Week Ending May 22, 2026
This week, on Author Update, we explore the death of dad books. Print nonfiction plummeting 8%. Publishers blaming podcasts while ignoring their own echo chamber. Traditional publishing just posted another inflation-adjusted loss. Barnes & Noble’s CEO sparked a boycott over AI books. Google unveiled voice drafting tools for authors. And the rise of the mysterious Elara Voss is a telltale sign of AI. Let’s update.
PUBLISHING NEWS
Why Dad Books Are Dying
According to The Wall Street Journal, serious nonfiction print sales have declined for four straight years. Biographies, history titles, politics books, and current-affairs titles that once filled Father’s Day gift lists now rank as the weakest segment in the print market.
Nonfiction print titles fell nearly 8% through May 9, 2026, according to Circana BookScan. Politics and current-affairs books dropped 19%. Ron Chernow’s 2025 Mark Twain biography has sold 119,259 hardcover copies, compared to 381,604 copies for his 2017 Ulysses S. Grant biography.
Men who once bought 700-page history books now listen to Hardcore History or the Joe Rogan Experience. Podcast consumption among men rose to 62% in the prior month, up from 46% in 2023. Barnes & Noble CEO James Daunt notes that when the world feels interesting, readers turn to news rather than books that explain it.
Traditional publishers have become dramatically less representative of the broader male nonfiction audience. Only 11% of new hires over the last five years were men. 79% were women and 10% identified as non-binary or other, according to Publishers Weekly‘s Salary & Jobs Survey analysis. Later Lee & Low surveys show roughly 31% of publishing staff identify as LGBTQ. From these numbers, we can infer that many of the 10% of men who are able to get hired into publishing companies are LGBT.
The books, magazines, and newspapers industry has directed 88% of campaign contributions to Democrats since 2020, according to OpenSecrets, with many houses and newsrooms hitting 90%+ Democratic in recent cycles. A 2021 UnHerd survey found 100% of U.S. book-publishing respondents self-identified as left-leaning.
If you want to acquire bestseller dad books, who on the pub board represents or even knows what kind of book would appeal to dads? Industry executives blame everyone but their own bias. They blame podcasts, Substack newsletters, YouTube, and Netflix documentaries for the shift. The real problem is a lack of diversity. The left-leaning monoculture cannot publish books that will appeal outside of their echo chamber. When a publisher purges every employee who voted for Trump, they purge the ability to publish books that will appeal to the majority of Americans who voted for Trump.
Audiobooks could compete with podcasts if the companies publishing them were as conservative as the companies publishing podcasts. Podcasts now pay better for nonfiction content than publishers do. The Obamas got a $65 million advance on two nonfiction books. Compare this to the $200 million licensing deal Joe Rogan signed for just three and a half years of Spotify exclusivity on his podcast. If you are a true expert, you can make far more money in the YouTube and podcast space than you can as an author.
Sources:
The Wall Street Journal: Dad Books Are a Dying Breed
Publishers Weekly Salary & Jobs Report (2025 data on new-hire gender)
OpenSecrets: Books, Magazines & Newspapers Industry Contributions (1990–2024)
UnHerd: The Left-Wing Bias of Book Publishers (2021 survey)
Lee & Low Diversity Baseline Survey (editorial gender and LGBTQ data)
Thomas: This Wall Street Journal article got a lot of buzz, and the people they interviewed blamed podcasting. That is part of the story, but not as much as they would like to think. The kind of dad who would buy a 700-page history book will now listen to a 70-episode history podcast, but that same dad would also listen to a 40-hour audiobook on that topic if the audiobook was of interest to him.
There is no advocate on the pub board for the kind of book that dad would want to read. There is no one in that room who even knows what kind of topics he would be interested in.
What’s more, 100% self-identified as left-leaning. Some of them are secretly funneling money to the Republicans, but nobody will raise their hand. In the United States, a majority of people voted for Donald Trump. If you don’t have anybody in your publishing company who has that worldview, then nobody knows how to create the kind of content that would appeal to those consumers.
This is not an industry like Michael Jordan’s, who, when he was encouraged to get political, said, “Republicans buy tennis shoes, too.”
The publishing world would rather get fewer sales and not sell to conservatives than create the kind of content conservatives would want. That actually explains why podcasting is so popular. It is not merely that readers could get the same content from a book or a podcast and are choosing the podcast. There are no recent books from major publishers that are as conservative as the major podcasts.
The horses have left the barn financially. The Obamas got $65 million for a two-book deal, but Joe Rogan’s Spotify deal for three and a half years of exclusivity was $200 million.
