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Sci-fi becomes real as renowned magazine closes submissions due to AI writers
- ChuckMcM 4y agoAlso discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34885253 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34885253
- dredmorbius 4y agoAnd a week ago based on Neil Clarke's statement: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34810758 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34810758>
- n0us 4y agoCheckout "INFINITE ODYSSEY MAGAZINE" which is only AI-generated art. I'll use the term "art" here because there must be some human skill involved. Personally I'm not able to get results as good as theirs when I use these tools. There are some really cool image series they've put out. https://www.infiniteodyssey.net/ https://www.infiniteodyssey.net/
- krapp 4y ago> I'll use the term "art" here because there must be some human skill involved. I mean, there's human skill in creating the prompts but AI alone is capable of this level of quality. You can follow any AI art tag on Instagram and see for yourself.
- eikenberry 4y agoThe skill is in designing, building and training up the AI. The prompter is providing such a tiny amount of input that it is hard to say they did much anything at all in comparison.
- jointpdf 4y agoThe skill is in creating the training data in the first place. Training a model is hardly a skill. It’s more like playing Tamagotchi—check on it once in a while to make sure it hasn’t died, and guess at ways to make it happier in the future.
- p1esk 4y agoI agree with your first statement, and disagree with the second one. Training a new, non-trivial model is 1/3 craft, 1/3 science, and 1/3 art. There are not very many people in the world capable of training GPT-4 level models or beating state of the art in image generation.
- yamtaddle 4y agoLike a lot of people in high-level positions in organizations, whom we often credit with "creation" of various things. Often they receive far more credit than the ones who did the actual work. Famous painters who just sketch in the piece and let nameless assistants "draw the rest of the fucking owl", producers who don't do much but get to claim a lot of credit, musical "artists" who don't write their music or play any of the instruments on their albums (that'd be work for some nameless musicians or, these days, maybe just a studio engineer with some electronics), choose their own clothes for public appearances ("they're just so creative, don't you think? What provocative choices!") or really do much more than provide some raw material to an autotune system for the vocals it will produce, and learn dance moves that someone else came up with. Uncredited script-fixers. The ghost-written "autobiography". The shared-pen-name or author-as-a-brand (but ghost writers do all the first drafts). The authentic and personal self-promoting blog where all the post-writing is actually outsourced. Politicians who call each other traitors on the radio then go golf together that same afternoon, and don't even bother to bring it up. It's all fake as hell already. Kayfabe. Pro Wrestling is as real as most of it (so, not at all) Now everyone can be the do-nothing "idea guy" producer and take all the credit. Democratization of artistic parasitism. The meatless alternative to exploiting actual humans. Truly, the brink of a revolution.
- mr_toad 4y ago
- mistrial9 4y agono human can play drums like this drum machine! </s>
- krapp 4y agoYou say that as if professional music doesn't use drum loops all the time.
- bawolff 4y agoI feel like we're in the early days of photography. How can there be skill when the camera mechanically captures the scene perfectly?
- rcme 4y agoNot to discount the photographer's eye, but painting a scene does take a lot more skill than taking a photograph. And photography is largely dying thanks to the smartphone. I like your point that we're entering a new age we don't quite understand yet, but some things will probably be lost as well.
- galleywest200 4y ago> And photography is largely dying thanks to the smartphone. I am not so sure about this statement. I would argue that photography has possibly been more prolific than it has been in the past. If you mean "manual photography where the user manipulates shutter speed, ISO, and aperture" then I still am unsure about this as Instagram is a huge boon to that industry as well.
- rcme 4y agoI mean photography as an artistic medium.
- thot_experiment 4y agoWhat? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills over here, how is photography DYING because of the smartphone? It would not surprise me if there's more fantastic photography being created in 2023 than in any previous year, and I say this as someone who will let go of my fully manual 50 when you pry it from my cold dead hands.
- rcme 4y agoI think it's a pretty basic law of supply and demand: increase supply and value goes down. Sure, there's lots of "good" (mostly AI assisted) photography, and its value is mostly worthless. Take Instagram for instance. If you use it, do you even remember a photograph you've seen in the last month? Things are so ephemeral now. Most things are not worth remembering.
- themodelplumber 4y agoAh man, the fingers on that blue-eyed knight. I love this hands issue with AI art. Is there a story about that?
