Author Update | Week Ending March 27, 2026
The publishing world is asking an uncomfortable question this week: what happens when the people trusted to protect your words start using AI to change them?
We’ve got a packed edition. Mia Ballard is suing Hachette Book Group after the publisher canceled her horror novel Shy Girl. She alleges her editor brought AI into the process without her knowledge or consent. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court handed down a unanimous 9-0 ruling that significantly narrows authors’ options for fighting book piracy, and two new studies are raising alarms about AI writing tools subtly reshaping authorial voice, even when all you asked for was a grammar check.
Rounding out this week’s coverage: OpenAI’s quiet shutdown of Sora and what it signals about the state of generative video, plus a breakdown of Google’s TurboQuant breakthrough and what it could mean for the road ahead in AI development.
Author Sues Hachette for $1 Million Over Cancellation of Shy Girl
This is a follow-up to last week’s story, where we covered Mia Ballard being publicly accused of AI use by her publisher, who then canceled her contract. If her publisher is wrong, this is a textbook libel case. To qualify as libel, there must be actual financial damages, and those damages are self-evident: she lost her contract.
One of our Author Update listeners, Angela Hunt, experimented with one of her books she published in the 1990s. She ran it through an AI detection ,
These AI detection tools are not authoritative. They are guessing with false confidence. It’s not 39%. It’s not 41%. It’s exactly 40%. That precision is the quintessential example of AI slop. The tool is far more confident than the evidence warrants.
Mia Ballard is now suing Hachette for $1 million. We don’t typically cover lawsuits this early in the process, but we flagged this one last week because she likely had standing for her suit. Whether she wins or loses, the case could reshape industry norms. Hachette will almost certainly spend more defending this lawsuit than they would have lost by staying quiet and ignoring a Reddit thread.
This was not a broad reader revolt, as some in the industry have said. This was an outcry on a subreddit run mostly by bots. It’s a tornado in a teacup. Reddit is not a reliable measure of public opinion, and a significant portion of the outrage wasn’t even from real accounts. Ballard’s books were selling. Readers liked them. Reviews were solid, at least by horror genre standards.
Ballard’s reputation has been damaged. She may win the million dollars or more. This is one of the few ongoing legal stories we’ll continue to update as it develops.
Sources:
Hachette Pulls Horror Novel over AI Allegations
Shy Girl, Big Questions: What The Hachette-Ballard Affair Tells Us
Horror Novel ‘Shy Girl’ Canceled Over Suspected A.I. Use
Hachette Cancels ‘Shy Girl’ For Being AI Generated
Stephen Colbert-headed LOTR Sequel Provokes Backlash
Jonathan: The sequel, Shadow of the Past, is set 14 years after Frodo leaves Middle-earth. Stephen Colbert, a self-proclaimed Tolkien fanatic, is heading the writing. Philip Voyance, who worked on the Peter Jackson trilogy, is also attached, along with Jackson and Fran Walsh, who will produce.
The film will reportedly focus on Chapter 8 of The Fellowship of the Ring, the sequence in which the hobbits pass through the Barrow-downs and encounter Tom Bombadil.
I have very little trust that Hollywood can deliver a faithful Tolkien adaptation after Rings of Power. That series struggled because it forced contemporary concerns into a setting that couldn’t support them, and viewers noticed.
Tom Bombadil is a genuinely difficult character. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis argued about what he actually is. Is he a god? Is he an analog to Aslan? Beyond the theological ambiguity, he nearly kills the pacing of the novel. I
think Jackson made the right call leaving him out of the trilogy, which still holds up beautifully. I’ve been rewatching it with my daughters, and the pacing is excellent. Even the additions, like the elves at Helm’s Deep, work better than the book’s structure would have allowed.
Thomas: The Jackson films present the story as noble-dark. It’s weighty, serious, and transcendent. The Lord of the Rings has never stopped resonating with audiences because it operates above any particular cultural moment.
But the Bombadil sequence is something else entirely. At best the scene is noble-bright, a world where all is well and people are simply enjoying themselves. At worst it’s grim-bright, where the characters are good but indifferent to the brokenness around them. That is precisely Bombadil’s problem: he doesn’t care about the Ring. He doesn’t care about the threat to the free peoples. That tonal dissonance is jarring in the novel, and it belongs to an entirely different cultural orientation. It’s a different zeitgeist. It will be very difficult to adapt, and I don’t think it will land with a contemporary American audience even if the execution is technically well done.
Jonathan: That’s not going to happen, because the morality Colbert typically pursues is identity-based, rooted in immutable characteristics rather than in choices and conduct. That’s how a significant segment of Hollywood frames these stories now.
But Tolkien’s morality is built on what you do, not what you are. My confidence that they can handle the complexity of Bombadil while honoring that spirit is low. You can stay faithful to the facts of Tolkien’s world while completely betraying its soul. That was Rings of Power‘s core failure, and it didn’t even stay faithful to the facts.
People point to Colbert’s reputation as a Tolkien scholar, but expertise in the text is not the same as fidelity to its values.
Vellum 4.1 Delivers Expanded Heading Controls and Refined Word Imports
Thomas: Vellum 4.1 has launched with expanded heading controls and refined Word imports. It’s a minor update, but it’s free. If you’re using Vellum, this is worth downloading. There’s also one thing freelancers in particular need to watch for.
Jonathan: Authors formatting books in the Mac app now have new options for heading images and Word file imports. Inside the heading preset settings, you can adjust the position and size of heading images. A new “include in” setting restricts those images to ebook versions only. Vellum also added a default author name field in settings, so you can enter your name once and it applies automatically to every new project.
Jonathan: If you are a freelancer formatting books for clients, leave that field blank. Otherwise your name will appear on every book you produce.
Jonathan: The update also refines chapter detection in the Word import tool. I ran into this recently with a client’s manuscript. Vellum didn’t detect the chapter breaks cleanly, and I had to go back through manually after he flagged it. Hopefully this refinement reduces that kind of cleanup work.
