On Monday I found a message on Kindle Direct Publishing from the….hang on, let me get my reading glasses….Global Guild of AI Authors, or the GGAA.  It/they/he or she did use rather pompous pseudo-legalistic language;

“This letter is a formal demand from the GLOBAL GUILD OF AI AUTHORS (GGAA) to Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) to immediately cease discriminatory practices, technological gatekeeping, and targeted bias against independent authors who use AI tools in the creative process.”

So, stop being mean to ‘authors’ (note my ironic punctuation) who use Artificial Intelligence.  I did think, is this actually satire?  Back in 1943, Noel Coward wrote a song called ‘Don’t Let’s Be Beastly to the Germans.’

Don't let's be beastly to the Germans

When our victory is ultimately won,

It was just those nasty Nazis who persuaded them to fight

Maybe the GGAA (Shouldn’t it be the GGAIA?) is channelling Noel Coward.  At the time many thought he was being serious and he came close to the 1940s equivalent of cancellation.  Churchill loved it though and saw it for the irony it was.  When he saw Coward perform it he asked him to sing it again.  Anyway, no the GGAA is in deadly earnest;

“AI is here. It empowers creators around the world — especially those silenced or excluded by the traditional gatekeepers. It is time for Amazon KDP to stand on the right side of creative history.”

Being on the wrong side of history is a lonely place to be.  Look at the bloke who told the Beatles guitar bands were on the way out or the IBM executive who claimed there would only be a market for six computers in the whole world.  

The Global Guild (Guild, there’s posh) says opposition to Artificial Intelligence discriminates against “authors with disabilities who rely on AI for accessibility.” 

No it doesn't. You couldn't get much more disabled than Professor Stephen Hawking and yet he published numerous erudite books without AI. And if he did use Artificial Intelligence his work would be stealing the work of other scientists. GGAA’s  argument does not get round the problem that AI is using other peoples' work.  I have worked with brain injury patients who have extremely limited physical function and no verbal communication. They can use equipment like a Lightwriter which can convert eye movement to text. It is slow, but what they write is entirely their own work. 

In the 1980s, an Irish writer called Christopher Nolan wrote three books - Under the Eye of the Clock, Dam-Burst of Dreams and the Banyan Tree - despite having severe cerebral palsy. He created a system where he could communicate letter-by-letter to his mother, Bernadette, who transcribed his dictation. I interviewed her and it was an insight into what could be achieved. Again, painstaking, but entirely his own work.  Anyone who has seen My Left Foot, with Daniel Day Lewis, will know about Christy Brown, another Irish writer with cerebral palsy. Joey Deacon - cerebral palsy again - wrote his life story with limited verbal communication or physical co-ordination. Jean-Dominique Bauby wrote the Diving Bell and the Butterfly despite having locked-in syndrome following a stroke.

So the argument that AI helps people with disabilities doesn't stand up to evidence; people have been writing original material in spite of the most limiting conditions - years before AI. Yes it is hard, but the point is it can be done. And their work is their own.

Before published and unpublished authors start cheering, your arguments are not watertight, either.  Creatives claim their work has been stolen to train Large Language Models.  True, LLMs have raided the internet to lift creative works wholesale.  But haven’t writers and artists always relied on what has gone before?  Isn’t all creative work an iteration of something else?  Ian McEwan admitted Atonement leaned heavily on LP Hartley’s Go Between.  Orwell’s 1984 was a re-working of Yevgeny Zamyatin’s 1921 novel, We.  Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy built on ideas in Dimension of Miracles by Robert Sheckley.  Did Richard Osman invent cosy crime?  And publishers are guilty of pumping out bandwagon books in an attempt to cash in on a hit.

Is AI doing anything which humans haven’t been doing for years?  Everything is a take on something else.  It’s how human knowledge evolves.  My own first book, written on an Amstrad and now thankfully in a landfill site somewhere, was ‘inspired’ by Richard Rayner’s LA Without a Map (which was made into a 1998 film starring Johnny Depp).  Mea Culpa, let he (or she) who is without sin, etc. 

It’s not just the arts; science has always been a constant process of building upon earlier work.  This is another problem with writers and artists leading the counter revolution against AI; it gives the impression there is only one Artificial Intelligence, a voracious beast which will kill all creativity.  AI has many forms, not least bringing huge advances in science and medicine.  AI played a role in helping develop an anti-Covid vaccine so quickly by collating and sifting mountains of data.  

When I was in hospital once I overheard a nurse vainly trying to persuade a patient in the next bed to take Warfarin, a blood thinner to help prevent another stroke.  Warfarin was developed from rat poison.  It isn’t rat poison, it’s a beneficial derivative.  But this guy was adamant he wasn’t going to take rat poison.  This is a law of unintended consequences with a broad brush stroke antipathy to Artificial Intelligence; all is bad. 

To end with a quote from Shakespeare, Act 2, Scene 2 of Hamlet;  "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so."

(By the way, according to the Royal Shakespeare Company Hamlet was based on Thomas Kyd’s “revenge drama, The Spanish Tragedy,  a huge theatrical hit in the late 1580s and 90s, delighting the contemporary taste for intrigue, bloodshed and ghostly presences.”  Just saying).