If you are creating nonfiction content, you make more money as a podcaster than as an author. I know this personally because I support my family as a podcaster, and I could not support my family as an author writing nonfiction books on book marketing.
Some of this also has to do with AI. This drop in nonfiction is not just a drop in “dad books.” It is a decrease in all nonfiction publishing. Some readers are going to AI for answers to their questions rather than to books.
The new way of encountering nonfiction content is through AI chatbots. For example, the What to Expect When You’re Expecting website’s search is now AI-powered. You’ll know we’ve fully gone to this new AI era when there is a What to Expect When You’re Expecting chatbot, because that brand follows every major trend. They were one of the first to have a website, an online community, and an app.
B&N CEO Open to Stocking AI-Written Books
According to NBC’s TODAY show, Barnes & Noble CEO James Daunt told host Jenna Bush Hager on May 18 that he has “no problem selling any book, as long as it doesn’t masquerade or pretend to be something that it isn’t.” Daunt added that the chain would stock AI-written books if they clearly label themselves as such, avoid ripping off other creators, and attract genuine customer demand.
Daunt framed the issue around transparency and reader choice rather than outright rejection or embrace of the technology. He noted that Barnes & Noble carries roughly 300,000 titles across its stores and acknowledged that some of those titles may already be AI-generated without the company’s awareness. He expressed doubt that AI-written books would gain significant commercial traction anytime soon and suggested the industry should approach the topic with “common sense and acceptance” while preventing anything from masquerading as human work.
The comments drew sharp criticism from working writers and readers on Threads, X, and other platforms. Many authors argued that AI-generated content threatens already slim margins for human creators and risks flooding physical shelves with low-quality output. Some called for boycotts of Barnes & Noble. Critics also pushed back on the idea that labeling alone solves the problem, pointing out that generative AI systems are trained on vast amounts of existing human writing.
In follow-up statements sent to the Los Angeles Times, Publishers Weekly, and other outlets around May 20–21, Daunt and company spokespeople clarified that Barnes & Noble “does not endorse or intentionally sell AI-generated books.” The company “takes active measures to exclude all AI-generated books from our online offerings and never knowingly orders any for in-store stock.” Barnes & Noble “demands that publishers label any books that are AI generated” and “will sell AI generated books if there is clear demand,” such as when a customer specifically orders a title, and “would not ban reputable books published by reputable publishers, even if AI generated,” provided they carry proper labeling and evidence of demand exists. Leadership believes it is “very unlikely that there will be customer demand for AI generated books, or that reputable publishers will publish them.”
Barnes & Noble has expanded aggressively under Daunt’s leadership, finishing 2025 with 702 stores and continuing to open new locations in 2026. Physical retail still drives meaningful discovery for print books, especially for debut and midlist titles that benefit from hands-on browsing and staff recommendations.
Authors should watch publisher contract language and submission guidelines around AI disclosure and ownership, any experiments with “human-authored” certifications or dedicated sections, sales patterns if labeled AI titles begin appearing through special orders or small presses, and reader sentiment data and community campaigns that could influence how both chains and independent bookstores curate their offerings.
Sources:
Barnes & Noble CEO Would Support Stores Selling AI-Written Books | TODAY
James Daunt Looks to Clarify B&N’s Position on AI-Generated Books | Publishers Weekly
Barnes & Noble CEO is fine with stocking AI-written books | Business Insider
Barnes & Noble store count and expansion context from Publishers Weekly reporting (January 2026)
Jonathan: The chatter on social media is vitriolic and religious. It has a Crusades-era fervor to it.
Thomas: People get mad at us when we use the term Butlerian Jihad for the anti-AI movement, but we use this term on purpose for several reasons. First, it is a deeply rooted term in literature going back to early sci-fi. Anyone well-steeped in sci-fi knows what it is. Second, we like it because of the religious fervor element, and thirdly, because it taunts the movement to come up with their own name. It is a small minority of very loud people.
Now that the What to Expect When You’re Expecting website’s search is AI-powered, it makes sense that Barnes & Noble feels threatened. If my wife signs up for the website and uses an AI app experience instead of buying the paper book at Barnes & Noble, Barnes & Noble has lost her as a customer. She is not even entering the door anymore.
Having some kind of AI presence and signaling AI exposure is good for your stock price, and Daunt has a fiduciary duty to his investors to look as AI-friendly as possible.
