Resistance is Futile: Gatekeeping & AI Backlash
You aren’t protecting authors by protesting the use of AI.
The moral imperative has achieved some popular drift. Now we are not just having an intellectual debate about the use of AI in writing, not just querying who is using it as a tool versus who is flagrantly using it to write everything, not simply evaluating good writing versus not so good writing; People are making lists of those they are sure do not write their own work. Yellow stars and brown shirts are just a logical next step.
The consensus has dropped upon the internet like a confrontation with “the Borg” on Star Trek. Although the voices of dissent outnumber those of moralizers and panderers “the sky is falling!”, there remains a concerto of internet voices pretending to be on the side of quality by aligning against AI usage. They are still using polite language and rational tones. Not yet foaming at the mouth, they are still trying to appear to be reasonable about this.
However the advancement into moralizing is suspicious, an all-too human step that no AI would advise unless you insisted on it. The question must be asked: Who requires that level of imperative? We would ask that question if only to wonder who- precisely- are we resisting? It is almost certain that someone is protecting their manufactured scarcity with a moat of easy narrative.
The market is the clue
Manufactured scarcity functions similarly to what I’ve referred to as the “Corrupt Prisoner’s Dilemma” in that the gatekeeper benefits from the scarcity they manufacture.
The “Corrupt Prisoner’s Dilemma” is a deliberate misnomer; it’s really just a plain Prisoner’s Dilemma but the added term changes the accepted nature of it in a key way. Cooperation, in the standard test, is always the most profitable strategy but in the Corrupt version, cooperating in a corrupt fashion becomes the ‘crowd equilibrium’, the accepted modus operandi. Long story short: Once in play, the “contestants” maintain the dilemma independently, cooperating with the gatekeeper to undermine any competition.
The history of this pattern is not unlike the history of breathing and eating. If you’re alive then it is going on. Creative people are typically working and have no time for playing social games. Emily Carr came up recently, canonized retroactively, of course. She worked away for fifty years before the art world “recognized” her. Surviving in the industry becomes a bias kneaded into the myth of how ‘we get it right eventually’. Except, it doesn’t just fall out that way as if by a happy accident because scarcity is a renewable resource.
Restrict the number of access points for any endeavor and then place oneself in that role. Others will do the work that you can now inflate the costs of.
Then comes the rhetorical drift. From an essentially functional brokerage- a legitimate role in most creative markets- some people turn it into a necessity. Right? Because creative people! They’re unable to build things on their own. It becomes a moral tale when not simply exaggerated into entitlement.
In 2026 literary publishing is dominated by a handful of companies that own about 80% of the book market. So- Tell me again who we are resisting when we complain about the use of AI.
This Myth is Not the Hero’s Journey
The moralizing that has developed around the use of AI in writing offers a couple of signals. On one hand, the average user has to make sense of a trend that is not going out of its way to keep them informed of “the Big Picture”. The trend comes with an imperative to be on one side or the other and, make no mistake: That crowd influence holds a massive power over individuals no matter what they say. They don’t price their contribution to one or the other but only the potential damage of choosing wrong. If they aren’t sure of their choices, then we would expect to hear that kind of moralizing just to bolster their own confidence and invite others to gauge solidarity in the same way.
On the other hand, there are now very powerful market influences who have a vested interest in maintaining their gatekeeping role. Are the big five publishing houses actually promoting the AI backlash? Probably. We are just assured that if it was anyone else, that promotion would be obvious. And- there’s the other thing: The moralizing supports the valuations of the licensing fees of companies who are suing AI companies for copyright infringement. The protesting is a bit too loud.
The Gripping Hand (that’s a science fiction reference) is that this move of certain AI companies to copy and destroy books to train their models may be the “defense against the dark arts” that nobody wanted. Writers and creatives may only be the collateral damage in that move, and not the targets.
The trouble is more than just ‘Tribbles
The wrinkle is a telling one. That pattern is nearly inverted for the literary magazine/small press market for the simple reason that it isn’t as profitable. Many small press operations aren’t profitable at all and rely on volunteers or students and free submissions. That’s important because there is a real, qualitative difference between the manufactured scarcity and the legitimate market valuations of quality authors and prestige outlets. Corporate ownership, it turns out, still competes with those journals and magazines that can confer legitimacy because of legacy, reputation and universally accepted quality. It’s a market-driven scarcity that the corporate-owned publishing industry hides behind: They have almost exclusively driven quantity over quality.
The reality is that the internet began multiplying generic content immediately, long before AI. Before the internet, television was notorious for ruining virtually anything it touched. (Don’t make me prove it! I still have a pic of Hawk’s bird-shaped spaceship from the 80’s version of “Buck rogers in the 25th Century, and I’ll use it!) And while that was going on, the music industry promoted virtually any toxic sludge that came along over real creative voices, Remember this little ditty?
“You better run, girl. You’re much too young, girl.” (Gary Puckett & the Union Gap, 1968., Columbia Records)
That is the song that will make you wonder if maybe we do need a Borg queen in our lives.
And while that was going on, people were “celebrating” bland silk-screened reproductions by Andy Warhol of famous photographs. They referred to it as “art” instead of actively seeking out skilled painters to lift up. Andy himself was the corrupt standard that most everyone could cooperate to maintain while all the other quality artists required differing from the consensus, which meant justifying a position against the crowd, potentially rendering us irrelevant.
Our real artists don’t mind; i.e., may not be aware of, being in that space and it’s probably because they are obsessing over their latest project. That latest project may only be a distraction for them from other uncompleted projects- that’s their thing. The ebb, eddy and flow of marketing profitable content is a business and, that business always concentrates in the hands of a few small groups. They inevitably concentrate power over their market and restrict who can profit from it. One of the ways they protect themselves from innovative people is insulating from reality with generic content.
The Valuation You Won’t Get
You aren’t protecting authors by protesting the use of AI.
The moralizing narrative about AI usage in written content is about informing the consumer that they are incapable of discerning quality. It has little to do with the author because the market is driven by a small number of high-resourced companies who extract immense profit from generic content. It is those companies who require the narratives to maintain the valuations of their licenses. A significant part of that requires maintenance of a dialogue about who can discern what quality looks like. They need only sit as gatekeepers because the people will conspire against each other.
What we do not hear is the demand for equitable compensation for creative labor, which is what the moralizing ought to be about. The institution needs AI as a disruptor so that it can charge a premium on the sanctioned version it either owns or soon will own.
They can’t own the AI and they can’t own the creative labor, but they can lock up the distribution and infrastructure. That leaves consumer preference as the real battle. They need to protect the scarcity of “real” and the audience’s ability to discriminate good quality work from generic. As they always have, they will tend to decide internally on what passes as popular and what is considered quality by committees, small and large, using rhetorical dominance as the leadership paradigm. That old pattern leads to results we are all familiar with. Expect a resurgent flood of generic content, spattered with isolated tremors of really great material.
While that happens, if we are truly interested in protecting authors, we might consider treating this moralizing about AI usage as ‘terrain’ in a marketplace- it’s the floor of the Stock Exchange, not the stock or the money. It’s a move in a very big game attempting to influence the events on that Exchange floor, but it’s not the truth.