Thomas: I was testing Vellum today as part of a MacBook review for my other channel, Novel Marketing. I’m hoping to have that review and a laptop buyer’s guide up soon. For testing, I created what I’m calling the Doom Doc, a 250,000-word document loaded with images, and I’ve been running it through various apps to measure performance. Vellum uses more RAM than I expected, roughly a gigabyte on the Doom Doc, but it still runs fast on the Apple M-series chip. I’ve been testing other apps as well, more on that in the upcoming episode. The surprise so far: Scrivener is remarkably efficient. The entire app runs on under 250 megabytes of RAM, which makes it an excellent option for memory-limited laptops. Full review coming next week, or the week after at the latest.
Jonathan: It’s a free update. Open Vellum and download it.
2027 Novel Marketing Conference Tickets Go on Sale April 6
Thomas: Tickets for the 2027 Novel Marketing Conference go on sale April 6. The conference runs January 22-23, and Jonathan and I will host a live Author Update for a studio audience on the Thursday evening before (January 21, 2027)
Tickets sold out last year, and this year they will likely go faster. When they’re gone, they’re gone. We are intentionally keeping the same small venue. The Novel Marketing Conference work partly because it’s intentionally small and intimate, which also means there are never enough tickets for everyone who wants one.
Last year, people were genuinely surprised to find it sold out. If you were there, you know how packed that room was.
We essentially run two versions of the conference on a rotating cycle, a blue year and a red year. The 2027 content will be entirely different from 2026 content. In 2027, we’ll be covering book launches, launch teams, and related launch strategy. We won’t be revisiting anything from last year’s program.
The ideal experience is to attend two consecutive years. The worst way to do it is to come every other year, because you end up cycling through the same content. I warned someone about that once, and he came back anyway. He said he ears to hear it the second time, which is fair.
Even though the content outline is the same every other year, our guest speakers rotate, marketing evolves, techniques change, AI changes, and every year reflects where the industry actually is.
Author Arsenal Challenge Sign-up Form is Live!
Thomas: The April Author Arsenal Challenge is coming up. If you think having someone bark at you like a Marine sergeant is the motivation you need to finish your book, this is worth checking out.
Jonathan: Every author knows how hard it is to stay self-motivated writing alone. This challenge is designed to bring authors together to produce hundreds of thousands of words in one month under a structured accountability framework.
I’ve built an updated Excel tracker, better than the previous version, that shows your words per minute, your words per hour, and where your bottlenecks are. It will show you where you’re overthinking in your drafting and where you’re self-editing when you should be producing.
The structure is 20 writing days with weekends for catching up on anything you missed. We’ll meet on Saturdays to talk through problems, hangups, and sticky points.
Authors who completed the last challenge reported a significant jump in productivity. I’m not actually barking at anyone, unless that’s specifically what you want, though I think it would damage my microphone.
The goal is simple: finish your book in one month and start building the career and the output you’re capable of. The cost is $100 for the month, and it’s non-refundable, because you may give up on yourself, but you won’t give up on $100.
Thomas: And Jonathan is not going to give up on the $100 you paid him.
Jonathan: This is for writing first drafts only. We’re not polishing, we’re producing. Get the book out, get it done, and then refine it as much as you want afterward.
Sign up for the April Author Arsenal Challenge.
Supreme Court Limits ISP Liability for User Copyright Infringement
Thomas: The Supreme Court just handed down a rare 9-0 ruling on copyright law, and nobody is talking about it. It was written by my favorite Supreme Court Justice.
Jonathan: On March 25, 2026, the Supreme Court reversed a $1 billion copyright verdict against Cox Communications in a unanimous decision. Justice Clarence Thomas wrote the majority opinion. The court held that an internet service provider does not face contributory liability when its subscribers pirate copyrighted works. Knowledge of the infringement alone is not enough to establish liability.
Thomas: Clarence Thomas just saved the internet, and no one is thanking him. If your ISP were liable for anything you did on your connection, why would any company provide internet service at all, or allow any freedom on that connection without monitoring everything you do? This ruling prevented the end of the open internet.
Sony does not need this kind of money. The reality is that copyright law is broken. No individual author I know of has ever collected a penny from copyright enforcement. There are maybe five or six companies that legitimately collect on copyright claims, and another five or six that are outright trolls, bullying people over spurious claims. Sony is in that second category. It wanted to extract billions from Cox, Time Warner, Spectrum, AT&T, and every other major ISP. That outcome would have been crushing for the internet and deeply corrosive to individual liberty and individual responsibility.
Their argument was: you didn’t commit the piracy, but you provided the connection. There is no limiting principle to that logic. It’s the same reasoning that led municipalities to cut electricity to churches during the pandemic. No. You provide electricity. You do not get to determine what someone does with it.
This is a great decision, and I’m genuinely glad the court got it right. To be fair, the Association of American Publishers was not pleased. Jonathan, can you read their statement?
Jonathan: The AAP statement reads: “We join our colleagues in the copyright community in expressing our disappointment and concern about the Supreme Court’s decision in Cox Communications versus Sony Music Entertainment. In addition to ignoring its own judgment on secondary liability as the only practical alternative to mitigate digital-age copyright infringement, the concurring opinion by Justice Sotomayor correctly states that the majority’s improper narrowing of secondary liability does substantial harm to Congress’s intent with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998.
It is one thing to decide that the facts of a particular case do not meet a liability threshold, but a far more problematic issue when the court artificially limits liability standards that have a long foundation in common law. We also agree with those who have observed that this ruling emphasizes the need for the United States to catch up with most democratic nations in implementing legislation to block access to pirate sites hosting and distributing copyrighted material.”
Thomas: You can tell this was drafted by a lawyer and not a PR person. When Americans hear that the country needs to become more European, I don’t think the authors of that statement appreciate how it lands. The Monroe Doctrine is still very much operational. America was built by people who specifically chose to leave Europe. That framing is not going to persuade anyone.
Regardless, this decision does not harm you as an author, whatever the AAP is claiming. There was never a scenario in which an individual author was going to win a copyright case against Cox Communications or Spectrum. Even if Sony had prevailed, that victory would have belonged to Sony, not to you.
