Rage, rage against the dying of the mic!

Look, I have a book I should be writing, but I have so many other words screaming in my head that I need to write them down first. Buckle up, my darlings, because this post is breaking my social media rule of ‘Try to only be positive online’. I'm angry and upset. This post is too long. It’s probably riddled with flaws, but I’m not doing this for any other reason than to get it out of my damn head, and out into the world, because screaming into a pillow just isn’t cutting it anymore.

This story begins at a kitchen table in Shropshire

About two and half years ago, I had a conversation with one of my closest friends, in which I was full of despair about generative AI. She couldn't understand why I was so afraid. She said something along the lines of “People will always want art made by people, you’re worrying about nothing” in the kindest way she could. 

(And before I go any further, I am NOT talking about the sort of machine learning advances that have led to good things in the biomedical field, for example.) 

I tried to explain to my friend that I didn’t fear being replaced, that instead I feared that generative AI would be used to take away the jobs that authors like me rely on. That whatever it made would be mostly shit, but tech bros have become really good at convincing people who know nothing about tech to invest billions into it, and that this was going to vastly more harm than good before it collapsed just like any other tech bubble.

By 'authors like me', I mean those whose books are not bestsellers. I mean those who have to do one or more other jobs to be able to afford to live, so we can write. I consider myself very lucky because I have managed to carve out a life in which the other jobs I do are also creative, i.e audiobook narration, podcasting, making and selling visual art at conventions, and (very rarely) think tank type stuff. 

But I don't earn a decent living from all of these things combined. I live a frugal life, like millions of other people struggling to survive in the UK. I don’t go shopping for anything other than food, and that’s always the cheapest I can find. I don’t go on holidays, or out on day trips, or out for meals (unless it is a very special occasion for someone else and then I get so damn stressed about money). I only go to conventions that have some sort of financial compensation/accommodation provision (vanishingly rare) or an art show that can subsidise my attendance (displaying art is logistically difficult, a lot of extra work, and fundamentally a gamble as sales are not guaranteed). And as much as I love conventions, I simply could not attend at all if they weren't part of my job. LARP is my only frivolity, and I’ve cut back on that this year too. Sound familiar? Yeah, it's not fun worrying about money all the time, is it?

Narration work is very sporadic. I refuse to have advertising on the podcasts I currently produce, so the very small income from those is through Patreon. Making the Imagining Tomorrow podcast actually financially crippled me, as there was only a small amount of funding and it took up over a year of my life. The total words written for that one season was the same as a full-length novel, and on top of that was research, interviews and all of the audio production. Making it was a terrible decision for my finances, as I couldn’t write anything else at the same time. But it was important to me. I am proud of what I made. There is absolutely no way I would be able to make another season without a substantial grant.

Royalties from my nine novels, two novellas and short story collections are paid twice a year and barely keep me afloat. My Patreon is tiny but literally enables me to put food on the table. Book advances are shrinking across the entire industry. Social media has fractured and become algorithmically hostile to creators on so many platforms that it makes it even harder to get the word out there about our books. There is a cost of living crisis that is making absolutely everything harder.

I feel conflicted about writing all of that, because some might think I’m moaning. I’m not. I’m trying to give an indication of how precarious this is. I am autistic. I went through over fifteen years of trying to hold down ‘normal’ full time jobs, and went through repeated cycles of catastrophic burnout as a result. Teaching was the job that lasted the longest, and only because of the holidays. I still almost destroyed myself doing it, and couldn’t go back to it now. This patchwork, insecure, fragile working life I’ve struggled so hard to establish is my only option.

In that conversation with my friend I explained that I am barely scraping by. (I still am barely scraping by 2.5 years later). I am a single parent. If I didn't have a housemate who earns vastly more than me and is happy to pay a greater proportion of the bills, I'd be in even more trouble. I am very lucky in so many ways. Because all these other things I do to survive take time and energy and mental bandwidth, I cannot write books fast enough to maximise the potential royalties pool.

I told my friend that in 5-10 years, my audiobook work was likely to dry up completely. Not because AI generated voices would get good enough to 'replace' human narrators (I firmly believe we are many more years away from that). I explained it was because Audible will use the tech to destroy the economic ecosystem that makes the costly production process I am part of viable, making it too expensive to produce books the ‘old fashioned’ way. 

