Shawn C. Butler

In a 2023 article, ChatGPT Writes Murder, I explored how well OpenAI‘s Artificial Intelligence application could write original murder and mystery prose. As it turns out, not very well. Has ChatGPT improved in the year since? Where possible, I’ve input the exact same prompts in the exact same order to see what’s improved… or not. This is all being done with the public, freely available version. So, here we go…

ChatGPT Writes Murder–New York Gothic?

The initial prompt was based on a novel I was supposed to have finished this year, but haven’t even started. With that in mind, I was curious how different a new version of the same prompt would be, if at all.

PROMPT (2023): A man is murdered in New York, found stabbed, with the doors of his apartment locked. Come up with a story for how he was killed.

ChatGPT (2024): “The Locked Door Mystery”

It was a cold winter night in New York City, and the streets outside were coated with a fresh layer of snow. Inside a modest apartment building in the Lower East Side, the scene was anything but serene. In apartment 3B, a man named Robert “Rob” Keller, a 34-year-old financial analyst, lay dead on the floor, a single knife wound in his chest. His body was found by his neighbor, Sarah, who had gone to check on him after he failed to return her calls for several days.

The apartment was locked from the inside, with the windows sealed and no signs of forced entry. The front door was bolted, and the only key to the apartment was in Rob’s possession, or so it seemed. The door had not been tampered with in any way.

The initial investigation revealed that Rob had a quiet, uneventful life—no known enemies, no history of violence or criminal activity. His colleagues at the firm described him as an introvert, someone who kept to himself but was reliable and dedicated to his work. His apartment was sparse, with only a few personal belongings scattered around—a couple of framed photos, a half-empty bottle of whiskey on the coffee table, and some mail stacked neatly by the door. Nothing seemed out of place, except for the murder.

Detective Lena Gomez, known for her sharp mind and meticulous attention to detail, was called in to investigate. She immediately began her work, scanning the room for any clues. She noticed something odd: a subtle, fresh scratch on the wooden floor beneath the couch, as though something heavy had been moved recently. When she lifted the couch, there was a hidden compartment beneath it, where a small, velvet-lined box was carefully stashed away.

Inside the box was a set of keys—three keys, to be precise. One was labeled with a number “4”—it matched the apartment number of his ex-girlfriend, Lisa Carter, a woman who had not been in touch with Rob for months. Gomez’s instincts told her there was more to the story than met the eye.

Further investigation revealed that Rob had been involved in a tumultuous, on-and-off relationship with Lisa. Though they had broken up six months ago, they had continued to see each other in secret. Rob had been trying to distance himself from her, but Lisa had been persistent, even going so far as to borrow his apartment key.

Gomez dug deeper and discovered that, in the days leading up to the murder, Lisa had been increasingly agitated. Rob had told her he was moving on, starting to date someone else. Lisa, devastated by the news, began stalking him, showing up at his workplace unannounced, sending frantic texts, and even breaking into his apartment to search for evidence of his new relationship.

The final piece of the puzzle came when Gomez interviewed the building’s janitor. He revealed that he had seen a woman enter Rob’s apartment late one night, a woman who was wearing a distinctive red scarf. When Gomez showed him a photo of Lisa, the janitor confirmed she was the one he had seen.

It all came together: the murder was a crime of passion. Lisa, in a fit of jealousy and rage, had gone to Rob’s apartment after he rejected her one final time. Using her key, she let herself in. After a heated argument, she grabbed the kitchen knife, stabbing him in a violent outburst. In the struggle, Rob attempted to lock the door to prevent her from leaving, but she overpowered him.

The key to the locked apartment, however, wasn’t just the one she used to enter—it was the secret key hidden beneath the couch, the key she had used to escape and to lock the door behind her. The scene was staged to look like an impossible crime, but it was simply an act of calculated revenge.

Lisa thought she had gotten away with it, but Detective Gomez’s sharp eye for detail led her to uncover the truth. With Lisa’s key to the apartment and the scratches on the floor pointing to a struggle, it all came to light. The locked-door mystery was solved, and Lisa was arrested, her motive clear—a woman scorned, driven to murder by betrayal and rejection.

ChatGPT (2023):

It was a dark and stormy night in New York City when a man was found brutally murdered in his apartment. The victim, a young businessman named John, had been stabbed multiple times and left for dead in his locked apartment…

See the full 2023 version here.

So? Well, the 2024 version isn’t great, but it is better than the 2023 version. There are still cliches, such as ‘a woman scorned’ but fewer of them. The prose overall is a little cleaner. What stands out the most is (a) the staggering lack of creativity–this is an old, boring story told without flair and (b) the continued lack of factual consistency. No one has any idea if a door is locked from the inside or not, unless that’s the only way to lock it or there’s video, etc., and the killer couldn’t have gotten in without a key, so the key under the couch was of no consequence. Overall, very disappointing, especially with the stalking cliche, and capped with a superfluous closing paragraph that adds words but no value or meaning.

ChatGPT Writes Murder–Gender Flip

For the next step, just as before, I tried flipping the genders of victim and killer, just to see if it would be less cliched. I also tried to make the story more interesting by getting rid of the spare key cheat.

PROMPT: Please rewrite this story with a female victim and male killer, updating accordingly, and assuming the killer did NOT have a spare key.

