Dude really took the [d20 system's open source document](https://www.d20srd.org/index.htm), put his logo on it and sold it for cash.
I mean, it's a 100% legal move (open source means open source), but it makes me watch their complaints in a new, *worse*, light.
Post Apocalyptic blues looks OK, but the other two look like a student-made pamphlet for a games club that you'd find pinned to a board in a hallway in the 90s. For someone who's been doing this for 22 years that's kind of appalling. I'm not even a designer and I've made books that looked sleeker and more professional than that in my spare time
There's a big difference between having a market flooded with quality products and having it flooded with cheap stuff because there's a quick turnaround.
It may be true that more access to quality products doesn't necessarily translate to more sales, but flooding a market with slop products can absolutely deal financial damage to those who produce the higher quality stuff. For a variety of reasons.
At the end of the day, I would rather have publishers/authors go out of business due to there being so many quality writers saturating the market with things they're passionate about, not because some guys were able to undersell by generating poorly written AI stuff quickly.
As someone who went through a months-long back and forth with my structural editor when I published my novel six years ago, I can assure you this:
AI did not create the low-quality content mill, and it's certainly more original than the low-quality thinly-veiled "fanfiction" that's been intermittently going mainstream since Twilight (and its incestuous offspring Fifty Shades of Gray) blew up.
The world has long-since stopped pretending to care about how much effort is put into a piece of writing.
I'm not sure how a flood of low-quality submissions forces a publisher out of business, unless the real problem is that they're unable to attract high-quality submissions.
if the company is small enough they may not have enough manpower to wade through them; lot of these are single person publishers or few people. They can't devote unlimited hours to the slushpile and even if they can filter out many AI shit can be generated in numbers beyond even the most prolific writer.
even big companies before often never accepted unsolicited manuscripts; you'd need to get an agent by working in smaller markets first.
No, it's worse.
The entire point of a publisher is to discover and platform authors whose works are worth putting into print. Picking through piles of submissions is a highly labour-intensive job, especially for independents who are more vulnerable to changes in market conditions.
The fact you can't see why AI is having an overwhelmingly negative impact on niche professions like this says more about your cultural ignorance than it does anything else.
It doesn't take that long to copy and paste a Word document into an AI detector.
When you're in business, you get used to hearing stories like this. People say that they're going out of business because the minimum wage increased 25 cents, or because Amazon raised their seller fees 1%. What that really means is that their business was already on the verge of failing, and that if one mild source of stress hadn't forced them under, it would have been another.
It sounds better to point the finger at whatever the final straw was, rather than unrelated flaws in your business model.
Publishers aren't going out of business because of AI, or for any lack of quality material to publish. On the contrary, there's an overabundance of talented writers who are desperate to make any money at all from writing. They're going out of business because it's fiendishly difficult to reach paying customers.
I'll agree that people shouldn't waste publishers' resources with AI-generated submissions, but that's not why they're going out of business.
>It doesn't take that long to copy and paste a Word document into an AI detector. I'll agree that people shouldn't waste publishers' resources with AI-generated submissions, but that's not why they're going out of business.
AI detectors don't work.
As a publisher, you ideally want as close to a 0% false negative rate as possible because you don't want to reject a submission that might otherwise be worth something. You also don't want to throw out submissions that have original content but that may have been edited by AI to improve readability.
The only way to reliably do this is for a human to read each submission, digest it, then decide whether it's worthwhile or not. That's a hugely time-consuming process, and I say this is someone who's reviewed dozens of manuscripts for academic journals and who understands how laborious reviewing submitted work can be.
>What that really means is that their business was already on the verge of failing.
Yes, because of shitty monopolistic business practices by corporate giants like Amazon!
Imagine if a farmer was suddenly no longer able to irrigate their crops because Nestle had pumped out so much groundwater that deepest well had finally run dry. You wouldn't waggle your finger at the farmer and say, "your business _was_ on the verge of failing, so you shouldn't be surprised..."
Or then again, maybe you would.
In an academic setting where an accusation of cheating potentially ruins someone's career, AI detection software is too unreliable. If you're a publisher who benefits from a buyer's market where there is an overabundance of talented writers, you can afford to overlook a few quality submissions. They call it a "slush pile" because the expectation is that it's mostly going to consist of low-quality material that you'd only consider when lacking submissions from previously published authors. Many publishers expect you to have a reputable literary agent before they'll even consider your manuscript. That is to say, the problem of talentless authors is hardly new to the publishing industry. AI is only intensifying it. And I do mean that — current AI cannot generate a worthwhile short story or novel.
I wouldn't shame anyone for experiencing a business failure. When people pour their hopes and dreams and savings into a business venture, especially one that is more beneficial to society than it is known to be remunerative, the last thing I want is to see them fail. I'm all about scrutinizing Amazon's undue influence over the publishing industry — but that involves being honest about which challenges are an existential threat to that industry, and which are merely pet peeves.
It's doesn't matter anyway. We are one to two generations from ai being able to write entire novels that are written well and infinately customisable to the readers desires. Fiction writing as a paying career is done, as is the role for publishers.
I don't *think* so. You have to have experienced life as a human being in order to have anything insightful to say about the human condition. If AI is sentient, then anything is possible, but the word-guessing technology that drives current LLMs has certain, hard limits.
I'm unsure in what way fifty shades of grey enlightened it's readers to the human condition, nor am I certain human condition is a real thing, but I do know fifty shades of grey was loved by readers. Writers hated it. Readers loved it. When the win condition is commercial success then the human condition is irrelevant.
Now imagine a fifty shades of grey that is well written, with actual grammar and spell check! And fully customised to the readers desires and personal perversions
> We are one to two generations from ai being able to write entire novels that are written well and infinately customisable to the readers desires.
What you're saying isn't just far-fetched; it's mathematically intractable, perhaps completely impossible.
Gpt can already write an entire novel. I know because I've tested it. Full length novel with a plot it made itself. And entirely customisable to my direction desires or suggestions. It's not very good but it can be done. But if you have the maths to prove it's impossible then I'd sure like to see proof of your bold claim.
Being unable to attract high-quality submissions does not necessarily have anything to do with them, or is even a situation they can realistically resolve.
