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Failed Writer's Journey: AI and the Algorithm [1]
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Date: 2025-05-30
Imitative AI prompts are showing up in published works. The authors have apparently used AI to create some work or the polish the work or to make it sound more like existing, more successful authors. Some of the people caught have claimed that the AI prompts were left in by editors, some have ignored the problem, some have admitted that they use AI for idea generation etc. despite the prompts looking like attempts to have AI write their books. But what fascinates me is that these writers appear to all be self-published romance authors. They are at the mercy of an algorithm, and I am less than surprised to find out that they have tried to short-cut the writing process.
We should probably not use the term “the algorithm”. That wording implies that the algorithm is a distinct entity, one with its own quirks and motivations. It is not, of course. It is the creation of human beings, and it produces what those human beings want it to produce — an inducement for authors to publish at breakneck speeds. This, from Amazon’s perspective, makes sense. There is a HUGE romance market out there, and romance readers read a lot and don’t mind if their books tend toward the same tropes. For some readers, as in every other genre, that is part of the charm of the genre — exploring slightly different takes on the same stories that they find enjoyable. Amazon’s algorithm is set up to take advantage of that.
The algorithm pushes authors to produce a lot, knowing that so far that level of production has not driven down readership — quite the opposite in fact. Therefore, the algorithm encourages writers to publish a lot and punishes them if they do not. The readers identify the floor level of quality by buying or not buying books, and they identify the writers that can keep them interested at that rate of publishing by, well, buying or not buying books. The algorithm then is fine tuned to generate results for authors that meat a threshold of quality within certain time limits. And if an author cannot keep that pace up at a quality that readers will reward? Well, there are always new authors.
This is a choice, keep in mind. The algorithm could reward other kinds of metrics, or push newer authors who write slower, but possibly better-quality books. It could, in other words, try to build a bench of stable writers who can have a career at Amazon and still produce higher quality work without burning out. But that is both harder to do and not in their short-term interest. So, we get the Amazon treadmill, running at a pace that is just shy of impossible to sustain and churning through new writers as if they were scratch-off lottery tickets: cheap, disposable, but each one possibly a money maker.
Is it any wonder that authors on that treadmill would turn to imitative AI in the hope of both improving their quality and increasing their output? Their livelihood quite literally depends on finding that balance. Now, writers will never get to be better writers using imitative AI. The imitative AI systems are mere word calculators, providing you only what is statistically likely to fit based on their training data. In a very real sense, they cannot do anything but trend toward the mid, at best. But they can help people produce mid and below faster. Just like the people who wrote the algorithm want.
Weekly Word Count
About 45 pages. Rounding into the last act, and I am convinced that this thing is the worst script ever written and that, frankly, I should be kept away from paper, typewriters, word processing programs, pens, pencils, and crayons.
Well, maybe this massive failure can help my writing group help me find the holes in this story. It also occurs to me that, despite past comments on other projects, I am only funny to look at.
Ahh well. If I wasn’t a failed writer, what would I write about each Friday? Hockey, I suppose, but the Blackhawks are even more depressing than this script draft. Whining about my first-world hobby it is, then!
Have a great weekend, everyone.
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