This is My Lack of Sympathy

Performative AI critics are protesting in vain

Like it or not, AI is here. Everyone has surrendered on the illustrative and music fronts because a) the economics of illustration and the effective performance of the human illustrators are too horrifically bad to survive even halfway-decent AI production and b) the average individual’s ability to appreciate well-composed music and high-fidelity audio is virtually nonexistent.

The success and widespread adoption of AI music was not only predictable, but completely inevitable due to the success of three predecessors: punk music, rap, and the MP3 format. All three are objectively inferior to the current state of AI music and set a standard that proved to be absurdly simple for Suno to surpass. It barely took one year from the initial release of 1.0 to do so. Now more than half of all new music that is being professionally distributed is AI-generated.

Consider this Suno 5.5 track, a new mix of The Long and Lonesome Skyway, which is wildly superior in all three of the aforementioned categories. You don’t have to like the song at all to observe that a) the musical artistry and lyrics are better than every single organic punk song ever recorded, b) there is far more melody, musical complexity, and fewer derivative elements than in every single organic rap track ever recorded, and c) the 44.1 Khz CD-quality audio contains more information and sounds better than every single MP3 track ever sold.

On the long and lonesome skyway, where the shattered vessels go

Astro-martyrs lead the way to the worlds we’ll never know

In the seashell, in the circuit, every fractal holds the whole

On that long and lonesome skyway lost between machine and soul.

These things aren’t debatable or subjective. They are objective, observable, and easily provable facts. You would have to be comprehensively ignorant of the relevant subjects to even try to dispute them. Contemplate, by way of comparison, the chorus of the song deemed to be the #1 punk song of all time, Anarchy in the UK by the Sex Pistols.

‘Cause I, I wanna be anarchy

In the city

‘Cause I wanna be anarchy

It’s the only way to be

I shall refrain from subjecting the reader to the illiterate gruntings that presently pass for popular rap “lyrics”. Either way, you can see that clearing those particular hurdles of organic human creativity was never going to be a serious technological challenge.

Now, we’re not there yet with AI writing. This is partly because high-quality fiction is not a priority on the part of any AI company and the very hit-or-miss LLM models we’ve got to date are just consequential artifacts of advances on other fronts; no one is training an AI to optimize the writing of fiction because there isn’t enough money in it. And it’s also because an alliance of publishers, professional writers, and wannabe writers with a modest collective microphone and media connections are waging a relentless, though utterly futile, war against it.

I’m not unsympathetic to their concerns, which are, for the most part, real. On the one hand, the traditional publishing gatekeepers have lost their power. On the other, Amazon and its algorithm has even more, and the tidal wave of supply that began with the creation of the international ebook market and KDP self-publishing is being significantly exacerbated by AI.

It took me seven years to write A Sea of Skulls, a very good book with 104 reviews and an average rating of 4.7. It didn’t take me seven days to write Out of the Shadows with AI assistance, which has outsold its predecessor by a factor of 4.2x over the first six months of this year, has 98 reviews, and an identical average rating of 4.7.

So there is absolutely nothing anyone can say, no amount of posturing, no amount of public shaming, no amount of aggressive anti-AI campaigning that is ever going to convince me that it is in my interest to give up one of the most powerful tools in the literary artist’s arsenal.

What people tend to forget is that AI isn’t magic, anymore than a typewriter or a word processor is magic. AI absolutely requires the spark of human imagination and creativity, because without it, it inevitably descends into model collapse. There is no shortage of terrible AI slop, but that is because writers are either the sort of writers who produce terrible organic writing on their own or they are failing to use the tool properly.