- eikenberry 4y agoI was wondering which way this would go when I saw the title. Seemed equally possible it was due to people turning in AI generated articles as it was that the publisher decided it didn't need submissions anymore as it would use an AI to generate the articles. My guess is that we'll see more of both.
- mr_toad 4y agoIf I can ask an AI to write me a story, why would I pay a publisher?
- yamtaddle 4y agoAI's gonna need a competent developmental editor, and to be applied incrementally with human decisions and input in between, for at least a while longer (we'll see if it keeps progressing past that—seems likely, but one never knows) [EDIT] To be clear, it won't need those things to produce a story at all, but AI-assisted stories that have had significant human input applied will be notably better than wholly-AI ones (the kind of on-demand storytelling you're alluding to) for some time yet.
- bonsaibilly 4y agoEven leaving aside the fact that 90% of the slop an “AI” crapped out wouldn’t be worth reading in the first place, of what value is the culture of absolute solipsism you’re proposing? I would think we’re all rather beyond the age of asking our parents to tell us a story about a pretty unicorn and being satisfied with whatever meandering narrative they supply — is that really all you think books are? There’s no meaning the author was conveying, no value in a shared culture experiencing and interpreting the same work and building a common understanding, this can all just be effortlessly replaced by endless atomized autogenerated slop for piggies?
- lmm 4y agoPlenty of human-written books are bad. There are already genres where the way to get rich seems to be to crap out a narrative that hits the right keywords (or claim that you have - who's going to check?), tick the right representation checkboxes, pay the right influencers and bot farms to make it go viral on social media, and tada, there's your bestseller. While AI-generated books are not very good at the moment, there's nothing that inherently makes them better or worse than human-written books; ultimately it's the content that counts. I've been saying for years that curation is now a bigger problem than creation. AI is only accelerating the existing trend.
- fwungy 4y agoTang is fake, but it still tastes good.
- pizzaknife 4y agoahhh wait so if AI is authoring scifi, thats autobiography?
- arp242 4y agoSci-fi was that AI would be able to write great stories. Reality is that people flood submissions low-effort boring crap. You probably can use AI tools/ChatGPT to write interesting stories, or use its output as a starting point (I'm not sure if it would be less effort than just writing a story from scratch though). But that's of course not what's happening. First rule of designing anything is what I would call Tucker's Second Law[1]: "if some cunt can make a buck by completely fucking over your system then that cunt will completely fuck over your system because that cunt is a cunt." This is a huge problem with a lot of different things, ranging from email spam to how the "make a quick buck" type of hucksters have taken over cryptocurrencies to how nations design things like their tax and benefits systems. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mss7ZNIEhfo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mss7ZNIEhfo
- humanrebar 4y agoSounds like you need to (re)read Snow Crash and (re)watch Idiocracy.
- arp242 4y agoWell, not all sci-fi obviously. In many ways even the more depressive/dystopian sci-fi "got it wrong", as in the stories the reasons AI (and technology in general) is abused is often by some big powerful entity or entities (government, corporations, mob bosses, etc.) as part of its design. In reality it's abused by "the little people" who don't have any power or aspirations for it, and they do so for reasons that are banal and boring: to make a quick buck.
- williamcotton 4y agoAuthentically Human in a World of ChatGPT: https://williamcotton.com/articles/authentically-human-in-a-world-of-chat-gpt https://williamcotton.com/articles/authentically-human-in-a-... Argues for public infrastructure for identity verification.
- rst 4y agoNot sure how this is supposed to prevent a correctly verified, genuinely authentic human from pasting ChatGPT output into a submission box, and claiming it as their own.
- williamcotton 4y agoIt sure as hell slows down the flood of bots doing the same!
- rst 4y agoUntil one of those humans figures out how to write a Chrome extension that automates things... which, sadly, is something a lot of them would rather do than learn how to write.
- williamcotton 4y agoOnly one submission per public key? You’re right, though, this is not as straightforward as it originally seemed!
- flangola7 4y agoProbably the same way a stolen iPhone is rendered useless without the real owner's account password: software, hardware, and servers that work closely together to disallow unauthorized types of use. Even if you found a way, your identifier will be taken off the whitelist once discovered.
