By RR Haywood
I love artificial intelligence. So much so that I wrote about it in my bestselling novel DELIO, which tells the story of how a self-aware AI takes over the world.
As an indie writer, someone who self-publishes their own books, I have to work hard to gain traction. So anything that disrupts the stranglehold that big companies have in the world, such as AI, can surely only ever be a good thing. Right?
Open language models like chatGPT have given ordinary people access to a communicative system that can translate or create legal documents and explain medical test results and so much more … in an instant.
I use ChatGPT to help me word emails and technical documents, and I know of writers using those systems as sounding boards to bounce ideas. Granted, it does talk back to you like a precocious robotic child – but then that’s exactly what it is. really.
But even I have now felt the chill of fear creeping up my spine at the power of it, and the consequences it is already bringing into the real world.
Let me explain.
I’m the author of The Undead, a popular dark comedy horror series that follows an everyman called Howie as he navigates what he thinks is the zombie apocalypse, but then discovers it’s a deadly disease released by some dastardly types.
I started writing The Undead in 2012 while I was still a serving police officer, and in all honesty, I never expected it to become so popular.
Fast forward 12 years and I’m now one of the UK’s most downloaded indie writers, having sold nearly four million books and being a Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Amazon, and Audible bestselling author.
I’m still mostly self-published, and The Undead is fast approaching 30 books in the series, with a large, loyal readership with an insatiable appetite for more content.
It was because of that popularity that last year I decided to write eight new ‘episodes’ of The Undead and release them back-to-back. Like a TV series but in book form.
My plan was to release the first two episodes within a week of each other and then release an episode every two to three weeks. That would give me great exposure and have eight new titles in the charts.
But that plan has already failed, and I believe AI is the culprit.
The first new episode, The Undead 26, was uploaded to the Kindle Direct Platform (KDP) at the close of last month. KDP timelines say a new book can take up to 72 hours to go live, but the experience of most authors, me included, is that the books go live within a few hours of upload.
By the next morning it was already live on Amazon and soon charted inside the top 15 for the UK charts and was number one in many genre charts.
The next week – Thursday, 4th April to be exact – I repeated the process with The Undead 27, expecting to see it live by the following morning.
Except it wasn’t, and more than a week passed before it did finally appear on Amazon. It’s selling like hot cakes but I’ve hit exactly the same delay with The Undead 28, having no idea when it will go live – which means I can’t plan the release dates for the rest of the episodes.
This being a new experience, I’ve immersed myself in grasping what could possibly be going on, and what I’ve discovered is alarming.
From my research, it seems that increasing numbers are seeing AI as a golden goose, encouraged by certain high-profile social media influencers to use AI to generate art and text for ‘low and medium’ content books. Think colouring books, journals, planners, diet sheets – books without a lot of words, essentially.
Others are using open-language models like ChatGPT to create fiction titles. These are often novella length due to the complexities involved with using AI to write full-length novels and the usage limits for free accounts.
Sell them on Amazon via KDP, the advice goes – it’s a free-to-use system and as the books have been basically created by computers, it’s cost virtually nothing in time and money to achieve.
So all of these books by wannabe hustlers, more ‘autors’ (as in ‘auto’) than authors, are, of course, increasingly flooding KDP. This, in turn, has, it seems, jammed up the system and resulted in widespread technical failures.
And why stop at uploading one book to KDP when you can as easily churn out multiple titles within a short space of time, even though these low-to-medium content books (emphasis on ‘con’) are flagged up by Amazon’s internal system for extra checks to ensure they’re not AI-generated.
KDP teams simply can’t keep up, and because it’s a free-to-use platform there’s no reason for these autors not to try their luck in making some easy cash. Hell, a few might get through the cracks.
So the gears are grinding to a halt with this inundation and then I come along and upload two novella-length books within a week. This triggers the Amazon alarm bells – it doesn’t know I’m a legitimate Amazon All-Star author nor that these are episodes within a hugely popular fiction series.