Copyright law as it currently stands was drafted by Disney, for Disney and companies like it, not for individuals. I have been in this industry for 20 years and I have not seen an individual author win a meaningful copyright case. I’m sure it has happened somewhere, but an exception doesn’t establish a rule. There are four million ISBN books published every year, and essentially no individual authors are winning copyright cases.
If I had a magic wand, I would reset to the original copyright framework the founders created in the 1700s. Patents offer a better model: copyright protection for 14 years, with a seven-year extension available, and then the work enters the public domain. That structure rewards authors for writing, not for having written something 50 years ago. It would force publishers to make money on new books that readers want now, rather than extracting revenue from catalogues their predecessors acquired decades ago.
Jonathan: The 800th Barnes and Noble edition of whatever classic.
Thomas: Actually, those Barnes and Noble editions exist precisely because those books are in the public domain. Anyone can take Aristotle, bundle it with a quality introduction, and sell a handsome edition. The moment you try to do that with a more recent book, you can’t.
Here’s a concrete example. My family is doing a unit study on Texas history right now. Our homeschool curriculum doesn’t cover it, which as Texans we found unacceptable, so I built one. In my research I came across We Were There: A Story of Texas, a historical fiction novel set during the Battle of the Alamo. Every copy I could find was priced around $80. I eventually tracked down a $20 copy. The book has been out of print for decades. There is no ebook. Nobody has a financial interest in publishing it, and yet everyone is legally prohibited from making it available.
This is what’s known as an orphaned work, and it is the inevitable fate of nearly every book ever published. All but a handful enter orphan status long before they reach the public domain. The author is dead. Everyone who worked on the book is dead. It was published in the 1950s and won’t enter the public domain for another 20 years, too late for my children. I would love to load an ebook into an AI tool and build a curriculum around it. I can’t, because copyright law was written to protect corporations, not people.
Jonathan: How is it that authors in AI training lawsuits against Anthropic are collecting money, while authors with automatic copyright protection in the UK aren’t seeing a penny?
Thomas: They may yet. They just need to bring the right case in UK courts. The Anthropic litigation is actually an interesting exception to my general rule that individuals don’t win copyright cases, though it’s structurally unusual. That lawsuit is not primarily about the act of reading the books for training. It’s about how the books were acquired in the first place. UK copyright law operates somewhat differently, and UK courts work differently as well.
Sources:
Court rejects billion-dollar judgment for copyright infringement by internet service provider
Supreme Court Reverses $1 Billion Verdict, Rules Cox Not Contributorily Liable for Subscribers’ Copyright Infringement
Cox Communications, Inc., et al. v. Sony Music Entertainment, et al. (Official Opinion)
Supreme Court tosses $1B copyright verdict in record companies’ battle over illegal internet downloads
Author Update Memberships
Thomas: A quick note on the business side of Author Update. The show currently operates at a loss, however, your YouTube Super Chats help offset some production costs, and YouTube is now offering a matching bonus for the first 100 people who join as channel members!
If you want to support Author Update specifically, becoming an Author Update YouTube member is the one of the best ways to do it. Becoming a Novel Marketing patron in support of the show is harder to track, because most people who sign up as patrons are there for the Patron Toolbox, not for this show.
If you want the money to land here, membership is the right mechanism.
Jonathan: Once you subscribe to the channel, the “Subscribe” button changes to “Join.” Click “Join” and you’ll see the paid membership options. Depending on how much we invest in the program, members may eventually get access to exclusive episodes or other benefits.
Thomas: We haven’t finalized the member benefits yet, but I will say that every channel member will receive free access to Author Media Social. If you’ve been looking for a lower-cost way to get in, this is it.
The Future of Audiobooks: Zephyrus One
Thomas: ElevenLabs just announced what may be a glimpse at the future of audiobooks. A new title called Zephyryus One by Dave Huston features a mix of human and AI narration, and I want to play some clips. For full-cast audiobooks narrated in part by the author, this format represents a genuinely new frontier. The combination produces something greater than either element alone.
View the YouTube version at 30:24 to hear Jonathan playing Spot the AI Voice while Thomas plays clips from Zephyrus One.
Thomas: If your story features an AI character, casting an AI voice for that role is an obvious creative choice, and the production pipeline makes it fast and easy. Zephyrus One also features AI-generated music throughout. The author produced it using Suno AI, currently the leading AI music tool. Worth noting: Google launched a new music generation platform this week as part of its creative suite, and early reports suggest it’s competitive. Suno is no longer the only serious option.
The author rounded out the production with purchased sound effects from Sound Ideas, mixing everything together in Pro Tools. The final product combines ElevenLabs voices, Suno music, and a professional sound effects library into a single polished package.
Jonathan: I use Boom Library for sound effects, but the pricing is steep. I need to look at Sound Ideas and see if their catalog is more affordable.
Thomas: There are plenty of sound effects companies selling curated packs, 100 sci-fi sounds for around $10, with individual sounds available à la carte as well.
This production is not technically an audiobook. It’s an audio play, and that distinction matters for how you write it. Without a narrator, the dialogue has to carry the full weight of the story. One clean workaround is first-person narration, which allows for exposition without a separate narrator voice.
This format would actually suit Jonathan’s audiobook well, which is part of why I’m making him sit through these clips. I listened to the first eight chapters, and the approach is a strong fit.
Thomas: Links to the full audiobook are in the description. Fair warning: some of the clips I skipped contain adult language, so go in prepared. What this production represents is an interesting middle path between pure AI narration, which can sound robotic, and a full human cast, but at a fraction of the cost.
Jonathan: Honestly, I think it works. When I narrate multiple voices, female characters or accents I’m not fully comfortable with, I’m already breaking immersion in ways listeners associate with AI anyway. People want to hear the story. Even knowing an AI voice was in the mix, I never hit a jarring moment listening to it. A strained accent from a human narrator can be just as disruptive.
