Cultural Impacts of Machine Assisted Writing

When you read a novel, you navigate a maze of meaning, stringing together a chain of logical connections while drawn forward by your desire to confirm your speculations about what will come next in the chain. To avoid boring the reader, the writer searches for the shortest path between two points in such a maze of speculation and this gives the process of writing or optimizing a book a computational structure much like the traveling salesman problem in which you calculate the shortest distance to connect a set of points.

It is related to the problem of renormalization.

The solutions don’t always converge on the same answer and when the number of locations is large, there is no way to prove that a given answer is the best. The salesman may have just stumbled upon a local minimum when a global minimum has yet to be found.

In the language of computer science, this problem is known as NP hard because the number of steps required to solve the problem scales with 2 raised to the power of the number of elements in the system. With certain approximations, it is possible to make the calculation scale with the number of elements squared, but this typically constrains the result to a lower dimensional space, for example, by focusing only on the points that lie in a certain 2-D plane within a 3-D space.

Just as each traveling salesman calculation may extract a different plane of optimization from a given set of points, a reader of a novel may extract a different chain of meaning from a given book. Some readers may extract multiple chains at the same time and enjoy the dissonance conflicting perspectives entail.

What I’ve found to be true about books produced through software products that strip out and repurpose lengthy chains of events from other books is that they often leave the reader disappointed by a sense that the product was derivative and lacked depth. The reader notices that multiple dimensions or chains of meaning are lacking — as would be expected of software-produced stories that take cross-sections of other books and flesh them out with filler material.

As books produced with the assistance of software products begin to compete with human produced work, in a marketplace warped by fake reviews and large advertising budgets, one would hope that human produced work would have an advantage, but this is not the case when large publishing companies embrace books that have been produced with the aid of software packages, enabling less talented writers or bestsellers who have run out of steam to create products that have the look and feel of five star writing while delivering a two star experience overall.

You can see these reactions to factory produced literature all over Goodreads when the readers who haven’t been paid to review the books all complain about the same things: lack of depth, boring, simplistic plotting, lack of character development.

Consider a recent historical fiction novel about the life of Hedy Lamar.

“The only woman in the room” was how one of my female scientist characters described herself in my 2018 book.

The readers just couldn’t understand how the author had managed to make such a fascinating, intelligent woman sound so boring and cardboard.

I just found this generally underwhelming. I used to read a lot of historical fiction, but over the last couple of years I feel like every time I read a new novel, it lacks the depth I am hoping for. I’m not sure if it’s just the books I’ve happened to choose lately, or if popular historical fiction is getting lighter.

The protagonist of this book, although based on an interesting real life figure, just fell flat, lacking true emotional depth. Most of her decisions, thoughts and feelings traced back to a few underlying things. 1. She hates that everyone sees her as a pretty face and fails to want to know the person behind that façade, and 2. She feels guilty about a decision she made and wants to make amends. These are fine character motivations, but everything came back to them, and the story, and her motivations started feeling stale very quickly.

I also would have liked a little more historical/political depth. Someone like Ken Follett does a good job of creating interesting characters and getting you really attached to them, and then immersing you in a historical period and really making you care. I have a history minor, and focused mostly on 20th century history in school, and when I read Follett’s Century trilogy, I became truly invested, even though I knew what was going to happen.

https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/1861824-megan-lyons

Other reviewers complained that the book had more commentary on the color of the flowers given to her by her husband or the style of her dresses than on what went on in her head.

The first 150 pages read like a romance novel turned domestic drama, then her life’s work from her arrival in Hollywood to America’s entrance into WWII is condensed to 100 pages ending abruptly in 1950 most of which is tripe missing, and often changing, some salient facts. In addition to spread-spectrum technology, she is also credited with a number of other inventions and Howard Hughes put a team of scientists at her disposal. All of this is given short shrift with one sentence. One sentence! This book fails on so many levels, the most disheartening of which is that it misses an opportunity to provide a portrait of a woman ahead of her time. Hedy deserves to be known, but not as the vacuous femme fatale Benedict depicts in this book.

https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/22727329-victoria

That really isn’t acceptable, especially since this author also wrote a historical fiction novel about Einstein’s first wife that many complained didn’t do justice to the way a physicist really thinks.

