{"id":42265,"date":"2026-04-15T07:15:00","date_gmt":"2026-04-15T14:15:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/?p=42265"},"modified":"2026-04-15T08:18:50","modified_gmt":"2026-04-15T15:18:50","slug":"thousands-of-ai%e2%80%91written-edited-or-polished-books-are-being-sold-an-eerie-echo-of-orwells-novel%e2%80%91writing-machines","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/thousands-of-ai%e2%80%91written-edited-or-polished-books-are-being-sold-an-eerie-echo-of-orwells-novel%e2%80%91writing-machines\/","title":{"rendered":"Thousands of AI\u2011written, edited or \u2018polished\u2019 books are being sold \u2013 an eerie echo of Orwell\u2019s \u2018novel\u2011writing machines\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Laura Beers<\/a>, American University<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

At some point in the next several months, I am hoping to receive a modest check as a member of the class covered in the class-action settlement<\/a> Bartz v. Anthropic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2025, the artificial intelligence company Anthropic, best known for creating the chatbot Claude<\/a>, agreed to pay up to US$1.5 billion to thousands of authors after a judge ruled<\/a> that the company had infringed upon their copyrights.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I first learned about the settlement, I assumed that Anthropic was primarily interested in teaching Claude about the subject of my stolen work<\/a>, former socialist activist, British Labour politician and feminist Ellen Wilkinson.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It did not initially occur to me that Claude might also be learning about how I, Laura Beers, political historian, craft my sentences and translate my voice to the page.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet there is increasing evidence<\/a> that chatbots like Claude can be trained not only to regurgitate an author\u2019s content, but also to mimic their voice. In March 2026, journalist Julia Angwin filed a class action suit against the owners of Grammarly<\/a>, alleging that the company misappropriated her and other writers\u2019 identities to build its \u201cExpert Review\u201d AI tool, which offers to give editorial feedback in the voices of various authors, living and dead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That a machine might use my writing not only to learn about my subject matter, but also to analyze and ultimately mimic my authorial voice, points to a future that George Orwell envisioned with eerie prescience. In his 1949 dystopian novel \u201c1984<\/a>,\u201d Orwell imagined \u201cnovel-writing machines\u201d capable of mass-producing literature, employing programmed mechanical \u201ckaleidoscopes\u201d as substitutes for individual artistic process.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018In place of a human mind, a statistical average\u2019<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

To what extent, I wondered, could Claude mimic my own voice?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I prompted the chatbot to write an essay \u201cin the style of Laura Beers\u201d about an early 20th-century politician. I struggled to recognize myself in the resulting prose. But maybe Claude, having only consumed one of my books, didn\u2019t have enough to go on to really nail my tone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I decided to try again. This time, I would ask it to write a brief essay in the style of Orwell. The subject of my book \u201cOrwell\u2019s Ghosts: Wisdom and Warnings for the Twenty-First Century<\/a>,\u201d Orwell is one of the most distinctive literary essayists and prose stylists of the 20th century.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Most of Orwell\u2019s work is in the public domain, meaning it could have legally been used to train Claude.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I prompted Claude to write an essay \u201cin the style of George Orwell about the threat to individual identity and freedom of thought posed by AI and particularly by the ability of \u2018novel writing machines\u2019 to produce literature.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Primed with ample source material, the AI did a passable job:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cHere is a type of comfort, familiar to anyone who has ever been slowly dispossessed of something, that consists not in denying the loss but in not yet noticing it. The frog does not leap from the gradually heated water. The citizen does not protest the gradual narrowing of the permitted thought. And the reader, it seems, does not mourn the novel until the novel has already been replaced by something that resembles it in every outward particular \u2013 same chapters, same characters, same approximate sequence of feeling \u2013 yet contains, in place of a human mind, a statistical average of all the human minds that came before it.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The final sentence about the statistical average rings false. But Orwell would, I suspect, have liked the image of the slowly boiling frog. \u201cHere is a type of comfort\u201d is also a phrase that Orwell might well have written.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"The
Trained on vast collections of text, chatbots can convincingly imitate the prose of the literary greats. Michael M. Santiago\/Getty Images<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

