Baen Books Author Larry Correia Trashes AI Fiction Writing As "Vapid, Souless S***"

AI writing has been at the forefront of controversy this year, with news websites to fiction organizations being forced to chime in on whether it’s ethical or not. Now, Baen Books author Larry Correia, famous for his Monster Hunter International series chimes in on the topic, calling the product of AI, “vapid, soulless shi**.”

Many fiction writers in science fiction and fantasy panic about the use of AI writing. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association made a statement condemning its use after Clarkesworld magazine revealed AI submissions were clogging up their backlog. NaNoWriMo was rocked by many leftist activists in the field trying to cancel the organization because they wouldn’t explicitly ban AI use.

Most of the complaints in the mainstream industry center around ethical concerns that AI will take the jobs of many professionals. However, the elephant in the room is that AI writing is of low quality. In many ways, these organizations and industry professionals are telling on themselves when they complain about AI taking their jobs. The implication is their writing is not worth the paper it’s printed on.

Larry Correia is on such a successful track with his book sales from his hot series Monster Hunter International that he legendarily bought a mountain with the royalties he’s earned. He has a different take than much of the industry, which is that AI only removes the fun part of the writing process and doesn’t help with more difficult job of editing.

He posted to X when asked about the prospect of AI writing:

I see a lot of newbie authors thinking that AI is going to be some super tool, but the part you guys are missing is that writing is the fun part. Editing is the hard part. So you're giving the fun part to the machine, and then going through and doing painstaking clean up to humanize it. At least if you want it to not suck ass.

So let's say that I, as a very experienced author who we've established is pretty good at this shit, tells an AI give me a story about X, Y, and Z. And it spits it out for me in seconds. Yay.

Except then I need to take that AI generated manuscript and make it not read like it was written by a soulless autocorrect with a severe personality disorder.

What lazy authors will do is just take that AI dreck, do a quick editing pass (if that) and throw it out on the internet to try and make a quick buck. Slap an AI cover on it. They'll spam Amazon, sell to some dupes, make a few bucks, maybe. And flood the market with shit.

So back to me, an actual working pro with a name and a reputation for a certain level of quality and an existing fan base who pays my bills. I've got this AI generated manuscript, but I need to bring it up to snuff, otherwise my customers are going to read it and go what the fuck is this bullshit? And never buy one of my books again.

So this is the part you newbs don't get, writing/creating is fun. Editing is WORK. So now I need to clean up every single fucking line of this AI generated manuscript because the machine doesn't know shit about emotions. It doesn't know shit about how things feel. It can only regurgitate what others have written before. It is a compulsive liar. It makes shit up, but it isn't creative. It's got no soul. It's got no enthusiasm, and that's the biggest one that I'll come back around to.

Here's an ugly little secret of writing a lot of you guys don't grasp. There are two kinds of collaborations between authors. Collabs where both authors actually work, and collabs where one does all the work and the other phones it in, sticks his name on it, and then cashes checks at the end. James Patterson doesn't actually write a book a week.

I've got pride, so every single collab I've ever done I've put in the work into going over it, painstaking, line by line, and I take pride in the fact that on my many collabs when my readers try to guess which parts were written by me and which were written by my coauthor, 90% of the time you guys get it wrong. That means I did my fucking job.

And here's the hard part... It takes me LONGER to do a good collaboration than it does to just write a book by myself. Dummies think authors do collabs to churn out more books. WRONG. Only if you do it the lazy way. If you actually give a shit, it's a process that takes effort.

Because a collab should be a synergistic endeavor that results in something more than the sum of its parts. To do that requires putting in actual work. With this, you just teamed up to collaborate with a fucking robot that's got the humanity and sense of humor of an impaired Speak & Spell.

By the time you get done painstakingly redoing every line of cloying bullshit, congrats, you could've just wrote the fucking book you wanted to begin with. The creation is the fun part. I've said this many many many times, the writer's greatest weapon is contagious enthusiasm. If I'm having fun writing it, I know you guys will have fun reading it. That's it. That's the big fucking secret.

AI has no enthusiasm.

If an author isn't having fun writing, you can tell when you read it. It's a vibe. It's a feeling. You just know. If the author was having a blast you know it. The scenes where a good author was grinning or crying or doing a triumphant fuck yeah fist pump, you fucking know. Because reader and author are both human, you fucking GET IT.

The AI doesn't. It can't. It can fake it. It can uncanny valley its way through a book, and it will probably get better and better at faking it, but it isn't human, and good storytelling is a profoundly human endeavor.

This is the same reason the big media corporate entertainment of the day sucks so bad. It's made by a committee, and committees don't have have enthusiasm. And fake enthusiasm will never replace real contagious enthusiasm. If the creator doesn't give a shit, why should the audience?

AI can produce a TON of vapid soulless shit, but hey, so can modern Disney! In fact, when the creator doesn't give a shit about his art, not only does the audience feel it, the audience gets pissed off.

So if you want to produce tons of unenthusiastic shit product and roll the dice hoping it somehow sticks and makes a buck, great. But if you actually give a shit about what you're saying, then just fucking SAY IT.

The Baen Books author isn’t the only superstar to comment on the topic.

Vox Day is an epic fantasy author and AI music advocate despite writing and recording three Billboard Top 40 Club hits with his techno band in the 1990s. He told Fandom Pulse when we asked his thoughts, "The reason AI text is not a threat to authors the way AI music is a threat to musicians and AI art is a threat to artists is that the amount of vision required for a novel, or even a short story, is orders of magnitude beyond that required for a three-minute pop song or a single 1024 x 1024 image. That's why a few words are a sufficient prompt for the song or the image, but not for even an obviously inferior short story. Unlike the other AI applications, I haven't found the various text systems to be a useful tool for producing text of an acceptable quality."

The consensus among authors with talent seems to be that AI writing is not a threat, but instead it’s a tool that can be used, but for the actual process of creating great fiction, it’s an impossibility for the machine-made work to catch up to human creativity.

What do you think about AI writing and Baen Books author Larry Correia’s reaction? Become a paid member to support our journalism and leave a comment!

If you enjoy great fantasy fiction with great worldbuilding and a classic D&D feel, read The Adventures of Baron von Monocle six-book series and support Fandom Pulse! Book 1 is on sale for Black Friday!

NEXT: Pulp Fiction Scholar Savages Jonathan Mayberry's Weird Tales Fantasy Magazine Revival