Source: Persuasion
by Leonora Barclay
“Earlier this year, publishing house Hachette pulped the upcoming horror novel Shy Girl by Mia Ballard, following allegations that Ballard relied on artificial intelligence to write the book. Meanwhile, half of novelists in the UK fear they will be completely replaced by AI. As artificial intelligence continues to replace creative activities previously considered uniquely human, there’s a fear that fiction will grow ever more distant from the human experience, with predictable plots and simplistic dialogue and characters. Literature will start to function as synthetic junk food for the brain. Unfortunately, we didn’t need AI to do this. Literature has been functionally artificial for a number of years now, since long before ChatGPT came on the scene. It wasn’t computers that did this, it was us—publishers, agents, writers, and readers.” (06/30/26)
https://www.persuasion.community/p/how-readers-killed-reading