David Marchese: You were thinking about the financial value of various literary rights at times when other agents weren’t. It seems that rights related to artificial intelligence—
Andrew Wylie: [literary agent] Oh, God, let’s not talk about artificial intelligence. I am so sick of hearing about it, and I don’t think anything that we represent is in danger of being replicated on the back of or through the mechanisms of artificial intelligence.
D Marchese: You don’t think that a sufficiently advanced AI which is not that far away, trained on, say, Elmore Leonard’s work couldn’t create a salable facsimile of his novels?
A Wylie: No way. But take the best-seller list. That’s a little susceptible to artificial intelligence because the books on it are written without any particular gift in the nature of their expression. Stephen King is susceptible to artificial intelligence. Danielle Steel is even more susceptible to artificial intelligence. The worse the writing, the more susceptible it is to artificial intelligence.

I was talking to Salman Rushdie in Frankfurt, and he told me that someone had instructed ChatGPT to write a page of Rushdie. He said it was hilariously inept.

I’ve had a couple of anxious emails from authors saying should I be concerned about artificial intelligence. It’s out there, and no one knows quite how to deal with it, but it’s not relevant to the people that we represent. It is relevant to other people who tend to be very popular.

D M: Out of sheer vanity, I also asked ChatGPT to generate an interview in the “style” of David Marchese. I thought the results were boring and hacky, which then spiraled out into my thinking that maybe the AI was accurate and my work is boring and hacky. Who knows? [commentary]