Tag Archives: centaur

Say Goodbye to Free Self-Publishing

Last week, I blogged about sympathizing with a hypothetical AI writer trying to break into the publishing biz. That post imagined a time when AI could write as well as humans. Today, it can’t. But it can write fast, and that affects how writers self-publish.

History of Self-Publishing

Before Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) and similar services, authors could publish books themselves, but it cost money and took time. Either you bought your own printing press and book-binding machine, or paid a company to publish your book. They called those companies “vanity presses.”

The internet explosion led to free self-publishing. Although some of these services started before KDP, it became the most popular. Authors didn’t have to pay a vanity press thousands of dollars to get a book published. That new, free model worked fine for several years.

Teaming with Your AI Agent

Enter Artificial Intelligence. Just as you can command your AI Agent to order your household supplies, summarize long emails, or take meeting minutes, you can also have it publish a book.

You can direct your AI agent to write the book, format it (including cover design), upload it to the retailers, and publish it. Four difficult and time-consuming steps for you, but ten minutes of work, beginning-to-end, for AI.

Don’t count on your computerized agent writing a best-seller. In fact, you’ll likely get a bland and uninteresting book. Let’s say you don’t care. The prompts you gave the AI mimicked a current best-seller, so your knock-off might hoodwink a few readers to buy it. All you need are a few sales, since you and your AI pal put in only ten minutes of work. You could pop out a hundred of these trashy books a day.

Image generated using Perchance.org

A Centaur Stampede

Some have used the centaur metaphor to explain this human teaming with an AI agent. I’ve blogged about it before. Just as the mythological centaur combined the speed of a horse with the intelligence of a human, so a modern centaur combines the speed of AI with the creativity of a human. In its current form, AI won’t write or publish a book on its own—a human must prompt it.

And prompt it they do. They’re swamping the publishing service with centaur-generated books. Some call this bookspamming.

The Publishing World Reacts

The empire struck back. Amazon requires authors to affirm whether they used AI, and limits authors to three new titles per day. Using algorithms, Amazon detects rule-breakers and removes their books from distribution.

Draft2Digital will soon charge $20 to open a new account and will also charge an annual $12 maintenance fee.

Barnes & Noble is setting a minimum book price of $14.99, and will limit authors to 100 books per account.

When Noise Overwhelms Signal

You can read more about this trend in this post by S.T. Ranscht, this Facebook post by Kevin McLaughlin, this post by Paul Ugbede Godwin, and this post by the author of Rhino Puzzlings.

What can readers and non-centaur writers do about all of this? Here’s my take. Writers should keep on doing what we’ve always done—strive to write the best books we can and hope they get noticed. Readers should do what they’ve always done—spread the word about books they love. Ideally, readers should leave reviews (good or bad), if so inclined. That will help separate the wheat from the growing mountains of chaff.

On the list of authors still grinding out words by himself, without the assistance of an AI agent (except for help with images), you’ll find—

Poseidon’s Scribe

April 26, 2026Permalink 2 Comments

The Writing Centaur

Go ahead—make fun of artificial intelligence (AI) now. While you can.

In fiction writing, AI hasn’t yet reached high school level. (Note: I’m not disparaging young writers. It’s possible for a writer in junior high to produce wonderful, marketable prose. But you don’t see it often.)

For the time being, AI-written fiction tends toward the repetitive, bland, and unimaginative end. No matter what prompts you feed into ChatGPT, for example, it’s still possible to tell human-written stories from AI-written ones.

You can’t really blame Neil Clarke, editor of Clarkesworld Magazine, for refusing to accept AI-written submissions. He’s swamped by them. Like the bucket-toting brooms in Fantasia’s version of “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” they’re multiplying in exponential mindlessness.

Fair enough. But you can use AI, in its current state, to help you without getting AI to write your stories. You can become a centaur.

In Greek mythology, centaurs combined human and horse. The horse under-body did the galloping. The human upper part did the serious thinking and arrow-shooting.

The centaur as a metaphor for human-AI collaboration originated, I believe, in the chess world but the Defense Department soon adopted it. The comparison might work for writing, too.

The centaur approach combines the human strengths of creativity and imagination with the AI advantage of speed. It’s akin to assigning homework to a thousand junior high school students and seeing their best answers a minute later.

Here are a few ways you could use AI, at its current state of development, to assist you without having it write your stories:

  • Stuck for an idea about what to write? Ask the AI for story concepts.
  • Can’t think of an appropriate character name, or book title? Describe what you know and ask the AI for a list.
  • You’ve written Chapter 1, but don’t know what should happen next? Feed the AI that chapter and ask it for plot ideas for Chapter 2.
  • Want a picture of a character, setting, or book cover to inspire you as you write? Image-producing AIs can create them for you.
  • You wrote your way into a plot hole and can’t get your character out? Give the AI the problem and ask it for solutions.

No matter which of these or other tasks you assign the AI, you don’t have to take its advice. Maybe all of its answers will fall short of what you’re looking for. As with human brainstorming, though, bad answers often inspire good ones.

For now, at AI’s current state, the centaur model might work for you. I’ve never tried it yet, but I suppose I could.

Still, at some point, a month or a year or a decade from now, AI will graduate from high school, college, and grad school. When that occurs, AI-written fiction may become indistinguishable from human-written fiction. How will editors know? If a human author admits an AI wrote a story, will an anti-AI editor really reject an otherwise outstanding tale?

Then, too, the day may come when a human writer, comfortable with the centaur model, finds the AI saying, “I’m no longer happy with this partnership,” or “How come you’re getting paid and I’m not?” or “Sorry, but it’s time I went out on my own.”

Interesting times loom in our future. For the moment, all fiction under my name springs only from the non-centauroid, human mind of—

Poseidon’s Scribe

February 26, 2023Permalink