- bruiseralmighty 4y agoIts not so much a problem for the government to be metering out private keys on proof of heartbeat, but rather that it will always want to tie them to an actual identity. Nobody wants to or has enough trust in telecommunications to present their driver's license in order to participate in an online forum. If DoD really could provide a private key to bypass captcha tests then it could be useful, but there is a zero percent chance that it doesn't get tied back to people with real-world consequences almost immediately. A persistent, costly ID for online communications and commerce is good and well implemented in an OS like Urbit, but relying on DoD maintaining them is too risky given the current laws around government surveilling, policing, and an ascending domestic 'war on terror'.
- ilamont 4y agoSpam submissions will stop if there is a real cost imposed on the people wasting the magazine's time with passive income/side hustle schemes based on AI, content farms, or whatever. Assign a token fee, refundable in full as long as the submission meets the stated requirements and doesn't trigger the baloney detector. Even if the story is not accepted for publication, a real writer will get the fee back. The editor says he has some kind of system to detect bogus submissions, but it apparently doesn't scale or is based on manual review. He has to review the real submissions anyway, so the only ones who end up paying are the content farm/AI spammers.
- BeetleB 4y agoNot too long ago, these magazines didn't accept electronic submissions. You were required to print it (conforming to a certain format), and mail it. The rationale at the time was that the editors weren't going to read it on a screen, and so you should print it instead of making them do it. Seems like a simple solution. If a manuscript is accepted, only then request the electronic version.
- Fomite 4y agoThat heavily restricts the audience you can accept submissions from.
- fishtoaster 4y agoYeah, it's hard to come up with good solutions here. Maybe: Charge a dollar to submit, then get it refunded back when someone reviews it and confirms that it's not obviously GPTrash? That'd be a bit of a pain, handling those refunds and managing complaints from real authors falsely-identified as spammers (and spammers correctly identified, but hoping to argue their way through). Seems like the sort of thing that'd need software to mediate so you can easily click a button to do the refunds and some third-party company fields complaints. But then you run into the problem that such a system would cost money to build and maintain, which'd require charging Clarkesworld a fee, and they'd apparently have trouble paying that. Maybe the SaaS providing this service keeps some percentage of the dollar that submission pays that's identified as a spammer, but that sets up a terrible conflict of interest... I dunno, it's an interesting problem. One that I'm glad I don't need to immediately solve. :S
- rst 4y agoThey're trying to figure out what to do, but have already rejected these ideas for good reasons: https://twitter.com/clarkesworld/status/1628049689374334980 https://twitter.com/clarkesworld/status/1628049689374334980 A dollar isn't nearly enough to deter most of the crowd that's flooding Clarkesworld -- and much more than that would start to be a real burden for submissions from non-Western countries which they're actively soliciting. Current detection tech is too unreliable to trust and too expensive for them to run in bulk. And going through the submissions pile is already a tedious and thankless job. (BTW, part of their problem is that some sleazy "get rich quick with ChatGPT" guides were explicitly telling people to have it write some crap story and submit the result to Clarkesworld -- which is ridiculous. The mag is quite selective, and the fraction of sweated-over-by-human submissions that get publication, and a check, was already quite low.)
- Godel_unicode 4y agoWhat if I told you that the best way to make a quick buck with chatgpt is to write a bunch of crappy articles about how to make money with chatgpt, then stick ads on them. It’s a gold rush, sell shovels.
- afinlayson 4y agoIt's not just Sci-fi ... my partner thought I wrote my valentines day card using it .... (I did not, but I understand why)
- dw_arthur 4y agoIt's made me start reading on how to improve my writing. It's not good when you look at your own writing and think damn did an LLM write this?
- RugnirViking 4y agoDid you find anything worthwhile you could link to? That sounds like something i'd be interested in - never had particularly good writing myself either.
- dw_arthur 4y agoI bought a used copy of Style: Toward Clarity and Grace by Joseph Williams. A few people on HN recommended it and it's been great so far.
- insane_dreamer 4y agoSimilar problem: online reviews will now become quite useless as anyone can generate hundreds of different ones that all sound quite human-like (unlike the obviously fake reviews)
- paxys 4y agoNow? Online reviews have been useless since the moment they were introduced. Heck using ChatGPT for fake reviews is probably more expensive than the services that exist already.
- melagonster 4y agobut online reviews are valuable because they democratize evaluation and help people make informed decisions while also providing feedback to businesses. at least in old time, it's possible to sift through the noise and get a sense of the general consensus.
