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Sci-fi mag pauses submissions amid flood of AI-generated short stories

pcmag.com

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Re: Sci-fi mag pauses submissions amid flood of AI-generated short stories

#61

Post by vouaobrasil »

krapp wrote: post #50
vouaobrasil wrote: post #36

Yet another reason why AI is harmful. This is a real-world example of how AI, with its ability to trivially generate huge, low-quality volume, has shut down something people derive a benefit from. People like to write and read stories, and now they can do neither. Thanks to those who programmed ChatGPT /s

Don't worry. These publications will be replaced by completely AI-driven ones soon enough. Once everything is shit, people will have no choice but to learn to like the taste.

Yes you are right. AI is a race to the bottom.

Re: Sci-fi mag pauses submissions amid flood of AI-generated short stories

#62

Post by JohnFen »

kleiba wrote: post #4

It shouldn't matter which tools were used to write a story, just whether it's a good story or not. However, how would any publisher assess such a flood of submissions? Use AI to pre-classify stories as good/mediocre/bad?

It depends on what you want.

Personally, what I find valuable about art is that it's communication from another human, so it matters to me. I'd prefer the human-written story even if the machine-written one is technically better.

Sort of like how I prefer handcrafted pottery over machine-made pottery, or handcrafted furniture over machine-made furniture even if the machine ones are technically superior.

Re: Sci-fi mag pauses submissions amid flood of AI-generated short stories

#63

Post by CatWChainsaw »

vouaobrasil wrote: post #36

Yet another reason why AI is harmful. This is a real-world example of how AI, with its ability to trivially generate huge, low-quality volume, has shut down something people derive a benefit from. People like to write and read stories, and now they can do neither. Thanks to those who programmed ChatGPT /s

The thrill was more important than the consequences.

Re: Sci-fi mag pauses submissions amid flood of AI-generated short stories

#64

Post by basch »

JohnFen wrote: post #56
basch wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one of his essays I vehemently disagree with, and think has hurt Silicon Valley. The idea that ideas and idea people are worthless has had a cascading effect of putting non idea people in idea people seats, or locking out a class of people from participating unless they have some other engineering or marketing or leadership skill. Apple would never have become without Steve Jobs being able to see what was and…

I usually say "ideas are a dime a dozen." What I mean by this is that so many people starting tech businesses get really hung up on "protecting their idea" so it won't be "stolen" by others. But what makes an idea valuable isn't the idea, it's the execution. These people are worrying too much about the wrong thing. I don't mean that ideas are worthless. Everything we create starts with an idea.

And this is where I disagree. The inability to execute on a good idea doesn’t mean that the idea creator isn’t the best person to shape the idea. The idea may be more than a one sentence pitch and instead an entire vision.

The one sentence summary of the idea may be a dime a dozen, but that’s only because the listener is discounting the rest of the idea as not having any value, or that the one sentence pitch is a common idea, and the rest of the vision is unique and special.

The team needs to be able to execute, not the individual. If an idea person is both good at creating a succession of ideas and discarding bad ideas, why shouldn’t that a) have worth and b) be respected enough that they are compensated for their talent. Don’t do for free…

I have a good 10+ fairly complex product ideas, that I don’t see envisioned elsewhere. If they are a dime a dozen, why don’t I see other people coming up with them? Are they bad ideas or are they unique ideas that maybe are special. Maybe we will never know. Maybe everyone who doesn’t have ideas wants to convince others their ideas are worthless so they give up and share them.

Re: Sci-fi mag pauses submissions amid flood of AI-generated short stories

#66

Post by chinaman425 »

orblivion wrote: post #30
allturtles wrote: post #5

The floodgates are now open for all the people who believe they have it in them to be great writers, if only it weren't for all of that tedious writing. As if the value in writing consists mainly in having an idea. This is much like people who believe that their great business idea is (by itself) worth millions.

On the other hand - my dad is an industrial designer. He was initially irritated by how easy it was for lower grade designers to enter the field given the advent of new tools (even before computers). But he eventually embraced it and understood that the nature of his job changed to something more comprehensive. He just advised me to prepare for the same as a software developer in the age of ChatGPT. Perhaps he would…

[flagged]

Re: Sci-fi mag pauses submissions amid flood of AI-generated short stories

#67

Post by Barrin92 »

The logical consequence is going to be that magazines are going to move towards much more trust based and private systems as anything public gets spammed with mediocre and borderline plagiarized generated content. Basically the internet wasteland that Stephenson funnily enough predicted in Fall.