I am skeptical that anyone would classify Claude\u2019s efforts as indistinguishable from Orwell\u2019s prose. But when it comes to machine-produced \u201cliterature,\u201d perhaps it doesn\u2019t really matter whether it can fully approximate original art, as long as it\u2019s good enough to function as entertainment and distraction for the masses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jam, bootlaces and books<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

This was Orwell\u2019s own dispirited suggestion in \u201c1984<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With the help of “novel-writing machines,\u201d the employees of the Ministry of Truth \u2013 the government department responsible for controlling information and rewriting history \u2013 are able to mass-produce not only novels, but also \u201cnewspapers, films, textbooks, telescreen programmes [and] plays.\u201d They churn out \u201crubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime and astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes\u201d and \u201cfilms oozing with sex,\u201d along with cheap pornography intended for the \u201cproles,\u201d as the uneducated working classes of Big Brother\u2019s Oceania were known.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The technology disgusts Orwell\u2019s protagonist, Winston Smith, who pointedly decides to purchase a diary and pen to write down his own independent thoughts. But to Julia, Winston\u2019s nymphomaniac, anti-intellectual lover who works as a mechanic servicing the machines, \u201cBooks were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018Full-Length Novels in Seconds\u2019<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

According to estimates, thousands of books for sale on Amazon<\/a> have been written in whole or in part using AI.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In other words, today\u2019s AI is also being used to mass-produce literature like jam or bootlaces.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many of these works are not fully machine-written. Instead, they\u2019ve been, as the AI writing tool Sudowrite advertises<\/a>, \u201cpolished by AI.\u201d With its \u201cRewrite\u201d function, the company promises to give users an opportunity to \u201crefine your prose while staying true to your style, with multiple AI-suggested revisions to choose from.\u201d The service is akin to the \u201ctouching up\u201d provided by the Ministry of Truth\u2019s Rewrite Squad in \u201c1984.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Other books for sale on Amazon are, however, entirely machine-generated<\/a>. The AI writing tool Squibler<\/a> promises that if you give it an overarching prompt, it can produce \u201cFull-Length Novels in Seconds.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The potential of AI-generated \u201cliterature\u201d to turn a quick-and-easy profit ensures that readers will continue to encounter more of this content in the future, especially as AI\u2019s large language models become more refined. Already, studies have shown<\/a> that readers cannot easily distinguish AI-generated forgeries from original prose.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Last year, I had lunch with a screenwriter friend in Los Angeles. He told me that his colleagues are particularly nervous about the use of AI to produce sequels. Once you have an established cast of characters for a movie franchise like, say, \u201cFast & Furious,\u201d audiences will likely see the next installment whether it\u2019s written by man or machine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet my own brief experiments with Claude give me at least some hope for the future of literary art. A chatbot like Claude might be able to absorb and analyze \u201ca statistical average of all the human minds that came before it,\u201d but without the input of actual human experience and sensibility, it is hard to envisage them ever producing true art.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Whether AI can produce the next George Orwell novel or essay remains to be seen. That it can and will churn out an increasing volume of popular fiction and screenplays like \u201cFast & Furious 25\u201d seems less in doubt.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Laura Beers<\/a>, Professor of History, American University<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This article is republished from The Conversation<\/a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Laura Beers, American University At some point in the next several months, I am hoping to receive a modest check as a member of the class covered in the class-action settlement Bartz v. Anthropic. In 2025, the artificial intelligence company Anthropic, best known for creating the chatbot Claude, agreed to pay up to US$1.5 billion […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":56,"featured_media":42266,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[293,37,291,10,28,8],"tags":[17661,650,10656,10791,13298,17660,10513,3738,1409,149,885,891,886,860,1740,3506,17659,3504],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42265"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/56"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42265"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42265\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42267,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42265\/revisions\/42267"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/42266"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42265"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42265"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42265"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}