Sci-Fi Writer Cory Doctorow Attempts To Fearmonger About Technology: "AI Companies Will Fail"
While not the first establishment sci-fi writer to take to the internet to cry about artificial intelligence, Cory Doctorow has used the platform of The Guardian to put forth an illogical message that AI companies are both “failing” and that simultaneously it has to be something that’s fought against in an emotional article that has very little substance.
No one’s been fighting harder against AI than the publishing establishment in science fiction and fantasy, with groups like the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association taking up a cause against the new technology, trying to ensure it gets banned everywhere, as well as engagin in multiple lawsuits like the one against Anthropic for training its Claude large language model on millions of different books.
While judges have already ruled that art and prose generated by models like Claude are transformative and not in any way “theft” like establishment publishing tries to make it sound, they continue pushing the rhetoric. It’s ironic because you can never have something like Claude or ChatGPT spit out a direct copy of a book; it will always just make its own thing, and without any human guidance, the output generally is poor.
Cory Doctorow is a British sci-fi writer who’s been propped up by the establishment for a number of decades, a liberal activist in tech rights. He’s notably always been wildly anti-capitalist which is what’s garnered him a beloved spot among establishment publishing, which mostly operates off of government grants and selling to public libraries at taxpayer expenses to prop up their business models.
In fiction, he’s best known for his work in post-cyberpunk and solarpunk genres, often exploring themes like digital rights, surveillance, post-scarcity economics, and technology’s societal impacts. Some of his most notable novels include Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (2003, his debut and the first novel released under a Creative Commons license), the young adult bestseller Little Brother (2008, which addresses homeland security and civil liberties post-9/11), its sequels like Homeland (2013), Walkaway (2017), Radicalized (2019, a novella collection), Attack Surface (2020), The Lost Cause (2023), and the Martin Hench series starting with Red Team Blues (2023). He’s also written graphic novels like In Real Life (2014) and children’s books such as Poesy the Monster Slayer (2020).