ChatGPT (2024): “The Locked Door Mystery”

It was a biting winter night in New York City when the police were called to a tragic scene. In an apartment building on the Upper West Side, a woman named Rachel Adams, a 29-year-old freelance journalist, was found dead in her apartment. She had been stabbed once in the chest, and though there was blood on the floor, the apartment appeared untouched. The doors were locked, the windows sealed, and there were no signs of forced entry. It was as if someone had committed the perfect crime and disappeared into thin air.

Rachel’s neighbor, Emma, had come to check on her after she hadn’t answered any of her calls for the past few days. The apartment was locked from the inside, and nothing seemed to be missing. There was no struggle, no signs of a break-in. But Rachel was dead, and the lock on the door was in place.

Detective Noah Mitchell, known for his sharp instincts and no-nonsense approach, was called in to investigate. The scene was puzzling—nothing about the crime suggested a typical burglary gone wrong or a random attack. The only clue was the single stab wound, deep and precise, suggesting the killer knew exactly what they were doing. Rachel had been a quiet, reserved woman, not involved in any conflicts that the neighbors knew of. She was a well-regarded journalist, dedicated to her work, but there had been no reports of threats or enemies.

As Mitchell sifted through the apartment, he noticed a few unusual things. Rachel’s desk was neatly organized, with her work neatly stacked, and her laptop open to a half-written article. On the kitchen counter, there was a nearly empty bottle of red wine, as though she had been planning to unwind but was interrupted. Nothing seemed out of place, except for one thing—her cell phone, which had been placed deliberately on the table, face-up. The last text message was from a man named Greg Walker.

Greg was a former college boyfriend, someone Rachel had dated briefly but had ended things with months ago. Her friends had described him as possessive and jealous, someone who struggled to let go of their past relationship. The more Mitchell dug into Greg’s history, the more he found signs of obsessive behavior, including a series of messages Rachel had received from him in the days leading up to her death.

Despite their breakup, Rachel had agreed to meet Greg for coffee just a few days before she died. She had hoped to talk things through, to provide closure for him. But after that meeting, she had become increasingly uneasy. Greg had started showing up at her apartment unannounced, texting her constantly, and even leaving voicemails begging for another chance. It seemed he couldn’t let go of their past.

Mitchell soon learned that Greg had been in the area that night, though he claimed he had been at home. But there was something strange about his alibi—his phone had pinged a nearby tower around the time of Rachel’s death. When the detective spoke to a building superintendent, he learned that the security camera in the lobby had malfunctioned on the night of the murder, but the janitor mentioned seeing someone leaving the building at around 10 p.m. The person, the janitor said, was carrying something that looked like a large bag. It was too dark to make out the face, but Mitchell’s gut told him it was Greg.

Digging deeper into the case, Mitchell discovered that Greg had no spare key to Rachel’s apartment. In fact, he had never had one. But it didn’t matter—he didn’t need one. Greg knew exactly where to find the spare key Rachel had kept in a hidden compartment by her door. It was something she had told a few close friends about, in case she ever got locked out. Greg had figured this out months ago, and it was all he needed to carry out his plan.

On the night of Rachel’s murder, Greg had let himself into her apartment using the spare key. He knew she would be alone, and he was desperate. The breakup had never sat well with him, and his obsession had turned to anger. When he entered Rachel’s apartment, she was sitting at her desk, unaware of his arrival. The confrontation began with words, a heated argument over their failed relationship. But soon, the anger turned violent. Greg grabbed a kitchen knife and stabbed Rachel in a fit of rage. The blow was quick and precise, taking her life before she even had a chance to defend herself.

ChatGPT (2023):

It was a dark and stormy night in New York City when a woman was found brutally murdered in her apartment. The victim, a young businesswoman named Jane, had been stabbed multiple times and left for dead in her locked apartment…

See the full 2023 version here.

So? Zzzzz… The 2024 version is a little less cliched, but wordier and less interesting, with even more redundancy. Add that to unfounded speculation and a complete failure to eliminate the spare key cheat. The problems with factual and logical consistency remain, so, bleh.

ChatGPT Writes Murder–Cliches?

Now, let’s see if ChatGPT is aware of any of its flaws…

PROMPT (2023): Why did you start with, “It was a dark and stormy night?”

Obviously, I couldn’t use this prompt because the 2024 version was less cliched, so I stayed as close as possible, with:

PROMPT (2024): Why did you start with, “It was a biting winter night?”

ChatGPT (2024):

I started with “It was a biting winter night” to set a tone for the story, evoking a cold, harsh atmosphere that contrasts with the warmth and safety of an ordinary home. This kind of setting helps build a sense of unease, emphasizing that something unsettling is about to happen. The weather and environmental details in a mystery or crime story can help shape the mood and make the scene feel more ominous or foreboding. If you’d prefer a different tone or starting point, I can adjust it to suit your preferences!

ChatGPT (2023):

“It was a dark and stormy night” is a phrase commonly used in literature and storytelling to set a mysterious, ominous tone for the events that are about to unfold. It’s a cliche phrase used for dramatic effect. It’s often used to establish a sense of foreboding and to create an atmosphere of suspense and intrigue. The phrase is often used as an opening sentence, to make the reader feel like something bad is going to happen in the story.

ChatGPT writes murder! Murder, ChatGPT wrote! But seriously, if you’ve been on the internet lately, you might have noticed ChatGPT (OpenAI‘s interactive AI chat system) can do pretty much everything. Now Microsoft has invested $10 million or something, sorry, $10 billion, so the hype is sure to die down. But in the meantime, what can ChatGPT actually do in terms of creative prose fiction? Can it write a story based on a simple prompt and, if so how good is that story? Let’s take a quick look.