Jonathan: We are getting a new generation of zealots. At graduation ceremonies this past week, anyone who talked about AI got booed unless they said they hate it, and then everyone cheered. But all those students wrote their papers using ChatGPT.
Thomas: Rand Paul mentioned AI in his commencement address and did not get booed. It is very interesting who is getting booed and who is not.
A book written by AI is targetable by zealots. The AI checkers are really bad and give false positives, but it does not matter. If you yell, “You wrote it with AI,” that’s the ultimate insult now. If you don’t like something, you can say, “It must be AI,” as though you liked all human-written literature up to this point.
The big thing the CEO tried to clarify is that he wants clear labeling. But adding the label just reduces people’s enjoyment of the book without actually helping.
When it comes to art, people are not reacting to the art. They are reacting to the metadata. We covered a story last week about a Monet painting. If you tell somebody a real Monet is AI-generated, they’ll hate it, even though it is a real Monet. If you tell them an AI painting is a real Monet, they’ll love it. They cannot tell the difference.
They are reacting to the labeling, not the art itself.
Traditional Publishing Industry Sees Yet Another Industry-Wide Inflation-Adjusted Loss for Q1
According to the Association of American Publishers StatShot report released May 18, 2026, sales across more than 1,416 publishers reached $2.9 billion in the first quarter, a 0.9% increase over the same period in 2025.
Trade books totaled $2.2 billion and rose just 0.2%. Adult titles hit $1.5 billion but fell 0.5% overall. Children’s and young adult books reached $560.7 million and climbed 2.6%. Religious presses posted $219.6 million and dropped 1.4%. Professional and scholarly publishing rose 5.7%. Combined PreK-12 and higher-education materials gained 3.2% to $509.7 million.
Digital audio in trade books surged 15.9% to $302.3 million. eBooks slipped 5% to $261 million. Adult nonfiction hardcover plunged 15.6% and trade paperback fell 4.7%. Children’s/YA nonfiction jumped 16.8% while fiction eased 0.7%.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Price Index released May 12, 2026, year-over-year inflation ran 2.4% in January, 2.4% in February, and 3.3% in March. The quarter-average inflation rate therefore sits near 2.7%. A 0.9% nominal sales gain shrinks to a real-term contraction of roughly 1.8% once inflation is stripped out. Adult nonfiction and religious categories now show even deeper real declines. Only professional, education, children’s nonfiction, and digital audio categories deliver genuine growth after adjustment.
Trade publishing remains essentially flat in real dollars, which squeezes advances and marketing budgets. Adult nonfiction authors face the steepest headwinds, with print formats down sharply and eBooks also negative. Genre fiction, children’s/YA nonfiction, and audio-first projects continue to outperform. Indies who lean into digital audio or hybrid print-audio strategies gain a measurable edge over print-heavy traditional models.
Sources:
Association of American Publishers: StatShot Report – Q1 2026
Publishers Weekly: “Publishers Saw Small Sales Gains in Q1” (May 18, 2026)
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics: Consumer Price Index – April 2026 (covering Q1 data)
Thomas: Every other news outlet reporting on this story is failing to give the inflation context, and they are reporting it as good news. We are the only ones that acknowledge the existence of inflation.
That 3.2% increase in combined pre-K through higher education sounds good, but if you compare it to 3.3% inflation, it is actually a 0.1% decrease in real terms. Traditional publishing is yet again failing to keep up with inflation, and part of it is this echo chamber. They are a monoculture only appealing to a very narrow segment of the population. That segment gets narrower every year. They are not really trying to appeal to men. They are not really trying to appeal to the majority of Americans who vote for Donald Trump. They are not really trying to appeal to rural readers.
If you are a straight man going into a bookstore, what section do you even go to? Historically, the one section for you was sci-fi/fantasy. Now you go there and it is all romantasy. This lack of awareness is hurting the industry.
Jonathan: Adult nonfiction’s biggest competitors right now are podcasts, and it is really hard in the trad pub world, especially men, because men are usually going to listen to a podcast that is by guys who are like them.
Genre fiction is still doing the best. People want to read good stories in worlds they enjoy.
Thomas: The indie world is gobbling up market share, often targeting underserved readers.
Authors on the right are targeting readers on the right and one author is sometimes bigger than whole publishing houses in terms of sales. The real money is in being an indie author targeting folks on the right, because that author gets the publisher cut, the author cut, and sometimes even the retail cut. These authors are often selling direct, on their websites or in person, and making 80 cents on the dollar.
