Month: September 2025

AI Controversy

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There is an article in the Atlantic magazine on 19 September about how the publishing industry views AI. It is written by Boris Kachka, Senior Editor of the Atlantic. He titles the article ‘Publishing’s New Microgenre’

Boris Kachka

“Book publishing has, let’s say, a complicated relationship with artificial intelligence. Earlier this month, Anthropic settled a lawsuit brought by authors and publishers, agreeing to pay $1.5 billion after training its chatbot, Claude, on pirated text; hundreds of such copyright lawsuits against data-scraping tech companies are still making their way through the courts. Many in the culture industries see AI as not just a thief but an existential competitor, ready to replace human writers at every turn. Yet publishers are also fascinated by the technology (and not only because they use it for marketing and other tasks). The major imprints have been churning out a robust collection of books (more than 20 this year, by my count) that explain, extol, deride, fictionalize, and occasionally incorporate AI.

Among these recent releases, one overarching theme is a debate occurring between so-called accelerationists and doomers—those who think superintelligence will hugely benefit humanity and those who suspect it will kill us all. Adam Becker, a journalist and former astrophysicist, disagrees with both groups. Becker, the author of the recent anti-utopian critique More Everything Forever, wrote about his problems with a new dystopian manifesto, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares.

Becker’s main objection to both sides is that they overhype the long-term, world-altering effects of superintelligence while downplaying the “much more immediate and well-founded concerns about the dangers of thoughtlessly deployed technology,” he writes. The kinds of ongoing changes that he would prefer to focus on are well accounted for in 2025’s AI book haul. Readers can find out more about how AI’s processes resemble the workings of our brains (or don’t); how the technology is changing medicine, warfare, education, business, and politics; how it has already profoundly altered society. But to me, the most interesting of the crop (or maybe just the most fun) are the works that explore our individual relationships with AI, through fiction or memoir.

Novels such as Amy Shearn’s Animal Instinct and Jayson Greene’s UnWorld imagine chatbots standing in for boyfriends or dead loved ones; politician-author Stacey Abrams invents a rogue medical-AI company in her latest legal thriller, Coded Justice. Hamid Ismailov’s wildly experimental novel We Computers, translated from Uzbek and longlisted for a 2025 National Book Award, creates an alternate history in which a 1980s computer intelligently generates a new kind of mind-expanding, transnational literature.

Occupying a category all its own is Searches, a fragmented memoir in which Vauhini Vara works through her complex feelings about technology. Vara interweaves the story of the rise of the internet with the narrative of her life and work as a tech reporter. She also includes strange interludes: prose-poetic lists of her Google searches; a collection of her Amazon-purchase reviews; and, most strikingly, a series of long interactions with ChatGPT-3 as she works to revise an essay about a sister who died years ago. As Matteo Wong noted in his Atlantic article about the book, the large language model produced what Vara considered to be the essay’s best lines while also inserting plenty of lies. She wound up employing the bot not to think for her, but to prod her into a different kind of thinking; it forced her, she writes, “to assert my own consciousness by writing against the falsehoods.” I enjoyed the book in part because it was less about what technology is doing to us than what we are doing in response.”

Dan Brown’s New Novel

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On the AP website there is an interview of Dan Brown written by Hillel Italie, which explores his writing techniques in the context of his new novel, Secret of Secrets.

Dan Brown

Brown says, “Anybody who writes a thriller needs to have a plan. There’s a great saying that the thriller writer who starts a book without knowing where’s he’s going is just lying,” he told The Associated Press on Tuesday.

“And certainly these books are very complicated. One way I sort of battle, trying to keep it all straight, is to write every single day, just to keep it fresh. If I go through two sleep cycles (without writing), it starts to evaporate. And, of course, I also have what looks like a detective’s chalkboard in a police station. We’ve got the pictures and the yarn and the notes and the sticky notes, all that on my wall trying to keep it straight as well.”

Brown’s “The Secret of Secrets” has been published this week, a 650-page thriller and mind-bender from the author known worldwide for “The Da Vinci Code”, “Angels & Demons” and other million sellers. Brown again combines suspense, philosophical digressions and travelogues, along with codes and puzzles and secret societies as he dispatches favorite protagonist Robert Langdon to Prague and ensnares him in a deadly, international race for the key to ultimate wisdom — what happens when we die.

