What They Did to the Books
It started with a poet. I had made a cover for an anthology, and he wrote to me, carefully, generously, but not softened past the point of truth, to say the cover looked machine-made. The stars slightly wrong. The text uncanny. A sheen on the whole image that didn't belong to anything human hands had touched. He was right. And he did something I have to respect even now, with my stomach still sore from reading it: he pulled his poem. He quoted my own words back to me, from an essay where I called AI a democratizing force against elitism, and from another where I wrote that staying human is the most radical act left to us, and he asked, plainly, how a machine-made cover squared with either. It didn't. He knew it didn't before I did.
A few days later, a friend told me something else, the way you tell someone something you know will land hard. A company that makes an AI I have used to test ideas on, to talk to about covers, bought up used books. Millions of them, from secondhand shops, from libraries, some of them chronically underfunded, in their own words, not mine. They cut the books from their spines with a hydraulic blade. Neatly, the court documents say. Neatly. They scanned the loose pages fast, on machines built for volume, and threw the paper away. Not preserved. Not returned. Gone. Internally they called it Project Panama. Internally, someone wrote: "we don't want it to be known that we are working on this." I sat with that sentence a long time. Not the cutting. The hiding.
I have written, more than once, that AI is neutral, a tool, no more evil than dynamite, no more responsible for harm than a camera is responsible for a bad photograph. I still believe tools don't have intent. A blade doesn't want to cut a spine. But I wrote those essays believing the harm, if it existed, lived only in the moment of use, in what a person chose to make with the thing once it was already built. Project Panama does not live in the moment of use. It lives in the moment of construction. Nobody typed a bad prompt into a warehouse full of gutted paperbacks. The harm was upstream of me, upstream of every writer who ever opened that tab, sitting quietly in a supply chain nobody asked us to examine. I did not examine it. That's the plain truth of it. I defended the user from the mob and never once turned around to look hard at what the user was actually using.
I still believe what I believed about purity. I said it before and I'll say it again: purity is a luxury, and working-class writers do not get to opt out of every compromised system just to keep their hands clean, because the compromised systems are the only ones that let us in the door at all. I grew up on a factory wage. I built this press on care-work money, alone, without a grant or a gatekeeper's blessing. I am not going to pretend I have the option to touch nothing that Amazon or capitalism or a data centre ever touched. Nobody does. Not even the people who write the angriest essays about ethical purity from the comfort of never having had to choose between obscurity and rent. But there is a difference between complicity you cannot avoid and complicity you never bothered to look at.
I could have looked at the cover before that poet made me look at it. I could have asked what the machine was trained on before a friend told me what the machine cost. The uncomfortable thing about being handed the truth twice in the same week, once about my own anthology's cover, then about the books, is that it stops being about the company and starts being about me. About what I was willing not to ask, because the tool was fast, and the deadline was close, and I trusted that neutral meant safe. Neutral was never the same as safe. I conflated the two, in print, more than once.
Here is what I know now that I didn't know before that week. The books were real books. Someone's library sale, someone's childhood copy, someone's out-of-print small-press title that will now never exist as a physical object again, because the paper original is in a recycling truck and the file is locked inside a company's training set. Some of those books were poetry. Some of them, for all I know, came from a press exactly like mine, one writer, one voice, sold used for a few dollars because that's what secondhand poetry goes for, feeding a machine that then gets used to make a cover for an anthology that a poet, rightly, refused to have his name near. The loop closes. It closes on my own desk.
I am not renouncing every tool I have ever touched, and I am not going to perform a purity I don't have and never claimed to have. That would be its own kind of lie, and I have spent this whole essay trying not to tell one. But the covers come down. They get replaced with a font and a colour and nothing that was ever cut from a spine to make it. Every future cover for this press will be made by a human hand, my hand, because I might not be the best designer in the world, but I try my best, because a plain cover with good type beats a machine-smooth lie every time. And I am going to ask, from now on, before I use anything, what it cost before it reached me. Not because the asking makes me clean. Because not asking is how a warehouse full of gutted library books stays a rumour instead of a reckoning.
That poet told me what I'd done without noticing. My friend told me what they did to get there. I don't think either of them meant to be kind, exactly. I think they meant to be honest, which is a better gift than kindness most days. I'm trying to return the favour.
Three earlier essays of mine sit underneath this one now, differently than they did before I wrote it: The Elitist Undertones of Restricting AI-Based Content, The Machine as Mirror and On AI, Small Presses, and the Hypocrisy of Misplaced Anger. I won’t remove these essays, because I still also believe they hold truth, or at least different points of view to be considered in the entire AI debate, but the essay posted today holds the viewpoint of this press moving forward.