Book Review: Fake Creativity by Blake Loch

Thanks to BookSirens for providing me with a review copy. This is an intriguing self-published novel with a backstory almost as interesting as the plot.

The story is a descent into paranoia as an author is convinced that an AI is plagiarising his work. As the madness takes over, he's forced to confront whether his creative processes are genuine or not.

It raises some excellent questions about whether AI can replicate art. It also posits some solutions for ensuring genuine human content. Without going in to spoilers, I think some of the methods the protagonist comes up with might be the only way to "prove" that a human has created a work.

The pace is excellent - with some well-placed plot twists. As with any self-published novel, it could do with a little tightening up. Some of the characters have oblique motivations which need a bit more exposition.

A note on AI use. There's a novel-within-a-novel which is genuinely generated by an AI (as the author freely acknowledges). I think this is an acceptable use of generative AI - the prose it produces is utterly risible and cliché ridden. It works as a nice contrast to the human generated text.

I suspect more and more authors will turn to AI fears just as they turned to pandemic allegories a few years ago. This is a decent attempt to capture a moment in time when authors stared into the abyss and found only themselves staring back.