Biggest losers are likely going to be aspiring artists who rely on these venues to get a foot in the door. Sad moment for the arts that the publishers of technology probably paid very little attention to, which is funny given that this is one of the topis they're certainly going to find in their training data, if they had read it.

Re: Sci-fi mag pauses submissions amid flood of AI-generated short stories

#68

Post by Avshalom »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #54

I think this is an under appreciated symptom of a much larger problem, accelerated shit production. I've observed that markets are really bad at selecting for quality. The "invisible" hand is driven by price and so the production of "equivalent" products at a lower price does two things; 1) It consumes product demand from quality insensitive consumers (the whole 'sucking the oxygen out of the eco system problem.') 2)…

Every market is A Market For Lemons.

nothing but price can be objectively compared. We were just talking about the dropshipocalypse/aliexpressification of amazon where it's no longer possible to tell if any two products are actually two different products; or if it's the product you will receive. Even quality sensitive/price-insensitive consumers have no way to know if they're buying quality; or if they do buy quality, will it survive 6 months of OTA software updates.

Re: Sci-fi mag pauses submissions amid flood of AI-generated short stories

#69

Post by fl0ps »

basch wrote: post #52
satvikpendem wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's rather that developers don't want to work for idea people because they usually are not Steve Jobs, who is the exception to the rule.

And just like every profession there are idea people and people who think they are idea people. Unlike engineering, you can’t as easily make interview tests that pretend to be able to discern between those who are good at something and those that aren’t. Idea people are left to hitting a home run, succeeding and making a name for themselves. No one is going to hire a first timer into Chief Idea Officer. Paul’s letter…

I wouldn't lay blame on Paul's letter specifically.

I'll make the bold clain that there's no industry simply bereft of idea people who have no other function. Mainly because industry has almost no tolerance for people who have a great idea but no understanding of how to go about implementing it, even if that "go about implementing" is mainly having the leadership skills necessary to harangue, terrify, goad, or gingerly coax people who can do the implemeting to act as a cohesive group towards a common goal.

It's unrealistic to think there's any market for the "hey, here's a great idea!" person to receive a check for their brilliant statement and walk into the sunset. There are probably a great many "idea people" who wish that were the case and perhaps feel the world is unfair for this lack. Perhaps those are the kinds of people that the 1-800-Uinvent (or whatever it was) marketing scams preyed upon. Maybe the same group that wants to be the Jobs without putting in the work to be the Woz?

Re: Sci-fi mag pauses submissions amid flood of AI-generated short stories

#70

Post by JohnFen »

dsr_ wrote: post #38
pixl97 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, I have my doubts that's actually what this is. Of course this is just a guess as we don't have the information. See, per the article they are paying $.12 per word. Much like those spam sites that copy SO and put up ads on the site and get a few pennies per click, I'm guessing this is somewhat the same. Because there was a potential payout someone(s) realized you could bot farm this to make a few bucks.

Except you can't, because magazines are already used to receiving large quantities of low-quality submissions. It's called the slush pile. Much of editing consists of sorting through the slush pile looking for gems. This just vastly increased the size of the slush pile. Spamming, basically. Nobody made any money from this.

A wise man once clued me in about getting published in print. He said that publishers have a problem -- they own a very expensive printing press that costs a fortune whether it's printing something or not. So they're always desperate for material to feed the beast with.

The reason it seems like it's difficult to get published is that they also have another problem -- they are inundated with crap submissions. "Crap" doesn't even mean bad writing, it includes pieces that aren't suitable for the particular publication -- wrong writing style/tone, wrong audience, etc.

The trick to getting published is to understand the publisher's problem and help them solve it. You do this by paying attention to what they publish, noting the style/tone, length, topics, etc., and give them something that fits and is high quality. They'll love you to death.

Once I really internalized that, I found it was pretty easy to get published.

Online publishing changes the economics a bit, but even there, publishers have limited resources and the same rules still apply.

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