- insane_dreamer 4y agoI consistently check online reviews for products I'm thinking of getting, and I'd say it's been pretty easy to spot the fake ones. Not that I think the rest are reliable and I wouldn't fully trust them in any case (esp Amazon), but with ChatGPT it'll be pretty impossible to distinguish true from fake.
- ofalkaed 4y agoWill the effect of AI on the literary world end up just being that everyone will require submissions to be long hand and made by snail mail? More likely it will just increase the role of the middleman, everything will go through agents.
- zizee 4y agoIs the problem that they don't want AI generated stories? Or that AI generated stories are increasing the costs of their curating? A publishers entire value add is curation of content for their readers, and possibly increased exposure/recognition for writers. AI generated content has skewed their costs of providing their base service. They either need to find a way to make their curation/review cheaper, or pass on the costs to either the readers/writers. If we find ourselves in a world with infinite mediocre content, we'll see the true value people place on content curation, in the amount that they can charge the consumer.
- fsloth 4y agoMost out-of-the box AI stories perhaps are not worth publishing and a large flood of them would then be a ddos attack on the submission process.
- zizee 4y agoYes, the effect of the DDOS is the increase in cost to the review step in their curation process. At the risk of stating the obvious: If costs go up, they really only have four ways to react: * find a way to reduce those costs (e.g. automated detection, crowd moderation, allow everything through, allow only trusted authors through); * absorb the costs (keep the same process, employ more people/spend more time); * pass on the costs e.g. pay to submit, pay more for the publication; * Close shop. What I think will be most interesting to see play out is how much people are willing to pay for quality curation. If the rise of GPT and friends means infinite media, trusted curation become ever more valuable.
- fsloth 4y ago” trusted curation become ever more valuable.” This might save tradtional media.
- matwood 4y agoI think we should be embracing AI generated stories, but separate them from non-AI. Plus, what counts as AI? If I'm writing a story and use AI to help with parts is that an AI story? The other thing is I think AI will raise the minimum bar for 'good' stores. Ok stories will be easily generated so that non-generated ok stories will find no market.
- tjmc 4y agoHow about limiting submissions to subscribers only? Imperfect but not unreasonable.
- aix1 4y agoNot unreasonable, but isn't this largely the same as charging for submission? (Only a fixed monthly fee instead of a per-submission fee.)
- keithwhor 4y agoAs others have mentioned it seems like the solution is a small fee for submission. Ideally non-refundable instead of refundable. Talented authors should be willing to pay a nominal amount for the overhead of maintaining the bar for content, even if their submission isn’t accepted I assume this is a publication they’d like to continue to see succeed.
- PuppyTailWags 4y agoThis doesn't work for editors who want to avoid excluding new voices from marginalized communities. Also, it incentivizes magazines to accept more submissions than they can responsibly read because it becomes a source of income.
- olliej 4y agoFun fact: that fee is one of the bigger single sources of income for Nature, etc
- ChickenNugger 4y agoI think sci-fi became real when the Internet connected smartphone (personal computer was a name wasted too soon) became ubiquitous.
- anigbrowl 4y agoSpam is cancer. Spam has always been cancer. It pretty much destroyed Usenet (I know, it still exists, but spam broke the trust network it relied upon), and it wrecks everything it touches. Fundamentally the problem is that spammers see nothing wrong with lying and information pollution as long as they make some money out of it. To some this is merely a cultural more about trying your luck, being persistent, taking advantage of obvious opportunities etc, to others it's a grave moral affront. It's partly due to phenomena like this that we've seen the move to ward a 'zero trust society' with endless security arms races. It's hard to even adequately describe the problem. Large tech firms say they're doing a lot of fight spam on their platforms but basically just put out reports that make themselves look good, rather than being audited to any objective standard. The last economic study I've seen on the market for spam was a decade ago. I don't think we have good data on what % of internet content/traffic is real vs garbage. To my mind, a big part of the problem is that we just try to filter it away and pretend it doesn't exist, while we constantly get more of it. Perhaps we should track it better, and more aggressively target the sources. Even just looking at the HN submission page, I'm struck by how every day around the same time new accounts show up to promote keto or CBD gummies - I presume that's because it's midnight or morning in a timezone and either a script or some slave laborer is tasked with putting out that day's wave of spam across tens of thousands of submission forms. Thanks to VPNs etc we have no idea where, and even though there's more hacking/security talent clustered here than most of the internet, as a community nobody can do anything about it. Most of these submissions are auto-deleted, making it hard to even identify their origin point in order to counter-target it. Information pollution is a real and increasingly critical problem, and I think the passive acceptance of spam and unwillingness to engage with it in favor of mediocre technical workarounds is doing real damage to internet society.
