The End of an Era

一个时代的终结

We knew this day would come. Some of us have known for decades, have been writing and pontificating about this since Ken Jennings lost at Jeopardy and Kasparov lost at chess. The writing was on the wall, and now the writing is everywhere. Literally. Artificial Intelligence is writing about as well as humans — at least well enough to cause confusion and speculation — and that’s creating an existential crisis among authors, confusion among readers, and legal action within the industry.

我们都知道这一天终会到来。我们中的一些人几十年前就预见到了这一点，自从肯·詹宁斯（Ken Jennings）在《危险边缘》中落败、卡斯帕罗夫（Kasparov）在国际象棋中输给电脑以来，我们就一直在撰文探讨此事。当时墙上就已写下了预兆，而现在，文字无处不在。字面意义上的无处不在。人工智能的写作水平已经与人类不相上下——至少足以引起困惑和猜测——这正在作者群体中引发一场生存危机，让读者感到困惑，并在行业内引发法律诉讼。

When talking about my success as a writer, I almost always bring up the lucky timing I experienced. I finished writing my first novel in 2009, just two years after Amazon released the Kindle. By the time I went to find an agent and publisher, the self-pubbing world of KDP, CreateSpace, and ACX were beginning their inevitable pull. That was dumb luck, and without it I would have written for love but likely never for a living.

在谈到我作为作家的成功时，我几乎总是提到我所经历的幸运时机。我在 2009 年完成了我的第一部小说，那是在亚马逊发布 Kindle 的两年后。当我开始寻找代理人和出版商时，KDP、CreateSpace 和 ACX 等自助出版领域正开始展现其不可阻挡的吸引力。那是纯粹的运气，如果没有它，我可能会出于热爱而写作，但很可能永远无法以此为生。

This morning, an equally profound thought occurred to me: My lifelong dream of writing novels somehow overlapped with the 20 good years where stories could be published cheaply but not written cheaply. The writing was still hard. The publishing no longer was. I could sweat my way through a manuscript, and then use amazing tools like InDesign and Photoshop to create files, then upload those files FOR FREE to KDP and CreateSpace and hold a book. Sales and marketing, of course, were always and will always be a different story.

今天早上，一个同样深刻的想法出现在我脑海中：我毕生写作小说的梦想，不知何故与那 20 年的黄金时期重叠了——在那段时间里，故事可以低成本出版，但不能低成本创作。写作依然艰难，但出版不再困难。我可以呕心沥血完成手稿，然后使用 InDesign 和 Photoshop 等神奇工具制作文件，再免费上传到 KDP 和 CreateSpace，最终拿到一本实体书。当然，销售和营销一直并将永远是另一回事。

But think about it: the misery most writers faced prior to 2007 (and really, prior to 2012 or 2013, when the stigma just started to fade) of writing query letters, researching agents, amassing rejection letters, avoiding scammy vanity publishers (and scammy review sites, and scammy conferences, and scammy writer-help resources), or even worse: spending their life-savings on boxes of terribly printed books that would sit in the garage for all of eternity, barely selling a dozen copies, and never making back a fraction of the print run.

但试想一下：大多数作家在 2007 年之前（实际上是在 2012 或 2013 年，即这种偏见开始消退之前）所面临的痛苦——撰写查询信、研究代理人、积累拒稿信、避开骗人的自费出版商（以及骗人的评论网站、骗人的会议和骗人的写作辅助资源），或者更糟糕的是：花光毕生积蓄印了一箱箱质量低劣的书，它们在车库里堆放了一辈子，几乎卖不出十几本，甚至连印刷成本的零头都赚不回来。

Fast forward to today, in 2026. You’ve got this story: There’s a lot of insanity to unpack here. $2.4M advance! Holy shit. For a debut author, after what I hear was a bidding war among very excited publishers. That’s already crazy. But it gets crazier. Concerns were raised about the use of AI to write the book (not sure if this is a giveaway, but the book was about Nigerian cartels. You know the adage: write what you know). More questions were raised about style and some AI fingerprints, and the provenance of the book couldn’t be adequately proven. So the offer was rescinded. The deal fell apart.

快进到今天，2026 年。你看到了这个故事：这里面有太多疯狂的细节。240 万美元的预付款！天哪。对于一位处女作作者来说，据我所知，这还是在出版商们极其兴奋地竞价之后的结果。这已经够疯狂了。但更疯狂的还在后面。人们对该书是否使用 AI 撰写提出了质疑（不确定这是否是剧透，但这本书是关于尼日利亚贩毒集团的。你知道那句格言：写你所了解的）。关于文风和一些 AI 指纹的质疑越来越多，而这本书的来源无法得到充分证明。于是，报价被撤回，交易告吹。

Okay, there’s a chance this was a legit book from a legit writer, and the accusations are unfair (including my Nigerian cartel joke, but c’mon, this is like every college professor writing literary novels about college professors having affairs with their students. More imagination, people!). If this was a legitimate book, that might be the BIGGEST version of this story. Life-changing amounts of money, the start of a brilliant career, film or TV options, foreign deals, the works. It wasn’t just on the table, it was in writing. And then it fell apart for someone, all because it is now 2026. That’s one version of the insane new era we now find ourselves. Every book is suspect. No new author will ever be able to prove to anyone other than themselves that they can do it alone (hold this thought for later, because it’s not exactly true).

