You can't make art if you can't survive
Two truths from inside the audiobook world, held at the same time.
I narrate audiobooks. I have spent years inside the author and narrator world, and I want to be careful here, because the people I am about to disagree with are my people and they are not wrong.
Truth one. The anti-AI position in literature is correct. The written human story is close to the last thing we have that a machine has no business flattening. Guarding it is not hysteria. It is the right instinct about the right thing, and I hold it too.
Truth two. That instinct has curdled into something that eats its own. Authors are getting hunted by other authors over a tool they touched, on evidence nobody checked, while they are trying to keep a roof up in a year that has been brutal to almost everyone. Purity is a luxury good. It gets cheaper to buy the more money you already have.
Nobody has ever made art from inside a foreclosure.
Both of those are true at once, and the mark of an actually intelligent person is the ability to sit with that instead of collapsing it into a side.
We are surrounded right now by people announcing the absolute truth. There is a social network literally called Truth Social. So ask the only question that settles it: in all that certainty, has humanity moved one inch closer to agreeing on anything? If people actually knew the truth there would be no religious wars. There would be no wars at all. The thing would be finished.
Certainty that loud is a product. Holding two true things at the same time is the harder job, and it is the one worth hiring.
So no, I will not tell you AI is harmless, and I will not tell you to starve on principle. I will tell you what it costs and where the line is, and then I will hold that line in the work.