Full disclosure: I am a physicist who wrote a novelette and a popular Quora answer on the same topic back in February 2017. This book was published six months later and, given the speed enhancement offered by modern writing tools, it isn’t unreasonable to suggest that the popularity of my Quora answer might have stimulated the rapid production of this book, perhaps by allowing the author to automatically draw from earlier works on the theme. There was clearly a market for the topic, after all. I have yet to read it and dread forcing myself to do so.

It just doesn’t make sense to allow people with access to powerful novel writing tools to dominate our perception of history, churning out novel after novel without any consideration for the effect they might have on the historical record. I wouldn’t be surprised if these books were all coming out of the same factory.. perhaps the same factory that produced this other historical fiction monstrosity in which the author took the artistic liberty of having a soldier scribble out the equations for General Relativity while on the front lines of WW1 and then mail them to Einstein.

Then there is the bestselling New Zealand author’s romance novel set in Auschwitz that got basic historical facts wrong.

I know that 50 Shades style Stockholm Syndrome romances are all the rage, but “When a Jew loves a Nazi” goes way too far.

I have a theory that books that are in terrible taste only make it into the mainstream when tasteless writers are given access to powerful marketing and writing tools that allow them to cloak themselves in words that give the appearance of a high quality product despite low-quality thinking. This is what happens when stolen, AI mined prose is fed into the pen of an absolute idiot.

I’ll wrap this post up by revisiting a book that has all of the hallmarks of machine assisted writing. It has a sequel and I’d like to find out if the author continued mining the same body of work for material.

In my earlier analysis, I concluded that the author of The Loop had used the plot of Never Let Me Go for the first half and the plot of The Maze Runner for the second half. He had spiced up the world building by using a lot of the same, generic sci-fi elements that I used, but there were enough plot overlaps with my book that I was suspicious about how this book was constructed. When such a list gets long enough, it looks like a person was influenced by a single resource rather than the trends of the genre.

