Novels have survived plenty of revolutions before - but could this one be different?

The novel has survived the industrial revolution, radio, television, and the internet.

Now it's facing artificial intelligence - and novelists are worried. Half (51%) fear that they will be replaced by AI entirely, according to a new survey, even though for the most part they don't use the technology themselves.

More immediately, 85% say they think their future income will be negatively impacted by AI, and 39% claim their finances have already taken a hit. Tracy Chevalier, the bestselling author of Girl With A Pearl Earring and The Glassmaker, shares that concern.

"I worry that a book industry driven mainly by profit will be tempted to use AI more and more to generate books," she said in response to the survey. "If it is cheaper to produce novels using AI (no advance or royalties to pay to authors, quicker production, retainment of copyright), publishers will almost inevitably choose to publish them.

"And if they are priced cheaper than 'human made' books, readers are likely to buy them, the way we buy machine-made jumpers rather than the more expensive hand-knitted ones." Why authors are so worried The University of Cambridge's Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy asked 258 published novelists and 74 industry insiders how AI is viewed and used in the world of British fiction. Alongside existential fears about the wholesale replacement of the novel, many authors reported a loss of income from AI, which they attributed to "competition from AI-generated books and the loss of jobs which provide supplementary streams of income, such as copywriting".

Some respondents reported finding "rip-off AI-generated imitations" of their own books, as well books "written under their name which they haven't produced". Last year, the Authors Guild warned that "the growing access to AI is driving a new surge of low-quality sham 'books' on Amazon.