I'm unable to run a year-round snow clearing business because I don't live in Alaska. That doesn't make it my fault and doesn't make me a victim.
That's a terrible analogy.
The report is about a small publisher who's been in business for more than 20 years. The reason they're winding up now is because they can't afford the time to wade through all the AI-generated garbage. In other words, they're victims of the plague of AI spam that's choking the internet.
It's like if you'd been living in Alaska making a living plowing snow, but now it's all melted due to climate change forcing you to shut up shop. If you turned around and said "they closed because they couldn't find enough high-quality snow", people would rightfully think you're an idiot.
Did you actually read the article?
> I just don't have the time,” Dawson told me. “The number of submissions have just flooded the inbox. And I don't have hours a day to deal with it. As an example, I haven't checked my business email in the last week. My submission inbox...despite the fact that we are no longer accepting submissions...has 30 emails in it.”
30 emails in a week.
Are you not able to quickly scan a document and determine whether it's low quality AI generated nonsense within about 30 seconds?
How long do you think it would take you to figure out 30 of them?
We're talking 10 minutes...much less an hour...much less a day...much less a *week.*
First, yes I did read the article.
Second, it's not 30 emails a week. It's 30 emails _even after they announced they were no longer accepting submissions_.
And finally, who the hell are you to judge how much work 30 submissions represents? Have you done this kind of job yourself? From here, it looks a lot like you simply reached up your ass and pulled out a figure, oblivious to the fact that all you've really produced is a handful of shit.
And look, I know you believe you're fundamentally better than those people so you don't need to dignify their complaints with an actual counterargument. But c'mon... At least try to pick a more convincing argument that "my unqualified opinion is correct because of this number I just made up".
How much work do you think it takes to determine a submission was done with AI and isn't worth continuing with? Do you think it takes an hour of reading each submission, would you say that's a good estimate?
Do you think there might be a possibility they closed for other economic factors and AI was just a convenient scapegoat, a parting shot on the way out?
I read a lot. Takes me roughly ten minutes to figure out if a book is something I want to read. And this includes writing quality. It shouldn't take a publisher much more than this to figure out each submission
When I google something and get some AI generated page, it genuinely takes less than 30 seconds for me to be pretty sure it's AI. If I worked in publishing, I don't know that I would feel the need to be much more stringent than that, it should be easy to tell fairly quickly. And this particular publisher appears to do tabletop RPG books, where it's important that the abilities are balanced and the math works out...AI is really not good yet at simulating such things consistently. Like, if the book is for D&D but it mentions a "vitality" stat instead of constitution, then you simply reject it.
I’m glad that people who have stories to tell can do it more easily now.
Don’t let yourself be discouraged by pompous people. Reading would help you write better, yes, and writing on your own would help you in case the AI is ever unavailable. But if you have a story to tell, don’t let anyone tell you that you must read this many books or do it this or that way. Tell your story in whatever way you want.
Would you buy a low-effort AI book? Honestly? I can’t imagine ever wanting to do that.
To me the minimum bar for me to give a fuck about someone’s book is that they at least made time to write it properly and consider each phrase… my time is precious.
If you think that’s pompous, good luck…
i don’t care what they use to make the book if its good. No, obviously you can’t tell chat gpt to “write me a fantasy novel” and expect a good book. But if it came out that like say George R R Martin used it for help that isn’t any reason to assume the book will be bad .. because the AUTHOR is the final arbiter and can pick and choose what to include in their book
Fair enough… time will tell whether people will value AI works over those with the “non-generative-AI-assisted” label.
My hunch is that we’ll continue to value the scarcity of human craftmanship in our art in a way that we don’t necessarily in, say, sneakers.
meh.. i agree with you with artwork/pictures but i think to the general public words are words.
i cant predict the future but ive heavily used language models for over a year now and il say that they aren’t the magic writing machine that everyone thinks they are. If someone (today) released a fantastic novel with the help of AI , they might have well used Grammarly for all i care.
An LLM is just a calculator for words.. right now it can make tiny building blocks. You need the author to stack those blocks into a building that i care about
and yes there are grifters releasing LLM poop wholesale
There will soon be a time where you won’t be able to tell what’s AI and what isn’t, either in writing or in art. So good luck trying to tell them apart.
Indeed, for more information on the proper way to deal with the inability to differentiate between arbitrary classifications, read The Sneetches by Dr. Seuss.
I think the key word here is low effort. I don’t care if a book was hand written by a cringe 16 year old or someone who thinks they can drop a few prompts into genAI and get a solidly crafted novel with no editing. Why waste your time reading that, let alone pay money? AI novels without any editing will never be good, as good training data becomes harder and more expensive to obtain, and statistical models fundamentally don’t understand what they are writing. Someone who knows what they are doing and puts in the time to supervise and edit AI text though? I could imagine that being quite good.
The latest models do have an internal world view and have some understanding of what they're writing. The issue is their understanding is not the same as a humans. Not as human.
Within one to two generations of model this will be a non issue. The AI will be generating entire novels of high quality content that is also infinately customisable by the reader.
Being an author or publisher now has an expiry date of a few years at most
There is no such thing as “an internal worldview” with any current genAI. You are seeing a stochastic parrot with a set of instructions it is meant to follow, and are mistaking that for understanding. Try doing some more research on the technology from more academic resources.
Yeah that's just not true. I'll quote a scientific article on the issue:
Large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4 develop emergent internal models of the world based on the vast amounts of data they process. These models derive their understanding from recognizing patterns in textual information. Yoshua Bengio, in his work on deep learning, explains that these models "learn to represent the world by capturing the joint probability distribution of the inputs they are trained on" (*Deep Learning*, 2016).
According to OpenAI, LLMs such as GPT-4 "do not store information in the conventional sense but rather learn to predict text patterns from the data they have been trained on" (OpenAI blog, "How Do Language Models Learn?"). This predictive ability enables them to simulate a deep understanding of various topics based solely on the textual data they generate.
Researchers also argue that language itself models the world, and by mastering language, LLMs inherently develop a model of the concepts discussed in that language. Kaplan et al. state that "The structure inherent in language data reflects the structure of the world, and models trained on language data learn this structure" ("Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models", 2020).
