You have to think there's an AI-generated Sherlock Holmes book on Amazon, even now.
I don't know how many of us shop for random Sherlock Holmes books by names we don't know, so perhaps nobody has stumbled on it yet, but I have to think that somewhere out there one of those non-writers with big ideas and big desires has used the digital beastie to put together something that looks vaguely like the writings of Watson and put it on the web to sell.
We know folks have dabbled with the demon for toasts and art "just to see what it will do." We're also being sold on how it can improve your writing, not write things for you. But there's the slippery slope. At what point does the composition become the work of the AI and not your own, if you're using it to rework your words into something more palatable?
And here's the other thing we have yet to learn: Will a writer who leans on AI early on get better at writing? Will the old "thousand hours" proposed by goofy Malcom Gladwell result in expertise? Or will that writer be just as bad -- or worse -- at writing without the AI's help? Will they ever develop their own style?
Or will they simply annoy us by flooding the market with AI work that's pretty much like the AI work of other folks who decide to press the big AI "Easy" button?
The Sherlockian communities can be smaller, where people know each other and their work, so we might be buffered against the beastie somewhat. But with generational change, and the prevalence of the thing coming along, Sherlockiana may not be proof against it. It's gonna be a sneaky bastard.
In decades past, hardcore Sherlockians really crapped on pastiches in their love of the original Canon. As markets opened up, and opportunities for us to have our own pastiches published, whether online or in a collection, all except the worst of us have developed at least a surface tolerance for the pastiche. What will AI bring to that mix? Hard to say.
But it's coming, if it's not here already. So we shall see.
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