Frustratingly, this is even though I’ve ticked ‘no’ when asked by the KDP system if the content I’m uploading includes anything created by AI. Hustlers will, obviously, do likewise (they don’t want to give themselves away) so this safeguard is clearly not working very well.
My books, and those of other bona fide authors, end up locked ‘In Review’ and given that the KDP teams are being overwhelmed, there’s no timeline on how long this will last.
The backlog must only be getting worse as more hustlers jump on the bandwagon but why should Amazon pay for more staff to compensate when it’s a free-to-use system? It’s not like individual AI-generated books will ever sell well, if at all, so there is no financial incentive to get them processed faster.
The remainder of The Undead episodes will come out eventually but that’s not the real issue. Here we have a sudden, stark glimpse of the future – where real people who dedicate their lives to creating art in any form are at risk of disappearing under the deluge of AI-generated pap.
How to solve the problem before it’s too late? I welcome the idea of a tiered system where verified authors like me pay to publish our books through KDP and sell them on the Amazon platform.
They could even include a safeguard to make sure the cover art has been created by a verified artist or illustrator. A lot of self-published authors create their own covers so this system would have to allow the author to also be the illustrator.
A tiered system like this would enable professional content authored and created by humans to be released faster within the timelines. If accompanied by an emblem, such as the verified tick social media companies use, consumers could also know they are buying content created by a real person dedicated to their art rather than by a machine.
The free-to-use system can still remain, albeit slower than it once was, but it would ease the pressure from professional artists.
AI, if used well, can benefit our lives. But unless companies (and governments) take notice and deal with it, AI risks causing widespread disruption in our societies, with many facing unemployment.
Back when I wrote DELIO, I treated this danger as entertaining fiction. Now, however, my eyes have been opened and I, for one, will be seeking to make sure the books, media, and creative art I consume come, ultimately, from the heart, not the microchip.
Bestselling author RR Haywood’s The Undead series are available on Amazon. Visit www.rrhaywood.com or follow RR Haywood on Twitter or Facebook.
We speak to RR Haywood about the rising threat of artificial intelligence and learn more about his hugely popular The Undead series.
Q. When you wrote DELIO, AI was still largely in the realms of science fiction as far as the public were concerned. Now it’s derailing many areas of life, where many have already lost their jobs to AI. What do you think this means long-term for authors and other creatives?
A. AI is here and is being backed and rolled out by some of the world’s biggest companies, which means it can’t be stopped. Governments need to act now to put safeguards in place, otherwise there is very real risk of mass unemployment across many different sectors. Especially with the creative arts and all the ancillary services that are supported by that industry. There needs to be some kind of identification on creative content that marks it as AI or human produced. This will allow consumers to make an informed choice about what they are buying.
Q. Becoming a successful author takes time and dedication, not to mention talent. What would you say to new authors tempted by the power of AI to game the system or cut corners?
A. I can see the lure of it. The cost of living crisis has hit everyone, so something like AI comes along and some people see it as a way to make a bit of cash. Honestly, though? There really isn’t any point saying don’t do it. It’s like when I was in the police. They refuse to legalise cannabis or sex work but it’s happening all the time and can’t be stopped. So why not legalise and make it safe? That’s how I see AI. The Government needs to introduce controls so AI-produced content is labelled. All that will happen is it will create another tier within the creative industries, which is fine if it is managed properly.
Q. While it seems an influx of AI-generated books has temporarily delayed the latest in your The Undead series, it seems nothing can halt its success, with it fast approaching 30 books and being popular around the world. When you’d finished your first in the series, did you ever think it would continue for so long?
A. Gosh no! Not at all. I planned to write seven books in The Undead – Day One to Day Seven – and use them as a way of teaching myself to write. I’m from a working-class background and could never afford any creative writing courses, and I never got past high school either. Nobody read those first books (!) but I didn’t care. I was in love with writing. Then I put those seven ‘Days’ into one book and called it The Undead: The First Seven Days, and that took off and has been growing ever since. By the end of this year there will be 33 books in the main series, with two standalones. And it’s still growing!