LitRPG is a good example. Seth Ring has sold over a million books very quietly, and he is not even the best-selling LitRPG author. His books have a very unique masculine energy. They are philosophically conservative but not political. He has read the classics and is familiar with a classical worldview. Knowing who you’re writing for and how to write for them is really important.
Kindle Unlimited payouts grew in 2026 from $62 million to $64 million per month, and they have grown $28 million since 2020, surpassing inflation by far.
Indies are gaining market share, their growth is beating inflation, and the traditional publishers are losing. Nobody else is reporting on it because everyone is looking at the nominal numbers instead of the inflation-adjusted numbers.
James Patterson Pledges $10 Million for Adolescent Literacy
According to Publishers Weekly, bestselling author James Patterson committed $10 million to launch the Patterson Institute of Early Adolescent Literacy at Vanderbilt University. The institute will fund research, student tutoring, and teacher training focused on grades four through eight. This targets a critical gap where reading scores have dropped sharply per recent NAEP data, as middle schoolers face distractions and view reading as uncool. Patterson, who has donated over $220 million to literacy causes, aims to get kids reading books they actually enjoy.
Sources:
Publishers Weekly: James Patterson Pledges $10 Million to Launch Literacy Institute
Vanderbilt University Announcement
Thomas: This almost feels like a response to a story we covered last week about middle grade suffering as a category. It is a harbinger of bad things for the industry overall because literacy rates are way down and birth rates are way down.
James Patterson writes for normal readers who reads a book a year at the beach. He feels the drop in literacy in his sales numbers because he writes popular books for the one-book-a-year reader. He still writes dad books, but if Patterson was a brand new author, he couldn’t get a contract today. They wouldn’t accept him because he is not diverse enough.
Tom Clancy would never get a contract today either. He’d be seen as a cranky old white man writing violent and offensive books. But if Clancy were alive today writing his first book, he’d go indie and make tons of money. Patterson would also have been perfectly successful as an indie author if he started today.
Patterson cares about literacy, and this is a very generous thing for him to do. It is good for the industry and good for America. I hope Vanderbilt is successful with the $10 million gift.
Spotify to Launch Licensed AI Cover Tool for Premium Users
Spotify and Universal Music Group announced licensing agreements for a generative AI tool that lets Premium subscribers create covers and remixes of participating artists’ songs according to their joint statement on May 21, 2026.
The paid add-on operates on an opt-in basis, requires consent from artists and songwriters, and routes additional revenue shares to rights holders from streams of the resulting tracks. This upfront consent-and-compensation model offers authors and publishers a practical example of how rights holders can license AI derivatives of creative work while protecting control and generating new income streams.
Sources:
The Verge: Spotify is launching AI-generated remixes
TechCrunch: Spotify and Universal Music strike deal allowing fan-made AI covers and remixes
Thomas: We are very close to a prompt-to-fan-fiction model of publishing. What happens to music happens everywhere else a couple of years later. Music gets everything first.
This is going to happen to authors. Readers will be able to chat to their novel and say, “Write me a spinoff or a prequel. Write me into the story.” Their Kindle will write a whole version of the story with them in it. Stories will become more interactive. There will be a big drama over authors who opt in for this and authors who don’t, and then readers will do it anyway without permission.
You think this is a story about Spotify. This is a story about you.
Jonathan: I wouldn’t make it a hard “no” immediately, because there is a lot of benefit from fan art being circulated. It is the full-bar psychology. If people are making fan art or fan fiction about your book, your book must be good. It creates the idea of the party everyone wants to go to.
On the other hand, I totally understand the concern about people creating freaky stuff out of what you wrote.
Thomas: This is also a way for readers who think a book could have been better to say, “Let me create a fixed version.” That impulse is what inspires most authors to get into writing in the first place.
Jonathan: The big use case will be letting users make custom personalized stuff that no one else will be interested in, which will put everyone in their boxes. There is no homogenized culture anymore. We are not watching the same shows together. Everyone has the algorithm, and it tailors what you see to your tastes.
Thomas: In some ways this is very new, but in other ways it is very old. Before records, everyone who was middle class and above had a piano, and a common social activity was having friends over and singing together. Here’s the corrected paragraph:
Thomas: In some ways this is very new, but in other ways it is very old. Before records, everyone who was middle class and above had a piano, and a common social activity was having friends over and singing together. John Philip Sousa warned in his 1906 essay “The Menace of Mechanical Music” that the phonograph would cause the amateur singer to “disappear entirely,” leaving only “the mechanical device and the professional executant.” Children raised on phonographs, he feared, would “become simply human phonographs, without soul or expression.”