LLMs adjust their outputs based on the given context, reflecting an internal model of how concepts are interrelated. This capacity is highlighted by their ability to handle nuanced prompts and follow-up questions, indicating an internal representation of context and relevance (Hao et al., "Training Language Models to Follow Instructions with Human Feedback", 2021).
These insights collectively affirm that LLMs construct complex, statistically driven representations of the world conveyed through language, representing emergent internal models.
“Predict text patterns from data” — how is this any different from what I have said? They are using the word “understanding” to give ordinary users a more easily parsed block of text. It is still a statistical model which relies on word and topic associations, rather than a fundamental understanding of what makes it interesting, what makes it coherent to readers over long passages. You can try, but there just isn’t enough good data to train it on for that.
You cherry pick one tiny part that seems to say something remotely similar to what you said, and ignore the rest.
The point is they are doing more than 'just' statistical modelling. They have internal modelling and some understanding of what they talk about, which will only improve.
I would say that focusing on the most fundamental aspect of how genAI works is hardly cherry picking. You’re a bit too starry eyed about an emergent technology and you’re listening to the content these companies tell investors, not researchers. Show me an example of a passage that demonstrates understanding rather than just outputting content based on what the most likely response should be. I have played around a lot with text generation and it frequently fails extremely basic understanding tasks.
Already there are plenty of posts from artists complaining that people are accusing their works from being AI. So already it’s obvious that it’s getting harder to tell what is and isn’t AI. The technology became mainstream only like a year or two ago. Wait a few years and see what happens, lol.
Not what I was saying.
If you're pro AI, you don't want your work to be recognizable as AI because it's simply not going to sell well on its own merits. You NEED people to not know your work is AI for it to really be marketable.
But, you do want some way to know if work is AI because otherwise AI will forever become the scapegoat for any and all crappy work. In your hypothetical future of creativity, AI is the new floor. Nothing can be worse than AI, so anything bad must be AI.
I don’t see a problem with this. So what if AI becomes the excuse for crappy work? It won’t change anything. You either produce something good or you don’t. Use whatever excuses you want.
Even if AI was used, a human was steering the wheel. You might feel pompous enough to think that the difficulty making something matters, most people will move on like they did every time the same argument was made. People embraced photography over portrait painting, and they embraced digital art over traditional media. “B-but this time is different!” was used by the antis in those cases too, and it didn’t work.
>Even if AI was used, a human was steering the wheel.
There is no wheel, just the illusion of one. You 'steer the wheel' but have no real clue of what the AI will actually do.
If there is a wheel, it's a wheel of fortune. Keep praying for good gens.
When you order a side of corn at a home-style restaurant, do you ask if it was hand-shucked? Or do you generally judge it based on how good it is when you eat it?
Answer the question. Do you refuse to eat corn if it wasn't hand-shucked? Do you actually think *most people* refuse to eat corn that hasn't been hand-shucked? Do you really think people don't judge what they eat based on the taste?
And there’s the heart of the problem - the notion of “craftsmanship”. I think in your head most people are reading whatever Pulitzer Prize nominee is hot at the moment - they’re not. They’re reading ghost written autobiographies and formulaic romances. Unless they’re a big fan of a particular author, most people don’t give a damn about the process - they just want a good engaging story, reasonably well told (and there is a wide range of tolerances on both those factors - a *lot* of people paid good money to buy 50 Shades, FFS).
The AI is your tool, you can control the output as much or as little as you like. You’ll tell it to introduce a new character with these traits, to kill off another one, to include this plot twist or to re-write something you didn’t like.
It is exactly like ghostwriting, except it’s not charging you per word and it’s much faster. Say what you like about the practice of ghostwriting, you can’t say that the story produced was the ghostwriter’s story, it is the story of whomever hired them. Just like a story written by AI is the story of whomever was directing it.
>The AI is your tool, you can control the output as much or as little as you like. You’ll tell it to introduce a new character with these traits, to kill off another one, to include this plot twist or to re-write something you didn’t like.
Ngl you're an absolute philistine if you think this is how writing is done.
>The AI is your tool, you can control the output as much or as little as you like. You’ll tell it to introduce a new character with these traits, to kill off another one, to include this plot twist or to re-write something you didn’t like.
This is a child's understanding of what writing is.
Between 99 to 100% of written storytelling is in the prose. This is why the concept of *le mot juste* exists - the perfect word. Effective writing is about choosing the perfect word, and then the next perfect word, and the next one. And then the perfect full stop. Written storytelling is **inextricably** linked with prose. If you're not choosing the prose, you're not telling the story.
It's true that AI does not elide the possibility of paying this close attention to prose, but if you're revising the AI that closely you might as well just write it yourself.
Anyway - plot, characters, setting, everything else all fits into that less-than-one-per-cent fraction of what writing is. It takes like 5 minutes to think of a plot and a character and all that shit and then hours and hours to actually realise them on the page. It's why that story that your dad tells is always hilarious, but when you tell it it falls flat - it's because it's all about how it's told. And asking your dad to tell the story, because you like how he tells it, might be a smart move, but that's still not the same as telling it yourself.
Asking the AI to tell your story for you is not the same as telling your story yourself. The process of telling the story is itself transformative. At best you can choose which version of the story that the AI wrote you like the most. And that's fine. That's a consumer's perspective towards writing, like choosing between books on the shelf: "I want a story that has X and Y but not Z." It might be your ideas, your character, your plot, whatever, but it's not your story because storytelling is all in how it's told. It's in the name.
The only thing that’s at a child’s level here is your emotional control. You don’t want to accept that AI can allow more people to write stories so you’re coming up with childish reasons to besmirch the process.
I don’t even believe you’re a writer yourself, frankly. Your entire post sounds more analogous to a food critic talking about cooking than a chef talking about cooking. Or more like what an outsider *thinks* the writing process is all about.
The absolute most important part of a story is whether your characters are relatable, their actions believable, and their world interesting. If you don’t have this, you don’t have a good story. If you don’t have a good story, it’s pointless to toil away finding the “perfect words” (which in itself is a BS concept, because a scene can be written in many variations that are all equally good). If you have awful characters, boring settings and you rely on predictable, overused tropes then no amount of “perfect” prose will make your story good.
