The End of an Era

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. 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. This morning, an equally profound thought occurred to me: My lifelong dream of…