When I was about nine, I read Watership Down, and it became my whole world. Everything was rabbits and warrens. Then I saw a copy of it in a bookstore with a starburst on the cover that said “More than 1 million books sold!” and for a moment, I saw my future…
I knew for the split second before I realized it meant COPIES of the SAME book that I would spend my life reading the practically infinite number of sequels to Watership Down.
The come down from that split second… has stayed with me for decades…
But now, I can see us approaching it.
Maybe my 9-year-old self wasn’t as hilariously wrong as I’ve thought. Maybe it really was a vision of the future, just farther in the future than I realized.
Because once AI cracks novel writing — and it will — that’s what writing will be.
Creating space opera surf rock albums with Claude and Suno is basically just carefully choosing what exactly you want to listen to, describing it, and then being able to recognize it when you see and hear it.
Creation has always been about selection…
Choose what you want to say, choose how to say it, choose the first word, then the next and the next…
With AI you simply get to make selections in larger chunks. Instead of which word…
Which paragraph…
Which chapter…
Which book?
It’s not a question of if, but when.
For me, right now, it’s still easier to write fiction myself. And I’m sure there are still people who can write a song more easily by picking up a guitar and simply singing it.
But it doesn’t really matter to me how a song was written if I enjoy listening to it…
And I don’t think it’s going to be very many more years before writers insisting that they write all of their words themselves without help from an AI will feel more like an interesting curiosity (“Oh, that’s how it was written?”) than some sort of moral imperative.