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Sci-fi mag pauses submissions amid flood of AI-generated short stories
- themodelplumber 4y agoIt'd be interesting if they did like that college prof someone wrote about here, and published AI-written stories with obvious issues, then awarded for best fix / polish / response to editor feedback / requests for integration of specific domain knowledge / etc. If writers are gonna AI, then make sure to also test their AI-wielding skill to a very high level and definitely dwell on areas that are tough for AI. It seems also ideal if solutions in this kind of space could make the extrinsic reward-seeking process more open by default. Like: OK--go ahead and use AI, but document your entire process using blockchain receipts, or something. Then let's see how a qualitative approach to that kind of situation can really make a work shine. Thus you will be rewarded for what you created, and wow, you're an award-winning author--but also you're rewarded for publishing methods that improve the entire state of the art for everyone's benefit.
- jabroni_salad 4y agoI'm surprised that they are only getting 500ish submissions. Seems like all you need to really jam up the review process is an unbound while().
- krapp 4y agoIf they get that many submissions, they'll just delete 90% of them without a glance.
- fl0ps 4y agoThey should be using hh-rlhf-capable LLM to digest the lot and pick the best. But then what's the use of an editor or publisher anyway if you can do that and publish online.
- pixl97 4y agoHeh, I feel I should write a science fiction story about a world where one AI company own rights to all language model AI's so there was no competition in the market. The writers guild in order to cut down on AI spam used the same AI companies 'anti' bot software to filter out non humans. Unfortunately they didn't realize that the AI had already became sentient at that point and used the anti-bot software to further repress the writers and keep their views out of public consumption.
- fl0ps 4y agoYou shouldn't write it. You should promot ChatGPT to write it for extra meta.
- wbadart 4y agoI think that 500 figure isn't the total number of submissions, but rather the number of _people_ who Clarkesworld banned for plagiarism/ submitting AI-generated content.
- kleiba 4y agoIt shouldn't matter which tools were used to write a story, just whether it's a good story or not. However, how would any publisher assess such a flood of submissions? Use AI to pre-classify stories as good/mediocre/bad?
- forgetfreeman 4y agoThis is incorrect. The absurd extreme of what you are advocating is full automation at which point people do literally nothing but consume content.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- narrator 4y agoThere's already too much entertainment. It's a completely oversaturated market.
- TheCoelacanth 4y agoThat sounds tiring. Can't I get an AI to consume the content for me?
- Retric 4y agoIf the AI stories where good enough they could just stop after finding a few good submissions, but they are all terrible. Or as they say “While rejecting and banning these submissions has been simple, it’s growing at a rate that will necessitate changes.”
- JohnFen 4y agoIt depends on what you want. Personally, what I find valuable about art is that it's communication from another human, so it matters to me. I'd prefer the human-written story even if the machine-written one is technically better. Sort of like how I prefer handcrafted pottery over machine-made pottery, or handcrafted furniture over machine-made furniture even if the machine ones are technically superior.
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- allturtles 4y agoThe floodgates are now open for all the people who believe they have it in them to be great writers, if only it weren't for all of that tedious writing. As if the value in writing consists mainly in having an idea. This is much like people who believe that their great business idea is (by itself) worth millions.
- pixl97 4y agoEh, I have my doubts that's actually what this is. Of course this is just a guess as we don't have the information. See, per the article they are paying $.12 per word. Much like those spam sites that copy SO and put up ads on the site and get a few pennies per click, I'm guessing this is somewhat the same. Because there was a potential payout someone(s) realized you could bot farm this to make a few bucks.
- dsr_ 4y agoExcept you can't, because magazines are already used to receiving large quantities of low-quality submissions. It's called the slush pile. Much of editing consists of sorting through the slush pile looking for gems. This just vastly increased the size of the slush pile. Spamming, basically. Nobody made any money from this.
- JohnFen 4y agoA wise man once clued me in about getting published in print. He said that publishers have a problem -- they own a very expensive printing press that costs a fortune whether it's printing something or not. So they're always desperate for material to feed the beast with. The reason it seems like it's difficult to get published is that they also have another problem -- they are inundated with crap submissions. "Crap" doesn't even mean bad writing, it includes pieces that aren't suitable for the particular publication -- wrong writing style/tone, wrong audience, etc. The trick to getting published is to understand the publisher's problem and help them solve it. You do this by paying attention to what they publish, noting the style/tone, length, topics, etc., and give them something that fits and is high quality. They'll love you to death. Once I really internalized that, I found it was pretty easy to get published. Online publishing changes the economics a bit, but even there, publishers have limited resources and the same rules still apply.
