“The human part is 99 percent. The AI part is maybe 1 percent — even if 100 percent of the manuscript was dumped onto the page by AI.” — Keith Teare on writing with AI

What is “real” authorship in our AI age? For That Was The Week publisher Keith Teare, all authorship, even the most AI-enabled, is real. It’s the cave-dwelling Luddites who are the sloppy ones. For Keith, true creativity, in our age of Claude and Gemini, almost requires the use of AI.

A couple of weeks ago Keith confessed, or perhaps boasted, that he is writing an AI-assisted book entitled Who Owns Intelligence. This week, publishing discovered what happens when others play the same game without public acknowledgement. So we have the case of the “red-hot” debut novel, fought over by fourteen publishers, dropped overnight when the agent found AI in the mix.

“It’s a fantastic book,” the book’s agent acknowledged, before firing its less than transparent author. Which, for Keith, is precisely the scandal.

His position, argued in this week’s editorial “AI Detected,” is pretty absolute. Nothing is written by AI, Keith argues, because AI has no will. It doesn’t produce a single word unless asked. The human part is 99 percent, he says, even when 100 percent of the manuscript is spat out by the machine. So the real sin isn’t using AI but not acknowledging its use. So, on Who Owns Intelligence, Keith makes it crystal clear that “AI was heavily used in the writing of this book.”

I’m not so sure. Amazon is now infested with AI slop that requires no authorship. Besides, Keith clearly has no love of reading books. He admits to reading only a single volume in the last couple of years. And he’s still smarting from being, in his mind at least, ripped off by the publishing industry for his last published book some 40 years ago. He no longer needs to read books, he pronounces, because his world-view is already set. For a man who thinks he knows everything, AI isn’t scary. Maybe we should rename him Claude.

Postscript. Full Keith-style disclosure: these shownotes were produced with the help of Anthropic. When I fed Claude my draft, it responded: “‘Maybe we should rename him Claude’ is a closer I’m contractually obliged to enjoy.” Nothing, as Keith says, is written by AI. Although some algorithms seem to have cheeky opinions of their own. Maybe Anthropic should rename it Keith.

Five Takeaways

• Nothing Is Written by AI. AI has no will — it won’t write a word unless asked. The human part is 99 percent.

• Transparency, Not Technology. Fourteen publishers fought over a debut novel; the agent dropped it over AI while calling it fantastic. The sin is hiding the tool.

• “The Publishing Industry Is Basically a Scam.” Banning AI books is outrageous, says Keith — the real victim of publishing is the author: £10,000 on 50,000 copies.

• Sharks, Playing Their Own Book. Aschenbrenner’s $45B fund margin-called into Citadel; Amodei’s “as long as it’s safe” translated: against.

• Money Won’t Matter by 2036? Musk predicts it; Khosla half-agrees. Andrew bets the opposite — but you can’t bet money on money not mattering.

About Keen On America

Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen.

Website: https://keenon.tv/ Substack: https://keenon.substack.com/ YouTube: https://youtube.com/@KeenOnShow

Read That Was The Week: thatwastheweek.com

Chapters:

00:00:31 Introduction: happy August — and an AI book confession
00:02:38 Nothing is written by AI
00:06:32 The week’s scandal: fourteen publishers, one fantastic book
00:07:06 Transparency, not technology
00:08:58 Editors, subeditors, and the myth of solitary authorship
00:11:35 Universities drop their AI detectors
00:12:05 Cheating against obsolete rules
00:16:32 The vinyl analogy — cut from digital masters
00:21:29 In defense of “slop”
00:22:03 The Hunter question: banning AI books
00:25:00 The Churchill thought experiment
00:27:36 When did Keith last read a book?
00:30:20 “The publishing industry is basically a scam”
00:33:49 Substack’s anti-AI tool — and no AI tools
00:38:09 Phones in bathrooms: AI at dinner parties
00:39:09 Aschenbrenner: the $45 billion margin call
00:43:33 Amodei, Zuckerberg, and the open-source wars
00:47:19 China: the capital of open source
00:50:43 Money won’t matter by 2036?
00:53:57 The bet you can’t make with money
00:55:41 Thanks and goodbye