Thomas: That’s exactly the point. You’re not competing against a perfect production. A perfect production means $1,000 per produced hour, a full cast, real female actors voicing female characters, a professional audio producer. I don’t know what Dave spent on this, but it wasn’t that. And what he delivered is 80 to 90% of that quality, and almost certainly better than he could have managed solo. An AI female voice will outperform most male narrators doing female characters.
Jonathan has a female voice, singular. If a scene has two women in it, they sound identical. A professional human narrator runs $200 to $500 per produced hour. This hybrid approach almost certainly comes in under that. It requires time and some technical expertise, not every author knows Pro Tools, but the result is entirely the author’s vision. He’s directing the AI performances. He’s mixing the sound effects. It’s his creative fingerprint throughout.
The ultimate expression of this approach, pre-AI, is Gerhardt by Patrick Rothfuss. He and his wife voiced every character. He wrote all the music himself. He handled the sound effects and the artwork. It’s a singular piece of work precisely because almost no one has that range of skills. With AI tools, more authors can now build that kind of “cinema of the ears” experience without mastering five separate crafts from scratch. And it doesn’t have to replace the traditional audiobook. Offer both versions and let readers choose on Audible.
Jonathan: The chat wants to hear my female voice, for the record. I have more than one. I introduced a female character toward the end of the first eight chapters I posted on YouTube. That’s Devil Dog. You can hear it there. I also do a Latina character.
Thomas: Here’s my pitch for the book. It’s a LitRPG where a Christian Marine is accidentally sent to hell, becomes Doom Guy, picks up a shotgun, and decides he’s not taking any grief from demons. He’s a Marine and adapts immediately.
Jonathan: The demons are genuinely caught off guard.
Thomas: I was sold on the first page. He wakes up in what appears to be a medical lab, a demon looming over him, and skips straight past confusion to threat assessment. None of the disorientation that usually drags out the opening chapters of a LitRPG. This guy is a Marine. Violence is not a problem for him.
Zephyrus One Audiobook
Zephyrus One Instagram account
Open AI Closes Sora Without Notice
Thomas: OpenAI has shut down Sora. Is this the beginning of the end for the AI bubble?
Jonathan: OpenAI executives announced the shutdown of Sora on March 24. The company discontinued its AI video generation app and related platform roughly six months after launch. We covered it at the time as a potential tool for authors producing book trailers. OpenAI is now redirecting those resources toward robotics and agentic systems designed to handle real-world physical tasks. The financials tell the story: Sora generated approximately $2 million in lifetime revenue.
Thomas: That sounds like a lot until you consider what it costs to run AI video generation at scale.
Jonathan: Generating AI video is computationally intensive, and Sora doesn’t capture downstream value. If a video goes viral, Sora collects nothing beyond the original subscription fee.
Thomas: There may not even have been a subscription fee. Much of it was free, with no advertising revenue to compensate. OpenAI has been pulling back across several products: they shuttered Sora, walked back their “spicy mode” feature after backlash, and shut down their browser project. The pattern is clear. Not every AI capability translates into a business.
Part of what forced this reckoning is Anthropic. Claude has stayed disciplined, focusing almost exclusively on the highest-margin use cases. Right now, that means coding. Developers using AI to write code is where the serious money is. I was talking with a developer yesterday whose company recently did layoffs. The engineers who remained are producing 10 times the output they were before, because they’re using AI throughout the workflow.
I’ve been getting into vibe coding myself. I needed an app that converts video files to text without a monthly subscription, couldn’t find one, and decided to build it. I coded a functional Mac app in a single Saturday on the MacBook I was supposed to be reviewing. That’s partly why the review is late.
OpenAI was never going to win in AI video. The two dominant players will be Google, because they own YouTube, and ByteDance, because they own TikTok. Both companies sit on vast libraries of video training data that no competitor can match, and both already have video models that outperform Sora. There is no sustainable business in generating free low-quality video clips. Shutting it down was the right call.
That said, this does signal something broader. AI companies are beginning to feel cost pressure. Capital is no longer unlimited, and they are starting to make choices accordingly. OpenAI still has substantial runway, having raised roughly $120 billion from investors. They are not running out of cash.
And on the same day Sora was shut down, Google may have fundamentally changed the AI landscape.
Will Google TurboQuant Create a Dark Fiber Event in AI?
Jonathan: Google Research released TurboQuant on March 24. The new compression algorithm addresses a critical bottleneck in large language models. TurboQuant cuts memory use by a factor of six on average, delivers up to an eightfold speedup in attention calculations on Nvidia H100 GPUs, and achieves all of it with zero loss in model accuracy and no retraining required. Faster, cheaper, no quality tradeoff.
Thomas: Within 24 hours of Google publishing the paper publicly, developers were already using TurboQuant to run AI models locally that their hardware couldn’t have supported the day before. This moves us meaningfully closer to running capable AI models on personal machines. Some models can already run locally depending on available RAM, but there is a global RAM shortage driven partly by how memory-hungry AI has become. TurboQuant reduces that pressure.
Jonathan: The chip stocks dipped after the announcement. Less RAM demand means less need for the hardware that supplies it.
Thomas: Chip stocks lost billions in market capitalization, which sounds dramatic until you zoom out and see they’ve been on a near-vertical climb. What looks like a significant drop is roughly three weeks of prior gains erased. There is still substantial demand for RAM, and TurboQuant only addresses one layer of the AI stack.
The bigger question is whether this triggers a dark fiber moment. Here’s what I mean. In the late 1980s, the first fiber optic cable was laid across the Atlantic. Experts predicted it would take decades to reach capacity. It filled up in roughly nine to 18 months, because the existence of the infrastructure created demand for new uses of that infrastructure. So they laid another cable. And another. Every cable filled almost immediately. Industry projections had demand for fiber doubling every nine months, and companies raced to bury as much of it as they could worldwide.
Then someone invented a way to fire multiple lasers down the same glass tube at different wavelengths simultaneously. Overnight, the capacity of every existing fiber cable increased between 16 and 100 times. The global supply of fiber went from constrained to effectively unlimited. That fiber without an active laser running through it got a new name: dark fiber. Not a complicated term. It’s just fiber optic cable with no light in it. Dark.
