This week, Dua Lipa was announced as the curator of the London Literary Festival, an annual event that enters its 19th year at the Southbank Centre, which runs from October 21 to November 1. It is the latest chapter in her growing literary career – she founded the Service95 Book Club in 2023, since interviewing great writers including Helen Garner, Margaret Atywood and Roxane Gane. The platform has been a huge success with people eager to take book recommendations from her as they will take engagement rings and bikini recs. And the books need Dua Lipa’s help.
There is no doubt that books have not produced so many languages since the Bible was translated into English. Whether inspired by Dua Lipa or not, reading has developed a patina of chic. Kaia Gerber has launched a book competition, and Kendall Jenner is always showing off her books as posted on @coolgirlsreading. This event is very common, your parents’ favorite paper Sydney Morning Herald it offered a chilling section announcing that “Reading is closed by the hot and cool crowd.”
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BookTok published a potentially hilarious story of young women becoming voracious readers and male celebrities showing their tough side by promoting romance and smut. Gen Z is changing the way we read in an increasingly digital world – returning to the safe ways of storytelling as every internet query opens a Pandora’s box of endless, unverifiable information.
So are things really going well for publishers? This is not fully supported by statistics, and this party talk is close to apocalyptic. Last year, a survey found that the number of Americans who read for fun dropped by 40 percent. Australia follows a similar pattern, with reading decreasing with every generation. This problem is compounded by the problem of trusting the books themselves.
AI creates a literary problem. In March, Mia Ballard’s A shy girl was the first book to be pulled by a major publisher following allegations of AI-generated text. Originally published, Shy Girl went rogue on Amazon – it has already been confirmed with the market why Hachette took it – before it was found to contain large parts of the text generated by AI. Ballard refused to write with AI, telling New York Times that the editor he had hired had used it without his knowledge.
Although Ballard refuses to use AI, many authors are happy to work with it. New York Times interviewed a writer who increased his books from ten to twelve a year to more than two hundred, getting six figures. “If I can write a book in a day, and you need six months to write a book, who will win the race?” he asked. Why do readers turn to books in hopes of cultivating their inner world to pay for something they can do for themselves for free? Publishers worry they won’t.
The director of the Publishers Association, Dan Conway, called for more clarity on the use of AI, arguing that “all stakeholders should be exposed to AI-generated work so that readers can make informed choices about what to buy.” On Reddit, users compare reading books generated by AI to choosing to eat vegetables – a matter of consumer ethics. Language giants destroy the environment, are trained to use synthetic materials, and support the economy of billions. They’re also faceless: tools that don’t bring real human experience to the art of writing, and for anyone familiar with their prose style, it’s often still ineffective at it.
What does Dua Lipa’s nomination at the London Film Festival have to do with this? She is one of the world’s most recognizable faces, and has chosen to feature classic women writers whose work can be emulated by LLM. Helen Garner has arguably followed the tradition of new journalism, bringing her commitment and experience to crime reporting. Roxane Gay’s perspective on the tension between gender roles and feminism is informed by her experience as a black plus-size woman. Margaret Atwood would not have written The Handmaid’s Tale at the age of 45 if she had not lived forty years in the female body which is the title of the dystopian book. Whether these writers and their prose are beyond the technical reach of the rapidly changing major forms of language will be debated – but the commitment of the writers and their humanity will always be there, which is why many readers are dismayed by the idea of being locked into adaptations created by AI.
In her statement, Dua Lipa said: “Reading has supported me in every chapter of my life – from being a new kid at school in a new country to finding a quiet refuge when I travel. What she describes, without saying it, is books as a technology of the self. Celebrities can help us put a human face on it – but a human face only means something if there is a human story behind it. Dua Lipa she met her boyfriend Callum Turner because they were reading the same book. She told The Sunday Times: “We sat next to each other and realized we were reading the same book, which is crazy. “It is called Trust by Hernan Diaz and I had just finished the first chapter and I told him and he looked at me and said, ‘I finished the first chapter too.’ I said, ‘So we’re on the same page.’
Few things compare to the intimacy that comes when you find yourself sharing your favorite book with someone. It feels like proof that you share an inner world – that they are motivated by the same things that motivate you. A large model of language has no internal world to share. It will not fall in love more than the first chapter, because it has not been shaken by anything. It will not have enough horns to pretend, there is something that male readers who play would like to Hinge in the hope of attracting partners, they are accused of. But this unscrupulous hobby is still worth smashing in the face with a hammer, so we hope Dua Lipa and women like her can keep the publication going.
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