Storytelling followed the same arc. It used to be something we all did, gathering on the front porch and telling tall tales. Then the “infernal machines” came along and only professionals could tell a story. Now the machines are going the whole way and allowing everyone to create again. Is it masterpiece level? No. But neither were the people playing banjo on the front porch, and that was not the point. Not everything has to be for Carnegie Hall.
AI NEWS
Timeline Chronicler v2 Is Here
The Timeline Chronicler has been updated and is now a tool for all novelists, not just those who write epics. It now handles characters who lie. If the butler says he was not in the mansion on the night of the murder but the cook says he was, the Timeline Chronicler can handle those differing accounts while still catching mistakes in your timeline.
The tool also captures your story’s full history, not just events on the page. If a king tells a tale of an ancient war, that war lands on the timeline. If a grandmother mentions her childhood, those events go where they belong in history. The new version maps every event in your story world, including ones characters only reference in passing.
Conflict detection is sharper. The tool now flags travel-time impossibilities, characters appearing in two places at once, contradictory accounts between witnesses, age math errors, seasonal mismatches, duration problems, and unexplained gaps. Every issue comes with suggested fixes you can drop in with one line of dialogue or a chapter heading.
Other improvements include the book title leading the output, events grouped by time period for stories with deep history, narrative reliability tags distinguishing what the narrator shows from what characters claim, and a cleaner output structure with sharper headings.
Thomas: Version one struggled with manuscripts that had characters lying about what they were doing. Now I have tuned the Timeline Chronicler to give not just all of the events but the source of those events, whether the narrator or a character who claims something happened. You can use it to find timeline inconsistencies and also to build a compendium you share with your readers. Edit out the critiques and use the rest as a rough draft. Find it at PatronToolbox.com.
Google I/O 2026 Announces Features That Let You Speak Your Book Draft Into Existence
Google unveiled Docs Live and Gemini Spark at its developer conference on May 19, 2026. These features turn Google Docs and the broader Workspace suite into conversational AI partners that handle drafting, research, and organization for writers.
With Docs Live, authors speak ideas, ramblings, or outlines aloud and Gemini instantly structures them into formatted documents. The tool pulls relevant details from Gmail, Drive, Chat, and the web in real time. Users refine sections conversationally, and the document updates on the fly. Rollout begins this summer for Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers on Docs for Android and iOS, with English support first.
Gemini Spark acts as a 24/7 personal agent powered by the new Gemini 3.5 Flash model. It writes emails, creates outlines or study guides, monitors tasks, and pulls information from Docs, Gmail, Sheets, and Slides. Authors can assign long-term projects such as “track competitor book launches” or “draft a newsletter from my latest manuscript notes.” Third-party integrations with tools like Canva and Instacart arrive later this year.
Gemini 3.5 Flash becomes the default model today in the Gemini app and Search, delivering faster, more reliable agentic performance for writing and coding tasks. Gemini Omni Flash generates video clips from text, photos, audio, or existing video inputs, ideal for quick book-trailer prototypes or social-media promos. Google Pics, a Canva-style image editor powered by Gemini, rolls out this summer inside Workspace apps for book covers and marketing graphics.
New AI agents in Search run background monitoring on topics such as market trends or reader feedback, delivering summarized updates from blogs, news, and social media without constant manual queries. Drafting speed jumps because voice input eliminates blank-page paralysis and typing fatigue. Indie authors on tight budgets gain enterprise-level productivity tools at Pro and Ultra subscription tiers. AI-generated material now carries clearer provenance thanks to expanded SynthID watermarking and C2PA credentials.
Sources:
Google I/O 2026 Keynote Coverage – The Verge: The 13 Biggest Announcements
CNET Live Recap: Everything Announced at Google I/O 2026
WIRED: Everything Announced at Google I/O 2026
9to5Google: Docs Live and Voice AI in Google Keep
Mashable: All the Gemini Announcements from Google I/O 2026
Thomas: If you have seen Iron Man interacting with Jarvis and designing things by talking and brainstorming together, this is exactly what Google is developing. They also announced Gemini Spark, their answer to OpenAI’s agents, and released Gemini 3.5 Flash, which is three times more expensive than 3.0 Flash.
Google is falling behind in the AI race. They are making big promises, but instead of announcing things they have created, they are announcing things they are going to create. They were set up to win. They had the most money, the most computers, and they have been doing AI for 30 years. Google Search was always AI.
Jonathan: I see the surface benefit, but the reason I do not use dictation is because I organize my thoughts better as I type. Dictation produces the same blank-page syndrome. It is necessary for my productivity that I actually see the page I am typing on.