Audible and of course, its owner Amazon, have a long history of using business practices to crush and devour competitors. Two and a half years ago I said that this would just be another way for them to do that. That it would probably start with an offer of the service to self-publishers who can’t afford to pay narrators, to build up a vast number of audiobooks that use their generative AI narration service, to get consumers used to them at both ends of the process; producer and consumer. Then access to the service would be widened. And publishing companies will be convinced that using the service to maximise profits by cutting out the narrator and sound engineer and producer and proof-listener is the only way forwards. 

It would be no-one’s fault, of course. It’s economics, I said. It’s always economics. Using real people, with decades of hard-earned experience will become a luxury expense. People will start saying that it’s unfair to make publishers and consumers pay for audiobooks produced the ‘old-fashioned’ way. Any dissenting voice will be branded as a ‘luddite’, or cruel for not giving self-publishers the opportunity to publish an audiobook, when they don’t have the money to pay for it the ‘old-fashioned’ way. “All the narrators I’ve heard are rubbish! Screw ‘em!” will fill the comments sections on newspaper websites. 

My friend thought I was catastrophising. Because, in fairness, I have a tendency to do that. But not long after that conversation, I heard about a novelist with a journalism day job getting fired, along with many colleagues, because the publication was pivoting to using gen AI software to produce endless slop to fill pages with advertising space that could be sold. Visual artists have been suffering for far longer. Incredibly skilled linguists, who bring nuance and deep understanding to translation work are being laid off all together or forced into being editors, narrowing the scope of their work, and of course, the change being used to justify lower wages. 

In the time since that conversation, I have seen countless examples of fellow writers losing their day jobs, desperately seeking replacement work in the hope of staying afloat long enough to be able to write the next book. Look, it’s bad, okay? Across all of the creative industries. 

So did any of that catastrophising come true?

Two and half years after that conversation over 40,000 AI narrated audiobooks are available on Audible.

And Audible has just announced that it’s opened an end-to-end production service to a selected group of publishers to produce AI narrated audiobooks. Which will ultimately be widened, no doubt.

Of course, it’s all being framed as a fantastic opportunity for Audible and rights owners to make even more money. To compete with Apple and Spotify in the booming audiobook industry. People will argue that it’s only the audiobooks that never would have been made in the ‘old-fashioned way’ that will be made using AI, so they can co-exist! Everyone wins!

Spoiler: only a very small number of people are going to win here

To me, this looks like yet another example of an industry’s booming profits only being seen by an incredibly small number of people, the vast majority of whom haven’t actually created the source material. And yes, some self-publishers may be able to earn some money from this, when that wasn’t an option before. But obviously, they'll have to pay Audible for the service, or take a bigger hit on their royalties if it's not an up-front payment. Good luck having your audiobook found out there amongst the other thousands of AI narrated books that lots of people are filtering out of their searches, my friend.

Every single time I see some industry development that is touted as being good for everyone, I see a development that makes a small number of people insanely rich, starves out the creators (aside from a tiny, tiny percentage) and makes the end product cheaper and less valued than ever before. The people who commission the audiobooks, who have genuine passion for human narrators, may hold out as long as they can, but when the market is flooded with audiobooks that cost a tiny fraction to produce, and gradually erode away the consumer’s expectation of and preference for human narration, the financial pressure will grow to limit the number of non-AI audiobooks. It will only be the mega-bestsellers, and/or the authors with enough clout/money/sheer bloody-mindedness to refuse an AI narration that will keep the non-AI audiobook industry afloat. All the while the money is sucked ever upwards to Audible, and profit margins are squeezed, and production companies are forced to keep everyone’s wages/narration fees as low as they possibly can.

I self-published a short story collection called Before, After, Alone which is set in the same universe as my (traditionally published) Planetfall books. To create an ebook in 2023 was far, far easier than it was back in 2010 which was the last time I looked into it seriously. Progress! How marvellous! And as I’m lucky enough to be a narrator and experienced audio producer I made the audiobook version too. 

Amazon has driven down royalties for self-publishers over the years. There was a time when people could make a decent living from it. Then the Fire Nation attacked. Sorry, I mean, Amazon realised they’d sucked enough people into their ecosystem and destroyed enough of their competition to drastically reduce the royalty shares given to authors, thereby maximising their own profits. The most successful self-published authors lost a catastrophic share of their livelihoods overnight.

