The last 12 months have been a roller coaster ride for writers. On the one hand, AI has clearly made writing faster and idea generation almost instant. However, it has also seen a massive increase in AI-generated e-books that are starting to seriously muddy the waters. Countless sites (and YouTube tutorials) enable anyone and his dog to automate the ‘tedious’ process of prompting an AI chatbot to write a 200-page e-book, complete with cover art and back blurb, in under a minute.

This has led to a deluge of AI books that rip off existing works and/or just contain bullsh*t content. It has got so bad that Amazon has decided to limit the number of e-books that authors can submit.

Why AI-generated content is a problem

1. Separating the wheat from the chaff becomes harder. There is a reason that writing a good book – fiction or non-fiction – takes years. It involves countless hours of research, editing, writing and rewriting to produce a tome worthy of a reader’s attention. If we shortcut this process, it’ll get harder to separate the good from the goddam awful.
2. The authority problem. People write non-fiction because they want to prove they are subject matter experts. Now that we all theoretically have access to the same global font of all knowledge, anyone can claim this, which makes it harder to know who the real experts are. Even the most prestigious of the big writing-related awards have been forced to add AI disclosure clauses to their entry requirements following revelations of AI usage. All content will now have to pass the AI sniff test.
3. The risk to a book market ‘on its knees’? Pronouncing the death of books has been a perennial event since the advent of successively ‘better’ modes of content delivery. The publishing world was rocked by some shocking but widely disputed stats (50% of books sell fewer than 12 copies) that were revealed during a US lawsuit between the US government and the publishing titan Penguin Random House.

Despite the range of forces that threaten the publishing, sales are steady (around 1 billion a year in the US alone) and physical books are maintaining their post-pandemic resurgence. So whilst AI might enable more bad books to sneak into bookstores and pollute Amazon’s Kindle store, discerning readers will continue to vote with their wallets and quality will out.

Apple releases a revolutionary new device

Anyone who knows me knows that I am an Apple sceptic. I don’t like their constant upgrade cycle and the lemming-like behaviour of Apple fanboys and girls. However, this week Apple blew everyone away at their annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in Cupertino. It was at this event that Steve Jobs famously launched the iPhone, a product that revolutionised smartphone usage and that also revived a company that was on its knees. So, expectations were high and boy did Apple deliver.

Dressed head to toe in Silicon Valley black, Tim Cook strode onstage to wild applause. Silently, he then sat and waited whilst two Apple workers placed what looked like a grey circular disc emblazoned with the Apple logo centre stage. Cook then stood up and moved back on to the spotlighted disc and, like a big tech version of David Blaine, floated slowly upwards until he was floating 10 metres above the disc.

And there he remained, motionless, for exactly 60 seconds, as the audience gasped, cried and some even blasphemed, before he finally broke the silence and uttered what will surely go down in history as the punchline to the greatest product launch in history:

“Ladies and Gentlemen… I give you the iHover.”