The A.I. Romance Factory

The internet has already transformed the book work almost beyond recognition. Self-publishing and fan-fiction sites like Wattpad turned hobbyists into multimillionaires. The promise of big data spawned algorithm-driven publishers. Now, AI promises yet another turn of the screw. For Businessweek, Vauhini Vara (whose book about AI and selfhood drops this week) looks at Inkitt, a startup that’s wielding the technology with abandon—and raising some troubling questions in the process.

If we start by acknowledging that the medium is the message—that the form in which literature is delivered shapes the literature itself—what, in the age of the algorithmically powered smartphone feed, is a publisher for? If a business can not only discern a reader’s real-time reactions to a text but also use AI to quickly adapt it in response to those reactions, then that business might well conclude that literature should be a dynamic technological product, infinitely adaptable to a consumer’s desires. And in that view, the traditional book, a static human-authored document, starts to look like a relic.