The Butt-Clappers.
That’s what was displayed on the T-shirt of the dignified-looking man in the front row of Interabang Books in Dallas when I arrived for my author event. It was a line from my latest "Orphan X" thriller, a joke that is (I hope) funnier in context. He’d had it mocked up in the style of a rock band tour T-shirt and other readers were laughing and snapping selfies with him. I did the same before taking the microphone and by the time I was done speaking, the T-shirt had already been posted on various social media platforms and shared among fans.
Signing is my favorite part because I get to talk to readers one-on-one. A high school teacher had driven over five hours to get books personalized for her students. There were aspiring writers asking for advice, a woman who tearily recounted how a scene had brought up grief about the murder of a friend, fans joking about favorite characters, and a married couple arguing over which actor could play my protagonist. A young man told me in a hushed voice that when he’d been suicidal the summer before, his father had brought my books to him in the facility and that reading had kept him alive. I wanted to hug him but wasn’t sure if that would be weird. Instead, I signed his book with the most popular of The Ten Assassin’s Commandments, How you do anything is how you do everything, along with some words of encouragement.
I loved being there. How could I not?
My readership is delightfully varied along nearly every demographic criteria—young and old, conservative and liberal, secular and religious, action fans and those who prefer psychological drama. I split my tours evenly between red and blue states and my readers split their intake between ebooks, audio, and good old-fashioned physical copies. They read in English and Hebrew, Dutch and German, French and Bulgarian, and a few dozen other languages.
Not just that. My community has an intimate knowledge of all my characters, starting with my protagonist, Evan Smoak, whom they mostly like but wish would finally make up his mind about Mia. That would be Mia the prosecutor, who lives nine floors down from Evan in their apartment building in Los Angeles. And then there’s Josephine, the seventeen-year-old wunderkind-slash-hacker whose real mission is to turn Evan into a fully-fledged human being. Every time I interact with my readers, we talk about the people we know in common—my characters. And they care a lot. They feel connected to them.
Gregg Hurwitz at Thrillerfest (Photo courtesy of Kaye Publicity, Inc.)
"In five years, will human beings, who have been making art and telling stories for tens of thousands of years, still be doing that?"
What does that mean, given that we live on the precipice of an AI revolution? No one is sure whether it’s going to save us or destroy us—and that’s especially true in the world of content production. My friend, the microprocessor engineer and not entirely evil genius Jim Keller, recently told me that the scalable AI hardware he is creating will soon enough be able to help create, say, a Faulkner novel at the touch of a button. We can request however many Faulkeresque tomes we want, specifying the length and topic of each one. We can even dial the vocabulary up or down to match our precise IQ and level of reading comprehension. The same of course will be true of everything else from “news” to porn, which will be generated for us in combinations and contortions we can scarcely imagine.
Amazing, right? Endless Faulkner! Or Stephen King, JK Rowling, Toni Morrison, or anything else!
The big question is: In five years, will human beings, who have been making art and telling stories for tens of thousands of years, still be doing that? Or will our imagination have been subsumed by the robots? Will we be confined to their imagination? Is it inevitable that AI will become Sorcerer Mickey and we’ll be the eyeless mops hauling the sloshing buckets of our customized content?
I’m here to tell you that the end is not, in fact, near, that human beings will continue telling their own stories.
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Let’s recall: The promise of AI, at least when it comes to content, is that a computer will produce the perfect novel or movie or sonata or porn star just for you. It will be ideally, mathematically suited to your tastes—in fact, it will do a better job of catering to you than any human being ever could. It will know you better than you know you, and you are going to laugh, cry, be titillated—whatever—more than you ever imagined.
The only problem with this amazing AI “just for you” content is that you only think you want it.
You don’t actually want it.
Because at the end of the day, who the hell wants to read a book that’s created by a non-human or that’s created only for them?
Turns out, not many.
At least according to the AI study we commissioned at International Thriller Writers, where I currently serve as co-president with Lisa Unger. Of the let’s-hope-not-prescient 666 respondees, 97.1% believe publishers should be required to explicitly state on the cover if a book has been written using AI.
