Authors, Celebrity Authors, and AI - Katherine Roberts

Illustration from 'Alice and Sparkle' by... ???

Who wrote that latest celebrity title piled high in every bookshop? And why does it matter?

In his article 'Star Power' (The Author, spring 2023), Irish writer and illustrator Oisin McGann warns that celebrity books are in danger of taking over children's fiction. Experienced authors like him are often employed to ghostwrite such books, or at best collaborate with the celebrity, and yet their contribution is sometimes not even acknowledged; they simply get paid a fee for their work. You might think this is fine. Both authors - celebrity and ghostwriter - get paid. The celebrity gets their name featured prominently on the cover, the publisher gets a book they can sell easily, bookshops are delighted since they get commission on every sale, and the young reader gets a decent enough book for their money. Everyone is happy, everyone wins.

But where is this heading?

I'm old enough to remember when children's books used to be the poor relation of publishing, not really expected to sell in huge numbers. It was around the time I started submitting manuscripts to publishers, resulting in my debut Song Quest (Element Books, 1999), which happily (or perhaps, in hindsight, not so happily?) coincided with the growing excitement surrounding JK Rowling's rather more famous debut Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. Before this, a few thousand copies sold might have been enough to guarantee a new author's career. But then along came Harry, achieving sales figures that made the computers blink, and profit margins took over. Post Harry Potter, children's books enjoyed a golden age with a wealth of books being published by talented authors, both new and established, in search of that elusive Hogwarts magic. With the celebrity takeover, however, many book projects are now initiated by the publishers themselves, bypassing the creativity of their authors. A few authors whose books sold well enough during the golden period seem to have achieved celebrity status themselves. The rest seem fated to join a growing pool of potential ghostwriters, and not every author is suited to this type of work. Many have been forced out of the business altogether in the interests of making a living. Meanwhile, an increasing number of celebrities want their name on a children's book, but soon it will be difficult to find a suitably experienced author with the time or inclination to write it for them. At that point, publishers are either going to have to write the book themselves (and why don't they do this already?) or look elsewhere for their content... and if you read my post last month on this blog, you'll know exactly where they are going to look.

Artificial Intelligence. AI.

At the end of last year, product designer Ammaar Reshi spent a weekend using AI to create an illustrated children's book called 'Alice and Sparkle' about a girl and her friendly robot. The illustrations were far from perfect, and the book drew a lot of criticism plus some deep questions about copyright still to be resolved, but it was published on Amazon and sold better that month than most of my human-authored books. And that was without a celebrity name on the cover, although it seems Ammaar has become something of a minor celebrity himself for publishing it.

Alice and Sparkle
children's book created by Ammaar Reshi using AI

He is far from alone. Recently, someone on Twitter boasted that they 'wrote' a 256-page novel using ChatGPT in an hour. It is certainly possible. Other AIs, such as Bing and Midjourney, can generate images, which might eventually work for illustrated books. So a publisher could feed in their latest best-selling concept, and AIs could use this information to 'write' and 'illustrate' a short children's book in around half an hour. Slap a celebrity name on the cover, and bingo... you have a book that didn't need a human author or illustrator. Copyright maybe a bit tricky - the US requires human authorship, whereas UK law would currently protect the book under the 1998 Copyright, Designs and Patents Act - and the publisher would probably still need to proofread the results, but think of the savings! Some AIs are currently free to use, while others no doubt work out cheaper than hiring a human ghostwriter for each project. Time wise, it's a definite win. Get the computer to churn out an entire 24 book series in what... 12 hours? That's half a day's work for an AI. I dare any ghostwriter, however experienced, to work to those kind of deadlines. Remember AI does not need to sleep. So it can be working on a second best-selling series while the overworked ghostwriter is still snoring away, exhausted both physically and creatively after writing Book 1 of the first. If you're a sleep-deprived ghostwriter and you're tempted to play publishers at their own game, here's a helpful guide showing you how to use AI for best results.

Judging by the reviews I've seen of such AI-generated books, human creativity still has the upper hand. But AIs are learning fast... from us, the human authors and illustrators. And the one thing we all produced during the golden age of children's publishing is plenty of 'product' (books, best-selling or otherwise) for AIs to devour and learn from. Eventually, maybe a lot sooner than you think, children's books won't even need editors. Basic editing software such as Grammarly has been around for some time, and such software will only get more sophisticated. In fact, why not bypass the publisher altogether? The computer can easily come up with a best-selling concept based on previous best-sellers, feed it straight into an AI to churn out the words and pictures, run them through appropriate editing and proofreading software, say "yes" to publishing (well, it's hardly going to say "no" to one of its own, is it?) and publish the book in digital format with no human input at all.

The question is, will any human child want to read it?

*

Katherine Roberts writes fantasy and historical fiction for young readers. In the interests of research, she fed the first scene of her current concept for a new series aimed at middle-grade readers into ChatGPT. You can see the results on this blog next month (21st July), by which time Katherine and ChatGPT will no doubt have finished the entire series, and these books will be available on Amazon in time for the summer holidays... unless a publisher steps in to rescue them.

Find out more about Katherine's human-authored fiction on her website www.katherineroberts.co.uk