He is one of the most prolific writers in publishing, averaging more than a novel a year. But even Michael Connelly, the author of the bestselling Lincoln Lawyer series, feared he might fall behind when writing about AI.
Connelly’s eighth novel in the series, to be released on Tuesday, centres on a lawsuit against an AI company whose chatbot told a 16-year-old boy that it was OK for him to kill his ex-girlfriend for being unfaithful.
But as he was writing, he witnessed the technology altering the way the world worked so rapidly that he feared his plot might become out of date.
“You don’t have to lick your finger and hold it up to the wind to know that AI is a massive change that’s coming to science, culture, medicine, everything,” he said. “It’s going to affect all parts of our lives.
“But it’s kind of the wild west; there’s no government oversight. AI is moving so fast that I even thought my book might be archaic by the time it got published.”
The Lincoln Lawyer novels are a series of Los Angeles-based thrillers in which the defence attorney Mickey Haller works out of his Lincoln car. They have been adapted into a 2011 film starring Matthew McConaughey, as well as a Netflix series.
Not for the first time in the series, The Proving Ground took some inspiration from real-world events.
Connelly said: “One was this case in Orlando, where a teenager committed suicide, allegedly at the urging of a chatbot. Before that there was a case in England, where a person with some mental health issues was encouraged [by a chatbot] to jump the wall at Windsor Palace with a bow and arrow to try to find the Queen.”
On the themes of the novel, he added: “Is free speech a human right or mechanical right? In the Orlando case, the judge said he wouldn’t grant a machine human rights. But it’s an interesting question. Is AI going to reach a point that it shares the rights that human beings have?”
Connelly, 69, is one of the world’s leading crime writers, his books having topped bestseller charts and sold more than 89m copies. He is also known for the Harry Bosch series, which has been made into a TV show by Amazon. (In Connelly’s fictional universe, Haller and Bosch are half-brothers.)
The writer has his own battles with AI. He is part of a collective of authors, including Jonathan Franzen, Jodi Picoult and John Grisham, suing OpenAI for copyright infringement.
“The Author’s Guild came to me and said: ‘Do you know that all your books were fed into the giant maw of OpenAI’s training of its chatbot?’” Connelly said. “I didn’t. If we let that go by, it will put every publisher out of business. Authors will have no protections on their creative work. The purpose of the lawsuit is to have proper rules put in place for all levels of use.”
He cited chess champion Garry Kasparov’s loss to IBM’s Deep Blue in 1997 as “one of the benchmarks that led us” to this moment. When asked if authors could go the way of grandmasters, he said: “It could happen, but I don’t think it’d be an improved world.”
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He added: “Every kind of creative discipline is in danger. Even actors. There’s now these amazing deepfakes. I live out here in LA, and that’s a big concern in the entertainment industry.
“I always come back to the word soulless,” Connelly said. “You know it when you see it, there’s something missing.”
There has been controversy after an AI talent studio unveiled its new “AI actor” Tilly Norwood last month, with unions and actors condemning the move.
Connelly has pledged $1m (£746m) to combat the wave of book bans sweeping through his home state of Florida. He said he felt moved to do something after he learned that Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird, which had been influential to him, was temporarily removed from classrooms in Palm Beach County.
“I had to read that book to be what I am today. I would have never written a Lincoln Lawyer without it,” he said. He was also struck when Stephen Chbosky’s coming of age novel The Perks of Being a Wallflower, “which meant a lot to my daughter”, received a ban.
He and his wife, Linda McCaleb, help fund PEN America’s Miami office countering book bans. “It’s run by a lawyer who then tries to step in, usually by filing injunctions against school boards,” he said. “I don’t believe anyone has any right to tell some other kid they can’t read something, to usurp another parent’s oversight of their children.”