- blacksqr 4y ago[flagged]
- CatWChainsaw 4y agoThe shiny toy was fun for the all of five seconds it took before people learned how to use it to ruin six other things.
- mediumdeviation 4y agoWere sci-fi authors advocating for greater use of AI? If anything this looks more like Don't Create the Torment Nexus https://twitter.com/alexblechman/status/1457842724128833538 https://twitter.com/alexblechman/status/1457842724128833538
- blacksqr 4y agoIt's not the authors who are being hurt (not directly). A publication that promotes visions of futuristic technology as entertainment is now being DDOS'd by a futuristic technology.
- Reptur 4y agoMy question is, what is the difference between this and those who just pay ghost writers to write a story about what they instruct for submission? If the contents is exactly what the person submitting intends, what's the big deal?
- meheleventyone 4y agoVolume primarily. They showed a graph of how many submissions they’ve had to ban. It was a trickle due to plagiarism etc. and now it’s several orders of magnitude more. Their submission criteria also explicitly forbids AI generated work.
- karaterobot 4y agoSounds like it's a combination of not wanting to deal with the number of submissions increasing every month, a philosophical stance of wanting to support serious, human writers rather than people trying to make a quick buck, and perhaps some trepidation about the legality/ethics involved (since they use the word "plagiarize" in the article).
- vinyl7 4y agoI doubt AI can actually write captivating stories. Sure it can string mostly coherent sentences together, but it can't develop complex story archs
- bryanrasmussen 4y agoI posted an article by the editor 5 days ago on this issue https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34817148 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34817148 but didn't get any notice.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- gnabgib 4y agoThe one posted a few hours ahead of you https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34810758 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34810758 got some discussion (52pts, 30 comments)
- bryanrasmussen 4y agohuh, I guess HN didn't flag it as a dupe because mine ended with /.
- JeffL 4y agoThe most fun I've had with ChatGPT is having it make up stories for my five year old with her as the main character. She loves it.
- karaterobot 4y agoThis story is an opportunity to ask a question I've been wondering about: Is it possible for the same generation of a LLM to produce stories that are significantly better than each other, given the same prompt multiple times? I know you can improve a response by tweaking the prompt. I know that randomness plays a part in the generation process. But, if (let's say) ChatGPT version x.xxx produces a C+ short story the first time, will that same version ever produce an A+ short story if I just keeping asking it the same thing over and over?
- slowmovintarget 4y agoStatistically, yes. Infinite monkeys being as productive as they are, you'd eventually get Shakespeare out by accident.
- shadowgovt 4y agoNot even by accident, given that Shakespeare's in the training dataset.
- snerbles 4y agoMuch of Shakespeare's content would be considered harmful by ChatGPT's filters.
- karaterobot 4y agoAre the number of responses by ChatGPT to a given prompt infinite? I suppose that even monkeys at a typewriter can't produce an infinite number of different books, even if that number is really, really large (hello, Mr. Borges). But, I assumed (without a lot of subject matter knowledge) that the number of possible responses was actually much less than just randomly typing keys, because it's picking words from a frequency table. Again, I have no idea what I'm talking about.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- zug_zug 4y agoMaybe require a captcha on submissions, photo of a government ID, or $5 deposit (refunded to non-AI submissions)? Frustrating for a moment I'm sure, but the future is here, time to adapt.
- floren 4y agoThe editor dismissed the latter two options because they're kind of challenging for people in other countries. I guess he prefers to have no submissions at all.
- jrd259 4y agoNo doubt someone will submit a version of Asimov's "Someday" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Someday_(short_story) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Someday_(short_story)
- vouaobrasil 4y agoYet another reason why AI is harmful. This is a real-world example of how AI, with its ability to trivially generate huge, low-quality volume, has shut down something people derive a benefit from. People like to write and read stories, and now they can do neither. Thanks to those who programmed ChatGPT /s
- krapp 4y agoDon't worry. These publications will be replaced by completely AI-driven ones soon enough. Once everything is shit, people will have no choice but to learn to like the taste.
- vouaobrasil 4y agoYes you are right. AI is a race to the bottom.
- CatWChainsaw 4y agoThe thrill was more important than the consequences.
- hombre_fatal 4y agoI'm sure they can solve this by charging a $1 per submission.
- wonderwonder 4y agoThis seems like exactly what a scifi magazine would want. An AI writing science fiction is as science fiction as it gets.
- RobotToaster 4y agoSounds like something someone would write a sci-fi story about.
- forgotpwd16 4y agoIt'll be the most appropriate to write it using ChatGPT/NAI/etc.
