That's really Meta

The Atlantic has an article out about Meta using copyrighted books to train their crappy AI. When I first heard I was oddly relieved to see that one of my books (and several short stories) is on the list. That would’ve sucked otherwise. What, Meta, am I not good enough to steal from?

Then it hit me. The book, The Whisperer in Dissonance, is about things like working too much, the sense of isolation despite being connected more than ever, and the constant noise of untrustworthy sources. But the plot literally revolves around people being replaced by crappy AI chat bots.

The Whisperer in Dissonance was written between 2011-2012 and the first edition was published in 2013. Some part of my brain, let’s call it the Philip K Dick center of the brain, can’t help but think, are our dystopian stories causing this? Is our act of writing generating meta fiction leading to…er… Meta?

I also have two unpublished novels that seemed to have their predictions come true too fast to get published:

In 2018-2019 I wrote a sci-fi in a seemingly fantasy world where the protagonists had to develop a cure for a plague and the aristocracy tried first to pretend their was no plague, and then attempted to outlaw the cure. A friend who read it in 2019 said, “Ordinarily I’d say these villains are too obvious, but this is exactly the way the MAGA people would act if a plague came while Trump is in power.” Needless to say by the time the book was submitted in 2020 it was too late. Covid had hit and the MAGA people were reacting exactly that way.

In 2021-2022 I wrote a sci-fi spy novel where a villain partially inspired by Elon Musk works with a hostile spy service to attempt a coup. Again I had no way of knowing this was going to happen in the real world… should probably asterisk “real world” with some sort of footnote like “assuming this isn’t a simulation.”

I guess what I’m getting at is I either need to write a hell of a lot faster, or I need to stop writing dystopian fiction. As difficult as it is, I need to start writing fiction with solutions and characters making positive change. Maybe if we can write a better world it will meta itself into existence.