On business and AI
Toby Taylor
I’ve seen a lot of stuff in the news lately about AI companies destroying books, the sheer number of uncreative losers who use AI to pretend to be writers, and I have to be honest, it’s made me really depressed.
It’s not like I am gatekeeping writing. I think that everyone as at least one book in them. Maybe they’re not a career writer, or even a novelist, but I think that just about everyone has a book’s worth of life story. It is not incredibly difficult to get better at writing. I would estimate that every year I shelf at least thirty thousand words of various projects that just don’t work. But they are mine. I wrote them. Me.
Using Artificial intelligence that was trained on the work of real writers to pretend you’re creative, is like going out to each at four different restaurants, coming home and shitting on a plate, and then pointing to the plate and saying “Look, I cooked a meal.”
My goal for this company is to publish books that are written by people I don’t know. I know both people I’ve published so far, I have a few more coming down the pipeline. I want to be a publisher for other people. Ai is one of the reasons that lately it doesn’t seem worth it. There will inevitably be some asshole who manages to get his slop past me. I’m not perfect. I will not use AI, because real artist are getting hurt by AI right now. They trained the machine by stealing our stuff, and when it recognizes our styles it tells them we’re AI.
But, assuming I get a lawyer to word it in a way that is perfectly legal, I have a solution. It’s a simple clause in the publishing contract that says If we find AI in ANY part of your process, not only do we not owe you any money, you owe us back every penny you made ruining our reputation as an AI free company. (IF this turns out not to be legal, then who knows what’ll happen.) The idea being, why risk it? There are plenty of places to put your AI bullshit where you can pretend you’re an artist and not risk owing me money.
The other part that’s made me hesitant is basically the entire ethos of the company. We aim to make books affordable. That is the goal. I stand by this goal. The issue is distribution. I have always respected YouTubers who actually get into the money instead of just saying “It depends”. That is not to say I think they owe me their financial information. I just hate people who make a video about money and refuse to get into numbers. If you don’t want me to know your financial numbers, don't make a video with a title like. How much I make, or Here are real numbers about my business.
Top table: Potential books based on word counts. Bottom Table: Titles we’ve published. And yes, I could not figure out a way to add a table to Squarespace.
In order to keep the prices as low as I like them to be, there is basically zero way for us to be in book stores, because bookstores operate on this pesky system where if they don’t make a profit, they go out of business. (For the sarcasm illiterate, that was a joke)
We’re working on ideas and ways to make the company able to publish other authors, but for now…I’m basically just depressed about art and life and business and everything else.