好吧，有可能这是一本出自正经作家之手的正经书，而这些指控是不公平的（包括我关于尼日利亚贩毒集团的笑话，但拜托，这就像每个大学教授都写关于大学教授与学生发生婚外情的文学小说一样。大家发挥点想象力吧！）。如果这是一本正经的书，那这可能是这个故事最令人震惊的一面。改变人生的巨额金钱、辉煌职业生涯的开端、影视改编权、海外版权，应有尽有。这些不仅摆在桌面上，而且已经落实到了合同里。然后，这一切对某人来说瞬间崩塌，仅仅因为现在是 2026 年。这就是我们所处疯狂新时代的一个缩影。每一本书都值得怀疑。没有哪位新作者能够向除自己以外的任何人证明他们是独立完成作品的（先记住这个想法，因为这并不完全正确）。

Let’s examine another crazy version. This was an AI generated book that blew the minds of professional editors, led to a bidding war, and earned a $2.4M advance. Holy shit. I’ve been predicting this day was a few years out, but it might already be here. AI books winning awards. AI books crowding up Amazon bestseller charts. AI books now getting big advances and whipping up bidding wars and excitement among publishers? As the blog title says, it’s the end of an era.

让我们看看另一个疯狂的版本。这是一本由 AI 生成的书，它震撼了专业编辑，引发了竞价大战，并获得了 240 万美元的预付款。天哪。我一直预测这一天还要几年才会到来，但它可能已经到了。AI 书籍获奖。AI 书籍挤满亚马逊畅销书榜单。AI 书籍现在获得了巨额预付款，并在出版商中掀起了竞价大战和狂热？正如博客标题所言，这是一个时代的终结。

Which takes me back to my statement about lucky windows. We had less than 20 years of writing being hard and publishing being easy, and we will never get that window back. Ever. I’ve always felt bad for authors who lived and worked before 2007. The choices unavailable to them made life harder than it needed to be. Getting their work out into the world was brutal. After KDP, that brutality became a choice, not a necessity. I now feel awful for anyone who wants to tell a story post-2026. You will forever be doubted. If you love an em dash the way I do, or you like flowy run-on sentences like I do, if you grew up reading Proust to let the words flow over you in all their glory, if you memorized sonnets so the iambic pentameter would soak into your bones, you’re gonna sound like a fucking bot.

这让我想起了我关于“幸运窗口期”的说法。我们经历了不到 20 年的“写作艰难但出版容易”的时期，而我们永远不会再拥有那个窗口期了。永远不会。我一直为 2007 年之前生活和工作的作家感到难过。他们无法获得的选择让生活变得不必要地艰难。让他们的作品走向世界的过程是残酷的。在 KDP 出现后，这种残酷变成了一种选择，而不是必然。我现在为 2026 年之后任何想讲故事的人感到难过。你将永远受到质疑。如果你像我一样热爱破折号，或者像我一样喜欢流畅的长难句，如果你是在阅读普鲁斯特的过程中成长，让文字以其全部荣耀流淌过你的心田，如果你背诵十四行诗，让抑扬格五音步渗入你的骨髓，你听起来就像个该死的机器人。

Less than 20 years. More like 10, honestly. You can argue that 2014-ish was when self-publishing became legit and 2024-ish was when the tools made AI writing viable. A decade where it was easy in the ways it should be and hard in the ways it should be. That’s insane. Ten years across the one-hundred-thousand years of language. What comes next? I have some predictions, and they are pretty crazy.

不到 20 年。老实说，更像是 10 年。你可以认为 2014 年左右是自助出版变得正规的时候，而 2024 年左右是工具使 AI 写作变得可行的时候。这十年里，它在应该容易的地方容易，在应该困难的地方困难。这太疯狂了。在语言十万年的历史中，这仅仅是十年。接下来会发生什么？我有一些预测，而且它们相当疯狂。

The first prediction is that publishers weather a few of these big AI scandals, but as years go by, publishers care more about profits and they let things slide. AI books from big houses get editing passes, and later they develop internal tools to roughen up the AI slop, and machine-books appear in bookstores alongside meat-books. This feels inevitable. Brace for this. (Feel free to rage about it as well, if you’re low on cortisol.)

第一个预测是，出版商会经历几次重大的 AI 丑闻，但随着时间的推移，出版商会更看重利润，从而对这些问题睁一只眼闭一只眼。大型出版社的 AI 书籍会经过编辑润色，随后他们会开发内部工具来让 AI 生成的粗糙内容显得更自然，机器书将与人类创作的书籍一起出现在书店里。这似乎是不可避免的。做好准备吧。（如果你皮质醇水平低，也可以随意为此感到愤怒。）

Another prediction is that MOST readers will care about machine-vs-meat as much as they currently care about publishing imprints, which is to say almost none. Book series will go viral and readers will get wholly absorbed and where the story came from won’t matter. There will always be readers pushing beyond the fringe. That’s how fanfiction became viable. It’s why I had a career.

另一个预测是，大多数读者对“机器创作”与“人类创作”的关心程度，将和他们目前对出版品牌（imprints）的关心程度一样——也就是说，几乎完全不在乎。系列书籍会走红，读者会完全沉浸其中，故事的来源将不再重要。总会有读者去探索边缘之外的内容。这就是同人小说变得可行的方式。这也是我能拥有职业生涯的原因。