My Adorable Apotheosis (version 2) vs. The Loop

1. The story is set in the not too distant future where scientists don’t care about people and use people in their torture experiments. The protagonist is assigned a number as part of his/her employment/imprisonment. (Oliver p. 6) (Hacker p. 4)
2. There are government subsidies for jobs for regular humans because robots are competition. (Oliver p. 8) (Hacker p. 32)
3. There is a class of enhanced humans that have many advantages. People get biomechanical implants and there are cyborgs. (Oliver p. 8, 15) (Hacker p. 26, 33)
4. The protagonist is being tortured every day in a way that sounds pointless. Books are the only respite from the torture. (Oliver p. 9) (Hacker p. 37)
5. X has contact to the other inmates/employees but they are hostile and threatening. X understands that he/she has been placed in this environment solely to be used by another class of people for their enjoyment. (Oliver p. 11, 13) (Hacker p. 35, 36)
6. Specific, classic book titles are mentioned as X’s only solace in this isolating environment. (Oliver p. 17) (Hacker p. 37)
7. X primarily interacts with a kindly female mentor and a computer control system. (Oliver p. 17, 23) (Hacker p. 67)
8. X often thinks of a sister he/she will never see again. (Oliver p. 17) (Hacker p. 38)
9. The system seems friendly but X realizes that there is an evil presence within it. (Oliver p. 20) (Hacker p. 41, )
10. The world outside is a perfectly engineered imitation of nature. (Oliver p. 27) (Hacker p. 50)
11. X is extremely bored by his/her life. It is torture and he/she dreams of escape to an imaginary world connected to his/her childhood with a sister and a father. (Oliver p. 30, 45) (Hacker p. 38, )
12. X attends a night time social gathering with other people his/her age. (Oliver p. 39) (Hacker p. 45)
13. There is an interaction between a new girl and a group of older inmates. She is given a book to help her pass the time. (Oliver p. 50, 53) (Hacker p. 37)
14. The AIs are subject to ethical rules, but there are ways around them. They can lie. (Oliver p. 56) (Hacker p. 84)
15. They put monitoring implants into the bodies of the prisoners/employees. (Oliver p. 60) (Hacker p. 172)
16. Rich people can use AR lenses that make the ugly world prettier. (Oliver p. ) (Hacker p. 26)
17. They are using unwanted children for medical procedures. (Oliver p. 60) (Hacker p. 165)
18. The highly controlled and regulated future world came about after a great cataclysm involving war. (Oliver p. 63) (Hacker p. 232, 297)
19. X is surprised with a life-threatening situation that has the potential to change his/her status within the prison/lab. It is heralded with dimming lights and a countdown to disaster. (Oliver p. 68, 75) (Hacker p. 55)
20. X eats noodles – the only food mentioned in this book. (Oliver p. 83) (Hacker p. 172)
21. X gets advice from a crazy stranger on a train. (Oliver p. 91, 96) (Hacker p. 159)
22. X does something drastic and dangerous, pretending to be someone he/she is not to avoid having a medical procedure. X ends up having a horrific medical procedure anyways. It later turns out that the procedure gave X the ability to heal rapidly. (Oliver p. 105-114) (Hacker p. 172-176)
23. When X is returned to the facility, everything is in chaos and X doesn’t know what is going on. The female mentor advises X to be careful. The lab/prison is under threat due to a madness that is spreading throughout the city. (Oliver p. 120, 124) (Hacker p. 210)
24. Many of X’s friends are executed by the crazed, female leader of the facility. (Oliver p. 129, 132) (Hacker p. 217)
25. X leaves the lab/prison and enters a cruel world with no support system. X enters the home of a family that has self destructed. (Oliver p. 143) (Hacker p. 221)
26. There has been some sort of attack on the facility that deprives it of function. It disables the female mentor. (Oliver p. 143) (Hacker p. 242)
27. The protagonist is almost eaten alive by animals. (Oliver p. 147) (Hacker p. 243)
28. X watches as towers thunderously fall to the earth. The city is being destroyed. (Oliver p. 150) (Hacker p. 238)
29. X visits an abandoned house that represents X’s idea of paradise. It is a hopeless illusion. (Oliver p. 151) (Hacker p. 162, 249)