I didn’t want to only publish on Kindle, because of my ongoing disgust with Amazon, so I ‘went wide’, distributing to other platforms so my readers would have a choice on where to buy the ebook, meaning I receive a much smaller royalty per copy.

That decision literally cost me over £2000 in lost earnings on the ebook alone, because the vast majority of readers buy through Kindle, and I earn less per copy because I wouldn’t give Amazon exclusivity. 

I published the audiobook through Findaway Voices, which at the time was an independent audiobook distributor, and ‘went wide’ through them too for the same reason. That decision also cost me money (I can't face totting it up right now, but hundreds of pounds at least), because of the same smaller royalty share thing.

And then Findaway Voices was bought by Spotify, who have moved into audiobooks, because clearly they weren’t satisfied with devaluing music and wanted to branch into other types of audio too. So going wide simply led to me losing royalty share on Audible, and then being sucked into an arguably worse ecosystem. The only place I can sell my ebook without anyone taking a cut is on Ko-Fi, and that’s only because Ko-Fi were kind enough to give me a gold level service because of the money I raised through them for the RSPB off the back of my Dad’s balcony duckling adventures. I am lucky if I sell a couple of copies through Ko-Fi a month, even though tens of thousands of people bought the traditionally published Planetfall novels. I dread to think how few copies I would have sold of the ebook or audiobook if I didn’t already have an established audience.

Who cares?

You know what? I’m so tired. So fucking tired of doing all I can to financially stay afloat long enough to make the next book/podcast/audiobook, while the people who are running these distribution platforms do all they can to make that harder, whilst getting even richer.

Sod it, I could just get ChatGPT to ‘write’ a book (trained on our stolen work), then get Audible’s AI service to make an audiobook (probably trained on our stolen narrations) with no human being involved at all! Who cares if it’s slop? Who cares if it’s good? None of it is worth anything any more. But I bet the Audible subscription price won’t come down, will it? 

I should just go and get a proper job. Like those jobs in which people are using AI to summarise meetings and documents, to read emails, to reply to emails, entire email exchanges never passing through a single human consciousness. None of that matters either! All those skills being degraded, all that institutional knowledge being lost, all those mistakes being made and compounded upon, all those jobs eventually being such a reduced fraction of the original that wages are driven down more and more… who cares?

Those plucky venture capitalists need something to invest in, after all, and what better than generative AI? Be glad, fellow tiny economic unit, for a small number of people are getting insanely rich! That’s what being human is all about, right? Not to create anything. Not to deepen our understanding of the world and being a human. Not to love, not to alleviate suffering, not to try our best to make things better for each successive generation. No, the only true purpose of existence is to get rich, and if you’re too stupid/lazy/poor to do that yourself, then the only value you have is how you can enable rich people to get richer.

But I’m just catastrophising! They can’t get rid of everyone’s jobs! They can’t starve writers and artists out of creating! They don’t want you to stop, so they can still make money from you! If they destroy all the jobs, how would anyone be able to buy anything anymore?

But darling one, have you not realised that the infinitesimally small number of people benefitting from this foul, ridiculous system are already so rich that it doesn’t matter to them? They fundamentally do not live in the same world as we do. Do you think, for one single moment, that they will ever struggle again? Bezos could close Amazon down and never, ever need to dip into anything other than the interest payments of his current assets. He’s won the Game of Life.

And they can starve some of us out of creating, and already have. It feels like I am being ground to dust. That there are so many different existential threats I don’t even know which one to be more concerned about. And it doesn’t have to be this way. We could have libraries in every town, meaning absolutely everyone could access our work and we could actually earn a living from it. We could have functional public services, a first-rate national health service, healthy affordable food, social housing, the money to really start turning the climate crisis around - the list goes on! But no. No, we can’t have those things because then the people in power would have to reverse the decisions made by Reagan and Thatcher (and all the successive governments) to funnel money up to the rich. And funnily enough, the vast, vast majority of the rich are also either the people in power, or funding them. 

If you’ve got this far, hell, thank you. I’m not usually like this, I promise. I’m just so damn angry. And tired. And scared. For all of us. This is only a fraction of the damage being done by the generative AI industry. I could spend months writing about it, but all I would be is poorer, my book would be late, and not a damn thing would change.

I’m just a girl, standing in front of the British government, asking why they want to give away all my work as part of the UK's 126 billion pound creative arts industry, to serve another industry being run by greedy tech bros, just so they can destroy everything else just that little bit faster.