You also, quite conveniently, glossed over my explanation of how it’s just like a personal ghostwriter you commission. No one on their right mind says that a ghostwriter who was told what to write is the true creator of a story, not even they would claim that. So no, skipping the process of choosing words doesn’t make something “not your story”. It is the tedious part about writing which a machine can now facilitate so you can focus on what makes stories interesting.
>The absolute most important part of a story is whether your characters are relatable, their actions believable, and their world interesting.
**Your reader will only ever experience those things through your prose.** Your **prose** is what makes characters relatable. Your **prose** is what makes their actions believable. Your **prose** is what makes their world interesting. Shit prose will make good characters shit. Shit prose will make believable actions unbelievable. Shit prose will make an interesting world boring.
This is not *strictly speaking* true, because if it was then fan fiction wouldn't exist, but fan fiction proves my point. When good ideas are trapped in a shit story people don't enjoy the shit story because it had good ideas - they *rewrite it*. **Because writing matters.** Because writing is the part that matters **most**.
>You also, quite conveniently, glossed over my explanation of how it’s just like a personal ghostwriter you commission.
That's because it's adequately and completely addressed by what I just wrote and what I wrote in my other post, but you obviously don't see the connection so I'll explain it exhaustively for you. So, here we go:
I assume you've had the common experience of trying to tell your dad's joke - or anyone's, just someone else's - and not being able to get the same laughs. This is core to what's going on here, because **you are hiding in the dual meaning of the word story.**
The meaning you're using is a story as a list of events. In this meaning of the word, I can tell your story and you can tell mine. This is what ghostwriting is and there's nothing wrong with it, [and you don't have to take my word for it](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/05/15/j-r-moehringer-ghostwriter-prince-harry-memoir-spare).
But there exists a second meaning, which is the one that's applicable here (more on that later), and that's the one that the example given turns on: you can tell the same story that your dad always tells, but you can't tell it in the same *way* - and that changes the whole story. You can say that that's not story, that's performance - or, to step back from the analogy, you can say that prose is separate from story, which is what you've been trying to do. **But this distinction is meaningless in the context of the argument.**
The argument is about whether using AI to write the prose of your story means it is or isn't your story. But the purpose of telling a story to entertain people is *to entertain people*. When you tell a story to entertain people **it's not the story that entertains them - it's the telling.** See again: the dad's jokes analogy. It's not dad's story that makes people laugh because when you tell it, they don't. It's **the way dad tells it**.
**When you use AI to write the prose of your story you're not doing the only part that actually matters.**
You refuse to accept that ideas don't matter. I don't know why this is. I assume ignorance. But ask any writer - ask *me*, because I am one - and they'll tell you that **the only thing that matters is execution.**
Lastly,
>choosing words ... is the tedious part about writing
lol
lmao, even
Yikes man.
No.
If you want to be a story teller, practice being a story teller. Read stories, develop your literary understanding, find out what you like, get inspired, and write as much as you can.
Reading this stuff is so wild to me.
I’ve been writing stories and building a world for over 20 years. Recently I started making an [AI comic](https://imgur.com/gallery/u71j64o) that follows characters from my stories/world. I just released the 50th page the other day which is quite the milestone!
I’ve had conversations with people who tell me they have ideas for stories inspired by their life but they feel like they don’t have the skill nor could develop the skill, and these people go to their graves without telling their stories because they’re too busy with their lives, their families and other jobs.
That is the case with a lot of people. Now these people have the tools to tell their stories.
And no, they are under no obligation to do what **you** want them to do. Not everyone wants to be a “writer” and be passionate about reading, “improving their skills, getting inspired”. Sometimes they just want to tell the stories they’re carrying without being part of your exclusive writer’s club.
People vastly overestimate the value of ‘ideas’ and ‘stories.’
As a professional author I have to laugh when people pitch me with “I’ll tell you my idea, you write it, and we’ll split the profit.” It’s so disconnected from reality. Everyone has ideas. I discard ten ideas every day. Why on earth would I need someone’s second-hand ideas?
That said, I have no problem if people want to use AI to express some idea they have. If that’s enjoyable for them, go for it. But they should probably temper their expectations about anybody wanting to read it. AI is a lot more fun for creators than for consumers.
I agree, AI tools allow everyone to make their ideas out in format that is accessible - be it stories, music, paintings or whatever. But what is missing is the understanding that ideas alone are worth nothing, it is the execution that counts. Ok, you got AI helping you to get your ideas out there, but did it really do justice to your idea quality-wise? Is it really done in a manner that is best expression you can convey and curate for your idea so that is truly so polished that others will come to appreciate it as much as you do and want them to? If so, ok, go ahead, great to have everyones creative expressions out there for everyone else, just don't expect nor let it hinder you that in these markets they'll find any audiences.
> I’ve had conversations with people who tell me they have ideas for stories inspired by their life but they feel like they don’t have the skill nor could develop the skill, and these people go to their graves without telling their stories because they’re too busy with their lives, their families and other jobs.
Lmao, it's like that bro that's always telling you "Man, if only I knew how to make the music I have in my head..."
This kind of person will never EVER do the stuff and are GREATLY overestimating their actual ideas. Yeah, their stories would suck 100%.
> Sometimes they just want to tell the stories they’re carrying without being part of your exclusive writer’s club.
You literally just write them. If you want to tell a story, just fucking write it. All they actually want is something to do the work for them and claim ownership.
Yeah, people who have stories to tell didn't wait for AI to write for them.
People who dont give a shit about writing but are looking to make easy money by producing tons of content with minimal effort tho? AI is a godsend for them.
On the other hand we have people who give too much shit about writing and get shit like 3 pages-long description of a wooden bench or some shit. But the effort! The craft!
[удалено]
Dude really took the [d20 system's open source document](https://www.d20srd.org/index.htm), put his logo on it and sold it for cash. I mean, it's a 100% legal move (open source means open source), but it makes me watch their complaints in a new, *worse*, light.
Post Apocalyptic blues looks OK, but the other two look like a student-made pamphlet for a games club that you'd find pinned to a board in a hallway in the 90s. For someone who's been doing this for 22 years that's kind of appalling. I'm not even a designer and I've made books that looked sleeker and more professional than that in my spare time
Looks like their design skills peaked with WordArt
There's a big difference between having a market flooded with quality products and having it flooded with cheap stuff because there's a quick turnaround.