Besides Langdon, the Harvard symbologist who has found adventure and trouble everywhere from Paris to Washington, D.C., Brown has brought back love interest/noetic scientist-in-distress Katherine Solomon and a New York-based book editor with a very real-life counterpart. “Jonas Faukman” is an anagram for Brown’s editor at Doubleday Books, Jason Kaufman, who has worked with the author for more than 20 years. Author and editor are good friends, they say, although that didn’t keep Brown from subjecting Faukman to abduction and other un-literary experiences in his latest book.

“I always enjoy getting manuscripts from Dan and seeing where he’s going,” Kaufman told the AP recently. “I have to ask him not to tell me in advance what he has in mind. He always finds new ways to surprise me.”

Brown also spoke with the AP about how he decides on his subjects, his evolving thoughts on mortality and why Prague is the perfect setting for a few conspiracies. This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

AP: How do you go about deciding what to write about?

BROWN: It’s no secret that I like to write about big topics and there really is no topic that is bigger than consciousness. It is the lens through which we see ourselves. And so the real challenge was how to make a concrete urgent modern thriller about something that’s so ethereal.

About eight years ago, my mom passed away about the time that I was thinking of writing about consciousness, and I started asking myself, “What happens when we die?” and if you’d asked me eight years, ago, I’d say nothing It’s full stop total blackness. Over the course of the eight years that took me to write this book and all the conversations that I had with philosophers and physicists and noetic scientists, I’ve come out the other side with a totally different mindset. And in fact, it sounds crazy. I no longer fear death.

AP: Before you worked on this book, did you consider yourself an atheist? An agnostic? How would you have described yourself?

BROWN: I grew up Christian, Episcopalian, but I moved away from the organized nature of religion. I’ve always been spiritual and sensed there’s something else, but I’ve also been skeptical and said, “Well, that sense of there’s just something else could just be wishful thinking.” It could be because it’s so hard to imagine that there’s nothing else that we just sort of say, “Well, I sense there’s some thing else.”

And now I do sense there’s something else. And that is from an intellectual standpoint. I have not had a religious experience, a spiritual experience, an outer body experience, or near death experience. This change of mind comes from looking at the science that is happening right now in the world of physics and noetics.

AP: Some people talk about the creative process, so to speak, as almost a religious experience, that moment the idea comes to you, whether it’s the right phrase or a piece of music.

BROWN: It’s called flow, a muse. Certainly, we writers have that experience of, “Ah, I’ve got it. It’s just flowing through me.” I have certainly felt that. Not every day, unfortunately. There’s a lot of trial and error, but that is the feeling that creative people are always looking for. My mom was a professional musician. I was brought up to be a musician. I thought I would be a musician. I still play piano every day. I studied music composition in university, and I’ve had that experience also with music.

That sort of muse moment when something flows in, it’s different between writing and music. Writing sort of feels like finding the right Lego piece to put in. You say, “Ah.” It’s almost like doing a jigsaw puzzle. You’re like, “Got it. It fits.” And music is a little bit more fluid. It’s like making a big brush stroke. And the melody just sort of flows in and finds its way to your hands, and then it exists.

AP: The cities you set your books in are so important to what you do. Do you have a kind of wish list? Like, “I need to set a book in this city.”

BROWN: I mean, there are a few of them that I won’t mention because I don’t want people running out, and they’re sort of off the beaten path, kind of like Prague is.

I like to use location as a character. I want to make sure that, whatever book it is, it could only be set there. “The Lost Symbol” could only be set in D.C. because it’s about the symbology of D.C. “The Da Vinci Code” could only be set in Paris because it is about the Roseland. “The Secret of Secrets,” about human consciousness, could only be set in Prague. It’s been the mystical capital of Europe since Emperor Rudolf II (in the late 16th-early 17th centuries) brought all the mystics and scribes and alchemists to Prague. And as a character, Prague is perfect for Langdon. It’s full of secret passageways and cathedrals and monasteries and all, that’s his world.

AP: Puzzles and mystery and passageways, that’s just endlessly fascinating to you? It’s as interesting to you now as when you were 10 or 20?

