Human experience is the totality of what it means to live — our interactions, our emotions, our thoughts and perceptions as we go through our day to day lives. This experience is what shapes how we understand ourselves and the world around us.
Reading is one of many ways we enrich our human experience, just as art is a reflection of one’s human experience. When we pick up a book, be it a sci-fi odyssey that takes place in another world, a memoir that hits close to home, or a history book, we are reading to expand our knowledge, to understand and empathize with another person’s experience in the world.
Artificial Intelligence is infiltrating the book writing and publishing business more quickly than I could have imagined. Self-published books are flooding marketplaces, and the ability to differentiate between an A.I.-written and a human-authored book is becoming more challenging as there is no obligation to disclose who wrote the book. That scares me.
I don’t want to read about human emotions and experiences from something that is not actually human. The beauty of reading has always been in knowing that one human being has put these words on paper so that they could share their world view in one way or another. If a machine is emulating a person, my own emotions and empathy for the work will be dulled knowing that it didn’t come from a human brain and a set of uniquely human experiences. A machine can scoop up the world’s knowledge and spit it back out without the hard work of sitting at a desk and plotting, character building, and finding just the right words to build a work of art. The final product is not as admirable; the element of human achievement is gone.
If we don’t champion human work, then authors and the publishing world will become irrelevant. The creativity and innovation reflecting our human experience and that builds connections between us will be lost.
Christine Bell
Longer term, I worry about what happens to original thought and creativity when we are no longer doing the work but allowing A.I. to do it for us. If A.I. engines are trained from the breadth of content that already exists in the world, we lose the potential for entirely new and wholly unconsidered ways of looking at our world. Art has evolved over the centuries; its forms and messages reflecting and redefining cultures, societies and norms. Our society could not have evolved as it has without human creativity. If human art isn’t needed anymore and machines take over those creations, what is our real purpose in the world? Maybe A.I. can create a more grammatically correct sentence but is that sentence going to contain a new idea? There is also a huge risk that it spreads misinformation as it regurgitates web content that is untrue.
The publishing industry is threatened as well. The long-term health of the industry, and authors’ livelihoods are undergoing transformation. If we don’t champion human work, then authors and the publishing world will become irrelevant. The creativity and innovation reflecting our human experience and that builds connections between us will be lost. I am not willing to let that happen.
As you explore your own thoughts and feelings about A.I.’s impact on the world and publishing, I recommend a few human-authored books.
“The God Test: Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning” by Robert Wright captures the power behind the A.I. revolution. The book argues that we are about to witness the most abruptly dramatic social transformation in the history of our species.
“The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State” by Jill Lepore. Lepore argues that political campaigns, awash in fake bots, have been reduced to attention-mining algorithms, while media corporations dictate public discourse, and the era of the liberal nation-state seems to be coming to a rapid end, replaced by billionaire technocrats reliant on autocracy and the tools of A.I.
“A.I. Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can’t, and How to Tell the Difference”by Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor. By revealing AI’s limits and real risks, this book will help you make better decisions about whether and how to use AI at work and home.
Ultimately, A.I. is here to stay. It will have sweeping impacts on science, cultural norms, governments, politics, labor, ethics, our ways of connecting with each other and our values systems. We can’t stop A.I., and we recognize that A.I. technology is advancing many facets of life. But as readers, let’s choose books that have been written by human beings — people who have lived triumphs and failures, known true love and sadness, ached with jealousy and shimmered with joy. Let’s read books written by people who, even with all their differences, are just like us. If we don’t take this moment now to protect the sharing of human experience, we will lose it forever.
The American Bookseller Association has identified six A.I. issues for independent bookstores that impact the industry and readers alike:
•Book Ratings & Censorship: ABA opposes any state efforts to use AI to rate books for obscenity and to affect bans.
•Bias, Transparency and Ethical Accountability: ABA urges lawmakers to advocate for ethical AI policies that ensure transparency and accuracy while preventing biases in AI learning models.
•Data Privacy and Security: ABA supports national data privacy laws to avoid a patchwork of state regulations.
•Intellectual Property and Copyright Infringement AI models trained on copyrighted books without author consent is unethical and could be ruled illegal pending the outcome of numerous court cases currently in play.
•Competition and Market Fairness: Lawmakers and regulators must enforce antitrust policies and fair competition regulations to prevent big tech dominance.
•Regulatory Walls and Compliance Burdens: The ABA opposes any AI regulations that favor large corporate retailers by unduly creating compliance challenges for small businesses.
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