The Writer's Life: The Future of AI and the Creative World - Get Ready for a Rocky Ride

 

At the moment, all of my books are available as an ebook and can be downloaded from Amazon. At some point in the future, I would like to make them available elsewhere, and also as a paperback. Ebooks are said to be popular, but I have found it difficult to gain traction on Amazon. 

Amazon does offer the plus of being the biggest bookseller in the world. The minus is that your book is on the same platform as millions of others, easily lost, and never found. And despite the contemporary popularity, and curse of doom-scrolling, no one is going to scroll down hundreds, or even thousands, of pages to find your book.

I have concluded that on Amazon, most authors are invisible.

Increasingly, that is because of AI.

Reports suggest that most books being published today are AI. And not just on Amazon. Even worse, I suspect that most of them fall into the ‘AI slop’ category. It is also widely believed that most of these books come from writers who self-publish, with the hope of cashing in.

No one should be surprised about this.

The Great Creator Squeeze: Why Platforms Are Paying Less and the War Against AI Slop

 

For many years, the idea of earning a living online was simple: create content, grow an audience, and be blessed by the algorithm. Making money online was possible, and for a while it looked too easy. In reality, it was still hard work, but getting there could happen if you put in the time and effort.

Now, everything seems to be changing, and fast. Across platforms, creators are facing stricter monetisation rules. This can be seen in falling payouts, and an increased risk of demonetisation.

I noticed it firsthand when Medium slashed writer earnings from the beginning of 2025, and they haven’t recovered. They had problems from late 2024, and the new year began with lower earnings and a purge of writers who were not all that they seemed. AI writing might have had something to do with it.

Meanwhile, creators at Facebook have recently reported and complained about much-reduced payouts.

But the big change seems to be what is happening at YouTube.

So, what’s going on?

Most days in my YouTube recommendations, I will see videos from creators who have been demonetised or banned. Others report lower views and payments. Some say that payments have fallen, although view count is the same.

YouTube has tightened its policies around AI and the use of “reused” content. They are cracking down on “inauthentic” content. In recent months, the platform has stepped up action against AI-generated content that has little input from the creator.

Videos that are:

• Inauthentic
• Repetitive or produced from templates.
• Mass-produced.
• Reusing content without making significant changes.
• Or 100% AI.

All are being targeted and removed when found.

Content that falls into these categories is increasingly being demonetised, with channels being removed from the Partner Program entirely.

But is it just about the use of AI?

Some who have been banned claim that they are not using AI at all to create their videos. But even on appeal, they remain banned. And many very popular AI-produced video channels with millions of views have been demonetised and banned.

Is it a ban on AI?

The Writer's Life: Life After Medium and Writing Short Books

It has been around six months since I left Medium (you can find out why in this six part series — The Truth About Medium).

I no longer post on Medium as much as I once did. Most of the time, I will import a post from this blog, to keep things going, and see if anyone reads it.

That was one of the difficulties at Medium: finding the audience and getting reads. It is a site that does all the SEO stuff for you. If it did, I’m not sure that it helped in any way. It sounds like a good idea, just post and trust the algorithm to find readers for you, but I can’t say it worked well for me.

I tend to do my own SEO and keywords on this blog, with a little help from ChatGPT. AI is useful in that regard. In fact, I would say that I get a better response doing this myself on my own blog than I did relying on Medium's algorithm.

The Writer's Life: Becoming AI — What's a Writer To Do?

I never used to check my writing with an AI detector before joining Medium. And even when I first published on the platform, I didn’t check.

But then I read a few stories from writers who indicated their writing, or some of it, had been flagged as AI by an AI detector checker. I thought that I had better check my stories just to see.

For the most part, they pass with a big zero.

But occasionally, I receive a return that tells me that anywhere from 3% to 10% is most likely AI. My usual reaction is, “Really?” Often, it is only one line, one sentence, or at most a paragraph. Occasionally, it may consist of just a few words.

I ask myself why would the detector think that an occasional line in a story of several hundred words, or even a few thousand, is most likely AI-written? What is it about the words that makes the detector algorithm think that it has been written by AI? And typically it will say, 100% certain.

For example, the line below.

Of the two, I prefer the astronomical summer because it lasts longer!

It was part of a story I wrote about the two end dates of summer in the UK, meteorological and astronomical. I wrote it for the reason given; the end date of the astronomical summer is later than the other date.

It was a simple enough sentence. Anyone could have written it. But the detector thought that AI wrote that line. It didn’t make sense to me. Was it because I had used a fancy word like ‘astronomical’? Or maybe it was the exclamation mark at the end? Perhaps AI did not think that a human would write that way, to emphasise being happy?