It’s the same reason why, in 1996, no one cared to watch Deep Blue play Deep Blue. We wanted to see how Kasparov fared against the AI behemoth. Put differently, who wants to watch an AI-created basketball game? We want to watch Jordan soar. I could computer-generate an athlete pole vaulting three dozen meters. Or show you this. Which has your heart in your throat?
So, what do we actually want? What we want—and I say this having given nearly a thousand readings in hundreds of cities in dozens and dozens of countries—is community.
That is what we’re endlessly seeking in this mosaic-fragmented age, what we’re bemoaning the lack of, what we feel as a phantom twitch in our oxytocin-starved souls. I remember lining up for hours to see Burton’s "Batman" as a gawky sixteen-year-old in 1996, when nerdy was truly nerdy, not a front-handed compliment. That weekend premiere was shared communion, the audience gasping as one as the Batwing shot upward to fill the Batlight of the moon. My-favorite-part-ism prevailed as we shuffled out of the theater, into the next week, and back again for second viewing, awash in a collective dopamine glow.
By contrast today I find myself stupor-scrolling through billions of dollars of entertainment on our Apple TV, unable to determine what will distinguish itself as being interesting to watch. A new "Star Wars" show with nine Oscar nominees? A fresh Marvel sub-franchise directed by Someone Who Made That Wonderful Indy? Nothing feels magical. Luxury has been the death of us, our interests and our passions leeched to a dreary gray blur of programming. Excessive reliance on AI writing rather than creation-driven with community in mind promises more of the same.
Appointment viewing was once boss in TV, cementing us together in shared narratives of Who-Killed-JR? and Did-Heather-Locklear-Really-Show-Up-In-A-Nighty-On-"Melrose-Place"? But with our household viewing withering on the streaming vine, we can scarcely maintain a shared conversation around the virtual watercooler anymore. Our cultural discourse has grown constipated. Have you heard of "White Lotus?" What app is it on? Wait, don’t tell me anything—I’m only at Season 2 of "Succession."
The headlong rush into streaming fragmentation was driven, it seems, by a desire to spike short-term quarterly earnings reports to please the Wall Street overlords. In doing so, studios relinquished not merely the talent and experience of the artists, but in fact that of their executives and the producers they employ, deft as (some of them) are at talent relations, shepherding and curating, providing the tools to chisel the living form from the block of marble.
"What is moving about a novel is not that it can be readily generated for us alone. It’s that we have a chance to share in it together"
Likewise, publishers who opt to create push-button novels will be sawing off the proximal tree limb with Wile E. Coyote abandon. Why relinquish that much narrative and business expertise in steering stories along and bringing them to commercial and literary fruition?
What is magical about a book is not that it is created only for us. Floating around in WALL-E pods imbibing our own bespoke distractions like force-fed ducks is a far cry from the exciting future our tech advancements can promise. It’s Pinocchio’s Pleasure Island, where we can gorge on any immediate desire and have all of our (supposed) wants realized—until they change us into something that we weren’t before.
What is moving about a novel is not that it can be readily generated for us alone. It’s that we have a chance to share in it together. That someone somewhere created something that could speak to a community of us, that opened the door to new understanding, new possibilities, new meaning. If one of my novels sells a million copies, a million different versions will be spun into life in the brains of my readers—but they are all experiencing, enjoying, discussing, and grappling with the same story. It makes us believe in the possibility of connection—which is the bedrock, the essential underlying ingredient of community.
Ostensibly, "Orphan X" is a series of novels about an ex-government assassin who saves people in a bad spot. Every time someone calls his encrypted phone line, 1-855-2-NOWHERE, Evan Smoak answers, “Do you need my help?” But really, "Orphan X" is about a deeply flawed man gradually becoming a human being, learning to speak the strange language of intimacy, and, yes, building a community.
That’s the tension that courses through the series—and, in my view, through all of us, all of our lives. We want to be connected to other human beings, and the perfect, algorithmically determined “just for you” content of the AI is the opposite of that. Which is why the storytellers—the humans—will prevail.
Because together, we can offer something the machines can’t.
Gregg Hurwitz's latest book, "NEMESIS," comes out on Feb 11.
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