4 ms·

Does it matter if something is written by AI, if it's of sufficiently high quality? Would it be better to focus our efforts on reducing poor quality submission

Does it matter if something is written by AI, if it's of sufficiently high quality? Would it be better to focus our efforts on reducing poor quality submissions for things like this? Is that what they're already doing?

em-bee 3y ago
this is explained in the post. there are markers in a story submission that go beyond the quality of the story itself. a submission without those markers, which would just be a story of poor quality would just be rejected without a ban of the submitter.
- spicyusername 3y ago
  Then we could reject it on the fact that it's poor quality alone, right?
  - em-bee 3y ago
    yes, but i think part of the problem is that the number of submissions is to high. banning AI submitters hopefully discourages these people to continue. at present, AI submissions are not only a quality problem, but also a copyright risk. until we have clear laws and court decisions, any commercial publication can not take the risk of a copyright lawsuit that might come from an AI story incorporating elements of other stories. so even if we want to allow such stories, right now they can't be published. personally, i expect stories to include novel elements, even if just a few, that do not exist in other stories. current AI can't do that, but i do not believe that it will ever be able to. AI may at some time be able to generate stories that are of high quality, but it will never be able to generate stories that contain novel and unique ideas. at best it will contain elements that seem new, but that only means that the reader was not already familiar with them. anything that a computer produces must, by necessity be derived from existing input. computers will never be creative. maybe that is not a problem. maybe the stories will be good enough to entertain. the problem really is that we will be overwhelmed by such stories, and as a result drown out the work of human writers if we do not create environments where only human written stories are featured. i expect that clarkesworld will be such a place. and for this reason alone we must allow a publication and its readers to choose to reject AI stories, no matter how good they are.

em-bee 3y ago

this is explained in the post. there are markers in a story submission that go beyond the quality of the story itself. a submission without those markers, which would just be a story of poor quality would just be rejected without a ban of the submitter.

spicyusername 3y ago
Then we could reject it on the fact that it's poor quality alone, right?
- em-bee 3y ago
  yes, but i think part of the problem is that the number of submissions is to high. banning AI submitters hopefully discourages these people to continue. at present, AI submissions are not only a quality problem, but also a copyright risk. until we have clear laws and court decisions, any commercial publication can not take the risk of a copyright lawsuit that might come from an AI story incorporating elements of other stories. so even if we want to allow such stories, right now they can't be published. personally, i expect stories to include novel elements, even if just a few, that do not exist in other stories. current AI can't do that, but i do not believe that it will ever be able to. AI may at some time be able to generate stories that are of high quality, but it will never be able to generate stories that contain novel and unique ideas. at best it will contain elements that seem new, but that only means that the reader was not already familiar with them. anything that a computer produces must, by necessity be derived from existing input. computers will never be creative. maybe that is not a problem. maybe the stories will be good enough to entertain. the problem really is that we will be overwhelmed by such stories, and as a result drown out the work of human writers if we do not create environments where only human written stories are featured. i expect that clarkesworld will be such a place. and for this reason alone we must allow a publication and its readers to choose to reject AI stories, no matter how good they are.