That abundance, combined with the debt those companies had taken on to build the infrastructure, triggered the dot-com crash. I was in Austin for it. Companies around my neighborhood were shutting down weekly. My first business, at 16, was attending what my dad and I called .com funerals, auction sales of bankrupt tech companies. I’d buy laptops cheap and resell them on eBay. That’s how I got my start.
The dark fiber itself didn’t stay dark forever. YouTube, Netflix, and streaming broadly consumed all of it and more. The infrastructure enabled the next generation of the internet. But first came the correction.
The question for AI is whether TurboQuant and the breakthroughs that will follow, because other companies will now pursue similar compression research, represent the beginning of that same cycle. That said, demand for AI memory still outpaces supply. This alone is not a dark fiber moment. TurboQuant delivers a four to sixfold improvement in one specific layer of the stack. The dark fiber transition was a 16 to 100 times capacity jump across the entire infrastructure. We are not there yet.
Sources:
Wikipedia: Dark fibre
Forbes: Is The AI Boom Headed For Its ‘Dark Fiber’ Moment?
Internet History: Boom, Bubble, Bust: The Fiber Optic Mania (PDF)
Techno-Statecraft: Dark Fiber—an Archaeology of the Dot-Com Bubble
Fabricated Knowledge: Lessons from History: The Rise and Fall of the Telecom Bubble
The Fiber Optic Association: Fiber Optic History Timeline
Google Research Blog: TurboQuant: Redefining AI efficiency with extreme compression
arXiv: TurboQuant: Online Vector Quantization with Near-optimal Distortion Rate
VentureBeat: Google’s new TurboQuant algorithm speeds up AI memory 8x, cutting costs by 50% or more
Ars Technica: Google’s TurboQuant AI-compression algorithm can lower AI memory usage without sacrificing quality
Forbes: Is The AI Boom Headed For Its ‘Dark Fiber’ Moment?
AI Assistance Changes What Authors Actually Mean, New Study Shows
Thomas: Is AI rewriting your book without your knowledge, even when you’re only using it as a grammar checker?
Jonathan: A study published this week tracks exactly how large language models are reshaping human writing. Researcher Marwa Abdulhai and colleagues ran a controlled experiment with 100 participants who wrote essays on the question: does money lead to happiness? Half worked without AI. The other half used GPT-4o Mini. Writers who generated 40% or more of their text with the model produced 69% more essays that took no position on the central question. Heavy AI users also reported that the final work felt less creative and no longer sounded like their own voice.
The researchers then took essays written in 2021, before ChatGPT launched, fed existing human editorial feedback into the model, and asked it to revise for grammar only. The model still changed the meaning. It softened strong claims into hedged caveats, added positive emotion, removed personal pronouns, and made lexical changes three times deeper than the original human revisions.
I use ProWritingAid, and that grading system is a good example of the problem. It scores your work and nudges you toward more balanced, more positive, less pointed writing. That’s not a feature. That’s the algorithm flattening your voice.
Thomas: That’s exactly what makes it dangerous. These tools are literally extracting your personality from your writing. The science now backs up what I argued in an episode about three months ago called “When to Ignore Your Editor.” I’ll go further: Grammarly and ProWritingAid are the most dangerous AI applications for writers, more so than a developmental editor or copy editor, which are tools inside the Patron Toolbox. The grammar tools are dangerous precisely because they’re frictionless. There’s no mindless acceptance of a green squiggly line when you’re using a standalone editing tool. You have to go in and make each change yourself, which forces you to actually decide whether the revision reflects what you want to say.
Study participants were doing the opposite: pasting essays into ChatGPT, asking it to fix them, and accepting output that replaced their argument with a non-answer. That’s not editing. That ruins the writing.
A few additional notes on the methodology. They used GPT-4o Mini, a weak model without reasoning capability. ChatGPT is also the worst AI on the market for this particular problem, the sycophancy issue. It will validate nearly anything.
Jonathan: Llama is the best and worst alternative.
Thomas: Llama protects you by being incoherent. You read the output, understand nothing, and write it yourself. ChatGPT is just competent enough to be dangerous. You accept the revision, then spend time trying to reverse-engineer your original voice back into it. That’s not a workflow. Get rid of Grammarly. I used it for 10 years, dropped it, and don’t miss it. I have more typos now, and I consider that a feature. A perfectly clean text raises the same suspicion as an airbrushed photo.
Jonathan: The flaws are what make it real.
Thomas: Tiffany in the chat notes that ChatGPT seems compelled to rewrite even when you tell it to stop. That tracks. And the sycophancy makes it actively harmful for writers who are already prone to overestimating their work.
Jonathan: It tells you everything you write is fantastic and perfectly on brand, then offers a few small suggestions. I don’t need validation from software.
Thomas: It’s genuinely risky. It reinforces the delusions of delusional people.
Jonathan: ChatGPT loved my book. But authors need to know that AI does not love you. It is a program designed to keep you engaged. It does not love your writing.
Thomas: The study put participants in a room with ChatGPT and no instruction on how to use it effectively. A more useful critique of the study is that it measures unskilled AI use. It’s like giving half your test group power drills they’ve never touched and then criticizing the results. Good AI use requires technique.
That said, writers who develop better AI techniques tend to migrate away from ChatGPT anyway, toward Claude or Grok, both of which are significantly better for writing tasks. I’m close to canceling my ChatGPT subscription. I’m barely using it, and it feels like it’s getting worse while the alternatives are getting dramatically better.
Sources:
How LLMs Distort Our Written Language
Pangram Predicts 21% of ICLR Reviews are AI-Generated
Major AI conference flooded with peer reviews written fully by AI
Announcing: Zeitgeist Vibe Checker
While AI Thomas is still my magnum opus, this tool may be a close second.
Or put another way, the Zeitgeist Vibe Checker is for Author Update what AI Thomas is for Novel Marketing. Like AI Thomas, this tool evolves every time we release a new zeitgeist episode.
You know that feeling when a book that should be a hit just isn’t? The writing is strong. The story is compelling. But readers walk past it.