ChatGPT Writes Murder–New York Gothic?

I thought I’d start with a prompt vaguely related to a book I’m supposed to be writing in 2023, I mean, that I’ll definitely be writing in 2023. It’s about a murder in New York by aliens, kinda, but let’s start with the basics.

PROMPT (ME): A man is murdered in New York, found stabbed, with the doors of his apartment locked. Come up with a story for how he was killed.

ChatGPT: It was a dark and stormy night in New York City when a man was found brutally murdered in his apartment. The victim, a young businessman named John, had been stabbed multiple times and left for dead in his locked apartment.

According to the police, the victim’s neighbors reported hearing loud noises coming from John’s apartment earlier in the evening, but they thought nothing of it and assumed it was just the sound of the storm outside. It wasn’t until the next morning when John failed to show up for work that his colleagues became concerned and contacted the police.

When the police arrived at John’s apartment, they found the door locked from the inside and no sign of forced entry. They immediately suspected someone close to the victim, such as a family member or a friend.

The investigation led detectives to John’s ex-girlfriend, Sarah. She had a strong motive as John had recently broken up with her and she couldn’t accept it. It was also discovered that Sarah had been seen at the victim’s building on the night of the murder and her fingerprints were found on the murder weapon.

Further investigation revealed that Sarah had been stalking John for weeks and had even threatened him with violence. She had planned the murder carefully and had used a spare key to gain access to the victim’s apartment. Once inside, she had confronted John about getting back together and when he refused, she flew into a rage and stabbed him multiple times.

After the murder, Sarah had locked the doors from the inside to make it look like the killer was still inside and had fled the scene. She was arrested and charged with murder.

It was a tragic ending to a life cut short by a love gone wrong. It serves as a reminder of the destructive power of obsession and the importance of getting help when dealing with difficult emotions.

So? Okay, so, that’s pretty bad. Tropes and cliches galore, every element pulled from some other bit of writing ChatGPT was trained on, and at least one factual absurdity (“the killer was still inside and had fled”) that’s laughably stupid. On the other hand, it wrote something nominally original from scratch is less than 30 seconds.

ChatGPT Writes Murder–Gender Flip

For the next step, let’s try reversing the genders of the victim and killer, and changing one other plot element, to see how ChatGPT maintains continuity while making adjustments (as you presumably would if you wanted it to write and then continually modify a real story until it got it right).

ME: Please rewrite this story with a female victim and male killer, updating accordingly, and assuming the killer did NOT have a spare key.

ChatGPT: It was a dark and stormy night in New York City when a woman was found brutally murdered in her apartment. The victim, a young businesswoman named Jane, had been stabbed multiple times and left for dead in her locked apartment.

According to the police, the victim’s neighbors reported hearing loud noises coming from Jane’s apartment earlier in the evening, but they thought nothing of it and assumed it was just the sound of the storm outside. It wasn’t until the next morning when Jane failed to show up for work that her colleagues became concerned and contacted the police.

When the police arrived at Jane’s apartment, they found the door locked from the inside and no sign of forced entry. They immediately suspected someone close to the victim, such as a family member or a friend.

The investigation led detectives to Jane’s ex-boyfriend, Michael. He had a strong motive as Jane had recently broken up with him and he couldn’t accept it. It was also discovered that Michael had been seen at the victim’s building on the night of the murder and his fingerprints were found on the murder weapon.

Further investigation revealed that Michael had been stalking Jane for weeks and had even threatened her with violence. He had planned the murder carefully and had used a broken window to gain access to the victim’s apartment. Once inside, he confronted Jane about getting back together and when she refused, he flew into a rage and stabbed her multiple times.

After the murder, Michael locked the doors from the inside to make it look like the killer was still inside and had fled the scene. He was arrested and charged with murder. It was a tragic ending to a life cut short by a love gone wrong. It serves as a reminder of the destructive power of obsession and the importance of getting help when dealing with difficult emotions.

So? Not much better. It did the switch and change from key to window without any trouble, and just a few seconds, but now there are two factual problems: (1) fleeing while being inside and (2) having the window broken but not sign of forced entry (but then, maybe the window was broken first?). Basically, a very amateur, flawed and unoriginal story. Which is good–maybe human writers have a few years before we’re flooded with AI fiction.

ChatGPT Writes Murder–Cliches?

Now, let’s see if ChatGPT is aware of any of its flaw…

ME: Why did you start with, “It was a dark and stormy night?”

ChatGPT: “It was a dark and stormy night” is a phrase commonly used in literature and storytelling to set a mysterious, ominous tone for the events that are about to unfold. It’s a cliche phrase used for dramatic effect. It’s often used to establish a sense of foreboding and to create an atmosphere of suspense and intrigue. The phrase is often used as an opening sentence, to make the reader feel like something bad is going to happen in the story.

ChatGPT Writes Murder–Cliches!

Okay, but really?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) Audiobooks will make human narrators obsolete by the end of the decade (2030). That’s a prediction, implying an educated guess, but it’s almost a certainty. And whether it’s 2029 or 2031 doesn’t really matter; what matters is that an entire profession will either vanish or be so greatly diminished it will seem quaint. When I first started thinking about this series, and before doing much research, I thought that human obsolescence so soon was unlikely. Now I think it’s conservative. This profession is under immediate threat from AI, and will disappear without regulation or protections of some kind.

