My morning routine involves a lot of reading. A lot of coffee and a lot of reading. It’s a good thing that I do. Read, that is. As it turns out, of the many, many “good things to do” as it relates to writing a book, there are two for which I am qualified: (1) Getting someone to proofread my book and (2) reading a lot. Everything else on that list I was going to have to learn on the go.

In response: (1) I’ve got me, and (2) I read a lot. Of course, what “they” mean by reading a lot is to read other novels, especially ones in my genre, in my case, historical fiction.

I do read plenty of historical fiction and fiction in general, but I also have all my other reading. That’s what mornings are for. That and coffee. It’s decaf, so it’s not a problem. Except it means it takes me forever to wake up, and thus, long stints of reading on the internet await me when I rise. First, there are the emails. I don’t get many personal emails these days, so it’s always like Christmas or my birthday when I do get one, and I hurry to open those first. All the rest of my emails are from people I don’t know, but I’m interested in what they have to say, so I subscribe. I get a bunch of those every day. After those are all read, it’s on to the news aggregators, which, depending on the news cycle and whether the commentators I like have decided to comment on the latest, can turn into a two-or-three-coffee session.

Within all this reading, from the first sip of coffee to the last, there’s one topic that’s getting chopped up into a lot of two-cents’ worths these days: artificial intelligence. Everyone’s got something to say about AI, and it’s all landing in my inbox. The range of opinion about AI is diverse if my inbox is any indication. There’s the “Tomorrow will be wonderful and the more tech in it, the better” group of writers all the way to the “AI is the devil” bunch.

I don’t think the inordinate amount of anti-AI writing in my inbox is indicative of the world of large, but it sure is in my world, which nowadays includes numerous subscriptions to authors and editors and agents and assorted others in the book publishing industry whose wisdom I seek. It’s easy to see why anti-AI sentiment runs high in the publishing industry. Here’s a bit of news trivia you may not have heard: AI company Anthropic scraped the contents of a vast number of copyrighted books and fed that into their learning language model, all without seeking permission to do so from the authors or publishers of those books.

That’s a terrible precedent.

And if you’re like me, you know this kind of underhandedness runs rampant; it’s just Anthropic’s bad luck to get caught. The way I look at it, AI is not the culprit here. Sure, it has the ability to scrape and seed, but it’s the person who sets that wheel in motion who’s the bad actor. Let’s put the blame where it belongs.

So, that was a big brouhaha; and the good guys won. The brouhaha now is people writing their romance novels using AI, either entirely or in part. A lot of people don’t like that.

Book writers are looking at AI and their profession and facing the prospect of the bottom falling out of it. If someone can write a romance book using AI in a fraction of the time it takes writer Jane Doe, who doesn’t use AI, Jane has just priced herself out of the market.

Hey, she could shift over to historical fiction, where real people are still writing, at least the last time I checked.

Thinking of New Orleans during Jazz Fest. Here’s Tab Benoit …