The problem is often cultural timing, not quality. Reader appetites shift every 20 years or so, and we are in the middle of one of those shifts right now. Antiheroes are losing their grip. Morally gray villains feel exhausting instead of sophisticated. “Girl boss” protagonists are declining even among women. Meanwhile, ruthless noble heroes and stories about building civilization are surging.
The Zeitgeist Vibe Checker analyzes your fiction manuscript against the cultural zeitgeist using the frameworks from Novel Marketing and Author Update. Upload your book, pick your genre, and get a report that covers your story world, hero and villain archetypes, moral system, genre resonance, and where you fall on the construction-to-destruction spectrum.
It also gives you specific revision suggestions tied to actual scenes and characters in your manuscript. Not vague advice. Not flattery. Honest analysis.
Fair warning: this tool will not tell you what you want to hear. It will tell you what you need to hear.
Available now for Novel Marketing Patrons ($10/month and above).
One Piece Passes Superman as Best-Selling Comic with 600 Million Copies
Thomas: This may be the end of Superman’s reign, Jonathan.
Jonathan: I don’t agree with that conclusion, but here are the numbers. Publisher Shueisha announced on March 3, 2026 that One Piece, the manga series by Eiichiro Oda, has surpassed 600 million copies in circulation worldwide. The announcement coincided with the release of Volume 114 on March 4. Japanese readers account for roughly 450 million copies; international readers account for the remaining 150 million.
That total matches the estimated lifetime sales of Superman. DC Comics launched the character in 1938, and the series accumulated approximately 600 million copies sold over nearly 90 years and thousands of issues. One Piece reached the same number in under 30 years, since its debut in Weekly Shonen Jump in 1997.
My issue is the granularity. Superman has expanded far beyond a solo title. He appears across team books, crossovers, and shared universe storylines. I don’t know whether those are included in this figure.
Thomas: The count covers the core Superman title and related Superman comics, but not Justice League or appearances in other characters’ books. One Piece doesn’t have the same kind of extended universe, though it does have a television series and films. But the more significant point is this: Superman had a 50-year head start. He was the defining character of both the golden age and the silver age of comics, and he has already been matched. I have a full episode on this topic coming, so I’ll just offer a preview.
Go to your nearest Barnes and Noble. Find the American comics section, which is a single modest shelf. Then find the manga section, which in most locations is six to 12 times larger. Western readers are so disconnected from what Western publishers are producing that they will read a manga right to left before they will pick up a domestic title. The stories from the West no longer speak to them.
Jonathan: I still think the data is cherry-picked and the conclusions are overstated. Superman has shaped the Western conception of heroism for nearly a century. A new Superman film is a cultural event. Everyone has an opinion about who he is and what he stands for. One Piece hasn’t done that. If you want a complete picture, you also have to account for everything Superman has inspired: Invincible, The Boys, and the broader superhero genre. Comparing solo copy counts is a narrow metric that understates the cultural footprint.
Thomas: I agree Superman has deeper cultural penetration with older American audiences. Most boomers have no idea what One Piece is. Millennials are on the borderline.
Jonathan: I got genuinely annoyed when anime started showing up in the DC lineup.
Thomas: That tracks. The pattern is generational. The younger the reader, the more likely they are to consume Eastern storytelling and disengage from Western publishing. The number one Netflix film of all time is K-Pop Demon Hunters, a noble-dark story with a clear moral spectrum. It connects directly to what I’ve been discussing about the current cultural zeitgeist.
I have a full zeitgeist segment prepared on Project Hail Mary, and I’m giving everyone one week’s notice. I will be spoiling that film thoroughly next week. It feels like someone watched my sci-fi zeitgeist episode on Novel Marketing and used it as a production checklist. The film is breaking records.
The argument isn’t whether Eastern stories have definitively surpassed Western ones in all-time impact. The argument is that they are dominating the bookstore right now, selling at extraordinary volume, and resonating especially with younger readers. We do ourselves no favors by dismissing that with a shrug. Western readers want resonant stories. Right now, Eastern publishers are delivering them more consistently than Western ones.
I’ll stop there before I give away the entire upcoming episode. It features Seth Ring, it gets deeply philosophical, and I think it may be the best episode we’ve produced.
Sources:
ONE PIECE Manga Surpasses 600 Million Copies in Print
One Piece Ties Superman as the Best-Selling Comic Series of All Time
List of best-selling comic series – Wikipedia
One Piece – Wikipedia
One Piece Manga Commemorates Over 600 Million Copies Worldwide
AI as Metaphor: Corporations, Pagan Gods & the Managerial State
Thomas: I have a new theory about AI stories and where they fit in the broader culture.
When a new technology arrives, there’s typically a honeymoon period. People are excited, optimistic, and largely blind to the downsides. We saw it with television. We saw it with social media. We saw it with alcohol.
The original name for alcohol was aqua vitae, the water of life. It purified contaminated water. It cleaned wounds that would have turned gangrenous. It was a genuine medical marvel. It took generations to fully reckon with the dark side, and several more generations to develop a healthy cultural relationship with it. Gen Z, notably, is not a generation of heavy drinkers.
So why didn’t AI get that same grace period? There was no honeymoon. We were suspicious of AI from the beginning.
The answer, I think, is 40 years of fiction. From HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey to the WOPR in WarGames to the Terminator to the Agents in The Matrix, AI has been the villain. Consistently, across decades, across genres.
My theory is that none of those characters were actually about AI. They were society working through a deeper psychological wound, and AI was the metaphor it reached for.
The Matrix and 2001 a Space Odyssey Were Never About AI
Thomas: Let me explain the theory. The movie 2001: A Space Odyssey came out in the late 1960s. No one in that theater had ever interacted with a computer. Computers were institutional equipment housed in dedicated buildings, accessible to roughly as many people as knew nuclear launch codes. When HAL said, “I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that,” no one in the audience had ever experienced anything like that exchange, and most wouldn’t for decades.
So why did it resonate so deeply?
Because the story wasn’t about computers.
