OK, we know that at this point, George RR Martin just isn’t going to get around to completing his A Song of Fire and Ice series, The Winds of Winter. But what if — and hear us out — he hired out the rest of the book to a ghostwriter? OK, that’s a bad idea. But here’s an even worse one we’re thankful George RR Martin won’t get on board with: recruiting an AI tool.
Fortunately, George RR Martin is one of many authors who is leading the campaign against AI, taking part in the Authors Guild’s lawsuit against OpenAI. So, no, The Winds of Winter isn’t going to have some machine wrap up the book series, even if Martin knows the technology is here to stay. One of the issues George RR Martin has with AI – aside from, you know, being devoid of creativity and what humans have worked their entire history to perfect – is the compensation, an issue that has hit guilds across all art forms.
As Martin told WinterIsComing.net, “Obviously on AI they’re not just training one writer or not using one book, they’re using like 10,000 books. So they’re using 10,000 books to train their AI, does each of the 10,000 authors get a nickel, or a dollar, or $100? If it’s like $100, I don’t know, maybe that becomes the new backlist; writers write books and then their books enter the big AI thing, or they give permission. I don’t know. I don’t know what rules they’ll have but they have to have some kind of rules. If they have no rules, and things like the AI companies are just free to help themselves to anything they want, then I think we got a real problem because, you know, unlike AI authors need to eat and occasionally buy a house to live in and so forth.”
George RR Martin also cited the movie and TV industry as being particularly in the crosshairs of AI, which we’ve seen at new levels this week courtesy of the computer-generated “actress” Tilly Norwood.
What impact do you see artificial intelligence having on the book publishing industry within the next few years? Give us your predictions below.
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