When the announcement went out that Anthropic, the parent company of Claude, was being sued for training their AI models on pirated books, I nodded, lips thinning to an “about damned time” expression. In the Atlantic article, there was a link to see if Anthropic had fed a particular book to their hoppers to train their LLM machine. Curious if A Perfect Blindness had been pirated and fed to Claude, if strangers were using my hard-won word smithing to improve their own, I clicked. Thoughts of Anthropic making money on that novel I made none, dragged the ends of my lips down. Isn’t it hard enough for us writers without other people swiping our work and making money off it?
And yep.
A Perfect Blindness had indeed been fed to the Anthropic AI Machine.
I hadn’t said yes. Nor had I been paid for it.
Well, damned right I jumped in with the crowd suing them. Class Action, baby. Stealing my work. Grrrrr. Come on, teachers don’t teach for free. Nor do editors edit without money. And I worked years on that book. It’s likely part of the reason AI uses so many m-dashes. I love the damned things—the Swiss Army knife of punctuation.
Time to wait
I filled out the form. Now, all I can do was wait. It will take months for this to wind its way through various stages, and some unknown date in the near-ish future, I’ll hear something. Since I’m not a member of the Authors’ Guild, I can only watch their parallel suit from the sidelines, cheering them on.
Form sent, Class application in the works, the swell of anger receded.
What it’s really about
I had plenty of things to do then, most pressing was to show up in the booth at the Brooklyn Book Festival with other members of The New Wei, Author & Artist Collective.
But I hit a bump. One I’ve stumbled over more than once. How to answer the question: So, what’s the book about?
Sure, it’s about the rise and fall of a rock’n’roll band in the late ‘80s Chicago Industrial music scene. But that’s just the setting. It’s more about identity and what that means when we are all just the misunderstood characters in the stories everyone tells themselves.
So, I needed a pithy one-liner that went deeper than the surface. Something to intrigue, to get someone to linger a moment longer. Not an elevator pitch, which is more involved. That would come after I’d hooked someone’s attention.
But I had neither. Though I’ve tried to squeeze those out many times over the years, I’ve always been frustrated by the weak answers I could cough up.
What the Hell
So, I decided, what the hell. A Perfect Blindness has been fed to the AI machine. Let’s see what AI can do for me.
I wasn’t familiar with Claude. At all. Then, I remembered seeing that A Perfect Blindness on Google Books and figured Alphabet had eaten and digested the book as well, so thought I’d give Google’s AI a whirl. It burped up:
For answering the question, “What’s A Perfect Blindness about?”, you can start with a brief plot summary and then expand upon the more experimental elements of the book, such as its unique structure and central themes.
Not exactly what I was looking for, but I’m new to vibing.
And below that answer were prompts for me to dig ever deeper. I bit.
A Perfect Blindness by W. Lance Hunt is a challenging, experimental novel that tackles themes of narrative perspective, subjective truth, and the nature of storytelling. It does this by telling three different, contradictory stories about the same events, mimicking the structure of Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet.
Sounding Smart
Well, damn. I sound bloody smart. And that answer is dead on with the Alexandria Quartet. I quote from it inside the novel. Means that Gemini has read… no, digested the novel.
I hit the next prompt about the kind of books are like it—comparative titles (comp titles in writerly lingo):
If you enjoyed A Perfect Blindness, consider these books that similarly play with narrative form, subjective reality, and unreliable narrators.
Oh, my. Look at that. This boy is seriously smart. And Gemini does know how to stroke a poor writer’s human ego, going on with
Books like W. Lance Hunt’s A Perfect Blindness might include literary fiction focusing on complex human perception and interconnected stories, such as Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet.
[And is r]ecommended for readers who appreciate complex narrative structures, profound philosophical questions about perception, and explorations of the human condition under extreme circumstances.
Gemini kept on, inviting comparisons to Jorge Luis Borges, Shirley Jackson, Italo Calvino, Sarah Waters & Milan Kundera.
According to Gemini, I’m some kind of god-damned literary genius.
But that is only AI talking.
Now, I do know AI is a bullshitting machine. Ask it a question, and it will give you an answer, even if it has to make something up to provide it.
Taking a step back, I asked the same question of ChatGPT. That LLM became obsessed with the Rock’n’Roll theme, adding ideas to the book that are not there. So-called hallucinations. Really just more bullshitting. It clearly hadn’t digested the book, but after some guidance to use reviews, both editorial and readers’ on Goodreads and Amazon, it coughed up some solid ideas for Amazon and Meta ads, including suggestions for the artwork. Not what I was looking for, but I kept them. In case.
In the end,
I realized I had to remake my book description, the seven Amazon keywords, and fix the categories on KDP for A Perfect Blindness. Aiming at the kind of reader who gushes about the book in reviews. Those who love the style, the language, the immersiveness of the world.
More on that soon.
By the way, I stuck with my own idea: “it’s about the rise and fall of a rock’n’roll band in the late ‘80s Chicago Industrial music scene. Showing how we’re all just the misunderstood characters in the stories everyone tells themselves.”
Thanks for being here.
William Lance Hunt†
†I’ll dive into that nym change soon, too, promise.