Rick Moss is a multi-disciplinary artist living in Brooklyn, New York. His most recent novel, Once a Man (2026, Rare Bird), is a sweeping, poetically rendered epic of survival, love, and the perilous promises of AI technology.
Moss is the author of three previous novels. The darkly comic Impossible Figures (2020), employs multiple, looping narratives to unfold the tale of Ranger, a once-celebrated conceptual artist making a desperate comeback attempt. Ranger recruits Oscar Hiller, a self-destructive young physicist on the verge of a quantum theory breakthrough, to stage the most consequential art performance of all time—one that threatens to unravel time and existence in the process.
Ebocloud (2010), Moss’s first novel, is a near-future thriller about a massive social media movement. Cited at the time of its release for its predictions of a coming “social singularity,” it was included in the syllabus for a Duke University literature course, alongside William Gibson’s Neuromancer and Dave Eggers’ The Circle. It features a unique novel-within-a-novel structure.
Moss’s second book, Tellers (2016), stitches together a series of short stories with an overarching narrative thread. Bestselling author Ryan Mathews characterized Tellers as “a Matryoshka doll of a book—stories nesting inside stories nesting inside stories.”
Moss earned his degree in fine arts from The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and California College of the Arts. Throughout his career in publishing and media, he has applied his design skills to a broad range of print, web, and video projects. He was a founding principle of the online business forum, RetailWire, where he oversaw editorial and marketing content. He publishes his songwriting under the name, Rock Moses.
You can view his work at: rickmoss.art
Sylvia Plath committed suicide a month after her only novel, The Bell Jar, was published in the U.K. We can assume the vast majority of readers were aware of that fact or learned at some time after reading the book, and certainly knowing that the story was reflective of the author’s own struggle with depression colored their reading experience and even, I’d argue, their comprehension of the author’s words. This added dimension—the visceral connection with the author’s life experiences—will not exist for AI-generated fiction, nor non-fiction for that matter.
I’m on the side of those who believe AI will be able to produce rich, engaging, emotive work, but I see it as two-dimensional for that reason. Much will depend on the reader, the topic, the genre, and other variables, but I think it’s likely readers will prefer the feeling of enrichment that comes with knowing a human struggled to produce the work, and they’ll often want to know more about what motivated the author to spend months or years devoted to its creation.
Due to this added dimension, I feel confident human-penned literature will remain on a higher plane than AI work. My fear is, however, that very few writers will make a living at it because AI work will overwhelm publishers and perhaps even bring them down. (Why pay for a book when you can ask your favorite LLM to write you a perfectly appealing novel based on everything it knows about you and your proclivities, ambitions, etc.?) I hope in ten years we’ll still be debating whether humans write better books than LLMs, but if no one can make a living as a writer, it will greatly reduce the possibility humans can stay ahead in this competition.