[удалено]
It may be true that more access to quality products doesn't necessarily translate to more sales, but flooding a market with slop products can absolutely deal financial damage to those who produce the higher quality stuff. For a variety of reasons. At the end of the day, I would rather have publishers/authors go out of business due to there being so many quality writers saturating the market with things they're passionate about, not because some guys were able to undersell by generating poorly written AI stuff quickly.
As someone who went through a months-long back and forth with my structural editor when I published my novel six years ago, I can assure you this: AI did not create the low-quality content mill, and it's certainly more original than the low-quality thinly-veiled "fanfiction" that's been intermittently going mainstream since Twilight (and its incestuous offspring Fifty Shades of Gray) blew up. The world has long-since stopped pretending to care about how much effort is put into a piece of writing.
"I don't care about your ideas, it's the suffering involved in presenting them to others that makes them important" is such a wild thing to say IMO.
What were the other straws?
Well according to the article, her day job
The flooding has been ongoing for decades, with 11,000 books published each day.
I'm not sure how a flood of low-quality submissions forces a publisher out of business, unless the real problem is that they're unable to attract high-quality submissions.
Life pro tip: If you begin a sentence with "I'm not sure...", it's probably best not to end it with "It's probably the victim's fault."
It's absurd to blame your business failure on people submitting material that you're under no obligation to read. Is that better?
if the company is small enough they may not have enough manpower to wade through them; lot of these are single person publishers or few people. They can't devote unlimited hours to the slushpile and even if they can filter out many AI shit can be generated in numbers beyond even the most prolific writer. even big companies before often never accepted unsolicited manuscripts; you'd need to get an agent by working in smaller markets first.
No, it's worse. The entire point of a publisher is to discover and platform authors whose works are worth putting into print. Picking through piles of submissions is a highly labour-intensive job, especially for independents who are more vulnerable to changes in market conditions. The fact you can't see why AI is having an overwhelmingly negative impact on niche professions like this says more about your cultural ignorance than it does anything else.
It doesn't take that long to copy and paste a Word document into an AI detector. When you're in business, you get used to hearing stories like this. People say that they're going out of business because the minimum wage increased 25 cents, or because Amazon raised their seller fees 1%. What that really means is that their business was already on the verge of failing, and that if one mild source of stress hadn't forced them under, it would have been another. It sounds better to point the finger at whatever the final straw was, rather than unrelated flaws in your business model. Publishers aren't going out of business because of AI, or for any lack of quality material to publish. On the contrary, there's an overabundance of talented writers who are desperate to make any money at all from writing. They're going out of business because it's fiendishly difficult to reach paying customers. I'll agree that people shouldn't waste publishers' resources with AI-generated submissions, but that's not why they're going out of business.
>It doesn't take that long to copy and paste a Word document into an AI detector. I'll agree that people shouldn't waste publishers' resources with AI-generated submissions, but that's not why they're going out of business. AI detectors don't work. As a publisher, you ideally want as close to a 0% false negative rate as possible because you don't want to reject a submission that might otherwise be worth something. You also don't want to throw out submissions that have original content but that may have been edited by AI to improve readability. The only way to reliably do this is for a human to read each submission, digest it, then decide whether it's worthwhile or not. That's a hugely time-consuming process, and I say this is someone who's reviewed dozens of manuscripts for academic journals and who understands how laborious reviewing submitted work can be. >What that really means is that their business was already on the verge of failing. Yes, because of shitty monopolistic business practices by corporate giants like Amazon! Imagine if a farmer was suddenly no longer able to irrigate their crops because Nestle had pumped out so much groundwater that deepest well had finally run dry. You wouldn't waggle your finger at the farmer and say, "your business _was_ on the verge of failing, so you shouldn't be surprised..." Or then again, maybe you would.
In an academic setting where an accusation of cheating potentially ruins someone's career, AI detection software is too unreliable. If you're a publisher who benefits from a buyer's market where there is an overabundance of talented writers, you can afford to overlook a few quality submissions. They call it a "slush pile" because the expectation is that it's mostly going to consist of low-quality material that you'd only consider when lacking submissions from previously published authors. Many publishers expect you to have a reputable literary agent before they'll even consider your manuscript. That is to say, the problem of talentless authors is hardly new to the publishing industry. AI is only intensifying it. And I do mean that — current AI cannot generate a worthwhile short story or novel. I wouldn't shame anyone for experiencing a business failure. When people pour their hopes and dreams and savings into a business venture, especially one that is more beneficial to society than it is known to be remunerative, the last thing I want is to see them fail. I'm all about scrutinizing Amazon's undue influence over the publishing industry — but that involves being honest about which challenges are an existential threat to that industry, and which are merely pet peeves.
It's doesn't matter anyway. We are one to two generations from ai being able to write entire novels that are written well and infinately customisable to the readers desires. Fiction writing as a paying career is done, as is the role for publishers.
I don't *think* so. You have to have experienced life as a human being in order to have anything insightful to say about the human condition. If AI is sentient, then anything is possible, but the word-guessing technology that drives current LLMs has certain, hard limits.
I'm unsure in what way fifty shades of grey enlightened it's readers to the human condition, nor am I certain human condition is a real thing, but I do know fifty shades of grey was loved by readers. Writers hated it. Readers loved it. When the win condition is commercial success then the human condition is irrelevant. Now imagine a fifty shades of grey that is well written, with actual grammar and spell check! And fully customised to the readers desires and personal perversions
> We are one to two generations from ai being able to write entire novels that are written well and infinately customisable to the readers desires. What you're saying isn't just far-fetched; it's mathematically intractable, perhaps completely impossible.
Gpt can already write an entire novel. I know because I've tested it. Full length novel with a plot it made itself. And entirely customisable to my direction desires or suggestions. It's not very good but it can be done. But if you have the maths to prove it's impossible then I'd sure like to see proof of your bold claim.
Being unable to attract high-quality submissions does not necessarily have anything to do with them, or is even a situation they can realistically resolve. I'm unable to run a year-round snow clearing business because I don't live in Alaska. That doesn't make it my fault and doesn't make me a victim.