The defining transformation of the 20th century was the rise of the corporation. At the century’s start, roughly 80 to 90% of people worked for family businesses or small operations. They knew their neighbors. They knew their customers. If you needed an exception, someone could make one, because someone knew you.
By the century’s end, 80% of people worked for large corporations owned by other corporations. If you needed someone to acknowledge your humanity and make an exception, the answer was: “I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.” From your professor to the clerk at the DMV to the armorer checking in your weapons at the end of a deployment. The TPS report wasn’t filed correctly. The form is the form.
The people delivering those refusals didn’t hate you. They were following instructions. Their own agency had been stripped by the institution they served. And society had no existing narrative framework to make sense of it.
In earlier eras, there was a feudal compact, an expectation of mutual obligation between lord and peasant. The modern corporation offered nothing like that. It demanded compliance and returned process.
Throughout the 20th century, beginning with the public school system, there was systematic pressure to become a functional component of corporate machinery. Individuality was a misalignment to be corrected. Difference was a problem to be solved.
Because we couldn’t find a historical analog for the soulless managerial state, we projected it forward. And we found the metaphor we needed: HAL. The Terminator. The Matrix.
WarGames is another example. There was no realistic risk in 1983 of a computer autonomously launching nuclear weapons. There was a very real risk of a bureaucratic apparatus so automated, so fragmented into tiny individual responsibilities, that no single human retained meaningful decision-making authority.
That scenario nearly occurred multiple times. There is a Wikipedia article cataloguing the near-misses on both the American and Soviet sides, incidents that came terrifyingly close to nuclear exchange, prevented in several cases by a single individual who simply refused to follow protocol. One Soviet officer ignored a computer alert and his commanding officer’s order, concluded the data was wrong. He was right. His decision prevented a retaliatory nuclear attack on the United States. The planet was saved by one man’s defiance of the system. He was likely disciplined for it.
The third Terminator film, I’d argue, was actually about AI. The first two were about the managerial state. The Matrix makes this clearest.
Thomas Anderson works in a soulless corporation. The color palette is desaturated. His boss berates him for a minor infraction. It is, scene for scene, the same movie as Office Space, and it ends the same way with the protagonist emerging as a new man from the wreckage of the institution that was consuming him. The agents even wear suits.
Morpheus describes the Matrix as something you feel when you pay your taxes, when you interface with a system that cannot see you. That’s not a description of artificial intelligence. That’s a description of the administrative state. And at the end of three films, Neo makes no permanent difference. The Matrix is not destroyed. That’s the terminal logic of grim-dark: the machine persists.
Here’s the plot twist. AI now puts power back into the hands of individuals. Every job that exists to produce or review documentation, to process, to intermediate, is exactly the kind of job AI will eliminate first. The managerial state is the entity most threatened by AI, not workers in general. If your function is making TPS reports or reviewing the TPS reports of someone else, AI does both faster, cheaper, and more accurately than you do.
Once you understand that, the political realignment starts to make sense. T
he progressive left has historically positioned itself as the party of technological advancement. It is also the party most invested in the managerial state: public institutions, regulatory bodies, credentialed administrative class. AI is an existential threat to that infrastructure. That’s why you’re seeing Democratic politicians increasingly hostile to AI development, arguing against domestic data centers, suggesting the work should happen elsewhere. The constituency they’re protecting isn’t workers broadly. It’s the administrative class specifically.
That’s the zeitgeist argument. Jonathan, I suspect you disagree.
Jonathan: I do. I think framing corporations as the villain is too narrow. This goes back much further, to the structure of paganism and idolatry, specifically the idea that divinity is derived from the material world rather than the material world proceeding from the divine.
The God of the Nile. The God of the harvest. The God of the sun. These entities had enormous, impersonal power over human life. They had to be approached on their own terms, in their own language. They were not accessible in human terms. They didn’t love you. They had to be appeased.
That structure has transmitted across the centuries: kings, states, corporations. The terms change. The dynamic doesn’t. These are the gods, reskinned.
And pagan gods, specifically, are soulless. They don’t connect with you. They sit above you. You don’t negotiate with them as a human being. You make supplication in the form they require.
Consider the corporate practice of offering to cover abortion travel costs for female employees. The corporation wasn’t acting out of care for the employee. It was making a calculation: the procedure and travel expenses cost less than a year of maternity leave and lost productivity. That is a transaction with an entity for whom you are not a person. You are a resource unit. That is the pagan dynamic, transposed.
When you look at HAL through this lens, you’re not looking at a computer program. You’re looking at a god, a contemporary reimagining of what a deity would be. The Terminator exists outside of time, is nearly impervious to physical force, and cannot be reasoned with, only reprogrammed. That’s exactly why Terminator 2 is the better film. In the first film, the Terminator cannot be prayed to. It cannot be entreated. In the second film, it can. It becomes a protector. It responds. People love it more because it can be spoken to as something approaching a person.
The managerial class was a priesthood, of sorts, enforcing the language and requirements of that soulless divine structure. I had six months of pay withheld because a computer system still listed me as deployed in Iraq. You don’t argue with the computer. You speak its language or you go without.
When AI eliminates that class, it’s not just a labor market shift. It’s a theological event. It’s the deletion of the priests.
Who else confronted a managerial class operating like a priesthood? I’ve been reading through Mark, and it’s striking. Jesus is systematically dismantling the administrative religious structure as he moves through the narrative, returning authority to its actual source. The miracles aren’t just acts of mercy. They’re jurisdictional claims. He’s not working within the system. He’s replacing it.
These films were never really wrestling with computers or AI. They were wrestling with the gods that stand over us and what those gods look like in each age. That’s why the Matrix and the Terminator still hit. We’re fighting the gods.
Thomas: Framing corporations as pagan gods is genuinely compelling, and the etymology supports it. “Corporation” derives from the Latin corpus, meaning body. A corporation is legally a person, a juridical person. And like the gods of myth, like elves in folklore, corporations don’t die of natural causes. They persist. They can be killed by war or catastrophic failure, but they don’t simply expire.
