AI Detected?

Speaker

[music]

Andrew Keen

Hello, everybody. Happy August. We finally arrived in the summer of 2026. A couple of weeks ago, we did a That Was The Week tech summary show with my friend Keith Teare, the publisher of That Was The Week, entitled Who Owns Intelligence? We talked about the smart wealth of nations and Keith, I don't know if it was an acknowledgement or a confession or a boast, he told me that he is in the process of writing an AI helped book. I'm not sure entirely AI authored, but certainly involved with AI, appropriately entitled Who Owns Intelligence? So Who writes books in our age of AI? And should authors use AI? That's a subject that we are talking about once again this week. Lots of stories this week. There's a red hot book at the center of an AI mystery. That The Wall Street Journal writes about that's taking over the publishing industry. I assume it's not Keith's. Snapchat has joined other popular platforms in its fight against AI slop. It's joined YouTube, LinkedIn and Substack to combat what it calls fake writing, images and video. And even the Financial Times is getting into the business. They had an interesting piece this week about the new premium product being books written by people, as in contrast, I'm guessing, books written by AI. Keith has a different take on it, though. This week in his That Was The Week editorial. In an editorial entitled AI Detected, he says it's not cheating. You should use it at will. Keith, in terms of using it at will, what does that make of your Who Owns Intelligence book? Who's going to buy a book in publishing if it's been written by AI?

Keith Teare

I think the opposite might be true. I think it might sell more. Because it's of the times and it's going to be intriguing to people. But before I provoke you with that thought, let's just stand back a little bit. Nothing is written by AI. There is absolutely nothing in the world written by AI because AI doesn't have any will at all. It won't even write a single word unless you ask it to. And so... Let's just start there. Intelligence is the word we use for the collective wisdom of the human race and dumb things as well, not just wisdom. It's our collective evolved understanding of ourselves, the world, and so on. So it's only human. And when a human uses AI to do anything, they are leveraging what they know in order to produce some kind of an output And AI is no different than any other tool they might use. If you go way back, and I say this in the editorial, in platonic times, the very idea of writing something down was considered bad because in those days they believed that an idea could only live in a person's brain and come out of a person's mouth. And the minute you wrote it down, It deteriorated in value.

Andrew Keen

Well, yeah, I mean, I take your point and you're right in a way, although of course not everyone agreed on that. I mean, Socrates believed that, but others didn't. So there was a debate back then as there is today about how much tech we should and shouldn't use when it comes to creativity.

Keith Teare

Yeah, but the short story is I think it's already strange for an intelligent person To produce any creative work, not just books, and not engage with AI as part of what they do. I mean, why wouldn't you? I'm not saying there's anything wrong with not using it. If you don't want to use it, great. You know, I sometimes buy things on Etsy that are craft made by human hands, but most of the stuff I buy isn't. It's made in factories. And there's no value judgment between the two. One isn't better than the other. And writing with AI isn't worse than not writing with AI. It's just a tool.

Andrew Keen

So how, and you, we've had this conversation before. You asked me for some advice about finding an agent for your Who Owns Intelligence book.

Keith Teare

Coining a phrase, finding an agent.

Andrew Keen

Right, finding, exactly, finding a human agent as opposed to an AI. I'm not sure how serious you were about that. I'm not even sure how serious you are about this book. You have a day job, which takes up most of your time, and then you have your newsletter and this show. But what is a publisher supposed to do if they believe, rightly or wrongly, that AI mostly wrote this book? Most agents, literary agents these days, I think, would say, well, we don't want to go anywhere near it. Are they wrong?

Keith Teare

Completely wrong. They're going to lose their jobs soon. I think that it won't matter. It literally won't matter. Either way, by the way, it won't matter. It really all depends on the quality of the ideas and the thinking if it's a nonfiction book and the quality of the story if it's fictional. And there's nothing about using AI that makes it worse. And it may make it better. So I think the whole discussion is a little bit strange. It's understandable, but it's a little bit strange.

Andrew Keen

So you're saying then, for example, that this debut novel by a writer called Jerry Falarde that was fought over by 14 publishers, And then they discovered that he, I don't know, again, I'm using this idea of him using AI, and I don't know how or when he used it, that these publishers and the agent are wrong to retract their support and interest in this product.

Keith Teare

Right. Well, the irony is the very last sentence of that story from the agent who's dumped the author says it's a fantastic book. And so what is driving this schism actually is lack of transparency. I think lack of transparency is a much bigger problem than using AI. Using AI and not and being shy about it because you fear offending somebody. And therefore you end up looking as if you're cheating or being devious. That's the problem. You should just own it. Own the fact that you use AI. And when I wrote that in my editorial, I went to that book that you pointed to and I put a strap line underneath my name that said something like AI was heavily used in the writing of this book. Because I think it's really more about transparency. I actually think every book's going to have that soon because who won't use AI in some way or other in writing?

Andrew Keen

Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, with the invention of word processes and computers, no one ever came up with that caveat for books that they were written by hand or on computer. I wonder... How realistic it is because no one's going to be entirely honest. Some people will have a little bit of guilt saying, well, I couldn't have written this without AI or this sentence required a bit of sharpening up. This wasn't really mine. Are we doing away with the idea of human originality? We talked about that last week and the unintended legacy, the ironic legacy of French post-structuralism. That we're no longer quite as authoritative as we thought we were.

Keith Teare

Here's the book that I wrote in 19... I wrote it in probably 1986. It was published in 88 with a very famous preface by John Pilger, who has now passed away.

Andrew Keen

He may have passed away having written it.

Keith Teare

Well, this book was edited by James Woodhausen and sub-edited by Mick Hume. And every book has an editor and a sub-editor. In fact, a publisher won't even look at your book unless you have an editor and a sub-editor. So how much of a book is really the author's work anyway? It's ridiculous to say that AI changes authorship, because if you're going to do that, you should say that editing and sub-editing changes authorship.