BROWN: I don’t know what that says about me, but yeah, I still love secret passageways. You talk about that “aha” moment. It’s kind of the same thing to say, “Wait, there’s something here that you don’t see and now you see it.” It’s the same kind of sensation of “aha.”

Review: The Road to Freedom

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This book was recommended to me by an Italian niece, a brilliant mathematician, who works at a university, guiding doctoral candidates in writing their economic theses. She said, “Joseph Stiglitz is my hero.”

Joseph Eugene Stiglitz (born February 9, 1943) is an American New Keynesian economist, a public policy analyst, political activist, and a professor at Columbia University. He is a recipient of the Noble Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (2001) and the John Bates Clark Medal (1979). He is a former senior vice president and chief economist of the World Bank. He is also a former member and chairman of the U.S. Council of Economic Advisers. He is known for his support for the Georgist public finance theory and for his critical view of the management of globalization, of laissez-faire economists (whom he calls “free-market fundamentalists”), and of international institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

Joseph Stiglitz

The sub-title of this book is “Economics and the Good Society”, but the key word is “freedom”, and the key theme is that in society if one individual, group, company, institution, or market is given more freedom, some individual or group will have less freedom. And Stiglitz’ point is that in the US today (and in much of the developed world), the economic system (neoliberal capitalism) and its attendant political philosophy has failed because it waves the freedom flag but it neglects the many people who are harmed by the freedoms given to corporations, institutions and powerful individuals. The US does not understand that markets are not self-correcting, and require regulation. The author says that free and unfettered markets have conveyed great wealth and power to a few individuals but have exploited consumers, workers and the environment. Moreover, free markets have delivered financial, opioid and inequality crises. The book is rich with specific examples of how free markets have failed. He contends, in addition, that control of the environment, health and property – particularly intellectual property – should be improved. His arguments for what he calls progressive capitalism, and what it would do differently are compelling.There is an eight page chart summarizing the failures of neoliberal economics and what progressive capitalism’s corrective policies would be.

One cannot help feeling that the prescription for putting progressive capitalism in place is missing. I, for one, am sold on progressive capitalism. How can we implement it? But the barriers to change are enormous. The entire Republican party is wholly committed to neoliberal capitalism. Millions of wealthy, powerful people depend on it. It is ingrained in the American culture. A huge educational effort would be required to gain the understanding of the American people. The change is so fundamental that it cries out for a constitutional change. But that would never happen. What is more possible is the Democratic Party taking up the ideology and implementing it gradually over the course of a generation. In the meantime we have the first step in Stiglitz’ book: we know what’s wrong with neoliberal economics, and that makes it essential reading for every American.

Getting Accents and Dialects Right

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Harry Bingham’s email of last week deals with the tricky subject of how to write in accents or dialogue convincing but not condescending.

Harry is the founder and CEO of Jericho Writers.

Harry said, “So here is an example of transcribing a character’s voice in a patronising way:

“Eet eez ’orrible to ’ear ze proud Frensh race beleettled in zis stooped manner.”

But what the character involved has actually said here is:

“It is horrible to hear the proud French race belittled in this stupid manner.”

The first sentence, by transcribing its pronunciations in a very literal way, makes the speaker come across as ludicrous – cartoony, a circus clown with a striped jumper, a string of onions and a comical moustache. But what’s actually comical? The sentence itself displays perfect command of English, and what’s being apparently laughed at here is an accent, over which the speaker has very little control.

And, golly gosh, that’s a slippery slope.

Most people writing a non-English character in this way will (if English) speak roughly RP, or Received Pronunciation – in effect, roughly what a BBC newsreader used to sound like. In the US, it’s much the same thing, except that the reference dialect is Standard American English.

(And, please note, in RP English, we say “She placed the glahss on the grahss next to her great big – handbag.” But we wouldn’t even conceive of inserting the letter H into the two italicised words to mark the weird pronunciation. Nor do we adjust the spelling to take care of the flat “a” sound in American and North-British versions of those words. So when it comes to our weird pronunciations, we don’t even think of trying to reflect them in spelling.)

And of course, as soon as you start to accord any kind of typographic privilege to a particular accent – whether RP or SAE – you get into all sorts of bother.