Q. What do you think is the secret of its ongoing success?
A. The Undead is labelled as a zombie series, but really the zombies are just the vehicle to carry the characters through their stories, and it’s those characters that people are hooked into. It was the same with my big breakout trilogy, EXTRACTED, and then again with The Worldship Humility trilogy. One is time travel; the other is about people living on spaceships – which many readers would turn away from simply because they think they don’t like sci-fi. But my books are always about developing flawed and real characters. People like me and you with the same fears and needs that we have, who just happen to be in some other setting.
Q. You describe The Undead series in terms of ‘seasons’ and ‘episodes’, with the latest season comprising eight new episodes. Why is this?
A. The First Seven Days formed a natural pattern to the storyline. The book covers a week in the lives of the characters navigating a very British apocalypse. It then made sense to put the next seven books, Day Eight to Day Fourteen, into another compilation called The Undead: The Second Week. That pattern then formed the shape of the whole series. The first week is season one, the second week is season two and so on. It helps me give each set of books a set tone, or to follow certain plot lines. Later, I moved away from the day by day format to expand the timelines, but I’ve kept to the seasons format.
This season is season five with an overtitle of ‘The Rain’, and the eight new episodes are all set against a constant near on biblical downpouring that changes the landscape around them and adds another level to the peril and dangers.
Q. The Undead series is crying out for TV or film adaptation. Is that on your radar at present?
A. I’ve had quite a lot of approaches about The Undead. All of my other books are in different stages of being optioned, but I’ve always resisted selling the rights to The Undead. It’s my baby, and I want to be on set as the executive producer/showrunner, which means partnering with a team that can accommodate that. I’ve written it into a TV series. I know the flow of the episodes, and I know whom I want to cast. There is a very cool production company I am talking to. They are super interested in The Undead and can recognise that if done right, it could be mammoth and up there with things like The Boys, or The Walking Dead in terms of scale and audience.
Q. Your novels, with The Undead series being a good case in point, often incorporate elements of humour alongside the more serious themes. How do you strike a balance between this and drama in your storytelling?
A. The single biggest complaint about crime dramas and military shows based in the UK is the po-faced themes where everyone is serious all the time. I was in the police for 20-plus years and during that time I worked in some elite teams and public order squads, which in many ways is very similar to the way the British military work. And we are constantly fooling around. Every team. Every unit. Every department. We’re a small team with tight budgets and we’re dealing with harrowing things. Humour is our coping mechanism and harks back to that Stiff Upper Lip mentality, which the Brits do so well. That’s reflected in everything I write, which is sometimes an issue for the middle-class, London-based editors I work with who assume the police and military are only filled with very serious people only ever being very serious.
I show that humour among the gritty rawness of life, and if anything, it adds to the depth of the storytelling and humanises the characters to a much greater depth.
Q. Unlike some of your other series, you continue to self-publish The Undead rather than hand them over to traditional publishers. Why is this?
A. I still love working with traditional publishers with other projects. I love that side of publishing. But I also adore the rawness of The Undead. I can write and release at my own pace, and I’m not governed about my storylines.
Self-publishing also means being able to react quickly to the feedback from the readers to adapt the story as it goes on. You just don’t get that with the much slower pace of traditional publishing.
Q. Thirty books in, do you think The Undead will keep running and running or do you have an end point in mind?
A. I’m still as in love with The Undead as when I started it. But the beauty of self-publishing also allows to push back against the norms and the expectations that every story must be tied up neatly. The characters in The Undead are working towards a goal, but the story isn’t about that plot. It’s about the characters. It’s like asking the producers of EastEnders how it will end. It’s ongoing. But if I feel it needs to end then I can do that.
