Not so many posts ago, I mentioned that I had been contacted by a webtoon company looking to licence my Greenland stories. They attempted to woo me with phrases such as
Recently I came across your work and couldn’t help but be captivated by Greenland Crime Series, its rich narrative has the potential to be brilliantly adapted into the dynamic world of comics.
And
If the prospect of adapting your books into visually compelling webcomics intrigues you, or if this is something that aligns with your creative vision, we invite you to explore this opportunity further.
And I agreed. I was suitably wooed. And I love the idea. I’ve mentioned this before, a couple of posts ago. And, clearly, I haven’t let it go. Because another part of the mail suggested the expertise I would benefit from if I took them up on their offer, adding,
we are a team of talented artists and writers with a proven track record of bringing literary works to life through the visual medium.
Well, as I mentioned in those previous posts, I did some digging and discovered that their experience is based on the “proven track record” of others, in that they use AI to generate the images for the webcomics, and AI to generate the text. So the images are based on the work of visual artists, and the text, well, that would be based on the work of other writers, and my work, of course. It had to be AI, as how else would they be able to produce a whole webcomic within 48 hours? I got that last bit from the company’s website.
As mentioned before, I agreed to a video meet, but in the week or so it took them to get back to me, I had done a deep dive on the company, and seen far too many examples of their end product. I had never intended to licence my work with them but thought about taking the meeting for the experience.
Now, the company has moved on, of course. No sense wasting time on a non-starter. But the ripple they set in motion is, obviously, still rippling. In my head, at least.
I talked to a friend about it, and we agreed that we’re not going to be able to stop this surge of AI products and services. My friend even suggested that, had I said yes, I would have more content that required little to no effort to produce, which could bring in an income, allowing me to write more stories.
It’s true. Although a quick look at the way the company suggested money could be made from webcomics indicated there would be next to no income, which I guess is to be expected for effortless content creation.
And there it is.
Algorithms and the mega corporations that employ them, have already drastically lowered the cost of what consumers are prepared to pay for “content”. So artists are already in a “next to no income” situation, relying on sales at scale to bring in any income at all. Selling at scale, of course is wholly dependent upon currying favour with the God of Algorithms, and such favour is preferably curried in cash.
You can fudge it a little, and that’s what I do with my content marketing, i.e. publishing new stories on a regular basis to stay visible in the charts, which is akin to treading water to keeping my head above the surface. Other publishers and a lot of indie authors with fewer books pay through the nose to do the same.
I’ve written a lot of stories to keep breathing, and I’m really pleased with the stories I’ve written. But it’s not sustainable. Not in the long run. So when an AI company comes calling, no matter how terrible the compensation might be, or how awfully generic the end product is, I can understand why authors might be tempted. Or, at the very least, curious enough to hit ‘reply’ and learn more about how they might approach such a task, and to answer the all-important question ‘what’s in it for me?’
What is in it for me?
That’s the bigger question, and if I was to think about AI when I answered that, then I would realise that there is plenty in it for me, even though I didn’t ask for it.
AI, for example, is a part of my Internet browsers, although I choose not to use it, or anything like ChatGPT etc as – never mind how good or bad they might be – these services use 6-10 times the amount of energy when searching for something or generating text. And, thinking of the environment, as the tech companies scale up and incorporate AI into EVERYTHING, then the promise that AI will solve the ‘issue’ of climate change, is a bit of a moot point, really, because it’s going to fry the world in the process.
Where I do use AI, although I hadn’t really thought about it, is in the initial grammar and spell check I do in WORD. It used to be okay, but now it is something called Editor, enhanced with AI, and, well, it’s really gone downhill, to the point where even a cursory first pass is a little suspect now and I ignore 99% of the suggestions.
This, actually, gives me hope. Although not in a good way.
The worse it gets, and the more people realise it, then there might be some backlash. The hope is, generally speaking, that the more prevalent AI becomes, the more we start to see the same images and passages of text, the more we will hunger – hopefully – after something unique, maybe a little raw and a tad unpolished.
The same friend who I talked to about AI said they had heard that social media is suffering, and that so much content is produced by bots and AI that, pretty soon, social media will only be populated by bots and AI. And then – and I’m really hopeful now – the same tech companies that make a killing when companies (publishers and independent authors among them) curry the favour of the algorithmic gods, will realise they have created a closed system, with bots and AI (probably one and the same, but, honestly I don’t care) feeding upon one another.
Which makes me smile when I think of my silly and ineffective resistance to Facebook wanting to use all my images, videos, and text on their social media, combined with all the content created by all the people in the world – including a high percentage of artificially created content – to feed their equivalent of the AI they are making.
It’s the digital equivalent of cannibalism.
And, at this point, I’m thinking they should go right ahead. Knock yourselves out.
No, literally, I mean that.
Knock yourself out.
Go create your social media fishpond, your ‘put and take’. We’ve ‘put’ everything into it. You’ve done your darndest to ‘take’ everything out of it. But don’t be surprised if we stop visiting the fishpond. Or, rather, be surprised. I would love that and would love to see the so-called tech bros’ faces when they wonder “Hey? Where’s everybody at? Where’d everybody go?”
Well, you took our content, you’re coming after our jobs, and when you’ve taken everything, including the planet, we will literally have nothing left to give.
So go ahead, take it all. But don’t expect a shoulder to cry on when you realise you’ve created a monster, and the monster is all you have left.
They say that AI is the very last thing humans will create.
So be it.
But while writing this, a huge dragonfly landed on my window, and I looked up, watching it for as long as it stuck around, preferring to look at something real, something unique, and something timeless.
Dragonflies, according to Britannica (i.e. the original encyclopaedia) have a fossil history dating back over 300 million years to the Late Carboniferous Epoch, predating the dinosaurs by 100 million years.
They are truly timeless, and I think we could and should learn something from that.
Chris