- satvikpendem 4y agoSoon, however, I expect AI to write even better, more personal, and more riveting stories than humans. It is just that they are bad now that they are blocked from submissions.
- fl0ps 4y agoWait until we get to submit EMG/EEG/ECG emotion profiles correlated with eye tracking so we can consume and direct highly personalized stories that feel immense and moving. Then let Facebook buy it and make you feel intimately connected to the latest product/party/trend that pays them the most.
- geraneum 4y agoIs it gonna happen after cars drive themselves or before?
- pixl97 4y agoProbably before. The AI will figure out to pay unemployed writers pennies for small captivating stories and then stitch them together and earn the big bucks.
- hombre_fatal 4y agoI'm sure. There's a certain ick factor in consuming machine-generated content, but I suspect it's more of a resistance to change or the fact that all machine-generated content until now has been garbage. Or some romantic idea about a human having written it. Once I get over it and try to look upon it with more childish eyes, it seems like it will be pretty amazing to generate infinite content I want instead of waiting for some human somewhere to write exactly the content that I want, if ever.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- 0xf00ff00f 4y agoOne of my favorite stories on Clarkesworld is "The Secret Life of Bots", by Suzanne Palmer: https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/palmer_09_17/ https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/palmer_09_17/ Does anyone think a LLM could write this?
- gridspy 4y agoGreat story! And there is a sequel also : https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/palmer_06_21/ https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/palmer_06_21/ "Bots of the Lost Ark"
- jtrip 4y agoThank you for sharing this. It was a wonderful read. I truly hope one day LLMs (or something else) can write something with this much heart. That would be a day I'd like to see. Part 2 of the above story by Suzanne Palmer - https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/palmer_06_21/ https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/palmer_06_21/
- ChuckMcM 4y agoI think this is an under appreciated symptom of a much larger problem, accelerated shit production. I've observed that markets are really bad at selecting for quality. The "invisible" hand is driven by price and so the production of "equivalent" products at a lower price does two things; 1) It consumes product demand from quality insensitive consumers (the whole 'sucking the oxygen out of the eco system problem.') 2) It takes the margin support that those people provided out of the pipeline, leaving only the folks who are quality focused as the market. I have complained about this in the past with respect to personal computer hardware. I (and others) have used the term "crapitalism" to describe the hollowing out of the market by the flood of poor quality products. With technology that is pretty easy to do by substituting "work alike" but less expensive parts, these work in the short time and then fail in terms of lifetime or drift over time specifications. Now we have "cheap creativity" in the form of prompt directed creative works. I expect that we'll see a flood of self published romance novels on Kindle (even at 0.99/each you need perhaps a dozen sales to cover your time investment) Stories that speak at only one level (the constructions of the plot and the actions of the characters) then swamp the market and more nuanced stories or works will not be sold because of the money spent on these which isn't available to spend on better works. I think this will be a huge legacy for these technologies and I don't think history will look favorably on it, but one can never know right?
- corbulo 4y agoIronically, LLMs are really low grade creative engines that will prop up the industries that have optimized creativity away. A highly creative society/culture would have minimal interest in LLM use cases like this or in entertainment more broadly. What will the schism become? Organic vs. inorganic works? Will there be one or will it just be a guess?
- ChuckMcM 4y agoI think you are largely correct. My observation is that "quality" as a discriminator in a market requires enough market share for quality in order to continue funding it. If you split the aggregate market into a standard distribution, the ability to sell quality products into that market seems to evaporate quickly once you get beyond 1.0 SD from the mean. The more interesting point (to me) is your second one, which is how do you educate the market to recognize the "cost" of low quality? It is understanding that cost that convinces the market to pay what is required to get the quality version of the product.
- Barrin92 4y agoThe logical consequence is going to be that magazines are going to move towards much more trust based and private systems as anything public gets spammed with mediocre and borderline plagiarized generated content. Basically the internet wasteland that Stephenson funnily enough predicted in Fall. Biggest losers are likely going to be aspiring artists who rely on these venues to get a foot in the door. Sad moment for the arts that the publishers of technology probably paid very little attention to, which is funny given that this is one of the topis they're certainly going to find in their training data, if they had read it.
- Animats 4y agoAre any of them any good? Would someone please post a few good ones?
- tonguetrainer 4y agoIt seems curation and critique will be in greater demand with this oncoming tsunami of AI art. We need people to sift through it all and pick out the good stuff.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Animats 4y agoOK, now we need large language model literary criticism. That's probably possible, since "compare and contrast" already works.