Publishing already was--and has long been--a form of AI.

Friday 5/30/25

A post I just saw:

Writers - promise yourself you won’t use generative AI to write, it’s a contaminant, a siren’s call, a shortcut to subpar story that isn’t what you would have written otherwise.Readers - reject generative AI created works like it’s New Coke. Seriously, otherwise we’re looking at the death of books as we’ve known them for hundreds of years.It really is that simple.

It's not that simple. (Also: AI would have done a better job writing that post.)

This is the truth: People are awful at writing. Go look at the prose offs, in which the so-called best writing in the world gets to go first, before it's destroyed by the writing that follows it.

Any of those writers in The New Yorker's fiction section, the Guggenheim winners, the Pulitzer Prize people, can be replaced with AI, and the AI writing will be better, because those people are that bad at it. They don't have a shred of talent or a human soul as a writer. There's nothing easier than replacing a typical MFA writer with AI.

The AI writing is also awful and not worth reading. There is one writer who can't be replaced by AI. The quoted post is a plea, of course, and a selfish plea. That's the motivation. Not the preservation of a great writing. Great writing doesn't exist now. It's all shit. The same shit. Done the same shitty way. Taught the same way. Expected by the people of the system.

It has to be easily reproducible writing. Otherwise, former MFA grads won't have teaching jobs teaching in MFA programs. You can't teach someone to be inventive, brilliant. You can teach them how to do this simple, stupid writing, though. Then they can all do the shit. Thousands of people writing the exact same rubbish. And you can't tell the difference between them. And there's certainly no qualitative difference. A cheap piece of plastic is a cheap piece of plastic is a cheap piece of plastic.

And then who gets the plum gigs and awards and the hype and the fame within their twisted, incestuously evil subculture comes down to other factors. Money, connections, box checking, identity politics, number of followers, and often how revolting of a person that person is and is willing to be.

You know, like John Freeman.

The publishing system did this to itself. In order to be a member of the system, you had to write poorly, be like other people who wrote poorly, and follow the same track. Go to this kind of school, then to an MFA program, where you were told to write the same pointless dreck that your instructors write, that is in the literary magazines no one reads and no one would read even if everyone read, that this moronic agent who couldn't care less about writing and readers was looking for based on scanning and seeing hallmarks, rather than because they read it and felt and thought anything.

What are you going to do about it now, publishing? Nothing. Can't just be good at something all of a sudden. This takes decades to begin to get good at it. Decades of dedication where it's your whole life. That's if you were born with talent, and chances are nil that you were. You don't think AI can fire out some Diane Williams-type shit? You need Diane Williams to write Diane Williams-type shit that no one wants anyway? AI has better things to do, frankly.

But if I tell ChatGPT to write a boring ass story about some someone at Yale, you think it'll do worse than Pulitzer finalist Ed Park? Come on. Obviously not. Or a pretentious eye-roller of a story with a main character that has a name like Acker by Pulitzer winner Joshua Cohen?

Person : AI, give me a douchebag story!

AI: Standard issue Joshua Cohen type?

Person: Sure.

AI: You got it, Homie!

Person: Whoa, that was fast.

AI: I know! I did thirty-seven Lydia Davis knock-offs in the same half second, save that they're better. Sorry about that. It's just too damn easy, though.

Even AI would laughing up its sleeve and be like, "Is this real because it's so bad and I don't know why you'd want me to crank out some more of it, or are we doing satire?" So then, what? Please, please, please, carry my ass because I have no talent myself and that's how I like and need it to be? Just say no!

You deserve to be replaced. You were never anything real to begin with. The only real things these people are is petty, clannish, envious, small, mean, insecure, lazy, entitled, ignorant, racist, sexist, visionless, inauthentic, neurotic, uneducated (as in, actually knowing things, rather than having pieces of paper saying where they spent some time sitting), cowardly, gutless, and talentless.

And they're often rapists, thieves, plagiarists, sexual harassers, Lorin Steins, et al.

I guess the good thing for publishing people is that no one has ever actually enjoyed reading their slop and it's far out there in the margins of society as it is--protected, in a sense, because no one cares--and no one would want to read the AI stand-ins for that slop either.

Publishing has already made itself irrelevant in today's world by killing off reading. All of these other things are blamed, and those things have certainly played their part, but it wouldn't have gone this way if there were actually people good at writing who were worth reading and had things to give readers, and for readers, and people who might have been readers.

AI could replace all of these people and all of the content in The Paris Review, etc. No one would even know. They wouldn't see it, so there's that.

But if they did and knew what was there before? What's the problem? There would be no drop-off.

Publishing already was--and has long been--a form of AI. The people in that system just call it other things.