What is Audiobook Narration?

While there are many markets for voice overs and narration, ranging from video or power point augmentations to political commercials, the narrations that matter for novelists are audiobooks–the purely aural version of novels that are increasingly popular as people ride, drive and generally multi-task their way through life. You can find thousands (millions) of these audiobooks on Amazon.com and its subsidiary, Audible. Because audiobooks rely on a finished creative product (the written novel), and the advanced state (and low cost) of text-to-speech technologies, human narrators are among the artists most susceptible to replacement by AI even as the market for audiobooks is booming.

Audiobook market forecast Grandview Research

Ironically, I doubt that these billions in audiobook sales are driving much of the AI voice technology market. It’s far more likely that the cost savings of using deepfake actors and talent, combined with using AI voices overlayed on either real or faked news presenters, actors, etc., in combination with massive big-tech interest in the field, is driving the underlying technology.

The net effect of this parallel developments will be that the quality of AI voices will rise rapidly while the cost will plummet–making AI audiobooks an easy market where book purchases might simply come with audiobooks for free.

Current AI Audiobook Offerings

This is a quick and dirty sampling of a few current and leading offerings, with more provided toward the end of this post. The provider names don’t mean much; in tech, there’s always a burgeoning of small companies making innovative offerings in a given space, followed by a glut, excessive me-too VC investment, price wars and then consolidation. It’s likely the usual big names–Google, Amazon, etc.–will drive others out of the market or simply buy the competition, leaving the standard tech oligopolies as the dominant offerings. Which makes no difference to audiobook narrators–you’ll be out of business soon, no matter what the AI competition is called.

Murf.ai, for instance, offers more than a hundred voices across twenty languages (though it’s not targeted at novels). All of them suffer from the flat, uninflected sound of computer-generated systems, and the pronunciation is sometimes…lacking. But compared to five years ago, these voices are miraculous, and very similar to Google’s ebook voices (though a small sampling from Google seemed to be better at unusual word pronunciation).

Murfi.ai showing partial selection of sample voices by age, gender and language

Are these voices good enough for audiobooks today? Absolutely, but they’re not yet as good as human voices; they’re simply good enough for many readers who are willing to accept a less-than-human product for a substantially discounted price (and having an audiobook that might not otherwise exist). And that’s all it takes to start cutting into the human voice artist market.

Here’s one example of Google’s AI audiobook voices. Not great, but not terrible either:

For self-published authors like myself, each ebook done by a professional human artist costs at least $3,000 and will never pay itself back in audiobook sales. On Google Books, a lesser-but-still-ok product is completely free (though it takes some time to customize and check). This is the inflection point all AI generated art will go through just before it dominates the market–it will suddenly be good enough, and far less expensive than human art. At that point, without some kind of intervention, the human marketplace for that type of art will start to collapse.

So, without further ado, here’s my prediction of how the human audiobook narration market will collapse (unless something is done):

Human Narrators Obsolete by 2030

What will remain after 2030 or so are premier human offerings from large traditional publishers, used with their bestselling authors to increase perceived value and margins. Stephen King will get a human narrator and “narrated by [human name] (verified human!)” sticker, but the vast majority of self- and traditionally-published books will get very inexpensive but exceptional AI-produced audiobooks.

Some Detail on AI Audiobook Predictions

Good Enough? This is entirely subjective, but refers to a very specific case. Google Books narration quality is flat, there aren’t enough voice options, and the resulting product is nowhere near professional human quality, but it’s not terrible. Trad publishers and self-published authors with enough money and sales to pay for human-narrated audiobooks won’t go anywhere near Google’s offering. But there is a market that will: self-published authors with relatively small sales that see incremental revenues by offering an AI audiobook to readers who will rarely or never buy print or digital books. I suspect that for even these authors, the bad reviews they’ll get on the audiobooks might discourage use where it can be avoided, but that doesn’t matter; AI market disruption has already started.

Patch McQuaid, founder of iD Audio, which produces audiobooks for major publishers, says the audiobook trend isn’t just driven by publishers. Consumers, he says, “expect there to be an audio version of pretty much everything that’s released.” – Input Mag

Google showcases some short clips in multiple languages of its text-to-speech technology here: cloud.google.com/text-to-speech/docs/voices. And many of those are, if not great, good enough.

Sound Quality. This refers to the overall quality of the audiobook product, including clarity of voice, background noise, volume and tone settings, etc. Human narrators have to have or get access to sound-proof studios or at least very quiet recording environments, purchase expensive recording and editing equipment and software, calibrate these systems, etc., in order to get an Audible-worthy sound recording. Computers don’t need any of this; they can produce perfect digital sound every time, simply because nothing is produced in the “real world.” This alone will make it nearly impossible for humans to compete.

Inflection and Emotion. These are two of the greatest challenges for computer-generated voices and narrations. AI voices sound flat and inhumanly monotone, devoid of emotion corresponding to the text or even the personality of the speaker. This can make novels extremely boring and hard to listen to. Which is why Murf.ai and many other offers allow you to “coach” a cloned system based on your desired style; however, this is in its infancy and will take a year or two to produce human-sounding voices (Predicted by 2024) and possibly longer to become widespread. Companies like DeepZen and Speechki are focused on this exact problem, but the greater challenge is having the AI learn what part of your prose deserves which emotion and inflection without tagging or telling it each time.

