It’s 1990, and I’m a recent college grad, living in New York City. I’m working as the assistant to the managing editor at Warner Books. It’s my job to make photocopies of book covers for all the editors and to check the proofs for smudges before they go to print.
One day, Jane, the managing editor, calls me into her office and gives me the assignment of my life. Jane is standing behind her desk on which are four manuscript-sized boxes stacked on top of each other. Since Jane is so small, the pile almost comes up to her neck.
“Are you familiar with Gone with the Wind?” she asks.
Does Jane think I was born yesterday!? Does she think I’ve never heard of the 1936 historical fiction romance by Margaret Mitchell and was turned into one of the highest-grossing films of all time? “Of course I’m familiar with Gone with the Wind!” I say.
“Well,” Jane says, placing her hands on the stack. “We are going to publish the sequel. It’s written by Alexandra Ripley. The novel will be called Scarlett, and it continues the passionate love story of Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler.”
“Wow!’ I say.
”Wow is right!” Jane says. Then she tells me that the manuscript on her desk is more than 800 pages long. “So I need you to take these boxes to the copy center across the street and make three copies, one for each editor.”
My tiny boss then explains that the paparazzi would love to steal even a page of it, so that they could sell it to a tabloid and make serious bank.
“Don’t let these pages out of your sight,” Jane says, before I pile the boxes onto a rolling cart and step out the door to head down to the street level on the skyscraper’s elevator.
While I know this is a critical mission to get right, I don’t yet realize the magnitude. I don’t stop to think that these pages will turn into a #1 New York Times bestseller, a #1 Chicago Tribune bestseller, a #1 Los Angeles Times bestseller, a #1 Publishers Weekly bestseller and more.
Book Piracy in the Age of AI
I can’t begin to imagine that one day, 35 years from now, book piracy will be an exploding industry. Thieves will upload digital versions of books and then sell them for a reduced rate on Amazon, eBay and other sites, or just give them out for free in order to lure web traffic to their shady sites.
Even though I started out as a temp at Warner Books, I soon joined the company full time, so now I bring in a $14,000 salary. I share an apartment with several other people in the West Village. The lights from the Pink Pussycat sex shop blink in my fifth-floor walkup all night long.
My roommate snores and the glass recycling truck crunches glass outside my window at 4am on the regular, so during the day, when I’m not making copies, I spend my time picking the remnants of my wax earplugs out of my hair.
Today, as I cross the street to the copy shop, I can only hope that soon I’ll be promoted from smudge-checker and copy machine guard to something more respectable like a proofreader or editorial assistant. Of course, I also harbor a secret dream that maybe one day I can actually be an author too, though I’d never be so bold as to speak that dream aloud.
I think that one day, if I can really do it—become a real-life author—I’ll have my own apartment in a suburb, and I won’t need to wear earplugs to bed, and pick out little pieces of them from my hair all day long.
Little do I realize that by the time I do actually become an author myself, the majority of full-time authors will earn less than minimum wage, in part because of book piracy, and in part because AI Large Language Models are eating millions of pirated books each day for breakfast.
As a result, world-renowned authors like Alexandra Ripley—and even lesser-known authors like me—will see our blood, sweat and tears blended into fortunes for the tech wizards of Silicon Valley, while we watch our own earnings fall off a cliff in the face of this unregulated technology.
When that day comes, I will place my last shred of hope in a billionaire named Elon Musk, who is fighting to regulate the most powerful artificial intelligence models. It’s on the off-chance Musk can persuade President Trump to institute safeguards that authors—along with the rest of humanity—might be saved from the biggest AI nightmare of all.
So what would I tell my young self?
If I could go back in time and talk to my 22-year-old self guarding the pages of Scarlett, what would I tell her?
First, I would say, “Stop flirting with the cute Puerto Rican guy in the lobby of the copy shop. Didn’t you hear what Jane said? Keep your eyes on the pages!”
Second, I would say, “One day in the distant future, AI will force your hand. You won’t be able to make a living by writing anymore. That’s the bad news. When that day comes, you’ll have to split yourself in two. Your old self will double down on your human creativity, pumping out original thoughts in an increasingly homogenized literary landscape. Your old self will need to become a warrior, fighting for the rights of artists everywhere to preserve our common humanity,” I’d tell her.
“Unlike a cricket that leaves its shell behind, you’ll morph like a tadpole growing into a frog. You’ll keep your most important organs with you through the dramatic change. Your new self will need to get with the program, so you won’t be left in the digital dust. One day,” I’d say, “you’ll use AI to analyze data, to translate information, to help you brainstorm and even to generate images, but you’ll never rely on AI to write.”
Then I’d tell her this: “Even though writing original content will take you longer than a chatbot—even though you’ll be tempted to use AI to take shortcuts—at least sometimes you’ll want to choose the words, one at a time, all by yourself. That is how you’ll fuel your soul.”
Shana Burg is the author of Poof! The Disappearance of a Writer in the Age of AI, a memoir that explores the transformative impact of artificial intelligence on the everyday lives of writers and other creatives. She is also the award-winning author of Laugh with the Moon and A Thousand Never Evers, books for young readers.