Interview with Alison McBain, founder of the Authors vs AI project
- Jan 16
- 6 min read
Interview conducted by Danielle Urban of AR Critique
Q: What is the big deal of introducing AI to the book industry?
Like any new technology, there are benefits and drawbacks to some of the ways AI has developed. Benefit: programs such as Grammarly or spellcheck, which can help authors proofread their work. Drawbacks: (1) Advanced AI programs have been trained on authors’ writings without the authors’ permission at all, which has resulted in several lawsuits (https://www.reuters.com/legal/pulitzer-winning-authors-join-openai-microsoft-copyright-lawsuit-2023-12-20/).
(2) AI writing programs produce substandard work, including writing that has strange emotional reactions and stilted dialogue. (3) There’s the question of who is profiting from this. It’s certainly not the writers, either the ones whose work is being used without their permission or the ones who are using AI to create substandard books. So, who are the ones receiving financial gain from this? It’s not the little guy. And if it’s just big companies increasing their profit margin… no, thank you.
Q: Should authors be worried about the use of AI?
Yes and no. Right now—no. AI won’t replace human writers for the most part, especially in the fiction genre. It can be used to assist writers; for example, a number of writers might use it to help them produce book summaries for their work, and companies are using it to write nonfiction copy. But when it comes to the creative act of producing realistic and enthralling fiction, it’s not currently a threat.
However, that doesn’t mean it won’t be one in the future. The thing with new technology is that it always has a lot of bugs and drawbacks when it first appears. But then it gets better… and better. Engineers and programmers find ways around the problems.
Look at cell phones today and compare them to the first commercial computers in the 1950s-1970s. There’s no comparison—cell phones run circles around those computers from just a few decades ago. What was science fiction back then (for example, tricorders, communicators, and universal translators from Star Trek) has become a reality to us now.
So, I think that AI will get better. It is a threat to creative pursuits everywhere, since it takes what authors and other creatives love to do and cuts out the human element and makes it solely about profit.
Q: Will human creativity win over the talent of the AI programs?
Right now, yes. AI programs create strange emotional reactions in characters they write, and use bland or strange language that might be technically accurate but doesn’t ring true for people reading it. It’s the whole idea of the “uncanny valley,” where people can see a robot that looks human but know that it’s not human. There’s something “off” about it. Same with AI’s writing—sure, it’s words. But they’re not the right words and they usually end up falling flat.
Q: Why do you believe that authors would be favorable in using AI to write their books versus using their own real strengths? Would publishers know the difference?
As a publisher myself of a small literary magazine, I’ll answer yes—we can completely tell the difference between human writing and AI. Some authors, however, will look for shortcuts in writing their books, since writing can be a long and hard endeavor. If you’ve been writing your book for half a year, a year, ten years… it might be tempting to think: “Oh, I can just plug this into a program and ask it to finish the book for me instantaneously.”
However, that’s the problem—it’s not your work then. Great literature is great because someone put the work into it. It’s just like a meal from a 5-star restaurant versus the mass-produced frozen food from the grocery store. Both might be food, but there’s a significant difference between the two.
Q: Tell us, readers, about your book, Author vs AI.
My project Author Versus AI is one author (me) showing that authors can write almost as fast as AI, but much, much better. Over the course of a year—from Global Book Day (April 23) in 2024 to Global Book Day in 2025, I’m writing a book a week. At the end of this project, I hope to have 52 books in a wide range of genres. I’m tackling everything from mystery to romance, science fiction to comedy, and there’s even a nonfiction book and some short story collections thrown in there.
And so far, so good. I’ve been completing the books and moving onto the next genre. I’m having a lot of fun tackling new stories every week, but I will probably be VERY tired by the end of this project and might not want to look at words for a while, ha.
Q: As an editor is the AI good or bad for the publishing industry?
If AI is used as a tool to help writers and editors, it can absolutely be good. It can help cut down on the tedium of producing marketing material for authors, which is something authors often do instead of spending their valuable time writing new books. It can help with spelling and grammar and make an editor’s job easier when they receive an author’s manuscript if the author has first run their work through an editing software program.
However, if it’s used to replace writers and artists and editors and the myriad of other creative professionals whose experience goes into producing top quality books, then I feel the industry will suffer. Right now, it can’t replace what people do. It just can’t—I’ve read manuscripts that have been checked over by editing software, and they have plenty of awkward sentences and uneven pacing, as well as some typos (for example, a recent manuscript I edited had errors such as confusing the name “Cain”—from the Bible—and replacing it with “Cane”). That’s something only a human editor can catch. I’ve also read short stories produced by AI programs and they’re badly written. Neither one holds a candle to a human writer or human editor.
AI is a new and trendy fad, and one that a lot of publishers, especially small press publishers, are turning against. But I think one major thing will determine what impact AI has on the industry, and that’s profitability. The publishing model has been changing for a while with the advent of cheap self-publishing and print-on-demand. However, self-published authors have still struggled to make as significant an impact on readers as traditionally published authors. And that’s because there’s a lack of gatekeepers to make sure the quality is standardized across self-published work. There can be fabulous self-published books that are well-written and edited, and there can be simply abysmal ones. But it’s sometimes hard to tell which is which before you start reading the book.
I think the advent of AI will make this trend accelerate. People will be pumping out AI-generated books with the idea that they can make a fast profit—the whole “something for nothing” mentality. I’ve seen it myself at my literary magazine, where we get spammed by dozens of submissions that are obviously AI-generated, even though our guidelines specifically say no AI.
So, what this means for the industry is that it will make things harder for the little guy. It will be harder for small presses to regulate and survive if they have to deal with an overwhelming quantity of submissions by a few bad apples. It reminds me of the early days of email before spam was really a thing. Now, there are all kinds of spam emails, including by fraudsters trying the steal your information. I think AI writing and scams will become more and more advanced in the same way, and the gatekeepers—such as those trying to prevent plagiarism—will become overwhelmed and unable to keep up.
Q: Where do you see the future of writers using their own words versus those that use AI to write for them?
I think there will always be demand for writers who don’t use AI. Authors write for the love of it and to share in the human experience, so I think that our words will resonate in ways that AI writing can’t right now… or perhaps won’t ever be able to, at least in the near future.
I think AI will become useful in nonfiction writing, such as writing website copy, instruction manuals, and the like. Because it tends to be emotionless and factual, it will work better in those fields rather than in fiction, which needs subtlety and a range of emotional reactions from the characters.
Q: What other projects are you currently working on at the moment?
Writing 52 books in a year should be enough for me, but I’m actually working on a few other things at the same time.
One, I’m the publisher for the magazine ScribesMICRO (https://www.fairfieldscribes.com/), which publishes very short fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction once a month. We’re about to start taking submissions for our annual contest, The Scribes Prize (https://www.fairfieldscribes.com/the-scribes-prize.html), which offers cash prizes to the top 18 writers. Top prize is $250.
Two, my press Fairfield Scribes is publishing the fabulous horror novel Designs of Death in October by debut author Micah C. Brown. Stephen King said of Brown’s writing that he has “a real storyteller’s knack.”
Three, I regularly write articles about writing, as well as short stories and poems on the writing platform Medium (https://medium.com/@amcbain) and publish essays, fiction, and poetry on Vocal (https://vocal.media/authors/alison-mc-bain).
Q: Where can readers find you and your work online?
The two main places where you can reach me are my website: https://www.alisonmcbain.com/ and my Author Versus AI website: http://www.authorversusai.com/. All my social media links are on those two websites, so follow me, tweet at me, or Tok to me anytime you want.
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