Okay, what in the world are you talking about?

I’m playing with words. You’re probably familiar with the acronym “AI”—capital A, capital I. Artificial intelligence.

So?

Well, the word “ai”—both letters lower case—turns up every second or third blue moon in crossword puzzles and Scrabble tournaments. It’s a three-toed sloth, Bradypus tridactylus, native to Venezuela and the Guianas, and its name comes from the high-pitched cry it emits when disturbed.

It cries out Bradypus tridactylus? Never mind. Bradypus tridactylus, aka ai, aka the three-toed sloth. But you just called it—

A twelve-toed sloth. I figure it’s only fair to count all of its toes, not just a single foot’s worth. One sloth equals four feet, three toes to a foot. You could, I suppose, call it the dozen-toed sloth.

So far I’ve never felt the need to call it anything at all. Nor have you, as far as I can make out. Why the sudden interest?

Well, I’ve been thinking about AI. The acronym, all caps. Artificial Intelligence. I’ve been trying to decide whether it’s redundant or oxymoronic. Is all intelligence by definition the product of artifice? Or, conversely, is the very phrase artificial intelligence a contradiction in terms?

What have you decided?

I’m leaving it open. But I’ve had to pay some attention to my own relationship with artificial intelligence, because I’ve only recently learned that I have one. A relationship, that is. I figured AI was something for more highly evolved people to worry about, while I confined myself to political upheaval and climate change.

The small stuff.

Exactly. But then a great hue and cry arose in my professional community. It seems that the published work of writers, whether or not protected by copyright, is being used to train Artificial Intelligence programs. With a mouse click or two, I could search data bases and determine whether the wily boffins of AI were exploiting any of my books in this manner.

And?

And I clicked away, and a slew of my titles, spanning the sixty-some years of my career, turned up on the screen. Whoever sponsored this site—it may have been Author’s Guild, it may have been somebody else—invited me to fill out a form and file an official protest against this unauthorized use of my work. So I did.

Good for you.

You think? I’m not so sure. Because just what is it that AI is doing? It’s reading my work, and the work of thousands of other writers, with the goal of improving its own writing ability. I thought about it, and here’s what I realized:

That’s exactly what I started doing back in the 1950s. I read hundreds of books, everything I could get my hands on, partly because reading was a source of pleasure, but also with the intention of becoming a writer myself, and learning my craft by reading the efforts of others.

I read and I wrote. And, after I’d sold a couple of stories to crime fiction magazines, I found a shop that sold back-date magazines for half the original cover price. I bought dozens of magazines, and I read hundreds of stories, and some of them were good and some of them were not, but in the course of a few months I managed to teach myself what a crime story was and how it worked.

I think you wrote about this in A Writer Prepares. You analyzed them, eh?

No, all I did was read them. The process was more one of absorption and internalization than anything analytical or intellectual. All I know is it worked, and most writers I know went through some version of this process. Almost all of us were eager readers before we were writers, and our reading fed and nourished our writing.

Now I don’t recall ever deliberately setting out to write like anybody. But there’s no question in my mind that my exposure to the work of other writers formed me as a writer and enabled me in time to find my own voice. It helped me to read the work  of writers I respected and enjoyed, but it helped me as much—and possibly more—to read the work of inferior writers.

You definitely wrote about that in A Writer Prepares. Working for Scott Meredith, reading stories from wannabes—

Many of whom couldn’t write their names in the dirt with a stick. Those were, as they say, the days. Never mind. The point is that I learned to write the way almost everybody learns to write.

By reading and writing.

Uh-huh. After a day at Scott Meredith, I’d walk a block east on 47^th Street to the old Mercantile Library, where I’d borrow half a dozen books by people like Fredric Brown and David Alexander and Peter Cheyney and William Campbell Gault. I’d go home to my hotel apartment at Broadway and 103^rd and I’d spend the evening reading or writing. Or both.

Now the dozens upon dozens of writers I read didn’t know they were furthering my education. They didn’t even know I existed. I certainly wasn’t putting food on their tables; neither libraries nor secondhand bookstores were in the business of paying royalties.

So would they feel exploited for having unwittingly schooled me? I rather doubt it. Over the years, any number of younger writers have told me that I contributed to their professional education in much the same manner, that books of mine had played a role in their development as writers; my response is never that they owe me money, or even gratitude.

So why should I get all in a huff when some AI developer tucks some works of mine into his syllabus? Because he’s not paying me? Well, why on earth should he? I wrote this stuff in the hope that it would be read, and it’s enormously satisfying to me that, through the miracle of ebooks and POD paperbacks, virtually everything I ever wrote is still available. I don’t delude myself with the notion that my work will last much past my lifetime—Spoiler Alert, nobody’s will—but it’s out there now, and that pleases me.

But isn’t it all part of a larger issue? Isn’t Artificial Intelligence shaping up as a threat to writers?

Probably. Every innovation puts some people to work and others out of it. I don’t know what the long-term effects of AI will be on the vocational landscape, and I suspect I’m by no means alone in my ignorance. Time will tell, and not everyone will be happy with what it has to say. Consider the enterprising chaps who make a living selling theses and term papers to indolent college students. They’ll all be out of work once their customers learn to outsource everything to ChatGPT.

But mine is ostensibly creative work, the output of my personal organic imagination. Could AI do it as well as I?

Well, how the hell should I know? Back in the days when I turned out reams of what we’re now pleased to call Midcentury Erotica for Bill Hamling and Harry Shorten, my colleagues and I transformed more than a few wannabes into ghostwriters, most of whom went on to have actual careers. The medium was a remarkably forgiving one, and we took these people and taught them how to write for it.

Didn’t you once say that it was only the lack of an opposable thumb that kept your average chimpanzee from doing the work?

Maybe. It sounds like something I might have said. And one of these days I suppose a twelve-toed sloth will take the words right out of my mouth.

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Um…is that it? Aren’t you going to crow about some great reviews? Announce some forthcoming projects? Tell us all what to buy? This is your first newsletter in months, and there’s no news in it.

I know. I published two books in the past twelve months, The Burglar Who Met Fredric Brown last fall and The Autobiography of Matthew Scudder in June, and both were very generously received and are selling well. I haven’t written anything since then and can’t say I feel the urge to do so.

There are two audiobook special sales of which y’all might want to take advantage. The Specialists is a relatively early crime novel of mine, the projected first volume in a series for which I never wrote a sequel. Fred Sullivan narrates it skillfully, and the $4.99 price is a steep discount from $19.99. Alas, I should have told you about this sooner, as the offer pumpkins out at the end of October—but if you opened this newsletter right away you still have time.

And the numbers are just about the same on this offer for the audiobook of The Burglar Who Met Fredric Brown, superbly voiced by the late Voice of Bernie Rhodenbarr, Richard Ferrone. List price is $19.99, but you can grab it for an even five bucks. (And you have until November 10 to do so.)

There you go. Not much news, but a couple of good deals, and more words overall than I’ve written in months. I figure that’s enough. Enjoy what’s left of autumn. And brace yourselves; they tell me winter’s coming.

Cheers,