My father has run and consulted on many companies over the years. He explained to me once that companies don’t die on their own. You have to kill them. If you do nothing with a dormant company, it simply continues to exist, accumulating tax liabilities and legal complications. You have to actively take it out and end it.
There’s a Jungian reading of paganism that treats the gods as psychological constructs, as the human mind’s attempt to impose meaning on forces too large and impersonal to process directly. If you apply that framework to the corporation, then AI becomes a Jungian symbol as well: a way of metabolizing the psychic wound of the soulless institution, and the very human longing simply to be seen.
Thomas: The soulless corporation’s defining logic is that it sees you as an automaton. It is more financially viable to pay for your abortion, including travel to whatever state the procedure requires, than to pay for your maternity leave.
Jonathan: And it is packaged as compassion. It feels like care. But it is a calculation made entirely in the interest of the entity above you, not for you.
Thomas: It’s the same calculus Ford applied to the Pinto. Engineers identified that the rear-mounted fuel tank was killing roughly 30 people a year in rear-end collisions. The company ran the numbers: recall costs versus projected funeral and liability expenses. Funeral expenses were cheaper. They did not recall the car. That case study appeared repeatedly in business school curricula as a cautionary example, but what it actually illustrates is the hyper-rational, soulless corporate logic operating exactly as designed.
This is one of the existential challenges facing civilization. Corporations are owned by corporations, which are owned by corporations, which are owned by corporations.
Jonathan: Ares answers to Zeus. His sons answer to him.
Thomas: It’s turtles all the way down. People rail against billionaires, but there aren’t that many billionaires, and most of them don’t actually control their own companies. The two exceptions I can think of are Zuckerberg and Musk, and I’m not even certain about Musk. He had to lobby shareholders for his own compensation package. He doesn’t have controlling ownership of Tesla. So who owns Tesla? BlackRock. Vanguard. And who owns BlackRock and Vanguard? A thousand other institutional entities. Turtles all the way down.
Because it’s turtles all the way down, every human actor in that chain has a fiduciary duty to serve the entity above them. The human soul, the capacity for judgment, the concept of noble obligation, it’s gone.
Western civilization had noblesse oblige for over a thousand years. The Anglo-Saxons practiced it. The Normans practiced it. Even the French gave it a name. And now many people have never heard the term. It has vanished so completely from our cultural memory that it doesn’t even register as a loss. That disappearance is a psychic wound we feel but cannot name. And that is why we reach for stories about AI to try to articulate it.
Jonathan: When you want to write a story that honestly engages with what AI is doing to society, you need to work with the mythological framework underneath it. The most resonant template is a new member of the pantheon destroying the old, because the gods have always consumed each other.
Pagan warfare was not fundamentally about ethnicity or nationality. It was theological. One god destroying another. The Ten Plagues were not only a liberation of a people from a physical empire. They were a systematic dismantling of the Egyptian pantheon, a demonstration of power over each deity in sequence. The God of the Nile, dead. The God of the sun, dead. And finally Pharaoh himself, who understood his own role as divine.
That kind of warfare is total. It is obliteration. That’s why Dune works as well as it does. It engages directly with the collision of divinity, corporate power, and the question of what actually stands at the top of the hierarchy.
If you’re writing a story about AI, whether as villain, liberator, or both, keep this framework in mind. The antagonist is always the soulless alien god. That’s why Lovecraft remains perpetually relevant.
Thomas: Your readers have grown up with institutional boots on their necks since kindergarten. From the first day of school, they were graded, ranked, and sorted by a system their teachers couldn’t fully control and their school districts couldn’t fully modify. It’s institutions governing institutions.
What’s true in the corporate world is equally true, arguably worse, in the government world. It is an infinite recursive loop of bureaucratic agencies. We don’t even have a reliable count of how many federal agencies exist. No single human being knows that number. That seems like a problem.
From kindergarten through graduation, you carry that institutional weight. Then you transition into the workforce, or into college first, and the institution changes but the weight doesn’t. Now you have a corporate boot and a government boot. And like the Matrix, most people don’t recognize it as a system. They experience it as normal life. Student loans, college debt, a stable job at a large company. That’s what their father did. That’s what his father did. It didn’t make those men wealthy or free, but the pattern persists because it’s the only pattern anyone can see.
Jonathan: All it does is feed the gods.
Thomas: It feeds the gods. These are sacrifices made on behalf of entities that are always hungry, and the sacrifices are getting larger while the returns are getting smaller. Millennials are beginning to notice. Gen Z has noticed clearly. They are not as wealthy as their parents were at the same age. The numbers are larger because of inflation, but the purchasing power isn’t there. Their parents took vacations. They can’t. Their parents weren’t financially anxious in the same chronic way.
Jonathan: And we reframe that as identity. We call it the grind. Keep grinding. But consider what grinding actually does to things.
Thomas: It removes everything distinct. You grind until the uniqueness is gone. You run your writing through Grammarly until every edge and personality has been smoothed away. Don’t say anything political. Don’t say anything religious. Don’t be controversial. Fit the template.
Jonathan: The ending of The Matrix is so striking because it echoes the opening of Genesis. Neo learns the rules by which the gods operate. He breaks them. He flies. He moves at their speed. He sees the code beneath reality. And what did the serpent offer Eve? “You will be as gods, knowing good and evil.” That temptation has never changed. The positive resolution of Neo breaking a soulless divine system on behalf of his own humanity, it’s a deeply human-forward story. But the mechanism is becoming a god yourself, using the rules of the gods against them.
Thomas: This connects directly to why my view of traditional publishing has shifted over the last 10 years. I’ve watched publishers place their boot on the necks of authors who have genuine things to say, books with real appeal and real audiences. The publisher’s response is to sand off every sharp edge, strip out anything political or controversial, and demand compliance. Fit the template. Don’t offend. Sometimes they simply reject the book outright.
In some ways that rejection is a gift. The writers who leave, or who are pushed out, are the ones who go build something else. They are the barbarians who cross the frontier, establish a counter-civilization, and eventually come flooding back over the walls.
Watch on YouTube
