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The importance of writing communities in the age of AI
What will the rise of AI mean for writing communities?
It’s a question that’s increasingly relevant given that the flood of AI-generated stories, books and everything else shows no signs of letting up. The online writing community Codex has a thread dedicated to one prolific scammer who managed to get more than 30 stories published or accepted for publication in desirable markets before they were discovered. And that’s just one person who happened to get caught.
This is nothing new to magazine editors and book publishers, of course. They have been complaining for some time now about the overwhelming amount of AI slop they receive. But it seems the problem is getting worse rather than better as the scammers get more sophisticated.
This will potentially lead to editors taking fewer chances on unknown writers and focusing on their established community more, if they are not already doing so. It’s great for the established writers, but it will become even harder for newcomers to break in now.
There’s no real answer yet on how to deal with AI slop. Yes, there are AI detection apps but the level of false positives seems to be high from all accounts. And there’s the ethical question of how to check to see if a work is AI without also exposing it to AIs that can scrape its content.
And there’s no disincentive for the scammers, as it’s essentially a cost-free effort with the chance at pure profit for any works that slip through to get published. And make no mistake: profit is the driving force for most. The only real cost would be the subscription for whatever service they are using to generate works — and there is an entire ecosystem of AI writing apps that has sprung up, which makes detection even more difficult.
The real solution may be for writers to take more active roles in their communities, both physical and online. Sure, writers are a solitary lot by nature and adverse to joining groups. But community is about supporting one another and creating purpose and opportunity for one another. With that comes a variety of very human things, such as respect, gratitude and of course recognition.
If there’s anything the AI age calls for, it’s a return to real communities.
No ghost in the machine?
I recently checked to see if any of my books were included in the books data set used to train AI systems and found The Mona Lisa Sacrifice and The Apocalypse Ark — Books 1 and 3 of my Cross series of supernatural thrillers. Book 2, The Dead Hamlets, was not included. I don’t quite know how I’m supposed to feel about that. Pleased? Irritated? The tale of Cross battling an order of renegade angels to free the gorgon Mona Lisa from their imprisonment is good enough? As is the tale of Cross desperately trying to stop the mad creature Noah from ending the world with his eerie ark at the Sunken City? But the tale of Cross becoming trapped in a ghost story featuring the original Hamlet ghost isn’t good enough for an AI?
I know I should probably have an opinion on whether or not books should be used in this manner, and I do: authors should be consulted on how their works are adapted or used and compensated appropriately. Without those basic rights, it’s a lot harder for authors to be able to keep creating the works we do. But I’m also too exhausted to say much else about it because, well, 2023.
And if the AIs run amok and try to end the world I’m really sorry about that….
The good news is that if the world doesn’t end the Cross books will be republished in 2024 with Wolsak and Wynn! Hopefully they’ll find some new human readers.
(Thanks to George Murray for the reminder about the data set. He has some thoughts about the whole issue in a recent Walrus article that is worth checking out.)
peter darbyshire 