Thomas: If you are just talking to vanilla ChatGPT or vanilla Grok, you are going to get a vanilla response. You can tune it to have as much personality as you want. Learn to use projects and system prompts.
I created a health-consulting project with a team of advisors: a nutritionist, a personal trainer, a biohacker, and a traditional Chinese medicine doctor. They each have different worldviews and they debate each other. If you unlock projects and create special documentation for them, it dramatically improves the quality of the output, and you get far less generic responses.
Are Humans Cheaper than AI Agents?
According to financial commentator Hedgie Markets on X and reporting from The Verge, Forbes, and GitHub‘s official announcements, major enterprises are confronting unexpectedly high costs from advanced AI coding tools under token-based billing.
Microsoft began canceling most internal Claude Code licenses this week. The company set a full cutoff for June 30, 2026, the end of its fiscal year, and plans to shift thousands of developers toward its own GitHub Copilot CLI tool. Uber’s Chief Technology Officer Praveen Neppalli Naga confirmed internally that the company exhausted its entire 2026 AI budget in the first four months. Claude Code adoption spread rapidly across roughly 5,000 engineers. Average monthly costs ran $150 to $250 per engineer, with power users hitting $500 to $2,000.
GitHub announced in late April that every Copilot plan shifts to usage-based billing on June 1, 2026, replacing fixed premium-request models with GitHub AI Credits tied directly to token consumption. Procurement data from Tropic shows AI-related software prices rose 20% to 37% at renewal across categories.
Enterprises built 2025–2026 plans on the assumption that AI tool costs would keep falling. Heavy usage, especially agentic coding workflows that chain multiple model calls, produced token consumption well above early pilot numbers. In some documented cases, teams found AI spend rivaling or exceeding the payroll of the human roles the tools were meant to augment. Meaningful replacement of human labor at scale would require inference costs to drop by an order of magnitude from current frontier-model levels. The “AI subsidy era” of cheap or effectively unlimited access is ending in real time.
Indie and traditional authors rely on premium AI tools for drafting, editing, marketing copy, newsletters, and light coding. Usage-based pricing and rising base rates create unpredictable bills for power users. The human advantages, voice, curation, emotional judgment, and final quality control, gain a stronger economic moat when raw generation costs rise. Authors who treat AI as a disciplined co-pilot rather than a full replacement maintain better cost control and output quality.
Sources:
The Verge: Microsoft starts canceling Claude Code licenses
Forbes: Uber Burns Its 2026 AI Budget In Four Months On Claude Code
GitHub Blog: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing
Thomas: I watched a software developer working on a project exploring what coding would look like if tokens were free. He had a lot of money and just let the machines run. In one month, he ran up $250,000 worth of token billing. When you are using your $20-a-month Claude subscription, Claude is spending maybe $60 or $80 to give you that subscription. The models are getting much more expensive. Every new data center makes AI more expensive to use.
The irony is that people who are afraid that AI will cost them their jobs are against building new, expensive data centers, but it is the building of those data centers that is making AI so expensive they are going to get to keep their jobs.
The joke is that Murphy’s Law of AI is that the cost of tokens is doubling every year. Tokens are getting astronomically expensive, and it is causing the entire economy to reorient itself around paying for tokens.
Right now is the golden age where there are subsidized tools and for $200 a month you can get $6,000 worth of credits at Claude and vibe-code an app with a Claude Code subscription. You will not be able to do that a year or two from now. There may be no bubble. They are just going to get all of our money.
Jonathan: People are starting to rely on free AI so much that when it is not free anymore, they are not going to know what to do. The habits are not changing.
One of the top podcasts in the US right now is Financial Audit from Caleb Hammer, and the people going on his show are not changing their habits. The $28-for-lunch argument that surfaced this past week is based on the fact that younger generations are not learning to cook.
Thomas: Take the Timeline Chronicler. If it costs you a dollar and saves you an afternoon’s worth of work creating the timeline manually, that is a really good deal. Even at $10, it might still be worth it. The whole industry is assuming that it is more expensive, but it’s still cheaper than doing it yourself. There is a lot of room for AI companies to raise prices where we will just pay it because it is still cheaper than the human alternative.
Right now, they are giving it to us cheap to get us addicted. A lot of the anti-AI people will be using AI five years from now, but they will be using the more expensive AI, having missed out on this subsidized golden window because they got caught up in the moral panic.
