The Uncanny Valley and why AI content make us feel gross

There's a reason that AI slop is great for authors

The Uncanny Valley is the psychological phenomenon where something sounds or looks almost human but not quite, and instead of finding it charming, we find it eerie / threatening / off. The closer it gets to human without crossing the line, the more it elicits this response.

This is what it’s like to swim in lands of AI-generated writing e.g. LinkedIn.

Working in tech for a large AI company, LinkedIn is a big part of my job (where my sub-job is telling people to stop outsourcing their brain to AI for LinkedIn posts). It has become almost unreadable, because people who aren’t writers don’t seem to notice that everyone can tell when they asked ChatGPT “write me a linkedin post about blah blah AI trend”. Even if they remove the em-dashes and the “it’s not X it’s Y” sentences, it’s just off.

The State of Brand shared a brilliant essay on what they call The Great Flattening. The bottom line is that companies all use the same model, trained on the statistical average of everything ever written, which produces the statistical average right back at them. So everything that comes out of an AI model sounds exactly that - flat, like the average of everyone else’s voice.

Many authors blanche at the mention of AI. We’ve spent years building this muscle and we have been made to think that we are watching it dissolve and that even the mere mention of AI is unethical.

I think we need to learn how to have this conversation. The Uncanny Valley is very real. When readers want to curl up with a book, they want to enjoy it (not feel threatened or weirded out by it).

At work I need to scold people for writing on LinkedIn using AI. Luckily, Substack is filled with authors who don’t need to be told.

So the question doesn’t need to erupt and cause panic.

There are ways authors can use AI, not for writing:

Research. AI is a brilliant starting point and good at summarizing what’s known. But it hallucinates without proper prompting or a critical human eye so use it to cover ground quickly and then go cover some of it yourself.

Brainstorming. Let’s say you have a plot hole to fill, work with AI to throw ten resolutions at you. You’ll probably hate nine (or ten) of them. One of them might give you an idea and then go from there.

Marketing. Use it for visual and audio work (read my post on this). Work with AI to scour for book clubs that have picked books like yours, finding relevant communities etc. My email voice is second nature thanks to my tech job, but for some authors email outreach is less a comfort zone and AI can be helpful to at least get started.

Bottom line, AI is a problem for everyone who now thinks they can write.

For us, it’s the opportunity of a lifetime.

Write the words of the book yourself and use AI for everything else.

This is a new section with AI x book marketing tidbits from my own experience. Subscribe to follow the conversation as I try to demystify the subject on everyone's mind.