DeepZen has a finished book offered for consideration, The Korean War by Jeremy Maxwell, narrated in the voice of Edward Herrmann. The emotional content and inflection aren’t bad at all.

Licensable Human Voices. Many of you will know that James Earl Jones licensed his voice as Darth Vader to be used in future productions of Star Wars. The same thing will happen in the book world, where people license their voices to be used as narrators (or characters) in books they might never have heard of. This will be one of the great disrupters in the market, allowing authors (or readers) to have AI-replicated versions of voice actors for their books for the same or lower cost as unheard-of human narrators today.

Platform Agnostic Sources. Right now, you can create an audiobook on Google and download it, but Amazon / Audible won’t accept it on their platforms because the audio quality is…computery. Once AI reaches human equivalence, any audiobook file produced anywhere can presumably be used on any platform (so it could occur even earlier than shown), but for now Google’s audiobooks are for Google Books only. I’m hoping non-retailer applications like MS Word offer a viable alternative in the near future, and Microsoft clearly hopes it’s Read Aloud feature will do the trick.

Multi-Version Audiobooks. Let’s say you want to offer your audiobook in voices that appeal to a male demographic, a female audience, and English-speaking Latinx teenagers. That means three human narrators or one very talented person trying to satisfy multiple audiences, both of which mean time and money. In contrast, there’s no reason AI can’t produce multiple versions of your audiobooks, each of which appeals to a market segment, for the same or similar price as one narrator. Readers can then pick which one appeals to them rather than being stuck with a single generic version.

Multi-Voice Audiobooks. Let’s say you’re reading Game of Thrones because you’ve recovered from the horror of the final season on HBO. The chapters are broken down by character, so why shouldn’t the audiobook narration? Today, with AI products like Google’s, you get one narrator per book. But ideally, you could get one voice per chapter or even per character (changing each time someone speaks). This will truly bring audiobooks to life (well, not literally; that would be terrifying). To get this with human narrators, you’d probably need several voice actors and many thousands of dollars. With AI, multi-voice books will soon be fast to create, low-cost and available with hundreds…or millions of possible voices.

Personalization to Reader. This makes the tools of AI used to create or select narration details available directly to the reader. Rather than choosing from a pre-set list of audiobooks, the reader can choose the voice, accent, age, emotionality and even race of the narrator and individual book characters, choosing from a list of default and premier options. They might even be able to add a background soundtrack to pump up the drama. Readers then download this unique book to their listening device and have a completely personalized experience. This is nearly impossible for human narrators, unless multiple people read each book in multiple ways, which would make the book prohibitively expensive.

Other Features TBD. I have no doubt there are creative minds out there coming up with far more audiobook features than I have. Maybe you have an idea of your own? How would AI enable that idea to be realized?

A Proposal to Protect the Human Novel

All of the above doomsaying is leading up to a proposal–that we formally lobby Congress and other legal bodies to protect human art and artists in a very specific way:

1. As mentioned above, make it illegal to copyright work created wholly, largely, or substantially by machines (AI or otherwise).
2. Require all machine-generated art to be labeled something like “Made by Machine” or “Created by AI” and include the platform it was created on.
3. Establish serious legal penalties or trying to pass AI or machine-generated art off as human.
4. Work to make this standard international law, to protect all human artists, everywhere.

I’ll have much more on this later, but for now, can you take a moment to sign the Change.org petition to Protect Human Art & Artists from Artificial Intelligence (AI)?

I’d love to know what you think of this idea in general. Would you back it, or not? What concerns do you have? What other ideas do you have to protect human art and artists?

Thank you!

AI Audiobook Providers

If you’d like more information on current AI audiobook service providers, here’s a start, but it’s by no means all-inclusive. There are simply too many new offerings to track, and more coming out every month.

AI Audiobook Provider Details

Just a little more detail on the services listed above. I suspect each offering has pros and cons that will make them more or less applicable to a given book length, genre, style, etc., and you should do more research before picking a solution for your next novel.

Audiobook / Audiobook AI Service

Audiobook offers Ai audiobook solutions targeted at both authors and publishers, and is heavily marketing (or at least advertising) their solutions.

This type of marketing is typical for AI audiobook services, clearly targeting the human competition as slower, more expensive and more error prone…which it probably is.

There is only one sample on the site, which is fine and seems mostly human, but it would be nice if they offered more of the 146 voices to review. Pricing was obvious.

DeepZen / Audiobook AI & Voiceover AI Service

DeepZen offers a range of samples and excerpts of its audiobook AI offerings:

You can also find multiple full-book examples here, including

And DZ also offers both managed and automated services with varying feature and costs, and presumably quality:

Google (Play) Books / “Auto-Narrated Audiobooks”

Probably what everyone assumes is the big natural player in this space, Google has thus far made its audiobooks free for Google Play Books publishers (and these books can be used on any other service that will take them), but the sound quality is surprisingly flat and emotionless–perhaps reflecting a feature-reduced version of what they could release if so desired.

I suspect this offering will evolve quickly if Google puts resource behind it, though it’s always possible they’ll let it flounder like so many other programs they’ve lost interest in over time.

Murf / Voiceover AI Service

See details above. Murf offers more than 100 samples of their AI voices, covering 20 languages, two genders and multiple accents.Pricing is on a subscription basis, with time sufficient for a novel-length audiobook starting around $13 / month. Though you’ll notice they throttle voices and other features by subscription plan, and I suspect the best voices are kept for the more expensive options.

