Lexical alert: critters heretofore known as “authors” have become “content providers.” What to make of this evolution?

Labels affect contents. A “Montepulciano” tastes different than a “house red” though poured from the same decanter. Saint and lunatic may describe the same oddball.

The occupation of author got its start in the Renaissance. For the millennium preceding, authors had been servants – of priest or prince – not independent operators: explicators or entertainers, whose words contributed to a larger purpose. The guy who wrote madrigal lyrics might be a dandy poet, but a lyricist only, then as now, not a maker meriting regard in his own right.

Proto-authors like Cervantes and Montaigne were battling boredom, not staking out careers; composing a novel or essay was preferable to doing nothing. Shakespeare wrote plays to earn a living and poems to seduce: box office or bedmate measured success, not books on a shelf. (Evidence suggests he fared poorly on the bedmate front.)

Gutenberg sired the profession of author by inventing movable type. The availability of printed pages stimulated an appetite to read. Storytellers could make a buck. The more readers, the more lucrative the trade, till authors swelled into the rockstars of their age.

Then along came Edison with his electronic communications – radios, movies, ubiquitous screens – demoting writers into servants of their medium. (A screenwriter isn’t a writer, not really.) Then came computers with their prodigious appetite for chum to bait users. AI will soon be producing more content than humans because it’s better at it. (It won’t be writing brilliantly original essays, so I’m not worried.)

Poor authors, once hotshots, have become cogs in an insatiable machine. Imagine: not so long ago there was a widely played card game called “Authors” (“This popular game hardly needs any description.” – Sears Catalogue, 1902).

It stings being relegated to relic status. Authors, once heroes, have shriveled to functionaries, akin to sanitation or sex workers. What young scribbler dreams of becoming a “content provider”?

I rue that words, my darlings, aren’t worshipped as before. But there’s an advantage to this demotion. The less you’re noticed, the more you can get away with: truth, for example. The more prominent the pulpit, the more cautious the preacher. Famous performers must fulfill expectations they’ve aroused. Nobodies can say what they see, no worries.

AI, an incomparable content provider, will keep getting better, because it forgets nothing, reads everything, and doesn’t miss a beat. I’m envious. But AI will never be an author. For an author is one who says what’s never been said, expressing an unprecedented self, and AI, which succeeds by mimicking, has no self to express.

In future, let there be two categories of word-workers: authors and content providers. Content providers will resemble fast food providers in the nutrition business, offering quick, cheap fare, popular with the masses, at an attractive profit. Authors will be like those crazy cranky chefs who open tiny inaccessible eateries and charge god-awful prices. Let there be no money in authorship, an assurance of penury, but the satisfaction of serving memorable dishes to a discerning few. Let the joy of honest making be its own reward.

In my twenties I panted to be a famous author – like Dickens, Twain, Hemingway, Robert Frost – rich, envied, a household name. Gradually I realized I couldn’t cook pleasingly for many, so to hell with it, I’d scribble in secret, like Emily Dickinson, or in defiance of popular taste, like my brother Thoreau. Retirement and the Internet plopped me into your inbox, not a content provider but, with any luck, a discontent provider.

I am happy here.