Andrew Keen

Well, what about the idea Does this stop nowhere? I mean, you've got your AI book, Who Owns Intelligence. You told me, I think, that it could take you a few hours to write this thing. How are you supposed to compare it with someone who takes months, if not years, to write a book? Are we just...

Keith Teare

Well, so I would say that... Let's use this as an example. Unfortunately, you can't click on the read icon because it's an image. But if you clicked on the read icon, There's 15 chapters and each chapter has a narrative, a sequence of arguments with references. All of that was put together by me in about an hour and a half based on years and years of thinking where I'm aware of all those issues. I'm aware of all the writers in each chapter. I'm aware of the historical precedence. And so the structure The chapters, the arguments within the chapters was all prompted by me. What the AI did was to take that and produce a manuscript from it that then I could critique and shape, if you will, shape according to my will. Just like a color grader using Photoshop takes a picture and they use sliders to change contrast and exposure. They put light in places that it wasn't really there in the original. They shaped the photograph. And so I think the human part is 99%. The AI part is maybe 1%, even if 100% of the manuscript was dumped onto a page by AI.

Andrew Keen

This was also a week where Universities drop their AI detection tools over fizz, over their accuracy. Are you saying then as paranoia in the university, just as there is within the publishing business, that AI can be used to quote unquote cheat? Is it possible to cheat with AI or is in your mind any use of AI is legitimate and the C word cheating is redundant?

Keith Teare

Well, I think cheating is entirely appropriate against a set of rules that are no longer relevant. So if you take the rules as they are today, I do think people cheat when they use AI. I think the rules are at fault, that teaching is going to have to change. And the rules are going to go from did you use AI to how well did you use AI? And there's going to be differentiation between students based on quality, just as there always will. And somebody who's good at using AI will produce much, much better work than somebody who isn't. Because ultimately, the AI doesn't really do much of it. So I think there is cheating, literally. But to want to call someone a cheat, you have to be prepared to defend the old rules prior to AI and not think they should change.

Andrew Keen

And are you saying then that the rules established, say, for example, for the publishing industry, that they need to change?

Keith Teare

Absolutely need to change. I don't even know if they're rules, to be honest, Andrew. I think they're unwritten.

Andrew Keen

Well, they're unwritten understandings. The publishing industry is a very traditional old industry.

Keith Teare

Yeah. So there's kind of a snobbery around the art that Damien Hirst, for example, has tried to make fun of. The snobbery around art is a very narrow definition of what creativity is. And, you know, if you're going to have a dinner party, you wouldn't want an author that used AI to be there. Because, unfortunately, they don't...

Andrew Keen

Well, you're not going to get invited, then, Keith, to many dinner parties. Although, I'm guessing in Palo Alto, you wear your AI hat, so to speak, on your sleeve, and you wouldn't get thrown out.

Keith Teare

I think you'd still be disrespected. I think we're still living at a time when the assumption is, and it is a kind of a snobbish dated assumption, but it's real. The assumption is that to the extent you use AI, you're not legitimate, authentic, and so on. I don't think that's right, but I do think it's the dominant view.

Andrew Keen

So what becomes then of The artisan writer in the future, the Margaret Atwood, for example, who clearly doesn't use AI, who's hostile to it. What becomes of the people who have won the Booker Prize? Do they all just go away?

Keith Teare

There's still going to be the best authors who write the best stories who everybody wants to read. And whether they use AI or not won't even be a question. It'll just be, was this a good novel? Did it make a good movie?

Andrew Keen

Do you think it makes any difference in terms of the consumer? Today, when you go to the supermarket, and there's some controversy over this, we choose products because they're organic or natural. Will in the future there'll be a table in a bookstore, for example, that will say organic books written without technology, without AI? Is that one way that consumers will be able to... Articulate their own interests or preferences. I mean, you clearly don't care, but some people do.

Keith Teare

I think if they care about that more than they care about the quality of the book or the story, you know, I don't know what really motivates them. I don't know why they would care. But let's say, take your question, look, I'll go to the British Museum to see stone tablets with writing on done by Egyptians because it's fascinating, but it doesn't mean that that's the only legitimate form of publishing. And so everything is still legitimate and it may well be the case that an artisanal novel is fantastic. There'd be no reason to be against it because it's artisanal, but there'd be no reason to be against it If AI contributed to it either, it really is just about the quality of the thinking and the quality of the storytelling.

Andrew Keen

But there is, I mean, we can see it with music. People, when CDs came along, marketers boasted about perfect sound forever. There was a great debate. For a while, it killed vinyl. And now vinyl outsells CDs. And there's a lot more money to be made in vinyl than there are in... Digital downloads, it would seem. So maybe the future could be for entrepreneurs, at least. I mean, you're clearly not someone who's interested in this, but there could be a future for, shall we say, artisanal literature.

Keith Teare

There will be. It's said, see, for books, there definitely will be. And look, vinyl's a great example. Vinyl, these days, is manufactured from a digital master. So the vinyl is not analog. What it's doing is playing analog version of a digital master.

Andrew Keen

Well, you're not a vinyl guy, clearly.

Keith Teare

I've got a whole set of vinyl up here, but when I listen to it, it has crackles, and it definitely is not better than streaming, for example, from Tidal, which has 129... 192 kilohertz streams that are perfect.

Andrew Keen

Well, clearly, Keith, you're not sympathetic to the...

Keith Teare

I like live music, Andrew, where it's really analogue.

Andrew Keen

So you, I think that in the future though, I think that what you call artisanal literature or art or music, I think will have more and more, for better or worse, more and more value. Maybe it won't be better, but it will be different or at least perceived to be different.