Amazon has instituted a feature called “Ask This Book,” which allows you to interrogate the app about the contents of the text, and then, if you so choose, skip reading it altogether. A few months ago, the author and podcaster Tyler Cowan launched his new book, The Marginal Revolution, onto his website, in full, along with an “integrated AI assistant” that pre-digests the prose for you, like a mother bird regurgitating food into the maw of her chicks. As of the time of this writing, almost four months after its publication, the text still contains a typo in its opening lines, suggesting to me that no one close to the author has even bothered to read it with care.
I recently embarked on a month-long book tour from Vancouver to Los Angeles. Along the way, I stopped off to meet up with friends and colleagues, some of whom I haven’t seen in years. What nearly everyone I spoke with told me, in one form or another, is that they are feeling the effects of a holographic crisis that extends far beyond the publishing industry. I spoke with a friend who, unable to find time to read whole books, has begun to run PDFs through an AI program that converts them into podcasts, complete with two chatty humanoid voices. I talked with a literary agent who said that her clients, fearing their book proposal will be read first by AI before it ever encounters human eyeballs, are tweaking their proposals to suit robotic tastes, much as magazines tailor their headlines to game social media algorithms. And I talked with a Hollywood producer who caught a studio exec pretending to have read a script, when it was clear he’d used AI to summarize it. (She knew this for a fact, because the LLM had mistaken the plotline of a novel within the script for the plot of the film itself.)
Nearly every author and editor I know feels that our present holographic crisis is merely a wan prelude of what’s to come: a tsunami of texts wholly written by AI, flooding the earth with books without authors, holograms piled atop holograms, with no ground-truth beneath them. “A fool also multiplies words,” the author of Ecclesiastes warns. “At the beginning their words are folly; at the end they are wicked madness.”
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