30. X revisits memories of his/her family and his/her damaged mother. Life was tragic. (Oliver p. 152) (Hacker p. 163, 188)
31. X sees that the city has been taken over by crazed, killer zombies. (Oliver p. 157) (Hacker p. 243)
32. X visits a childhood climbing tree, but under unhappy circumstances. (Oliver p. 158) (Hacker p. 165)
33. X gathers supplies to break back into the lab/prison via a series of tunnels. (Oliver p. 160) (Hacker p. 233)
34. Part of the break in entails opening a heavy metal hatch. And enduring strong gusts of wind. (Oliver p. 172) (Hacker p. 234)
35. A woman who has lost her arm and is bleeding to death has her life saved by a drug/procedure that puts her into a slowed state of hibernation. (Oliver p. 174) (Hacker p. 174)
36. X is gathered together with all of the people he/she knows from prison/work. They are dangerously surrounded by animals that will eat them. (Oliver p. 176) (Hacker p. 242)
37. X is aware that a person has been eaten alive by animals as a result of the breakdown of the city/lab/prison. (Oliver p. 178) (Hacker p. 244)
38. As a result of their imprisonment, many of the people in the group are crazy and defenseless, focusing on irrelevant, impossible things. (Oliver p. 185) (Hacker p. 247)
39. A woman runs off into a dangerous space even though she has been warned of the danger. She is hopeful and stupid. She is later eaten alive by animals. (Oliver p. 188) (Hacker p. 248)
40. X has surrounded himself with psychopaths and watches as a screaming woman is brutalized and murdered. (Oliver p. 193) (Hacker p. 252)
41. X’s friend recounts a story about a young, non-tech (Natural) woman she knew who got hired as a home help aid for a rich family and they abused her sexually, pimping her out to friends. (Oliver p. 217) (Hacker p. 227)
42. They survive and escape by climbing up on top of the city/prison walls. (Oliver p. 226) (Hacker p. 242)
43. Instead of sticking with the group, a stupid woman chooses to go to a dangerous place filled with animals that eat her alive. (Oliver p. 227) (Hacker p. 248, 256)
44. Soldiers show up to restore order at the same time that X leaves the city/prison/lab. (Oliver p. 230) (Hacker p. 246, 257)
45. There is a kindly, sane janitor character who rolls with the times and that all of the people in the city have succumbed to a madness. (Oliver p. 264) (Hacker p. 41)
46. There is a scene of a sunny day beside a freshwater swimming location with lots of happy people. (Oliver p. 279) (Hacker p. 27)
47. X is going crazy and losing a sense of who or where he/she is because of drugs. X hallucinates other versions of his/her idealized life until he/she is shocked back to reality. (Oliver p. 282) (Hacker p. 45)
48. X is threatened by a young man who is obsessed with him/her. There is a sexual aspect to this threat. The threat from this young man is eliminated. (Oliver p. 285) (Hacker p. 50, 247)
49. X meets a group of women who are on drugs and not affected by technology. They are strange but friendly. They are rebelling against the city. (Oliver p. 287) (Hacker p. 49)
50. A technological advancement that neutralizes rebels who were not caught up in the collective mind control is related to snow. (Oliver p. 292) (Hacker p. 271)
51. X returns to his/her childhood home and it is very changed. Depressing. (Oliver p. 298) (Hacker p. 162)
52. The drug that gives people a resistance to the mind control of the city makes people’s skin a strange color. (Oliver p. 301) (Hacker p. 188)
53. X has always felt guilty about leaving his/her sister. (Oliver p. 302) (Hacker p. 38)
54. In a moment of crisis, X hallucinates the voice of an old, female friend in an unlikely place. (Oliver p. 308) (Hacker p. 54)
55. X is in a horrific car crash that causes blood to spill out of his/her body, but because of genetic engineering, he/she heals abnormally quickly. (Oliver p. 312, 315) (Hacker p. 174, 175)
56. X remembers an old friend from a diner. (Oliver p. ) (Hacker p. 165)
57. The AI control system can manipulate people’s memories in order to control them. X has his/her mind hacked by this system (Oliver p. 335) (Hacker p. 287)
58. X loses his/her mind and can’t figure out what is real. (Oliver p. 339) (Hacker p. 281, 288)
59. X gets a description of the corporate origin of the evil AI control system Happy/Jabberwocky. (Oliver p. 345) (Hacker p. 213)