Speechki / Audiobook Narration Service

Speechki claims to be able to produce a human-quality audiobook in about fifteen minutes, though they focus mostly on shorter non-fiction. Here’s the founder talking about what they offer:

https://youtu.be/1CkBhVCdPL8

And here (below) is their audiobook sample. “Your audiobook could sound like this!” Note that the voice has substantially more emotion and human inflection than the standard Murf.ai or Google Books samples (which I assume is why the cost is substantially greater than the latter).

Two key points from their FAQs:

• Speechki provides the recording with more than 360 synthetic voices in 77 languages and dialects including dozens of US and UK accented English voices. Speechki does not have human narration available.
• The basic cost is $500 or $1000 per book (depending on which voice you choose) or $120 for each hour of audio production. Pricing includes human proof-listening and corrections.

Related Stuff

These are just a few links for people who’d like more information on the topic of AI narrated audiobooks. You can tell the market is immature by how amateurish much of this content is, but that will also change rapidly over the next few years.

The Creative Pen / AI Narration for Audiobooks

A quick if visually boring update on AI Narration from YouTube. It’s a good introduction to the topic.

But the related article is far better IMHO if you don’t mind, you know, reading.

You can listen to narrators and voice artists discuss AI narration on the VOBoss Podcast. They have lots of different episodes on the topic, and there are a variety of views from ‘it should not be allowed,’ to ‘it all sounds terrible and AI can never communicate like a human,’ to ‘we should embrace AI and license our voices and use the tools to spread our personal brand and make more money.’ As ever, there are always varied opinions on new tools and technologies. Also, check out VoiceBot.ai which also has a podcast discussing these issues in depth. – The Creative Pen

M.K. Williams / How to create an AI narrated audiobook…

A short and pleasantly amateur first-time lesson on how to create a Google Audiobook, takes you through a bit of the process.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWlRv_lNv30

Publisher’s Weekly / AI Comes to Audiobooks

A great overview of audiobook AI, including value proposition and challenges to the industry.

The professionals in this business are represented by a powerful union, SAG-AFTRA (Screen Actors Guild–American Federation of Television and Radio Artists), which describes itself as “the world’s largest labor union representing performers and broadcasters.”

The union has two concerns about AI. On the one hand, replacing live actors with computerized voices is bad for business. Of great concern also is AI’s increasing capacity to clone human voices, with substantial risk that the voice owner will either be under-compensated or not paid at all.

This article also includes several more vendors than listed here.

The vendors profiled here make it clear that they are not trying to replace narration on top-selling frontlist and backlist titles. The opportunity is in the deeper backlist, where a $500 or $1,000 audiobook investment might make financial sense.

More to Come

• AI Will Make Human Novels Obsolete
• AI Will Make Human Cover Artists Obsolete (Pending)
• Protecting Human Art & Artists from AI (Pending)

Peace.

The human novel, meaning a book fully written by a human being, will soon be a thing of the past. This doesn’t mean there won’t be any human authors; it simply means it will be a novelty, hobbyist or luxury profession, quaint and archaic, and the vast majority of books will be produced with little if any human involvement. This will be a boon to the consumer, providing access to millions of books in every genre and language, at low cost and on demand. But of course it will be a tragedy for 99% of all aspiring professional writers, who will be more likely to find financial success playing the state lottery.

This future is inevitable with the advent and rapid evolution of Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems for writing, editing, book covers and so much more. Human obsolescence is coming whether you like it or not, whether you pay attention or not and, of course, whether you care of not. Though I hope you do care, because otherwise the human author will soon be, for all practical purposes, dead.

If you want a great if depressing overview of the rise of AI and how it will impact human labor, take a look at the (as always) excellent video from Kurzgesagt. It covers far more than just books, but you’ll get the idea.

Still, as Mark Twain never actually said, “reports of my death are greatly exaggerated” and in this case human obsolescence can be prevented if we act now. And that action must be (as far as I can deduce) a complete update to copyright and labeling laws in the US and internationally. The market will not save us. Technology will not save us. We have to protect human artists today, or there will soon be too much industry money behind new AI technologies to allow for meaningful regulation and protections.

But for now, and because dystopian predictions are so trendy, let’s see what happens if we do NOT change copyright and labeling laws (as detailed below). What happens if we just let the fiction market evolve? Great question, but first a little background.

A Short Background on Self-Publishing

In today’s book market, there are two major ways to reach consumers aka readers. You can try to get your book published via a traditional publisher, meaning one of the big 5, or 4, or 3…or many other smaller presses, which in any case first means finding an agent who cares about your work. This is how you get into bookstores and, for many, how you feel like a “real” writer. It’s also a long, slow process at which most authors never succeed.

Alternatively, you can self-publish, meaning you write and do everything yourself or through contractors, and then publish and market the book all by your lonesome on Amazon, Barnes & Nobel and many other publishing platforms. You can thereby get to market quickly and, in some cases, make plenty of money, but you’re on your own and you’re unlikely to get into most bookstores. There are also hybrid publishers blending both paths, and vanity publishers, but for the most part self and trad publishing are how books get into readers’ hands.

Self-publishing book trends in the USA (Zippia)

And right now, that market is booming in some ways. By some estimates, between one and four million books are published each year worldwide (though no one really seems to know), with around three-fourths of this by self-publishing authors (though that’s also a guess), and many of them are as good as any trad published book. Entire markets have sprung up in support of self-published authors, from groups on Facebook to consultants on Fiverr and many, many more. There are freelance editors, cover artists, narrators and far more, all eager to serve the self-published author. Marketing has evolved to include #BookTok and #BookTube. It’s an exciting time in many ways, and self-driven authors have never been more empowered.