Every new technology creates a moral panic. The best one was where doctors claimed the human body could not go over 30 miles an hour and therefore should not ride on trains.
Technology is not evil. People are evil, and people use technology to do evil.
Are Promptonyms Like Elara Voss Haunting Your Writing?
According to a May 19 thread by AI researcher Brian Roemmele on X, Dr. Elara Voss is not a real person. She is a promptonym, a statistically favored name that large language models default to when writers ask for a brilliant female scientist, archivist, or protagonist in science fiction and fantasy.
Models predict the next token based on patterns in training data. Early AI-generated stories featuring “Dr. Elara Voss” entered later datasets and created a feedback loop. The result appears across GPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, Llama, and others. Journalist Max Read first detailed the phenomenon in an August 7, 2025 Substack article, counting 62 books credited to “Elara Voss” on Amazon at that time. By May 2026 the number had grown significantly, with active author pages listing dark romance series under Elara KL Voss and sci-fi titles under Elara Voss. Hundreds more books use the name or close variants as characters.
The same models repeatedly surface Elias Vance or Kael for male leads. Claude often defaults to Marcus Chen or Sarah Chen for professionals and developers. Gemini and others favor Dr. Aris Thorne. Place names such as Whispering Woods and Eldora appear with similar frequency. Wikipedia’s “Signs of AI writing” page now lists Elara Voss and Whispering Woods as recognizable fiction tells.
Authors who use AI for drafting, character creation, or ideation inherit these defaults unless they intervene. On KDP the marketplace already reflects these statistical attractors. Readers increasingly recognize the pattern and label similar books “AI slop,” which hurts discoverability for every title that follows the same template. Model collapse research, including the 2024 Nature paper by Shumailov and colleagues, shows that training on synthetic data erodes diversity. Promptonyms are an early, visible symptom of that process in creative tasks.
Use sophisticated tools like the Character Namer from the patron toolbox. Promptonyms reveal where current models still struggle with true novelty. Authors who combine AI assistance with deliberate human research, cultural specificity, and final voice control produce work that stands out.
Elara is gaining in popularity as a baby name, almost doubling from 2023 to 2025, as parents use AI to brainstorm baby names.
Sources:
Brian Roemmele X thread, May 19, 2026
Max Read, “Who is Elara Voss?”, Read Max Substack, August 7, 2025
Sam Kriss, “Why Does A.I. Write Like … That?”, New York Times Magazine, December 3, 2025
Wikipedia: Signs of AI writing (lists Elara Voss and related tells)
Shumailov et al., “AI models collapse when trained on recursively generated data”, Nature, 2024
Amazon author page and title searches for Elara Voss variants (May 2026)
Community discussions on r/LocalLLaMA, r/ClaudeAI, and r/WritingWithAI (2024–2026)
Jonathan: AI is always going to default to a hierarchical structure. It is not looking for diversity. It gives you the most common, best-performing result, which is the weakness of a single-result output.
Thomas: All of this is a result of lazy, one-sentence prompting like “give me a sci-fi doctor who is an astrophysicist.” If you are typing sentences instead of paragraphs, you are breaking my number-one rule of AI, which is “prompt with paragraphs, not sentences.” You should never type a sentence into ChatGPT or Grok unless you have created a project with a good system prompt. If you are using vanilla GPT and typing a sentence like it is Google, you are going to get the most generic slop back.
You can write your own good prompts and get a better character name, or you can use the Character Namer tool in the Patron Toolbox. My wife helped develop it. She is an expert when it comes to names. The tool uses Social Security Administration data for American names going back 150 years. If your story is not based in the United States, it uses the best historical approximate. It asks you the birth date and location of the character. A character born in 450 AD in Britain gets an Anglo-Saxon name. One born in 1250 AD in Jerusalem gets an Arabic name. It handles fantasy and sci-fi settings, thematic names tied to the character’s description, and it gives you 24 names with rationales for each. That is much safer than lazy prompting and getting “Elara Voss” every time.
ZEITGEIST
Zeitgeist: Light, Fire, and Clarity: What the Latest Baby Name Data Tells Us About the Shifting Culture
According to the Social Security Administration’s May 8, 2026 release and analysis of the raw 2025 birth data files, American parents named their children with a clear directional tilt in 2025. While Liam and Olivia held the top spots for the seventh straight year, the real movement happened below the top 10. Parents moved toward names that evoke light, fire, clarity, strength, and uplift.
Liam remained number one for boys and Olivia for girls. Charlotte climbed to second for girls. Eliana entered the top 10 for the first time. Ava dropped out of the top 10. The top tier changed little. The story lives in the risers and decliners.