When the influence is environmental or due to the genre, the points will be more randomly distributed, not arranged in a line.

This list is about as long as those from the other books I’ve studied. The individual elements are also very conventional. Nevertheless, I’m curious about how many similar elements I will find in the sequel, The Block. If both books use an unusual amount of material that is also in book, I will have a puzzle on my hands. Does lightning strike in the same place twice? Did Ben Oliver and I simultaneously manage to create a unique extraction of the most glaringly conventional sci fi tropes circulating today?

I think he used a copying tool to generate writing prompts.

My Adorable Apotheosis (version 2) vs. The Block

1. The story is set in the not too distant future in a dystopian sci-fi world. (Oliver p. 1) (Hacker p. 314)
2. The fundamental conflict at this point in the story is with an evil AI who cannot be fully destroyed. (Oliver p. 1) (Hacker p. 315)
3. X is desperate to be with a person he/she loves and have friends. (Oliver p. 2) (Hacker p. 318)
4. It looks like X is going to get what he/she wants but this hope is ripped away. (Oliver p. 2) (Hacker p. 323)
5. X is trapped in hallucinations of other versions of his/her life. (Oliver p. 8) (Hacker p. 324)
6. X is trapped and tortured by a pointless, energy draining procedure involving almost getting drowned. X survives it. (Oliver p. 9) (Hacker p. 326)
7. X dreams of childhood and a sister X knows to be dead. X is hopeless about being rescued. X then has a lengthy conversation with a soldier/green person who is a true believer in an unjust system. (Oliver p. 10-14) (Hacker p. 327)
8. X again dreams of childhood and a sister X knows to be dead. This is part of X’s hallucinations of other versions of X’s life. (Oliver p. 28) (Hacker p. 38)
9. X goes into a sort of fugue state, losing his/herself to the hallucinations. (Oliver p. 33) (Hacker p. 300)
10. X has a memory of jumping into an outdoor, natural freshwater body of water with friends. (Oliver p. 34) (Hacker p. 27)
11. X has a hallucination of X’s mother. (Oliver p. 43) (Hacker p. 359)
12. X is forced underwater and almost drowns. X is rescued and with a new group of people. X doesn’t trust that the rescue is real. Book titles are mentioned. (Oliver p. 45-48) (Hacker p. 353)
13. The kiss from Romeo and Juliet is alluded to (Oliver p. 49) (Hacker p. 447)
14. After an escape from certain doom, X splashes into a body of water. (Oliver p. 56) (Hacker p. 351)
15. A bone in X’s body is horrifically fractured and hangs at a bad angle. Due to a medical event earlier in the story, X has been genetically engineered to heal quickly and this causes a horrifically fractured bone to mend unnaturally quickly. (Oliver p. 56-57) (Hacker p. 175)
16. X rides on a train and runs away from the threat posed by the prison/lab. (Oliver p. 61) (Hacker p. 157)
17. X ends up once again in a hospital being operated on. The goal of the hospital visit is to avoid having monitoring or mind control devices installed in X’s body. (Oliver p. 57, 77) (Hacker p. 175)
18. X keeps having hallucinations of other possible versions of his/her life. (Oliver p. 75) (Hacker p. 300)
19. X ends up in an underground book bunker with a high, domed glass ceiling. (Oliver p. 79) (Hacker p. 383)
20. X ends up in a space of knowledge described as a cathedral. (Oliver p. 78) (Hacker p. 55)
21. The space of knowledge is ruled over by a mad scientist who is addicted to drugs, older than X, of the opposite sex, and not attracted to X. (Oliver p. 79) (Hacker p. 112) (This looks like an example of how the algorithm will take two similar events in the story and reverse the order of the methods with which those events are expressed. In this case, the similar event is: X gets out of a trap and visits a sacred space and the method of expression is X ends up in a hospital and meets the mad scientist a method of expressing the same event that came from earlier in my book and which would match point 6 of the list I made for The Loop. If the method of expression had not been reversed, at this point in the plot, X would make plans to revitalize civilization with the collection of books by getting them to a degenerated population that requires mental rejuvenation.)
22. We learn that one of the characters in this space of knowledge is a cyborg — more machine than human. (Oliver p. 80, 95) (Hacker p. 167)
23. The surveillance equipment with which they are threatened is named after a bug because of the sound it makes (mosquito/cricket) (Oliver p. 82) (Hacker p. 172)
