My post yesterday, about how the profit motive in (and corporate control of) media has annihilated any hope of getting accurate representation of the news, was almost immediately followed up by my running into a story about how the same forces in creative media are working to strangle creativity at its source.
The article was from Publishers Weekly, and was about an interview with HarperCollins CEO Brian Murray. It centered largely on the company's whole-hearted endorsement of AI as part of its business model. He describes using AI to take the place both of human narrators for audiobooks and of translators for increasing their sales in non-English-speaking countries, which is troubling enough; but by far his most worrisome comment describes using AI, basically, to be a stand-in for the authors themselves. Lest you think I'm exaggerating, or making this up entirely, here's a direct quote from the article:
The fast-evolving AI sector could deliver new types of formats for books, Murray said, adding that HC is experimenting with a number of potential products. One idea is a “talking book,” where a book sits atop a large language model, allowing readers to converse with an AI facsimile of its author. Speculating on other possible offerings, Murray said that it is now possible for AI to help HC build an entire cooking-focused website using only content from its backlist, but the question of how to monetize such a site remains.
Later in the article, almost offhand, was a comment that while HarperCollins saw their sales go up last year by only six percent, their profits went up by sixty percent. The reason was a "restructuring" of the company -- which, of course, included plenty of layoffs.
How much of that windfall went to the authors themselves is left as an exercise for the reader.
I can vouch first-hand that in the current economic climate, it is damn near impossible to make a living as a writer, musician, or artist. The people who are actually the wellspring of creativity powering the whole enterprise of creative media get next to nothing; the profits are funneled directly into the hands of a small number of people -- the CEOs of large publishing houses, distributors, marketing and publicity firms, and social media companies.
I can use myself as an example. I have twenty-four books in print, through two small traditional publishers and some that are self-published. I have never netted more than five hundred dollars in a calendar year; most years, it's more like a hundred. I didn't go into this expecting to get rich, but I'd sure like to be able to take my wife out to a nice restaurant once a month from my royalties.
As it is, we might be able to split the lunch special at Denny's.
Okay, I can hear some of you say; maybe it's not the system, maybe it's you. Maybe your books just aren't any good, and you're blaming it on corporate greed. All right, fair enough, we can admit that as a possibility. But I have dozens of extraordinarily talented and hard-working writer friends, and they all say pretty much the same thing. Are you gonna stand there and tell us we're all so bad we don't deserve to make a living?
And now the CEO of HarperCollins is going to take the authors out of the loop even of speaking for ourselves, and just create an AI so readers can talk to a simulation of us without our getting any compensation for it?
Ooh, maybe he could ratchet those profits up into the eighty or ninety percent range if he eliminated the authors altogether, and had AI write the books themselves.
Besides the greed, it's the out-of-touchness that bothers me the most. Lately I've been seeing the following screenshot going around -- a conversation between Long Island University Economics Department Chair Panos Mourdoukoutas and an ordinary reader named Gwen:
And don't even get me started about the Mark Zuckerberg model of social media. When Facebook first really got rolling, authors and other creators could post links to their work, and it was actually not a bad way to (at the very least) get some name recognition. Now? Anything with an external link gets deliberately drowned by the algorithm. Oh, sure, you can post stuff, but no one sees it. The idea is to force authors to purchase advertising from Facebook instead.
Basically, if it doesn't make Zuckerberg money, you can forget about it.
If I sound bitter about all this -- well, it's because I am. I've thrown my heart into my writing, and gotten very little in return. We've ceded the control of the creative spirit of humanity to an inherently parasitic system, where the ones who are actually enriching the cultural milieu are reaping only a minuscule percent of the rewards.
The worst part is that, like the situation I described yesterday regarding the news media, I see no way out of this, not for myself nor for any other creative person. Oh, we'll continue doing what we do; writing is as much a part of my life as breathing. But isn't it tragic that the writers, artists, and musicians whose creative spirits nurture all of us have to struggle against seemingly insurmountable odds even to be seen?
All because of the insatiable greed, arrogance, and short-sightedness of a handful of individuals who have somehow ended up in charge of damn near everything that makes life bearable. People who want more and more and more, and after that, more again. Millions don't satisfy; they need billions.
As psychologist Erich Fromm put it, "Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever actually reaching satisfaction."
Great article, enjoyed your spirit, despite the depressing outlook facing creatives. Keep up the good work
ReplyDeleteI find it odd that you list one of them as a "publisher" when it's clear that they're little more than a vanity project for the founder.
ReplyDeleteI was being charitable, but your assessment is more accurate.
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