My first experience with AI started innocently enough: a social media message from a stranger. The stranger had been messaging an AI chatbot programmed to respond like a therapist, and the chatbot had recommended several of my books. But the person couldn't find them in any bookstore. The titles were not, in fact, books I or anyone had written, yet the descriptions provided by the AI sounded very similar to my already-published books by different names. I told the stranger as much and we had a brief and pleasant interaction. Afterward, someone I related the story to asked me, "Are you sure he wasn't a robot?"
Honestly, I can't be sure. None of us can be, not anymore. Except when we obviously, terribly can. On Monday, Clarkesworld, a long-running science fiction magazine, took the unprecedented step of closing submissions to writers. Because the more than 50 submissions editor and publisher Neil Clarke had received that single day before noon? They weren't by writers. They were by AI.
Clarke wrote in a blog post, "In 15 days, we've more than doubled the total [submissions] for all of January," later sharing a graph showing over 500 submissions for the first few weeks of February alone that were, as he described it, "Plagiarism and bot-written."
AI-generated stories and pitches are not a fun social experiment. They're malicious spam that wastes time and they couldn't come at a worst time in the currently precarious world of literature and writing.
Clarkesworld is a prestigious online science fiction and fantasy magazine that has been publishing monthly for nearly 20 years. It's known for its fast turnaround times when it comes to submissions of work by writers hoping to be published. Writer Meg Elison said in a reel on Instagram, "It has the distinction of being constantly open to submissions, unusual in this world . . . they have a reputation of responding in about 48 hours," an unbelievably fast response time given that most magazines take months or longer. (A writer friend once sent a birthday card to his short story when it had been under consideration at The Georgia Review for a year.)
The sudden influx of AI stories "gummed up the process," said Elison, an alarming uptick that was notable not only for its abruptness but for the quality of the stories. Which were terrible.
Anyone who thinks you can get rich quick through being a writer has never been a writer.
Clarke said he wasn't going to publicly note all the differences between human-written and AI stories, not wanting to give tips to improve that algorithm, but mentioned "some very obvious patterns, and I have no intention of helping those people become less likely to be caught." The AI submissions consisted of plagiarized, stitched-together bits of previously published short stories, some of which had been published in Clarkesworld itself.
Buzzfeed News wrote, the "explosion of generative AI — tools and services that can generate any kind of text or image with a simple prompt — has birthed an online ecosystem of hustlers," citing a recent Reuters story about how Amazon's self-publishing arm has been inundated with AI-generated "books." Why? Because some people who use online apps like ChatGPT and Midjourney want to make fast and easy money.
Clarke told Buzzfeed News, "These are not people that were trying to legitimately submit fiction to us. These are the people who are trying to make money on the side hustle."
Anyone who thinks you can get rich quick through being a writer has never been a writer, especially a fiction writer. The New York Times reported that the average pay for full-time writers was $20,300 in 2017. Clarkesworld pays 12 cents a word for stories, which is higher than many literary magazines, some of which pay nothing at all.
When it comes to books, the typical book advance for a first-time author is about $10,000. You have to earn that back in book sales before you receive a cent of royalties. But Publishers Weekly reported, "In 2004, 950,000 titles out of the 1.2 million tracked by Nielsen Bookscan sold fewer than 99 copies. Another 200,000 sold fewer than 1,000 copies . . . The average book in America sells about 500 copies."
These were books written by people, who put serious time and effort into creating something hopefully new, not simply entering some key words into ChatGPT, which is not that great at "writing." Clarke said, "There's a difference in rhythm, and there are some serious tells, like a bunch of submissions with the same title generated by an AI program."
It does the opposite of what AI is "supposed" to do: it makes more work, not less, for humans.
That's AI right now. What about AI in the near future? Like a science fiction story, the technology is advancing faster than we can figure out what to do with it or how to manage it. Witness the Bing chatbot who professed its many so-called feelings, including love for the reporter interviewing it, in a viral New York Times story. Clarke worries, "AI is going to be writing at such a level that you won't be able to detect it against a normal human."
Like AI art, writing generated by AI both plagiarizes and takes away from real, living artists and their craft, training and livelihood. It's a sad amalgamation of creativity. It also does the opposite of what AI is "supposed" to do: it makes more work, not less, for humans. When I proposed this story, my editor forwarded me one of the recent AI pitches she had received at Salon. The awkward, halting sentences, inexplicably joined together, reminded me of first year English Composition, catching a student in obvious, cut-and-paste plagiarism.
The reason for the email was also unclear. There was no call to action, no request for acceptance or money even. If it was a story pitch, it was a sad shadow of one. What's the purpose of this, other than an experiment that makes many people's lives harder?
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The infusion of AI comes at a precarious time for the writing world. On Valentine's Day, Catapult announced it was shuttering its popular literary magazine and would no longer offer writing classes. Its founder, Elizabeth Koch, wants to focus on something called Perception Box, which is as nebulous as it sounds. Other literary magazines to recently end include Astra and beloved and well-respected poetry journal and chapbook publisher Glass Poetry Press.
It's a hard time to be a writer or a lover of words. It's a hard time to be an artist — to be a person. It isn't a hard time to be AI.
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