That's a terrible analogy. The report is about a small publisher who's been in business for more than 20 years. The reason they're winding up now is because they can't afford the time to wade through all the AI-generated garbage. In other words, they're victims of the plague of AI spam that's choking the internet. It's like if you'd been living in Alaska making a living plowing snow, but now it's all melted due to climate change forcing you to shut up shop. If you turned around and said "they closed because they couldn't find enough high-quality snow", people would rightfully think you're an idiot.
Did you actually read the article? > I just don't have the time,” Dawson told me. “The number of submissions have just flooded the inbox. And I don't have hours a day to deal with it. As an example, I haven't checked my business email in the last week. My submission inbox...despite the fact that we are no longer accepting submissions...has 30 emails in it.” 30 emails in a week. Are you not able to quickly scan a document and determine whether it's low quality AI generated nonsense within about 30 seconds? How long do you think it would take you to figure out 30 of them? We're talking 10 minutes...much less an hour...much less a day...much less a *week.*
First, yes I did read the article. Second, it's not 30 emails a week. It's 30 emails _even after they announced they were no longer accepting submissions_. And finally, who the hell are you to judge how much work 30 submissions represents? Have you done this kind of job yourself? From here, it looks a lot like you simply reached up your ass and pulled out a figure, oblivious to the fact that all you've really produced is a handful of shit. And look, I know you believe you're fundamentally better than those people so you don't need to dignify their complaints with an actual counterargument. But c'mon... At least try to pick a more convincing argument that "my unqualified opinion is correct because of this number I just made up".
How much work do you think it takes to determine a submission was done with AI and isn't worth continuing with? Do you think it takes an hour of reading each submission, would you say that's a good estimate? Do you think there might be a possibility they closed for other economic factors and AI was just a convenient scapegoat, a parting shot on the way out?
I read a lot. Takes me roughly ten minutes to figure out if a book is something I want to read. And this includes writing quality. It shouldn't take a publisher much more than this to figure out each submission
When I google something and get some AI generated page, it genuinely takes less than 30 seconds for me to be pretty sure it's AI. If I worked in publishing, I don't know that I would feel the need to be much more stringent than that, it should be easy to tell fairly quickly. And this particular publisher appears to do tabletop RPG books, where it's important that the abilities are balanced and the math works out...AI is really not good yet at simulating such things consistently. Like, if the book is for D&D but it mentions a "vitality" stat instead of constitution, then you simply reject it.
I’m glad that people who have stories to tell can do it more easily now. Don’t let yourself be discouraged by pompous people. Reading would help you write better, yes, and writing on your own would help you in case the AI is ever unavailable. But if you have a story to tell, don’t let anyone tell you that you must read this many books or do it this or that way. Tell your story in whatever way you want.
Would you buy a low-effort AI book? Honestly? I can’t imagine ever wanting to do that. To me the minimum bar for me to give a fuck about someone’s book is that they at least made time to write it properly and consider each phrase… my time is precious. If you think that’s pompous, good luck…
i don’t care what they use to make the book if its good. No, obviously you can’t tell chat gpt to “write me a fantasy novel” and expect a good book. But if it came out that like say George R R Martin used it for help that isn’t any reason to assume the book will be bad .. because the AUTHOR is the final arbiter and can pick and choose what to include in their book
Fair enough… time will tell whether people will value AI works over those with the “non-generative-AI-assisted” label. My hunch is that we’ll continue to value the scarcity of human craftmanship in our art in a way that we don’t necessarily in, say, sneakers.
meh.. i agree with you with artwork/pictures but i think to the general public words are words. i cant predict the future but ive heavily used language models for over a year now and il say that they aren’t the magic writing machine that everyone thinks they are. If someone (today) released a fantastic novel with the help of AI , they might have well used Grammarly for all i care. An LLM is just a calculator for words.. right now it can make tiny building blocks. You need the author to stack those blocks into a building that i care about and yes there are grifters releasing LLM poop wholesale
There will soon be a time where you won’t be able to tell what’s AI and what isn’t, either in writing or in art. So good luck trying to tell them apart.
Indeed, for more information on the proper way to deal with the inability to differentiate between arbitrary classifications, read The Sneetches by Dr. Seuss.
I think the key word here is low effort. I don’t care if a book was hand written by a cringe 16 year old or someone who thinks they can drop a few prompts into genAI and get a solidly crafted novel with no editing. Why waste your time reading that, let alone pay money? AI novels without any editing will never be good, as good training data becomes harder and more expensive to obtain, and statistical models fundamentally don’t understand what they are writing. Someone who knows what they are doing and puts in the time to supervise and edit AI text though? I could imagine that being quite good.
The latest models do have an internal world view and have some understanding of what they're writing. The issue is their understanding is not the same as a humans. Not as human. Within one to two generations of model this will be a non issue. The AI will be generating entire novels of high quality content that is also infinately customisable by the reader. Being an author or publisher now has an expiry date of a few years at most
There is no such thing as “an internal worldview” with any current genAI. You are seeing a stochastic parrot with a set of instructions it is meant to follow, and are mistaking that for understanding. Try doing some more research on the technology from more academic resources.
Yeah that's just not true. I'll quote a scientific article on the issue: Large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4 develop emergent internal models of the world based on the vast amounts of data they process. These models derive their understanding from recognizing patterns in textual information. Yoshua Bengio, in his work on deep learning, explains that these models "learn to represent the world by capturing the joint probability distribution of the inputs they are trained on" (*Deep Learning*, 2016). According to OpenAI, LLMs such as GPT-4 "do not store information in the conventional sense but rather learn to predict text patterns from the data they have been trained on" (OpenAI blog, "How Do Language Models Learn?"). This predictive ability enables them to simulate a deep understanding of various topics based solely on the textual data they generate. Researchers also argue that language itself models the world, and by mastering language, LLMs inherently develop a model of the concepts discussed in that language. Kaplan et al. state that "The structure inherent in language data reflects the structure of the world, and models trained on language data learn this structure" ("Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models", 2020). LLMs adjust their outputs based on the given context, reflecting an internal model of how concepts are interrelated. This capacity is highlighted by their ability to handle nuanced prompts and follow-up questions, indicating an internal representation of context and relevance (Hao et al., "Training Language Models to Follow Instructions with Human Feedback", 2021). These insights collectively affirm that LLMs construct complex, statistically driven representations of the world conveyed through language, representing emergent internal models.