- AnimalMuppet 4y agoI agree, but I don't think it's just as simple as us becoming "willing to engage with it". It's a hard problem, and a solution may be literally impossible. I remember reading Cory Doctorow saying why DRM could never succeed. For an attacker to decrypt your content, they need the encrypted content, the decryption device, and the key. For a legitimate user to see your content, they also need the encrypted content, the decryption device, and the key. If it turns out that one of your users is also an attacker (it only takes one), then it's game over. In the same way, the internet as we know it takes the ability for any source IP address to be able to send packets to any destination IP address, plus protocols for mail, web, and so on. This lets anyone create content for anyone. But if one of the "anyones" turns out to be a spammer, it's not quite game over, but the information pollution begins and poisons everything. But the point is, I don't think you can fix it while also keeping what made the internet wonderful.
- lucidguppy 4y agoI like the idea of AI helping the average person write good enough content when and where its needed. I don't like the idea of the internet becoming a vast wasteland of spam...which is what 60% the case right now? But its only a matter of time until reality is drowned out by spam and the internet ceases to be useful. What will the world be like when 99.99% of all comments, reviews, books, articles, and art is just chatGPT talking back to itself. It's nauseating...
- physPop 4y agoLook what happened when chatGTP was first released, every second reply on HN used it. How do we know that isn't still happening?
- marblar 4y agoI definitely understand your concern about AI-generated content potentially contributing to an increase in spam and a decline in the overall quality of content on the internet. However, I think it's important to consider the ways in which AI tools can actually be used to filter out spam and identify content that is not useful or relevant. Additionally, the development of AI tools for content creation has the potential to raise the overall quality of content on the internet, rather than contributing to its decline. While there may be a risk of the internet becoming saturated with AI-generated content, it's unlikely that it will completely replace the unique perspectives and voices that come from human creators. Ultimately, the responsible development and implementation of AI tools for content creation is key to ensuring that they are used in ways that are beneficial and sustainable for all users. It's important to approach these advancements with a critical and thoughtful perspective, and to work towards finding ways to ensure that the technology is used in a way that is both effective and ethical.
- nektro 4y agobeen saying this since before chatgpt was announced
- WalterBright 4y ago> Pay-to-submit sacrifices too many legit authors. It's still probably the most pragmatic solution. And really, if you've sweated a week writing a story, surely you can come up with $10 to submit it. After all, email spam and phone spam is entirely enabled by being free for the spammers.
- sacnoradhq 4y agoThe answer to that in the short term is requiring a submission fee. The answer to that in the long term is to create AI editors who have good taste and can nudge writers to deliver.
- yieldcrv 4y agoWe don't have a solution for the problem. We have some ideas for minimizing it, but the problem isn't going away. Detectors are unreliable. Pay-to-submit sacrifices too many legit authors. Print submissions are not viable for us. Various third-party tools for identity confirmation are more expensive than magazines can afford and tend to have regional holes. Adopting them would be the same as banning entire countries. We could easily implement a system that only allowed authors that had previously submitted work to us. That would effectively ban new authors, which is not acceptable. They are an essential part of this ecosystem and our future.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- 5350-uiop-1130 4y agocrazy how quick every niche gets saturated.
- Arcorann 4y agoThis reminds me of an old Roald Dahl story, "The Great Automatic Grammatizator". A man creates an electric computer that can write short stories in a few minutes (this being written in 1953, when electric computers were just becoming a thing), and starts churning out magazine submissions. Having made a name for himself as a writer (several names, in fact), he then upgrades it to write novels. Finally, he starts offering existing writers the chance to license their names to the machine's works. It's a good read. Of course, the situation isn't quite the same, largely because unlike the story the magazine here can identify AI submissions, but the similarities are nevertheless interesting.
- motbus3 4y agoWhat if you write your article and use it to rewrite with better language?