Week 18 – in which I realise that we are all only human
The keen eyed among you may spot that this is the second “Week 18”. This is not a typo. The especially sharp may also have noticed that my previous post on the “Reviewer’s Pledge” has disappeared from our Substack. The reason for all of this is slightly humbling.
The Reviewer’s Pledge was a response to my own frustrating experiences with getting decent quality reviews. As I said in the now deleted post, I’ve written about this before, so I won’t go over it again, but basically it concerns lack of reviewer response (you just never hear back to your approach), lack of accountability (a book is taken on for review, but you never hear anything ever again), and poor quality and unprofessional reviews. We can add to these gripes the increasing use of AI and the fact that many professional services (NetGalley, Kirkus, Reedsy Discovery) charge for reviews. So I thought I’d do something about it.
But it turns out that “doing something about it” was not as straightforward as I’d thought. First of all, there is the problematic nature of such a “pledge”. Reviewers give their time and effort for free (the provision of a complimentary copy of a book is not – let us be clear – “payment”), and carping about the quality of a free service is somewhat problematic in terms of optics, as political spin doctors might put it. Reviewing is already a pretty thankless task, and that doesn’t include the hassle reviewers receive from disgruntled authors and publishers. But there’s also the legal issue – which just hadn’t occurred to me. As some reviewers who contacted me made clear, the whole pledge thing comes across as attempting to “police” reviews. Both the US (the FTC) and UK (the CMA) have pretty strict guidelines on what you can and can’t ask from a reviewer, and the pledge (even though it was optional and voluntary) was perhaps too prescriptive in terms of the core principles I was asking reviewers to sign up to.
So, I decided to recast the idea in a more positive way. I realised that what most annoyed me about my experience of getting reviews could be boiled down to one thing: dehumanisation. When someone ignores you, ghosts you, treats your book as if it’s a football or a punching bag – this is painful for any author, but it’s also a symptom of a more widespread trend in society. We worry about AI taking our jobs and replacing human activities, but the dehumanising effects of modern technology have been ramping up for decades, perhaps even centuries. Look at the way that social media encourages us to treat one another as cartoonish video-game characters, fit for the online sports of trolling, owning, doxxing and burning. But the positive metrics are similarly debased: instead of meaning and connection, we have “friends”, followers, star ratings and likes. People are not people, they are data points, potential voters or customers. So, yes, AI is a worry and horror show, but it’s simply the endpoint of a process that has been eating away at human culture for a good long while.
Anyway, we’ll save the “Decline and Fall of Western Civilisation” speech for another time. The upshot is that I realised that I could frame my concerns in a broader, more positive and less antagonistic way. And when you can do that, you probably should.
Anyone who broadly agrees with everything I’ve said above can go to this page and download this graphic:
You can then display it wherever you like – your website, social media, or blog – to state your opposition not just to AI, but to the trend that treats people as things, as ends to some tech CEO’s nefarious means, and not ends in themselves. If you then also link back to the Supporting Human Made page, you will help spread the message and allow others to take part. I’ll add more graphics eventually to suit different uses – let me know what you need.
If you’re a publishing creative of any sort – an editor, proofreader, typesetter, illustrator or designer – then remember that WoodPig Press is always looking for freelancers who share our values, so drop us a line.
The page also has a handy searchable table of book reviewers who oppose AI for creative purposes. If that’s you, then you can request a listing using this form. There is no pledge, and we won’t police or verify those who submit (other than a brief, basic quality check), so there is no guarantee of quality or professionalism. But it’s a start.
Anyway, apologies for the review pledge hiccup. I am, after all, only human.