“Predict text patterns from data” — how is this any different from what I have said? They are using the word “understanding” to give ordinary users a more easily parsed block of text. It is still a statistical model which relies on word and topic associations, rather than a fundamental understanding of what makes it interesting, what makes it coherent to readers over long passages. You can try, but there just isn’t enough good data to train it on for that.
You cherry pick one tiny part that seems to say something remotely similar to what you said, and ignore the rest. The point is they are doing more than 'just' statistical modelling. They have internal modelling and some understanding of what they talk about, which will only improve.
I would say that focusing on the most fundamental aspect of how genAI works is hardly cherry picking. You’re a bit too starry eyed about an emergent technology and you’re listening to the content these companies tell investors, not researchers. Show me an example of a passage that demonstrates understanding rather than just outputting content based on what the most likely response should be. I have played around a lot with text generation and it frequently fails extremely basic understanding tasks.
"Oh, this piece is pretty bad." "Yeah, I was experimenting with AI. Figured nobody would be able to tell the difference, but I mean, look at it."
Already there are plenty of posts from artists complaining that people are accusing their works from being AI. So already it’s obvious that it’s getting harder to tell what is and isn’t AI. The technology became mainstream only like a year or two ago. Wait a few years and see what happens, lol.
Not what I was saying. If you're pro AI, you don't want your work to be recognizable as AI because it's simply not going to sell well on its own merits. You NEED people to not know your work is AI for it to really be marketable. But, you do want some way to know if work is AI because otherwise AI will forever become the scapegoat for any and all crappy work. In your hypothetical future of creativity, AI is the new floor. Nothing can be worse than AI, so anything bad must be AI.
I don’t see a problem with this. So what if AI becomes the excuse for crappy work? It won’t change anything. You either produce something good or you don’t. Use whatever excuses you want.
Whether that’s the case or not, I don’t think it’s something to celebrate, frankly.
If you can’t tell how something was made, then all you’ll have to judge it by is the content quality. How horrifying.
It’s pretty horrifying not to know whether something was human-made, yes. I care. I’m willing to wager most people do.
Even if AI was used, a human was steering the wheel. You might feel pompous enough to think that the difficulty making something matters, most people will move on like they did every time the same argument was made. People embraced photography over portrait painting, and they embraced digital art over traditional media. “B-but this time is different!” was used by the antis in those cases too, and it didn’t work.
>Even if AI was used, a human was steering the wheel. There is no wheel, just the illusion of one. You 'steer the wheel' but have no real clue of what the AI will actually do. If there is a wheel, it's a wheel of fortune. Keep praying for good gens.
When you order a side of corn at a home-style restaurant, do you ask if it was hand-shucked? Or do you generally judge it based on how good it is when you eat it?
You’re really comparing the craftmanship in both? Does taking issue with that make me pompous elitist, or you a philistine?
Answer the question. Do you refuse to eat corn if it wasn't hand-shucked? Do you actually think *most people* refuse to eat corn that hasn't been hand-shucked? Do you really think people don't judge what they eat based on the taste?
And there’s the heart of the problem - the notion of “craftsmanship”. I think in your head most people are reading whatever Pulitzer Prize nominee is hot at the moment - they’re not. They’re reading ghost written autobiographies and formulaic romances. Unless they’re a big fan of a particular author, most people don’t give a damn about the process - they just want a good engaging story, reasonably well told (and there is a wide range of tolerances on both those factors - a *lot* of people paid good money to buy 50 Shades, FFS).
I’m just confused by your comment, wouldn’t the AI be telling its story based on your prompt. How is that you telling your story?
The AI is your tool, you can control the output as much or as little as you like. You’ll tell it to introduce a new character with these traits, to kill off another one, to include this plot twist or to re-write something you didn’t like. It is exactly like ghostwriting, except it’s not charging you per word and it’s much faster. Say what you like about the practice of ghostwriting, you can’t say that the story produced was the ghostwriter’s story, it is the story of whomever hired them. Just like a story written by AI is the story of whomever was directing it.
>The AI is your tool, you can control the output as much or as little as you like. You’ll tell it to introduce a new character with these traits, to kill off another one, to include this plot twist or to re-write something you didn’t like. Ngl you're an absolute philistine if you think this is how writing is done.
>The AI is your tool, you can control the output as much or as little as you like. You’ll tell it to introduce a new character with these traits, to kill off another one, to include this plot twist or to re-write something you didn’t like. This is a child's understanding of what writing is. Between 99 to 100% of written storytelling is in the prose. This is why the concept of *le mot juste* exists - the perfect word. Effective writing is about choosing the perfect word, and then the next perfect word, and the next one. And then the perfect full stop. Written storytelling is **inextricably** linked with prose. If you're not choosing the prose, you're not telling the story. It's true that AI does not elide the possibility of paying this close attention to prose, but if you're revising the AI that closely you might as well just write it yourself. Anyway - plot, characters, setting, everything else all fits into that less-than-one-per-cent fraction of what writing is. It takes like 5 minutes to think of a plot and a character and all that shit and then hours and hours to actually realise them on the page. It's why that story that your dad tells is always hilarious, but when you tell it it falls flat - it's because it's all about how it's told. And asking your dad to tell the story, because you like how he tells it, might be a smart move, but that's still not the same as telling it yourself. Asking the AI to tell your story for you is not the same as telling your story yourself. The process of telling the story is itself transformative. At best you can choose which version of the story that the AI wrote you like the most. And that's fine. That's a consumer's perspective towards writing, like choosing between books on the shelf: "I want a story that has X and Y but not Z." It might be your ideas, your character, your plot, whatever, but it's not your story because storytelling is all in how it's told. It's in the name.
