How To Be A Human Author in the AI Hellscape: In Conversation with Annika Howells

I’ve always dreamed of having a novel published.

And it’s finally happening! As I write this, I am working through the edits of my debut novel, Storm Girls. This book has been a passion project over ten years in the making, and I cannot wait to see the finished product come together.

While I’m excited about the upcoming release, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little trepidatious.

Not because I’m worried people won’t like it (I really hope you do), or that no one will read it (please read it).

It’s because I’m worried about how bad the AI slopification of art will be by the time my book comes out.

Living in the anslopocene

The speed at which AI slop has encroached on our day-to-day lives has been alarming and infuriating. First, it promised to make writing emails easier (was it ever that hard?). Then it threatened to take our jobs. Now, it apparently plans to destroy us all. But before it does, it’s going to produce an absolute butt-tonne of terrible art, music, and writing. The world apparently does not end with a whimper or a bang, it ends with a Jesus made of shrimp and restaurant menus so ugly it makes me yearn for the days of comic sans and clip art.

Being a writer in this AI hellscape is brutal. Every morning I wake up to another horrifying headline about AI’s impact on the publishing industry. One day it’s stealing work from authors all around the world, the next it’s being fed mountains of rare books like some kind of insatiable monster. Now, AI slop books are flooding the market, crowding out real authors and leaving readers unsatisfied. There have already been multiple instances of high-profile books being cancelled over suspected AI use, but no one can say for certain whether AI was used or not. And now every author is at the mercy of AI accusations if they so much as use an em-dash or a slightly unusual metaphor. I’ve already seen people online saying they are giving up on reading newly published books because they don’t trust them to be AI-free.

Thanks to AI, our work is being devalued and our audience is being betrayed.

Releasing my book into this world feels like I’m sending my baby off into oncoming traffic.

Art will always belong to the people

I always knew making it as an author would be hard. But I’m not giving up. I refuse to let AI take our art away from us.

Art and storytelling are integral to the human experience. We’ve been making art since we had firelight to illuminate our cave walls. We’ve been passing stories down from the moment we invented language. Any art that is not made by a living breathing human will always be worthless, and it will always lose.

Art is so much more than the finished product. It is the effort and intention that makes it valuable. Michelangelo's David is a masterpiece because it was painstakingly carved by hand from solid rock. Without the effort and skill, it is just a buff naked guy on a cold day. The Lords of the Rings is still a cornerstone for every fantasy novel because of the meticulous details JJR Tolkien put into Middle Earth, built from his imagination, his scholarly expertise, and his life experience. Without his particular skillset, it is just a bunch of hairy dudes on a camping trip.

But human art still matters even when it’s not a masterpiece. Anyone can tell a story, or paint a picture. It’s the act of creating that matters. AI cannot create, it can only regurgitate what was fed to it, vomited back at us in an ugly, meaningless mess.

Sticking it to the artificial man

People who think AI can do a creative’s job are the kind of people who point at a piece of art in a gallery and smugly say, “I could do that.”

Maybe you could, but you didn’t. Because the doing is the part that counts. It’s the part that takes courage and effort and intention and talent and mistakes and learning and growing. It’s the part that takes guts, something AI will never be able to understand no matter how much content it guzzles down.

The tech bro losers want us to believe that AI is inevitable, but they are wrong. The only thing that is inevitable is that humans will keep making art, and people will keep connecting with that art.

Art is political, and so is hope. They want artists to believe there is no hope for us so we stop resisting them. That just means we need to resist harder. Tell your local café you preferred their old menu. Support small business making things by hand. Buy books from publishers and authors taking an iron-clad stance against the use of AI in their works.

I’m going to keep writing. Sometimes it will be hard, or lonely, or frustrating. But I would rather struggle along at my own pace, building stories on my own terms, than give an inch to these AI sloptarts.

And you can pry the em-dash from my cold, dead hands.

Annika's debut, Storm Girls, will release from SkyNation Publishing in 2027. Add it on Goodreads!