Let’s Shatter the AI Mirror!

This morning, we met with our friend the social media advisor, and she quoted some text generated by an AI engine, Gemini. Our friend asked this AI, “Who is the market for independent bookstores?” As our friend was reading aloud the answer—which sounded enthusiastic and upbeat, and referenced Millennials and Gen Z folks seeking community and authenticity—I realized suddenly that, hey, these phrases sounded a little too familiar. I exclaimed, “That’s what the American Booksellers Association says! Those words are pretty much what’s on the ABA website.”

She answered, “Sure, if you want to, you can find out what website the AI got it from, you can dig a little, and click the link.”

“But what you just said was you asked AI—you asked Gemini, Google’s AI—and that this was AI’s answer. So, your thinking was: AI was giving you this answer. But I’m saying, that is not AI’s answer. There is no AI, really. That's the ABA’s answer.”

“Of course,” she said. “AI takes information it finds on the web.”

I calmed myself down, and we continued our meeting. Inside, though I didn’t really feel calm. I felt angry. I’ve spent my career advocating ideas and business strategies around bookstores embracing roles as community centers offering profound, real-life experiences impossible to replicate online. Now, here’s AI—the mirror opposite of indie bookstores—parroting the language we indie booksellers have developed to fight this damned AI.

Soon this blogpost itself will get scraped into the AI junkheap. My complaint about AI pirating ABA’s carefully developed phrases will itself begin to be cited in AI’s responses to queries. (There’ll be just a one- or two-year time-lag, as I understand it, because of AI’s delayed web-scraping protocols.)

The death of the author.

Funny—this all reminds me of the arguments we were having twenty years ago when Google was scanning all books, and the Authors Guild was suing. But—this time, the digital pirates seem to be farther ahead of the creators than they were back then. Back in 2006, I wrote a blogpost about this topic: I’d realized that the fight over copyright goes back centuries, and authors won our copyrights by fighting for these rights.

We have to keep fighting. Let’s shatter the AI mirror!

Here’s my old blogpost: Guest Comment for Bibliophile Bullpen—March 19, 2006

Joyce Godsey invited me to vent about the industry! Herewith:

Barnes & Noble and Borders are posting record numbers and Amazon masters the universe, but are we bookpeople their slaves forever? Monopolies and oligopolies have always been trampling the asserted rights of individuals whenever possible. Take for example copyright, once there was none. But today's laws that protect the weakling authors are the outcome of centuries of battle.

Compare Google's recent assertions about the violable nature of authors' copyrights to the great Whig lawyer, Lord Camden who in 1774, successfully fought to destroy the existing tradition of copyright and combined Pope's opinion of the generality of booksellers with his own aristocratic scorn of the man who made his living by the pen. "Knowledge", declared Lord Camden, "has no value or use for the solitary owner: to be enjoyed it must be communicated.... Glory is the reward of science, and those who deserve it scorn all meaner views: I speak not of the scribblers for bread, who tease the press with their wretched productions; fourteen years is too long a privilege for their perishable trash. It was not for gain that Bacon, Newton, Milton, and Locke instructed and delighted the world; it would be unworthy such men to traffic with a dirty bookseller. When the bookseller offered Milton five pounds for his Paradise Lost, he did not reject it and commit it to the flames, nor did he accept the miserable pittance as the reward of his labour; he knew that the real price of his work was immortality, and that posterity would pay it." -Frank Mumby, "Publishing and Bookselling: A History from the Earliest Times to the Present Day" (1954. London. Jonathan Cape.) 190-1.

By this argument of course only the rich could afford to write and publish! Yet, though Lord Camden won that day, authors ultimately regained their copyrights, as did those dirty booksellers, who were that era's publishers. Perhaps Google's modern-day attack on copyright is only a sideshow: the big battle today is over centralization of distribution and the consequent marginalization of small booksellers and publishers, along with the innovative, challenging, adventurous authors they champion. But here—as with copyright before—a change is coming: the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the few are under attack from all sides. As authors once had to fight to be paid for their writing, today independent booksellers and indie publishers are fighting to be paid for our own efforts. No chain-store systemized attack on indie stores—with hourly-wages for those would-be indie booksellers forced by default into chains' employment—can long endure. Wage slavery will lead to Rebellion; Masters of Capital, we'll see you in hell.