[Apologies in advance if Twitter drama is too niche for you to have heard of, or if you are one of those Twitter people for whom this is ancient history since it happened in the beginning of the week and that might as well be the Paleozoic era]
Earlier this week, there was a phenomenal amount of outrage happening on Twitter over a website called Prosecraft, and I'm honestly a bit baffled by it. The site has now been taken down due to the outrage, but from what I'm able to gather, it was basically a site that compiled granular statistics about the text of various books.
For instance, word count, most common words, percentage of passive voice, percentage of adverbs, percentage of adverbs ending in -ly vs adverbs not ending in -ly, how all of these categories compare to other books.
Basically, totally useless micro-analysis that has always nonetheless been fun for word nerds and book lovers to see laid out in graphs and word clouds, etc.
The site has apparently been around for years, but recently, authors on Twitter found out about it and are FURIOUS. They're ripping into the guy who made it, Benji Smith, like really letting him have it, threatening lawsuits, bashing his motives, his intelligence, his ethics, you name it. It's...a lot.
I think if this site had gone viral last year, before the advent of ChatGPT, it would have garnered a very different reaction, with word nerds passing it around and being like "look at this cute site" and "huh, apparently my favorite writer's most common word is 'implement'" or other such trivialities that the internet has always been the perfect place for. I can't even count how many times I've seen posts about the most common words and phrases used in Harry Potter vs. Twilight vs. The Hunger Games - people love this meaningless stuff, and Smith just scaled it up.
To be fair, we probably would have gotten into some arguments about the criteria Smith invented, such as the highly subjective "vividness" measurement, which purports to analyze how descriptive the prose is based on individual words used. And debated whether Smith's stated intent — of analyzing published writing in this clinical way in order to help people improve their own writing — actually could help anyone be a better writer (my money's on No, That's Not What Makes A Good Book or Good Writing, but have fun with your nerdiness).
But for the most part, it may have been a conversation topic for a little while, but probably not The Ultimate Representation of All That Is Evil and Exploitative of Writers' Work In The World, like it is right now.
From where I sit, there are a few factors feeding into the perfect storm that has created this hurricane of fury raining down on Smith:
The advent of AI makes a ton of authors deeply uneasy about any computer database/algorithm having access to the text of their books. My sense is that people fear the slippery slope — sure, today the algorithm is just generating word clouds, but who's to stop it from one day being used as training data to train a future bot to generate entire books? This is unfortunately a very real concern, but it also isn't Smith's fault.
The Writers Strike and Actors Strike are currently highlighting how much labor is devalued and frequently used without consent or compensation, and this can fit into that trend, if we interpret the statistical analysis as belittling of the source texts, or if running texts through an algorithm is an example of using writers' labor without compensation. Again, a valid concern and a very thorny topic, but since the site was not monetized, I don't think it fits so clearly into this exploitative framing, and I'm also not clear on whether it violated fair use rules since it was clearly providing commentary on the text. (Does every post about most common phrases in HP or Twilight violate fair use as well?)
Authors feel judged by a lot of the criteria. I can understand that to some degree — eg, the abovementioned "vividness" category — but most of the criteria are not value judgments; they're just statistics, like percentage of adverbs ending in -ly. The site didn't provide quality rankings, just percentiles to contextualize how books compare to each other in these particular dimensions. How much passive voice or how many adverbs a book uses isn't a value judgment — to me, the variety even highlights the diversity of styles that can successfully produce a great book.
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At the end of the day, I'm not here to try to say that Benji Smith did nothing wrong with Prosecraft -- maybe he did, maybe he didn't; that's up to the legal people to suss out and I thankfully never went to law school.
But what I AM trying to say is that the outrage is clearly stemming from much, much bigger and broader issues than this dinky little website that no one ever heard of before last week, and Smith provides a convenient focal point for people to vent that fear and outrage.
It's much easier to lash out at some tech bro than to, say, make Disney give a darn about writers, that's for sure.
Thank you for reading this edition of SM’s Movie Cramming Project, where I, SM, mostly watch movies so that you don’t have to, but occasionally also give the internet a stern talking-to and encourage it to think about what it’s done.
And I have no idea how many adverbs it has, but my story “Moon Melody” is now available in Jewish Futures: Science Fiction from the World’s Oldest Diaspora. I’ve been told it’s a good one; let me know what you think.