24. Airborne attack drones are a threat at this point in the story. (Oliver p. 82) (Hacker p. 406)
25. After an operation at a hospital, X is given an irritatingly cheerful AI assistant who doesn’t like to be told to go away or be turned off. (Oliver p. 80) (Hacker p. 282)
26. It is possible to disguise one’s appearance with digital tools. (Oliver p. 81) (Hacker p. 27)
27. X is being pursued by an evil AI that cannot be killed. The evil AI is trying to improve humanity by killing people. (Oliver p. 88) (Hacker p. 340)
28. It has an ark/arc on which it intends to save a special selection of his favorite people. (Oliver p. 114) (Hacker p. 346)
29. X is irritated by an AI that wants to be his/her very helpful best friend. The friendly AI doesn’t like being put into sleep mode. (Oliver p. 150) (Hacker p. 282)
30. X has to leave his/her lover behind and venture out on a dangerous mission. (Oliver p. 155) (Hacker p. 367)
31. X ends up in a military base, in the belly of the beast. (Oliver p. 157) (Hacker p. 368)
32. X witnesses a public execution/beheading of a number of heretics/traitors. (Oliver p. 161) (Hacker p. 217)
33. X enters a restricted part of the military base, comes face to face with the evil AI, and gets the prisoners released. (Oliver p. 168) (Hacker p. 370)
34. People in the military base embrace sexually after having been deprived of real human contact for a long time. (Oliver p. 170) (Hacker p. 372)
35. X’s closest friend has his eyes removed. (Oliver p. 177) (Hacker p. 393)
36. X gets put into a deathlike stasis chamber and then wakes up in a non-real computer generated environment. (Oliver p. 194) (Hacker p. 445, 448)
37. Jazz music is mentioned. (Oliver p. 194) (Hacker p. 219)
38. They can’t feel or taste anything and they look like 21st century video game characters with pixels for eyes. It is designed as a safe way to wait out a dangerous environment. Even though they can’t feel specific things, they can still feel good emotions. (Oliver p. 198) (Hacker p. 449)
39. There are non-avatar video game characters who are scary, but the dangers aren’t real. (Oliver p. 199) (Hacker p. 451)
40. X spends time in a bar with friends. (Oliver p. 198) (Hacker p. 457)
41. After spending most of the story showing X struggling and fighting against the evils of the system, both stories conclude that the only way to win against an unstoppable enemy is not to fight and to just go with the flow. This is the moment at which X finds happiness for the first time. (Oliver p. 221) (Hacker p. 463)
42. As part of their entry into this world, they have been given a substance that provides eternal life and physical regeneration. (Oliver p. 220) (Hacker p. 463)
43. We learn that after a mass-die off, the AI makes plans to re-institute religions in which old deities are worshipped. (Oliver p. 220) (Hacker p. 462, 295) This is another location at which something thematically similar is happening in two places and they are reversed in the stolen sequence.
44. They are trapped in paradise, but plan to escape back into the real world where the things they do actually matter. (Oliver p. 226) (Hacker p. 464)
45. Due to the cryofreezing, X has lost all sense of time and spends a moment to consider this. (Oliver p. 228) (Hacker p. 473)
46. There is a male character named Alix in this otherworldly place with a bar. (Oliver p. 228) (Hacker p. 459)
47. They debate remaining in hiding or returning to the fight for humanity and civilization. (Oliver p. 246) (Hacker p. 474)
48. X accuses the villain of taking away people’s free will and trying to act like their god. (Oliver p. 246) (Hacker p. 351)
49. A cloud of drones from the bad AI threatens to destroy them all. (Oliver p. 258) (Hacker p. 406)
50. A woman has a baby that she didn’t want with a father she didn’t love. (Oliver p. 262) (Hacker p. 364)
51. There is a city-wide flood. (Oliver p. 263-274) (Hacker p. 338, 242)
52. After a disaster, X is captured and returned to the city as a prisoner. (Oliver p. 269-284) (Hacker p. 409)
53. Vision was being returned to a blind character. (Oliver p. 287) (Hacker p. 395)
54. X ends up famous and is used to put down a rebellion. (Oliver p. 296, 314) (Hacker p. 307)
55. People are exposed to a new truth that changes their worldview. (Oliver p. 315) (Hacker p. 307)
56. The story concludes with a discussion between X and the two figureheads of the AI. (Oliver p. 300) (Hacker p. 308)
57. The story hinges on the morality of people being used as unwitting cogs in a machine of progress. (Oliver p. 299) (Hacker p. 312)
58. X dies leaves the evil world behind. (Oliver p. 320) (Hacker p. 583)

