I Want To Hold It In My Hot Little Hands
On Things You Can't See, Things You Can't Control & A Fucking I
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not being a curmudgeonly fuddy duddy (ok maybe I am) and I fucking love the internet, and even enjoy the convenience of using AI to answer a question here and there, but don’t you sometimes long for things that are real, that you can hold in your hands and keep beside you? Things that you would notice if they were gone - or stolen?
I was alerted to the fact that Meta had stolen a bunch of books to train its AI on and there was a link provided to an Atlantic investigation where authors could type their names in and see if their book baby was there in the Library Genesis, aka LibGen. Sure enough, mine was.
Seeing this made me feel kind of dirty. A little used. A little weirded out.
I alerted my author pal
who was already alert to this and yep multiple books of hers were being used to train AI bots too. In the process of checking on things, we both discovered other weird things about our books. One of hers was apparently available to download free in Arabic, despite the fact she had not been approached nor given permission for any translation and I found a free downloadable pdf of mine on Spotify (of all places, shock horror) - my audio book is already available on there for free to premium users.As a music maker/rights holder, I’m used to dealing with frustrating copyright anomalies (I have spent literal years trying to help recover copyrights belonging to my father that have been stolen and abused by what a known in the music world as ‘bad actors’) but I’m somewhat naively horrified to discover that books also suffer from the same vulnerabilities. They seem so solid.
That led me to wistfully browse my many bookshelves and notice many books in there written by authors that were also now Substack writers -
and that gave me a warm feeling. These were all books I’d held in my hot little hands and become deeply absorbed in, educated, amused and moved by. I sat in the car finally getting to read a long sought copy of Lou Reed: King of New York yesterday for two beautiful hours while my kid was shooting strangers at paintball. My beloved copy of ’s Just Kids wasn’t in there because I had lent it to a friend. Ditto a book on what to do after publishing a book. I left my dog eared copy of High Fidelity by on a plane some time ago, which is why I read ‘s lovely new memoir on Kindle on a recent long flight. I spent many wonderful hours walking accompanied by telling me her wild ride of a story. I love becoming immersed in a great audiobook - I’ve just started Mood Music by , an alarming corporate horror story about those bums at Spotify. It does not make for relaxing walking but better the enemy you know, right? The point is, I’d absorbed and loved the individual words, stories, styles of all these authors.
I typed these author’s names into the search bar out of interest - and yep, that net had been cast wide and many of their books were also captured.
Wow. That led me to try a little experiment in ChatGPT, that very quickly became dystopian and disturbing. Read for yourself.
Jesus, that’s not too far off - a little clunky, mawkish and definitely on-the-nose cliched but believable. I remember reading the thing about Nick Cave requesting a song written ‘in the style of Nick Cave’ that was godawful, but I guess things have progressed a bit since then. I continued with my experiment.
I quite liked all of these, and it’s a fascinating exercise in tone and style differences - but honestly, what the actual fuck! How can this be legal? I mean, it’s not - but how could this be allowed to happen? Who is responsible for this enormous theft?
People - or rather, ‘bad actors’ in the writing world, can and are now using AI to write their books now, books that are written with no care, no passion, no life lived or hours spent thinking, rewriting, researching, books simply whipped up and uploaded to Amazon in a bid to trawl for some easy ‘side hustle’ money.
The horse has bolted and the genie is out of the bottle. I can’t see a world in which it’s shoved back in.
I’m lost for words. I was going to ask AI what I should think but I hit the free limit and there was no way I going to pay for it.
If I were to put it in ‘the style of author Lo Carmen’, (which according to AI now feels overly fucking flowery and cliche-ridden) I’d say “I want words that exist for me alone. I want to stumble upon or be given a book and treasure it forever. I want to hold it in my hot little hands and fall asleep beside it, then keep it safe on my dusty shelves from the marauding unseen hands of the future that want to steal the very juice from it and regurgitate it to sell to back to the unwitting world” .
As we say in the music world, thank you and goodnight. Yes I know it’s only 10am where I am, but I’m ready to go to bed after this.
Where do we go from here?
Oh my Jesus Christ! Why is my version all moany and cynical? Oh…
Lost Connections.
I struggle to comprehend this. The big, bad machines are coming for us. Farkkk