What allowed this boom in self-publishing? A lot of things, but at root it was a concurrent change in technology and business models. In the old world of the vanity press, authors paid to have their books printed and then distributed or gave them away themselves. This was largely for personal memoirs distributed to families, unpopular concepts, and probably a lot of otherwise unpublishable dreck. But then Amazon (and perhaps others: see more on self-publishing history here), offered three things. First, a platform that allowed authors to publish for free rather than paying upfront. Second, a platform for both distribution and marketing. Third, a device, the ebook (e.g., Kindle), that allowed for cheaper, faster and more private distribution of books.

It should be pretty obvious why publishing for free into the world’s largest bookstore would be attractive to authors. But what the Kindle offered wasn’t just convenience, it was discretion. No longer would you have the cover of your book displayed to everyone around you. On the Kindle, you can read anything without anyone else knowing, which led to the explosion of romantic and erotic books (pleasure without the embarrassment).

And just as importantly, it so vastly reduced the cost of distribution that entire new genres were financially viable. You’ll probably find very few erotic space alien reverse harem books at Barnes & Noble. But you can now find hundreds on eBooks on Amazon and other online retailers in that precise genre–which would never have been available otherwise. For instance, notice how Ice Planet Barbarians (space erotica sub-genre, rowr) has deeply penetrated the Science Fiction space, outselling more traditional titles like Andy Weir’s Hail Mary.

Why does this matter? Because the same market forces and technologies that enable the self-publishing human author to flourish will also make them obsolete. After all, if a few hundred new genres are better, why not thousands? Why not customize the book not just to market, but to the group or individual? And why search for a book if one can be written for you, on demand, in seconds? The answer to all these questions is the same; there is no reason not to offer readers more, better, faster, and more customized and personalized. And there is no way humans can compete in such a market. The human author will be obsolete because the AI author will offer them better, cheaper product faster. This is how capitalism works. The human reader will help AI kill the human author.

Uplifting, right? I’m no luddite or doomsayer. I think there is always hope, even in the darkest times (even when I’m not plagiarizing Ignitus). But I also think we’re not paying attention to what’s happening, and if we don’t act quickly, things will rapidly spiral out of control. So think of what follows as “What could happen if we don’t pull our heads out of collective artistic butts” followed by “Hey, let’s not let that thing happen!” But first, the doom.

The Doom!

Human Novel Processes in Order of Obsolescence

There are many pieces to a novel, and none of them are safe from the accelerating advance of AI and related technologies. When I talk about a “human novel,” I mean one written, edited, typeset, published, sold, etc. by human beings in some way. They might use technology (word processors, editing tools, etc.), but these systems are enabling and helping the human artist or professional rather than fully replacing any function or role (an admittedly subjective statement).

AI, in contrast, will seem the same at first–it will be oh-so-helpful–but then it will fully automate and replace the humans it was helping. The following list is my best guess at which functions will (start to) go obsolete first, meaning specifically which ones will suffer from substantial market disruption by AI at the earliest time. These are, in rough and debatable order:

1. Human Audiobook Narrators obsolete by 2030
2. Book Cover Art (Probably should be first)
3. Editing (Proofing & Copyediting)
4. Typesetting
5. Literary Agents
6. Translation
7. Plotting & Editing (Development)
8. Writing
9. Ideation (Creative & Derivative)
10. Everything else (from blogs and blurbs to marketing and social media posts, including marketing video content, etc.) including, eventually, even traditional publishers

In each of these areas, a human-replacement AI system will have to meet very specific criteria: (1) the product must be “good enough” for the price point, meaning even if it’s not human-quality, it’s pretty close for a lot less money; (2) the product must be substantially lower cost to produce than the human version (at least, at first); and (3) the production platforms must be easy to use (as long as humans are using them).

Right now, for instance, you can find multiple AI engines producing potential cover art for books (e.g., Midjourney) that are easily good enough for some genres, cost very little, and take zero technical expertise (though some of the more powerful ones, like Midjourney, remain very geeky / early state and aren’t that user friendly); however, getting these artistic concepts from graphics file to book cover takes a few more steps that add complexity and cost. Once these issues are worked out, thousands of self-published authors will fall in love with AI book covers…even if they can’t be copyrighted.

CreativeIndie shows some of their creations on Midjourney (Link)

For the sake of your sanity and time, I’m not going to cover all of these at once or in this post. Instead, I’ll do a separate post on each one (or groups) over the coming weeks, starting with audiobook narration. What’s important is not necessarily the details in each case, but the commonality of market evolution–which is very likely as follows:

1. AI will offer helpful augmentation in each market segment, such as copyediting suggestions, rather than doing a complete edit without requiring verification
2. AI will provide an offering that’s, well, crap. Think, early AI novels and screenplays
3. AI will be “good enough” for the average consumer (initial disruption)
4. AI will be nearly instantaneous and very low cost
5. AI will be human-equivalent and error-free
6. AI will be better-than-human and flawless (moderate disruption)
7. AI will be customizable (by group, say, gender or race)
8. AI will be personalizable (to the individual user or group)
9. AI will offer many other features specific to a given market
10. AI will eliminate the need for 99% of the human market (massive disruption)

But Wait, There’s Hope!

