AI, publishers, and science fiction magazines
Making a bad situation worse
A little after I'd read the Hugo-nominated short stories and come to a new appreciation of the short story form, I saw that three of the last-standing classic science fiction magazines have been bought by a publishing conglomerate which was recently demanding permission from authors to let their stories be edited or recycled and run under their original bylines or not at the publisher's wishes. The publishers claim they'll be backing down - but that hasn't yet been confirmed. And it's a bad sign for the future.
What might the publishing conglomerate have had in mind there? A simple explanation would be that they just wanted to ease negotiation with authors. It can take many rounds of editing to nudge an author into edits that'll make the publisher happy with a story, and I can see a publisher wanting a contract giving themselves the final say. Publishers have much more leverage than authors, so I'm not surprised a publisher decided to go for it. But on the other hand, I'm not surprised "Submission Grinder" (a site where writers share information about publishers) has delisted Analog magazine, saying these contract terms are unacceptable. Authors need final say over what goes in their stories under their bylines. Anything else is, at best, fanfiction.
I hope the publishing conglomerate will reverse their decision, as they claim they will.
But the publishers might have in mind something even deeper.
Several romance authors have recently been caught using AI - modern LLM's - to help write their books. What's worse, they were only caught because their prompts got left in their published books - so we know nobody was even editing the AI's output enough to notice this. Who knows how many other authors are using AI and remembering to edit out the prompts?
What we do know is that myriads of AI-written books are showing up on Amazon.com, often obviously based on recent (human-written) books.
So, when a magazine holds out a contract which gives them the right to recycle authors' words under whatever byline... I can't help wondering if they're eyeing AI.
I wrote last year that AI can't hold in mind the core of what makes a story good. AI's have surprised me since then in how much they've been able to do - but I still hold to what I said there. Still, despite this, AI's can certainly write. They can do it less horribly when trained on lots of existing stories in the same genre.
At Worldcon this month, I was listening to someone talk about training an AI on the scene structure of myriads of stories - he was planning to use it for literary analysis not writing, but that's one sort of training that would help an AI write something that could sort of fit in a genre. Its stories would still be formulaic and poorly put together without a good core, because an AI can't grasp the core of a story. But it can still write something readable.
So, I'm imagining now a dark - but not impossible - future, where the corporate publishing-house takeover of magazines is complete to the point of eliminating human authors altogether. Every month, perhaps, they put out a new electronic magazine composed of AI-written stories recycling the same genre tropes - without any human ever laying an eye on it until it's published.
Some people might be fine with this. I've encountered avid fanfic readers who'll happily read everything published with a certain romantic pairing, or a certain set of tropes, regardless of how repetitive the fics are. I've heard that some romance readers are the same way, and that the romance genre tends to recycle the same formula much more than other genres. Perhaps they'd happily read the AI-recycled magazines.
But the stories would not tread any new ground, at least not on purpose, and they wouldn't intentionally be participating in any conversation with other writers or with the reader or with anyone or anything else outside the AI models themselves.
If the world does move further toward that AI-recycled future, what place would there be for human writers? In a world where publishers are already happy to chop off stories incomplete, what should human writers be doing?
When I read the article about AI books crowding the Amazon recommendations, my immediate thought was that the real problem is people trusting the Amazon recommendations. I never do. I usually don't even look at them. Book recommendations are a hard problem, but Amazon hasn't come close to solving it. If they're now recommending AI-written books, they've gotten even farther from a solution.
But, someone might say, Amazon is recommending things people have actually bought after viewing or searching the things you've viewed or searched. In other words, people have actually bought the AI-written books. My response is to wonder why. Perhaps they're deceived and don't realize what they're getting. But even so - when the AI books are advertised as "A Summary of [human title]", they're only luring in people who want the proverbial "Cliff's Notes": a summary written by someone else.
(And apparently people are lured... I've sometimes seen books like that in my own Amazon recommendations.)
If people who want low-quality summaries go to AI, that leaves other readers for human authors. As I wrote earlier, they can find their recommendations in places other than Amazon - places that recommend books in more detail than just what other people looking at a particular title ended up buying. The AI's have cut the bottom off the market, but there's still a market there.
Someone might say that not enough readers want quality; that most people will settle for the AI-recycled tropes and the AI Cliff's Notes, leaving real human authors at a loss for readers and at a loss for money to pay the bills.
This problem's already happening, to some extent, and was happening even before AI. Writing hasn't been a well-paying full-time job for ages, except for a very lucky few. Many people will happily write as a hobby, or a second job - and many more will happily write internet fanfiction for free.
Granted, there's no reason to make this worse. If we could somehow ban AI-written slop, that would give authors some boost... but I don't think it would be much of one, given how publishers are currently treating authors and how many of them are already paying bargain-basement rates. If the pulp market was still in a healthy state, I'd be more interested in defending it. But as it is, I'm more inclined to say "good riddance."
Someone might say that I'm only saying this because I'm not trying to get money for my own writing. That's true - but looking at the statistics, I don't see how people can hope to support themselves that way. Author Jim C. Hines, as well-known as he is (I heard him recommended a few times at Worldcon), isn't making enough to support himself. Analog magazine is paying 8 to 10 cents per word; at maybe 10000 words per story, that's maybe $1000/story. You could support yourself on that if you sold thirty stories a year... but who sells that many, across the few magazines still running?
So, I think AI writing stories would just worsen a market that's already almost unlivable, and worsen a problem of finding good stories that's already very bad.
When I last wrote two years ago about the problem of recommending good books, I sketched out an idea for weighting people’s recommendations by how many of their recommendations you've already agreed with. I still think that's a good system - and it would be robust against AI's until or unless they actually write good stories.
(It is possible, with enough human involvement... but I don't think people who want to use AI will provide that, except occasionally as a gimmick.)
Once that system is in place, and people are using it, it might finally be possible to break out from the publishers' stranglehold on the market. But nobody's made that, even once it's made it would require some effort to use, and it's entirely possible that some problems I'm not thinking of would kill it.
But until then, we can only watch a bad situation getting worse.
Hmm, being a natural contrarian, I'm going to push back.
Of course people are using AI to help them write. And of course there will be abuse, but it might be a net good. If good authors (defined as authors I like) turn out more words that's a win for me. And maybe there is a future where you can train an AI on the works of Heinlein or Sturgeon and I can have another Heinlein novel or Sturgeon short story to read. As far as the publishing industry goes, if they embrace AI written books and that results in their demise (or weakening) then so much the better. As you say there is plenty that is published for free, or self published and that looks like a better market idea. (Particularly self publishing. I think Michael Malice publishes his own books.) It's easier than ever these days to get your words in front of other peoples eyes and that's a net win for all of us. Maybe favorite way to find new books is the 'read sample' function on my kindle. It's up to me to find authors I would like to sample.