Are you a closet Marxist?

My latest Substack post: subscribe for free at plakcy.substack.com.

Karl Marx, AI, and the $2 Million Novel

What a publishing controversy tells us about the value of human creativity

Are you opposed to AI? You may be a closet Marxist.

I heard something on the Author Update podcast recently that made me think differently about the controversy over artificial intelligence and fiction.

Thomas Umstaddt Jr. brought up Karl Marx.

Now, Marx is not somebody I expected to enter the conversation about AI-generated novels. But the basic idea was intriguing: Marx argued that the value of a commodity was connected to the human labor required to produce it. More precisely, he wrote about “socially necessary labor time”—the amount of labor ordinarily required to produce something under prevailing conditions.

Which brings me to Jerry Falade. His debut crime novel, Call Me, I’ll Hide the Body, created the kind of publishing frenzy most writers can only dream about. Fourteen publishers reportedly wanted it, and the auction for U.S. rights reached $2 million.

Then questions arose about whether AI had been used in creating the manuscript.

Falade has denied using AI to write the novel, saying he used an AI tool for research. I have no idea what actually happened, and I’m not interested in deciding whether he did or didn’t use AI.

All writers learn to write partly by reading other writers. I learned what a sentence could do by reading thousands upon thousands of sentences written by other people. I absorbed vocabulary, grammar, structure, pacing, dialogue and countless conventions of storytelling. Eventually I learned to produce my own versions of them.

In a very different way, isn't that also what a large language model has done? It has encountered an enormous quantity of human writing and learned patterns from it.

Obviously, the mechanisms are radically different—I have a life, memories, emotions and intentions, while an AI does not—but the analogy makes the question more complicated than simply saying that a machine "stole" someone's writing.

What interests me is what happened to the perceived value of the book.

Publishers had read the manuscript and apparently thought it was terrific. Fourteen of them wanted to publish it. One was willing to spend $2 million for the privilege.

Then its provenance came into question.

The words hadn’t changed. The characters hadn’t changed. The plot hadn’t changed. Whatever had made publishing professionals excited about the manuscript was still there.

But suddenly the amount—or perhaps the kind—of human labor behind those words mattered enormously.

That raises a question I haven’t been able to stop thinking about:

What exactly makes a novel valuable?

Obviously, Marx’s labor theory doesn’t work very well as a theory of artistic value. I could spend five years writing a terrible novel, while somebody else could write a brilliant one in six months. Nobody would argue that mine should be worth ten times as much because I worked on it ten times longer.

We value the result, not the hours on the time clock. Or at least I thought we did.

AI complicates that assumption.

Imagine reading a novel you absolutely love. You stay up until two in the morning because you have to know what happens. You cry at the ending. You recommend it to your friends.

Then you discover the entire thing was generated by AI from a few prompts.

Is it still the same book? Textually, it is. Not one word has changed. But I suspect many readers would feel differently about it.

Maybe that’s because when we read fiction, we’re consuming two things at once.

One is the story. The other is the human being who imagined it.

Somebody decided this character should betray that one. Somebody understood what it felt like to lose a parent or fall in love or be humiliated or terrified. Somebody remembered a childhood experience and transformed it into something that happened to a fictional character.

The reader may never know which parts came from the writer’s life and which were completely invented. But there’s an assumption that another human consciousness is on the other side of the page.

If you read Dog of Secrets, you see the relationship between Steve and Rochester. If you read these newsletters or follow me on social media, you can see I have the same connection with Brody and Griffin, and so many of my ideas come from the time I spend playing with them, walking them, grooming them, and watching them eat the bowl food I’ve prepared for them, right down to the hard-boiled egg at breakfast.

AI threatens to separate those two things: the story and the storyteller. Claude and Chat sure aren’t walking my dogs. And I don’t think I’d ever trust a robot to do that.

We are rapidly approaching a world in which producing competent prose may require very little human labor. There certainly isn’t going to be a shortage of words.

The scarce commodity may become something else.

Words that readers believe came from another human being.

Which creates a strange paradox. As technology makes the labor required to produce words cheaper and cheaper, the evidence of human labor behind those words may become more valuable.

Maybe the great argument about AI and books isn’t really about whether a machine can write a good novel. Maybe it’s forcing us to figure out what we thought we were buying when we bought novels in the first place.