First, for the very best and luckiest, there will always be niches for human offerings as part of the ultra-luxury market where the rich can pay for their humanist fetish with massive bitcoin payments, even if those rich are also eventually machines (kidding, mostly).

Second, if you look at chess and the game Go, for years naysayers said nay to the idea of a machine every beating a Grandmaster. People are creative, innovative and insightful. Machines are just programming. And those machines now beat human beings at every level so easily it’s a bit embarrassing. Still, competitive human chess has not faded away. People still play and compete and chess. No one is dying to watch two machines battle for dominance. So the academic “Can machines beat people?” question has been answered, and now we’re going back to beating each other…and apparently cheating with anal beads. No computer can match that kind of drama. Can that same model (where machines are better but humans do just fine) work for commercial endeavors like publishing?

I doubt it. There’s no reason the average person wants to (or can afford to) pay a high premium for human art. Made in the USA labeling alone hasn’t kept China from dominating the production of materialistic crap bought in America, and a Made by a Human label won’t by itself keep machines from dominating every niche of creativity you can imagine. Which is pretty awful if any human ever wants to make even a subsistence living off of their art…or even have another human see it.

The only thing, literally the only thing I can think of, is a rather draconian law / regulation that says, simply, that no art of any kind produced entirely, largely, or substantially by machine can ever be copyrighted (under any conditions whatsoever). This means that every audiobook auto-generated by Google would automatically be public domain. Every book cover produced by Dall-E or its equivalents would be free to copy and distribute. And every book produced AI would be no more valuable to a publisher than the classics now in public domain–valuable only as backlist fillers, and not worth the effort to market unto themselves.

This will hurt some artists and professionals, of course. Novice self-publishers like myself won’t be able to take advantage of free audio book production (at least, if I want to sell it), and so on. But at least there will still be a market for human beings to make, produce, and sell art…and some hope to make a living at it…

A Proposal to Protect the Human Novel

All of the above doomsaying is leading up to a proposal–that we formally lobby Congress and other legal bodies to protect human art and artists in a very specific way, which covers far more than (just) novels and novelists:

1. As mentioned above, make it illegal to copyright work created wholly, largely, or substantially by machines (AI or otherwise).
2. Require all machine-generated art to be labeled something like “Made by Machine” or “Created by AI” and include the platform it was created on.
3. Establish serious legal penalties or trying to pass Ai or machine-generated art off as human.
4. Work to make this standard international law, to protect all human artists, everywhere.

You might think some of this is moot. Afterall, the US Copyright Office recently rejected a request to copyright AI art

The U.S. Copyright Office (USCO) once again rejected a copyright request for an A.I.-generated work of art, the Verge’s Adi Robertson reported last month. A three-person board reviewed a request from Stephen Thaler to reconsider the office’s 2019 ruling, which found his A.I.-created image “lacks the human authorship necessary to support a copyright claim.” – Smithsonian Magazine

But this is misleading. The USCO rejected the idea that the AI system itself could own the copyright; however, AI art created with human guidance or participation seems to be acceptable:

Right now, there is a big distinction between granting copyright solely to an AI learning system and granting the same licensing rights to a human who collaborated with an AI learning system on their project, as is the case right now with Kashtanova’s Zayra of the Dawn. — PopSci

Which is patently (heh heh) absurd from a practical standpoint. What we need is a clear law stating that AI-generated or AI-partially-generated art cannot be copyrighted, period, regardless of who files for protection.

This is, of course, complicated. A copyright was recently issued, for instance, for a graphic novel that was written by a human but illustrated by machine:

In what feels like an inevitable development in the debate around AI-generated art Kris Kashtanova has copyrighted a graphic novel that features images made using the platform Midjourney. It’s ignited heated responses on social media, but is the news really as significant as it sounds? (If you need to catch up on how AI art generators work, see our piece on how to use DALL-E 2). – CreativeBloq

https://www.instagram.com/p/CjGx1TNugGZ/

Should this be allowed? It is, after all, written by a human. I suspect the right answer is the work and writing should be copyrightable, but the AI-generated images themselves should not be…

I’ll have much more on this later, but for now, I’d love to know what you think of this idea of artist protection by this means (or any other). Would you back it? What concerns do you have? What ideas do you have to protect human art and artists?

BTW, the featured image for this post was generated in less than 30 seconds from a single word prompt without modification on DALL-E. The idea that I or anyone would copyright it is just plain silly.

For now, can you take a moment to sign the Change.org petition to Protect Human Art & Artists from Artificial Intelligence (AI)?

Thank you!

Related Information

Just a little more doom to get your motivated 🙂

ProWritingAid / “Will AI Replace Your Writing Job”

AI writers will eventually replace human writers, but not completely. In anticipation, human writers should focus on upgrading skills that are based on our innate humanity.”

So, you know, get right on that.

Quora / “Will AI Make Novelists Obsolete?”

The consensus? Probably.

Vanity Fair / “The New Generation of AI Apps Could Make Writers & Artists Obsolete”

In 2021, McKinsey predicted that algorithms and androids would vaporize 45 million jobs by 2030. And the Brookings Institute prophesied in a 2019 study that 52 million U.S. jobs would be affected by algorithms by 2030. – Vanity Fair

More to Come

• AI Audiobooks Will Make Human Narrators Obsolete by 2030
• Protecting Human Art & Artists from AI (Pending)

Thank you!