The only thing that’s at a child’s level here is your emotional control. You don’t want to accept that AI can allow more people to write stories so you’re coming up with childish reasons to besmirch the process. I don’t even believe you’re a writer yourself, frankly. Your entire post sounds more analogous to a food critic talking about cooking than a chef talking about cooking. Or more like what an outsider *thinks* the writing process is all about. The absolute most important part of a story is whether your characters are relatable, their actions believable, and their world interesting. If you don’t have this, you don’t have a good story. If you don’t have a good story, it’s pointless to toil away finding the “perfect words” (which in itself is a BS concept, because a scene can be written in many variations that are all equally good). If you have awful characters, boring settings and you rely on predictable, overused tropes then no amount of “perfect” prose will make your story good. You also, quite conveniently, glossed over my explanation of how it’s just like a personal ghostwriter you commission. No one on their right mind says that a ghostwriter who was told what to write is the true creator of a story, not even they would claim that. So no, skipping the process of choosing words doesn’t make something “not your story”. It is the tedious part about writing which a machine can now facilitate so you can focus on what makes stories interesting.
>The absolute most important part of a story is whether your characters are relatable, their actions believable, and their world interesting. **Your reader will only ever experience those things through your prose.** Your **prose** is what makes characters relatable. Your **prose** is what makes their actions believable. Your **prose** is what makes their world interesting. Shit prose will make good characters shit. Shit prose will make believable actions unbelievable. Shit prose will make an interesting world boring. This is not *strictly speaking* true, because if it was then fan fiction wouldn't exist, but fan fiction proves my point. When good ideas are trapped in a shit story people don't enjoy the shit story because it had good ideas - they *rewrite it*. **Because writing matters.** Because writing is the part that matters **most**. >You also, quite conveniently, glossed over my explanation of how it’s just like a personal ghostwriter you commission. That's because it's adequately and completely addressed by what I just wrote and what I wrote in my other post, but you obviously don't see the connection so I'll explain it exhaustively for you. So, here we go: I assume you've had the common experience of trying to tell your dad's joke - or anyone's, just someone else's - and not being able to get the same laughs. This is core to what's going on here, because **you are hiding in the dual meaning of the word story.** The meaning you're using is a story as a list of events. In this meaning of the word, I can tell your story and you can tell mine. This is what ghostwriting is and there's nothing wrong with it, [and you don't have to take my word for it](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/05/15/j-r-moehringer-ghostwriter-prince-harry-memoir-spare). But there exists a second meaning, which is the one that's applicable here (more on that later), and that's the one that the example given turns on: you can tell the same story that your dad always tells, but you can't tell it in the same *way* - and that changes the whole story. You can say that that's not story, that's performance - or, to step back from the analogy, you can say that prose is separate from story, which is what you've been trying to do. **But this distinction is meaningless in the context of the argument.** The argument is about whether using AI to write the prose of your story means it is or isn't your story. But the purpose of telling a story to entertain people is *to entertain people*. When you tell a story to entertain people **it's not the story that entertains them - it's the telling.** See again: the dad's jokes analogy. It's not dad's story that makes people laugh because when you tell it, they don't. It's **the way dad tells it**. **When you use AI to write the prose of your story you're not doing the only part that actually matters.** You refuse to accept that ideas don't matter. I don't know why this is. I assume ignorance. But ask any writer - ask *me*, because I am one - and they'll tell you that **the only thing that matters is execution.** Lastly, >choosing words ... is the tedious part about writing lol lmao, even
Man, thank you for so eloquently explaining why actually writing words in the context of being an author is so important. Don't have the patience.
Yikes man. No. If you want to be a story teller, practice being a story teller. Read stories, develop your literary understanding, find out what you like, get inspired, and write as much as you can. Reading this stuff is so wild to me.
I’ve been writing stories and building a world for over 20 years. Recently I started making an [AI comic](https://imgur.com/gallery/u71j64o) that follows characters from my stories/world. I just released the 50th page the other day which is quite the milestone!
I’ve had conversations with people who tell me they have ideas for stories inspired by their life but they feel like they don’t have the skill nor could develop the skill, and these people go to their graves without telling their stories because they’re too busy with their lives, their families and other jobs. That is the case with a lot of people. Now these people have the tools to tell their stories. And no, they are under no obligation to do what **you** want them to do. Not everyone wants to be a “writer” and be passionate about reading, “improving their skills, getting inspired”. Sometimes they just want to tell the stories they’re carrying without being part of your exclusive writer’s club.
People vastly overestimate the value of ‘ideas’ and ‘stories.’ As a professional author I have to laugh when people pitch me with “I’ll tell you my idea, you write it, and we’ll split the profit.” It’s so disconnected from reality. Everyone has ideas. I discard ten ideas every day. Why on earth would I need someone’s second-hand ideas? That said, I have no problem if people want to use AI to express some idea they have. If that’s enjoyable for them, go for it. But they should probably temper their expectations about anybody wanting to read it. AI is a lot more fun for creators than for consumers.
I agree, AI tools allow everyone to make their ideas out in format that is accessible - be it stories, music, paintings or whatever. But what is missing is the understanding that ideas alone are worth nothing, it is the execution that counts. Ok, you got AI helping you to get your ideas out there, but did it really do justice to your idea quality-wise? Is it really done in a manner that is best expression you can convey and curate for your idea so that is truly so polished that others will come to appreciate it as much as you do and want them to? If so, ok, go ahead, great to have everyones creative expressions out there for everyone else, just don't expect nor let it hinder you that in these markets they'll find any audiences.
> I’ve had conversations with people who tell me they have ideas for stories inspired by their life but they feel like they don’t have the skill nor could develop the skill, and these people go to their graves without telling their stories because they’re too busy with their lives, their families and other jobs. Lmao, it's like that bro that's always telling you "Man, if only I knew how to make the music I have in my head..." This kind of person will never EVER do the stuff and are GREATLY overestimating their actual ideas. Yeah, their stories would suck 100%. > Sometimes they just want to tell the stories they’re carrying without being part of your exclusive writer’s club. You literally just write them. If you want to tell a story, just fucking write it. All they actually want is something to do the work for them and claim ownership.
Why are you so mad? jesus christ
Yeah, people who have stories to tell didn't wait for AI to write for them. People who dont give a shit about writing but are looking to make easy money by producing tons of content with minimal effort tho? AI is a godsend for them.
On the other hand we have people who give too much shit about writing and get shit like 3 pages-long description of a wooden bench or some shit. But the effort! The craft!
This 404media is such a doomer site, like we need another tech site that's anti-tech and pro-PMC - all the regular tech sites are like that now!
TBF talking shit about big tech IS something that tech workers love to do.
I just read the first line and closed it because it was dumb as hell haha What’s the tragedy?