recent but very similar Kydd series. All of these follow seamen in the Golden Age Of Sail (ie the Napoleonic Wars) as they build their careers in the Royal Navy and becoming dashing frigate captains (frigates can have individual adventures, unlike the larger ‘ships of the line’ which float in large boring fleets).
To my surprise, there are an abundance of such series in Amazon Kindle, and I do not believe that most of these have actually been published in hard copy format.
The publication date between each novel in some of these series is remarkably short, making me wonder about how they can write such novels so quickly without an abundance of coffee, sugar, and other stimulants.
Where I really raise my eyebrows is in Military Sci Fi. My favourite military Sci Fi author is Jack Campbell Jnr, whose Lost Fleet series is inspired largely by the Anabasis of Xenophon. Campbell writes, at best, one novel per year.
When browsing Kindle, I find many military Sci Fi series, some of which are many books in succession (we are talking over 20) and where the publication dates are very close together. There is one author who (with one attributed co-author), in the 18 months since I started reading his recently concluded series, has added about 10 books (of 400 pages each) to the series, which ends after 16 books. He also has several other series on the go at the same time.
And I was delighted to learn of the imminent release of the latest instalment in yet another Napoleonic War series recently, which follows a roguish infantryman much in the form of Bernard Cornwell’s highly popular Richard Sharpe series. This is Book 17 in a series where Book 1 was released 4 years ago. Obviously I wonder as to how does someone write so many novels in the one series at a rate of one every 3 months?!?
I do notice that in a lot of these novels, the proof reading leaves quite a lot to be desired – one naval novel series has the hero relying on a solicitor whose name alternates between ‘Snodgrass’ and ‘Snodgravel’, whilst the wife’s maiden name is confused between ‘Morehouse’ and ‘Morehead’. In the peninsula war series, the characters all use the word ‘okay’ constantly – a word which originated in the USA about 35 years later.
So what conclusions do I draw from my observations after 18 months of reading ebooks on Kindle? I strongly suspect that a lot of these series rely on Artificial Intelligence to do a large part of the writing, in order to produce so many novels so quickly.
Unlike Trollope, Dickens, CS Forester, Bernard Cornwell, Julian Stockwin, and even Tom Clancy, who wrote every word of their novels, I believe that this is not the case for these ebooks I see on Kindle. The difference in the quality of the writing, the poor proof reading, the repetitious nature of some of the prose and themes is all indicative that AI has been writing these poorer quality novels.
So this is really the big threat from AI – not that it is going to destroy Mankind as a species, but that it is going to undermine what makes us Human, our creativity and imagination. It threatens our Humanity, not our biological existence.
Lost For Words! 