This arrangement of points looks more random, but when plotted together with the points from the previous book in Oliver’s series, the usage of a single resource to construct both books becomes more obvious.

It appears that the plot points are largely in the same order in Oliver’s book and my book and if they are plotted all together, treating Oliver’s two books as consecutive parts of a larger work, it appears that the The Loop drew more material from the first half of my book and The Block drew more material from the second half.

I should point out, that for the sake of consistency, I am using a single title for both version one and version two of My Adorable Apotheosis. I published version two under the name A Blazing New World and it was twice as long as the original publication. I also published version two as two separate books entitled: My Adorable Apotheosis and My Orwellian Odyssey.

It is clear that Oliver’s work marched in lock step with my book over the course of 600 pages. There is no reason for most of the overlaps for Oliver’s first book to be with the first half of my book while most of the overlaps with Oliver’s second book are with the second half of my book.

Whereas I attempted to paint a portrait of a person struggling with autonomy lost to the modern world, Oliver created a hyperbolic martyrdom tale. That is sort of a weird message to give to kids — sacrifice your life to stop the wheels of AI. Why is a British publishing house trying to radicalize kids?

If I had only studied one of these books, I would find the number of similar plot elements strange, but not completely condemning, however, looking at the two books together certainly paints a picture of deliberate wrongdoing on the part of the author or of the software package that assisted the author.

Either way, this product got an unfair marketing push that mine didn’t and I object to this shallow, poor quality writing being heavily marketed to kids when better products (like mine!) are getting buried by low-quality rip-offs.

As an example of the low quality that I’m complaining about, why does the protagonist change in his characteristics all of a sudden, without warning. For most of the story, he was obsessed with a girl and then he rescues a friend from a prison and becomes sort of gay all of a sudden. It doesn’t seem wrong in a cultural sense, just out of character. It comes out of the blue as one might expect from a text generator that drew from a wide variety of sources.

Suddenly, the older boy grabbed me, wrapping both arms around me and holding me tight. “I love you, Luka, you’re my hero.”

“You’re mine,” I reply, my voice muffled by the skin of his bare shoulder.

p. 170

After that, why was there a scene that read like a whiskey commercial for teenagers?

“What? We can’t drink. We have to stay alert, and you’re pregnant.” I stop myself as Sam’s eyes narrow. “Yeah, we could have one, I suppose.”

Getting drunk with a pregnant 16 year old on p. 117

The author is supposedly an English teacher for secondary students, so why does he use bad grammar?

‘Wait until there’s not as many soldiers looking for us.’

the bottom of p. 118 in The Block

The government aren’t supposed to watch the footage back without good reason or consent.

P. 74 in The Loop

Heaven help us. This is marketed to our boys and they deserve better.

This publisher is also releasing a sci fi book called Every Line of You that is marketed to our girls and I have my eye on it because the thirteen point premise matched that of my book on a beat for beat basis. If this book turns out as I expect, it will confirm my hypothesis that Chicken House Books ate my stolen manuscript and recycled it into two, crappy, gender specific products. Kids deserve better.

Instead of going after individual authors, perhaps we should hold to task the publishers or purveyors of software packages that enable such bad writing to proliferate. After all, today you can:

• Buy a software package called Plottr that will allow you to trade book templates with other writers. It is as easy as copying, pasting, and following the writing prompts.
• Get a job writing 10 chapters per week with a company called Radish. They will pay you 500 dollars per week to write according to detailed outlines.
• Get access to an AI writing assistant via the a program at the Bookpatch that promises to help you write a book in seven days.
• Buy a subscription from ‘Fiction Writing and Book Marketing for a Six Figure Author Career’ to ‘Pro Writing Aid‘ or ‘The Novel Factory‘ to help you write better and faster with a wide selection of book and character templates.
• Purchase a book from a Writing Services firm that will not trigger plagiarism detection tools. You can do the marketing and call yourself an author.
• Send your notes and unfinished work to a Fiverr freelancer and get a publishable product. You don’t need to know what sort of tools they used to generate the product and you don’t even have to credit them.
• Heck, this blog has probably already been slurped up into any one of the following autoplagiarism tools: Writesonic, ArticleForge, Copyscape.. all of which are driven by a GPT algorithm along the lines of the open source MIT code called Eleuther AI. Anyone who uses these tools plagiarizes without knowing how much or from whom they are taking.

I understand that the people churning out books filled with stolen material need attention and giving them an automated way to feel seen may seem like a great solution to a psychological problem, but I’m not sure that making such narcissism enabling crack freely available is a great idea. Maybe these people need an unconditionally loving mom instead.. someone to balance out the big, mean corporate dad that they are desperately trying to impress. Without focusing on gender, toxicity comes in all flavors. Rather, I wonder if there is a way to inject something unconditionally loving and godly into the collective psyche that would remind people of how shameful it is to make use of software writing assistants or purchased reviews. How would one do that? With a book, of course. It is a pity that all of the people infected with toxic levels of shame keep making so much noise that healing voices can’t be heard.

To some people, my reading behavior may seem like wallowing in other people’s refuse, absorbing the darkness they’ve offloaded into the media. In the most crass terminology I can think of, they ate my book and pooped out a bunch of products that I’m publicly consuming — like so much scat porn. Of course, I don’t see it that way. I’m a scientist and I’m studying their excretions, diagnosing their illnesses. It is rather interesting.