Raw count changes from 2024 to 2025 show strong movement toward specific themes. Ailany surged by 4,530 babies. Klarity rose from 87 to 344. Madisson climbed from 203 to 958. Scottie jumped from 1,519 to 2,228. Eloise gained 808. Other notable risers included Kasai (fire), Akari (light/brightness), Ailani, and several “lani” names meaning sky or heaven in Hawaiian. These names share traits: bright, energetic, clear, or expansive, with positive or noble connotations.
Several names tied to the previous cultural wave lost ground. Zendaya fell from 281 to 195. Aubrie dropped from 258 to 163. Many “-den” names (Aiden, Dylan, Jordan) continued sharp declines. Luna, Mia, Camila, and Ava all lost significant absolute numbers. Parents pulled back from 2010s celebrity-linked and heavily stylized spellings while embracing stronger or more luminous alternatives.
Strauss-Howe generational theory places the United States in the late stages of a Fourth Turning, a Crisis era marked by institutional strain and cultural pessimism. The model predicts this phase will resolve into a new High, a period of renewed optimism, stronger institutions, and civic confidence, likely in the 2030s and 2040s. The 2025 babies belong primarily to the Homeland Generation, the Artist archetype. Their Millennial parents are already giving them names suited to the coming High. Light, fire, clarity, and sky/heaven names fit a cultural mood that values hope, strength, and illumination over cynicism or fragmentation. These children will come of age between 2045 and 2055, precisely when the next High should be established.
Baby names function as a leading indicator because parents make emotional, long-term bets on the world they want their children to inhabit. The 2025 data shows a clear move away from grimdark-adjacent aesthetics and toward noble bright values: clarity over moral grayness, light and energy over darkness, strength and uplift over stylized coolness. After years of dominance by cynical, morally complex narratives, parents appear ready for stories and values that emphasize hope, heroism that costs something, and light that actually prevails.
Writers can use this data in two practical ways. First, character names for stories set in the 2040s or 2050s will feel more natural when they draw from the current riser list rather than names that peaked during the 2010s Unraveling. Second, themes of clarity, fire, light piercing darkness, and rebuilding strong foundations will likely resonate more deeply with audiences as the cultural mood continues shifting.
Sources:
SSA Popularity Increase Table 2024–2025
SSA Popularity Decrease Table 2024–2025
Strauss-Howe generational framework as outlined in *The Fourth Turning Is Here* (Neil Howe, 2023) and related analysis
Thomas: My wife is a name nerd. Christmas Day for her is when the Social Security Administration releases their spreadsheet. We have incredibly good name data going back almost 150 years because when they first started collecting this data around 1916, they captured everybody alive at that time. My wife can tell you any name and which decade it was most popular. While she can do it explicitly, most people subconsciously know that a Barbara would not be a baby name today. That is a grandma name.
Female names ebb and flow in popularity. Some male names do not. John has been a steady top-15 name in America for all time, but Bob has fallen off. You very rarely find a young Bob.
The trend is very clear. It is toward bright, energetic, optimistic names. The “Aiden” names from the 1990s, like Jayden, Brayden, and Hayden, are falling off. Tristan is declining. Zendaya fell off a cliff. Ellen dropped dramatically after the Ellen DeGeneres drama. Luna, Maya, Camilla, and Ava have all lost significant numbers.
The very top names are holding steady. Liam and Olivia are still popular. Charlotte is gaining. I am very curious whether we will see a surge in Charles next year, as parents name their children Charlie after Charlie Kirk. We saw a rise in the name Charlie, but Kirk was killed in September, and parents tend to pick names early in the pregnancy. We will not see the Charlie Kirk effect in any meaningful way until 2026 data.
Eliana entered the top 10 for the first time, and Ava dropped out. I think Ava is dropping because there are so many AIs named Ava in fiction. It is a very common AI persona name.
Jonathan: I wonder how much popular franchises like Bridgerton, which is a faux Jane Austen revolution, have contributed to the return of names like Eleanor, older-sounding names that would seem like grandma names. If they are being used in these universes and are young and attractive again, you are going to see a resurgence.
Thomas: This data is public. You can chat with AI about the numbers. In general, AI is very familiar with this data because it is not proprietary. This is very American. A lot of countries in Europe legally forbid certain names, particularly the Germanic countries, which have approved lists of perhaps 100 names. I have a friend from Germany who named his daughter a fantasy name that is against the law in Germany, and there was a big drama over her getting a German passport.