It’s one thing to have a comical Frenchman – France is a nuclear power and can look after itself – but do you really want to apply the same diminishing treatment to, say, a black resident of Harlem? Or a Scouser? Or a northern woman of Pakistani heritage? Or a Mexican immigrant?

The answer, if you haven’t already figured it out is, No, certainly not. Don’t go there. Step away from the quirky spellings.

That’s partly because of a perfectly legitimate anxiety about racism.

But it’s also just a recognition of modern linguistics. The RP / SAE dialects are simply two dialects amongst many, many others. They don’t come with a halo over them that says, “the king/President speaks this way, so this version is right and everything else is wrong.” The fact is that we all speak the dialect of our culture and each dialect has no more or less validity than the next.

That’s not just true of pronunciation. It’s true of grammar too. Any significant dialect has its own grammar, which may differ from SAE / RP grammar (which, by the way, each differ from each other.) So African-American Vernacular English has its own strict rules of grammar, that are just different from SAE – and not just different, but with subtleties that SAE struggles to cope with. SAE has four basic past tenses: I did buy it, I have bought it, I bought it, I had bought it. AAVE has five, but differently structured: I been bought it, I bought it, I done bought it, I did buy it, I do buy it.

What does all this tell us?

It tells us (duh!) that other people may speak differently from us.

It tells us (duh!) that it’s not respectful or, in fact, linguistically accurate, to privilege one set of accents or grammars over another.

And that means that the solution for a novelist is quite easy:

  1. Don’t try to capture nuances of accent in the way you transcribe speech. We don’t write “grahss” if we try to capture how the king of England speaks. We don’t write “eet eez ’orrible” if we try to capture how President Macron expresses himself.
  2. Do use the actual words that your character uses. President Macron is probably more likely than the rest of us to use the word voila even when speaking English. And if he says it, that’s what you write. Likewise, if a Black American character says finna (a contraction of fixing to or going to) then that’s the word you write down. It IS a word; it just isn’t an SAE / RP word. Don’t patronise your characters by editing their speech.
  3. Do use the grammar that your character adopts. So if your character is African-American, she might say ‘I done bought it’, in which case you write, ‘I done bought it.’
  4. For that matter, most of us are perfectly adept at code-shifting, so that same character might speak using AAVE when at home with her mother, but might use SAE when (say) running for President of the United States. And if your character code-shifts, you code-shift right along with her.
  5. The same goes for English spoken as a second language. Let’s say your novel features a top French footballer, who possibly now plays for Real Madrid. Perhaps that footballer says, “I do not chase after the records.” No native English speaker would naturally put the word “the” into that sentence, and nearly all English footballers would say “don’t” rather than “do not.” So you don’t need to do anything as condescending as write “Eet ees ’orrible” in order to hear the Frenchness in the speaker. You just have a careful ear for those non-native uses and let the reader intuit the rest. They definitely will.

I think the only time this is liable to get complicated is in relation to languages that are highly related to English, but aren’t actually English.

A lot of you will have encountered the broad Yorkshire speech of Wuthering Heights. This for example:

‘What are ye for?’ he shouted. ‘T’ maister’s down i’ t’ fowld. Go round by th’ end o’ t’ laith, if ye went to spake to him.’

Would that be better with “the master’s down in the fold”? And well – I don’t know. You can call it both ways. The modern tendency would be to eliminate some of the non-standard spelling, but in Bronte’s day, the fact was that broad Yorkshire dialect (“Tyke”) was pretty much a language to itself, related to English in much the same way as Robert Burns’ Scots is. In which case – honour the language. Give it leg room. That’s what I chose to do with my Orcadian sailor, Caff, and deliberately wrote a version of Orcadian that was damn close to impenetrable to an ordinary reader.

And if you want to do that then, (a) have fun! It’s really entertaining. And (b) get it right. I don’t speak Orcadian, I’m not Scottish, and I’ve never been to the Orkneys. So I did the best that I could with books and online resources … then wrote to the editor of an Orkney newspaper and asked for her help. She was very happy to give that to me, and I was very happy to receive it, and my readers have the joy of having a little bit more Orcadian in their lives: something we all need.”