Who’s Afraid of the AI-Enabled Author? On “Real” Creativity & Cheating in Our Age of AI Slop

**Andrew Keen** (0:00)
Hello, my name is Andrew Keen. Welcome to Keen On America, the daily interview show about the United States.
Hello, everybody. Happy August. We finally arrived in the summer of 2026 Couple of weeks ago, we did a That Was The Week text summary show with my friend, Keith Teare. The publisher of That Was The Week entitled Who Owns Intelligence. We talked about the smart wealth of nations, and Keith, I don't know if it was an acknowledgement or a confession or a boast, he told me that he is in the process of writing an AI helped book. I'm not sure entirely AI authored, but certainly involved with AI, appropriately entitled Who Owns Intelligence. So who writes books in our age of AI, and should authors use AI? That's a subject that we are talking about once again this week. Lots of stories this week. There's a red hot book at the center of an AI mystery that The Wall Street Journal writes about, that's taking over the publishing industry. I assume it's not Keith's. Snapchat has joined other popular platforms in its fight against AI slop. It's joined YouTube, LinkedIn and Substack to combat what it calls fake writing, images and video. Even the Financial Times is getting into the business. They had an interesting piece this week about the new premium product being books written by people as in contrast, I'm guessing, books written by AI. Keith has a different take on it though. This week in his That Was The Week editorial.
In an editorial entitled AI Detected, he says, it's not cheating. You should use it at will. Keith, in terms of using it at will, what does that make of your Who Owns Intelligence book? Who's going to buy a book in publishing if it's been written by AI?

**Keith Teare** (2:37)
Actually, I think the opposite might be true. I think it might sell more because it's of the times and it's going to be intriguing to people.
But before I provoke you with that thought, let's just stand back a little bit. Nothing is written by AI. There is absolutely nothing in the world written by AI because AI doesn't have any will at all. It won't even write a single word unless you ask it to. And so let's just start there. Intelligence is the word we use for the collective wisdom of the human race and dumb things as well, not just wisdom. It's our collective evolved understanding of ourselves, the world, and so on. So it's only human.
And when a human uses AI to do anything, they are leveraging what they know in order to produce some kind of an output. And AI is no different than any other tool they might use. If you go way back, and I say this in the editorial, in platonic times, the very idea of writing something down was considered bad, because in those days, they believed that an idea could only live in a person's brain and come out of a person's mouth. And the minute you wrote it down, it deteriorated in value.

**Andrew Keen** (4:08)
Yeah, I mean, I take your point, and you're right in a way, although of course not everyone agreed on that. I mean, Socrates believed that, but others didn't. So there was a debate back then, as there is today, about how much tech we should and shouldn't use when it comes to creativity.

**Keith Teare** (4:24)
Yeah. But the short story is, I think it's already strange for an intelligent person to produce any creative work, not just books, and not engage with AI as part of what they do. I mean, why wouldn't you? I'm not saying there's anything wrong with not using it. If you don't want to use it, great.
I sometimes buy things on Etsy that are craft made by human hands, but most of the stuff I buy isn't. It's made in factories.
There's no value judgment between the two. One isn't better than the other. Writing with AI isn't worse than not writing with AI. It's just a tool.

**Andrew Keen** (5:09)
We've had this conversation before. You asked me for some advice about finding an agent for your Who Owns Intelligence book.

**Keith Teare** (5:17)
Finding a phrase, finding an agent.

**Andrew Keen** (5:19)
Right. Finding, exactly.
Finding a human agent as opposed to an AI. I'm not sure how serious you were about that. I'm not even sure how serious you are about this book. You have a day job which takes up most of your time, and then you have your newsletter and this show. But what is a publisher supposed to do if they believe rightly or wrongly that AI mostly wrote this book? Most literary agents these days, I think, would say, well, we don't want to go anywhere near it. Are they wrong?