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

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

#71

Post by fl0ps »

xwdv wrote: post #42
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.

What a glorious era, where all humans can now be made more equal. Even the weakest minds can create artwork and stories that rival the most talented individuals. Why hasn’t AI come to the field of mathematics yet??

I'll just leave this here... :https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-03166-w

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

#72

Post by em-bee »

JohnFen wrote: post #70
dsr_ wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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" d…

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

yes, but then you only write what publishers want and not what your creativity drives you to write. i am not sure that letting publishers be gatekeepers is a good thing.

this is a hard problem though. and i don't know what is the right answer.

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

#73

Post by JohnFen »

basch wrote: post #64
JohnFen wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 com…

I don't think we actually disagree, honestly. I think we're just looking through different lenses.

> The idea may be more than a one sentence pitch and instead an entire vision.

Yes, the idea has to be fleshed out in order to be ready to start executing it.

I never meant to imply the idea creator wasn't the best person to do this, and I never meant to imply we were talking about an individual.

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

#74

Post by fl0ps »

krapp wrote: post #16
jabroni_salad wrote: post #3

I'm surprised that they are only getting 500ish submissions. Seems like all you need to really jam up the review process is an unbound while().

If they get that many submissions, they'll just delete 90% of them without a glance.

They should be using hh-rlhf-capable LLM to digest the lot and pick the best. But then what's the use of an editor or publisher anyway if you can do that and publish online.

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

#75

Post by JohnFen »

satvikpendem wrote: post #48
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…

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.

Well, to be fair and not to take anything away from his impact, but I wouldn't ever have wanted to work for Steve Jobs. We would have been far too incompatible.

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

#76

Post by JohnFen »

em-bee wrote: post #72
JohnFen wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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" d…

Once I really internalized that, I found it was pretty easy to get published. yes, but then you only write what publishers want and not what your creativity drives you to write. i am not sure that letting publishers be gatekeepers is a good thing. this is a hard problem though. and i don't know what is the right answer.

That's not precisely true. What you do is find the right publication for what you want to write. There's a HUGE variety to choose from. The odds are that there's one somewhere who is on the same page as you.

But it is also true that it's a business, and if you want to be published (and don't want to self-publish), then you'll have to do business-related work in addition to creative work. Or, if you're lucky or successful, have a literary agent who will do it for you (for a price).

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

#77

Post by wiredfool »

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)…

The cost to refute BS has always been an order of magnitude greater than the cost to create it. ChatGPT just made the cost to create "quality" bs an order of magnitude lower.

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

#78

Post by MBCook »

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.

That’s not so bad.

The big problem is the people who don’t care and are just generating and submitting 1000 stories in the hopes one makes $10 because it’s basically free to them.

They only care it gets accepted. Outside of that they don’t care one bit what the story is about or how good it is.

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

#80

Post by basch »

JohnFen wrote: post #73
basch wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 com…

I don't think we actually disagree, honestly. I think we're just looking through different lenses. > The idea may be more than a one sentence pitch and instead an entire vision. Yes, the idea has to be fleshed out in order to be ready to start executing it. I never meant to imply the idea creator wasn't the best person to do this, and I never meant to imply we were talking about an individual.

I think the ideas are worthless and a dime a dozen without execution has created a dismissive attitude. Everyone needs to be an engineer or lender to contribute.

Why would an engineer want to pair with somebody and “do all the work”?

Part of executing is looking at what features or decisions similar failure made, and righting the ship on the next go around.

Where is the idea person college course? MBA? Some kind of strategy?

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