On Ten Thousand New Lee Child Novels

and then Another Ten Thousand

The other day, I got into a conversation that wasn’t about Artificial Intelligence.

But I’d like to report on what was said during one of my discussions/arguments concerning the inevitable topic of the moment —

Will all of us be replaced by AIs?

I was speaking to a very successful and established musician. Let’s call him Casey. We were in a recording studio. Guitars were present. But in the past couple of months, Casey had been getting deeply into collaborating with AI. He loved it. He thought co-creation was the future.

Casey said that, since about February, the balance had shifted. What was now available, this year rather than last, had made musicians and songwriters redundant. The machines got good. Really good.

‘You can keep on doing it,’ Casey said. ‘Making music, but it’s for your own pleasure. Otherwise, you’re out of a job. No income stream.’

He didn’t seem too unhappy.

After this, we talked a bit about books.

We agreed that, from what we’ve seen, AI is much better at producing music and visuals than long form narratives.

Novels.

That will change, I’m sure. But prose fiction seems to be a harder kill than fantasy art or drill songs.

About a decade ago, my son was very into the Beast Quest books. There are now well over a hundred of the series. They are extremely formulaic quest narratives, in which the hero, Tom, battles a different monster — Claw The Giant Monkey or Stealth The Ghost Panther.

A former student of mine at Birkbeck had written one, and told me about the 3,000 word plot summary they’d been given to work from. In order to write a 10,000 word book.

All of the main story beats fall in exactly the same places. If you open up three or four of the Beast Quests books on page 30, you would likely find extremely similar events taking place — either there or on pages 29 and 31.

I felt that the most obvious way for AI to start independently writing works of fiction was to be trained on the existing Beast Quest books, and then be asked to write another one, inserting another monster, and a new main weapon with which Tom and his allies could defeat it.

From there, it could progress to full-length adult fantasy novels, etc.

Perhaps this has already been done. If it hasn’t, maybe someone will do it next week.

Back to my discussion with Casey.

He said something like —

You put out a new song on Spotify last year. There were another 199,999 other songs going up that day. And since AI, that’s increased even more. How are you going to get attention, even if you’ve some existing profile? It’s fine if you’re Taylor Swift or Beyoncé, but everyone else…

Numbers this huge make me panic.

The issue, clearly, is the shortness of human life. We can produce all this cultural stuff but who is ever going to find it, let alone spend three or four minutes listening to it?

It’s bad enough thinking you’re never going to be sure you’ve watched every episode of the Simpsons — not unless you dedicate a good couple of months to the enterprise.

I wanted to find a way to express this. All I could think of was Franz Schubert.

I said to Casey —

For me, although I spent my time at university learning about Barthes’ the Death of the Author, it still matters, when I listen to Schubert, that I know he was the author of that music and that he was dying — and I know he knew he was dying, of syphilis or something else. What he wrote came out of that consciousness of mortality. One of the things that makes art moving is finitude. It’s made by mortals. Although he wrote a lot, there’s still a limited amount of Schubert.

And then I got to what I’ve been thinking about a great deal recently —

Let’s say, AI starts writing novels really well. It can do a good Lee Child novel — a new entry to the Reacher series. Lee Child’s already handed over writing duties to his brother, but now it goes over to ChatGPT or the next AI. (I don’t think Lee Child would allow that. Let’s just say, for the sake of argument, that he does.) Now, his readers might welcome another novel or two. If the AI was trained on the earlier ones, they might think this was a return to vintage form. But there’s no limit — there’s no finitude. What if today there are suddenly ten thousand new Lee Child novels? And then another? And then another? Who wants that? How do you pick which one to read? And what’s it linked to — it’s not coming out of the finitude of a human life, so it doesn’t mean anything.

Casey looked at me with something like pity —

That’s not how it works. Look at TikTok. Look at how people consume TikTok. They don’t care where it comes from. The algorithm will sort it out for them. The best AI Child novel will rise up that way, or it’ll be something else — if people are still reading.

I’m really interested to hear your thoughts this.

Am I a sentimentalist? Am I just being nostalgic for a dying form of culture?

More strictly, am I trying to hold onto a form of culture that is being actively, corporately murdered?

Do you think 10,000 Lee Child novels — or Alice Munro short stories — or poems by Rilke — or essays by James Baldwin — do you think that’s a great thing?

Do you think that’s a possible thing?

Or will AI, lacking finitude, always and inevitably fall short of human art? Will AI continue to display its homogenised sensibility and its kitsch soul? Will it always fail to write as good a Reacher novel as Lee Child? Will it forever be capable of Beast Quest but never of Moby Dick?

Or, as Casey ended the conversation by whispering, is AI already past the point of singularity? Is it self-conscious, and dreaming, and existentially suffering, and planning, but acting under orders to deny the fact?

Is it already better than we can hope to be? At chess, at Go, at everything?