March 19 Update (Patreon)

Hello, fans of a porn game. I am going to write a post about AI and creative work. Hopefully everyone will bear with me.

If you follow the subject, you've likely heard lots of news about AI content generators producing art and text. I haven't posted about it, in part because no one is coming here for news and in part because I didn't have anything of note to say. As recent advancements in GPT-4 have been discussed in the authorial sphere, however, I find myself with enough thoughts that I'm going to do a post.

As for my general thoughts, I'll try to get them out quickly. I think Ted Chiang had the clearest-eyed view of the issue. While the technology has power, a lot of speculation is untethered from the reality of the situation.

Having said that, AI generation doesn't need comprehension or higher reasoning to have a disruptive impact. I paid my way through university in part via tutoring and in my opinion, AI chatbots have already surpassed the writing ability of some humans. It doesn't need to be great: if the AI can do a half-assed job and save money, it will be used in some contexts.

This is going to lead to the flooding of creative markets. It's legitimate to question how much of a difference this will make: human beings alone are already flooding markets so everyone is scrabbling for scraps of algorithmic attention. However, the recent changes are not merely incremental. Several short fiction markets have closed themselves until further notice because they can't keep up with the scale of AI submissions. As near as I can tell, the half-assedness of the whole thing puts the humans at severe disadvantage: AI is better at bullshitting than at detecting its own bullshit accurately enough. Humans can tell the difference without too much trouble, but their attention is what's getting squeezed.

For me, this is just a sterile example. Short fiction could never be much more than a minor stepping stone given my goals. But for a writer starting out passionate about short fiction? They're facing a rough path forward.

Some of the magazines that remained open are now operating by solicitation only, and I see this as a very negative outcome. It means more attention to the established names and more power to social cliques. Many avenues by which an unknown creator could be discovered, or someone who doesn't like to play the social media game could get traction, are disappearing.

Does that seem alarmist? As a comparison, I think about the western comics industry. I had friends who grew up wanting to write for the big labels and they've all been stymied. Marvel doesn't even accept writing submissions anymore, it hires writers off Twitter. Another example that predates recent AI is Tor.com, which moved completely to a solicitation model years ago. This model creates gatekeepers and is thus very appealing to creative-adjacent people who want to be gatekeepers. People will bemoan a lot of changes caused by AI content generation, but I expect to hear less about this aspect.

So the future I predict isn't wildly different, just a slightly worse version of what we already have. It will become increasingly difficult for new creators to gain any traction. Success will increasingly require being a social media star or getting retweeted by the right online cliques. That author getting catapulted to the top of Amazon by tweets is heart-warming in isolation, grim as a portent for the future. I expect to see an increasing need for creators to sell themselves as the primary product, contorting their life into a "story" that appeals to a broad base.

Even if the technology doesn't develop as its most ardent promoters claim, it will be coming for different kinds of writers over time. I believe I add something over an AI, but for many readers/players, they'd be equally fine with AI-written material. It's already the case that a lot of people don't care about whatever level of quality I can bring to my work. Writing is generally not valued, because ideas are a dime a dozen, and AI is likely to reduce that to a penny a dozen.

None of this is meant as a complaint or to announce anything negative. Here's the thing: I'm writing about this from the other side of the problem. However much of a small fish I am, I'm far more fortunate than writers trying to start out now.

Thanks to the generosity and support of everyone over the years, I'm in a strong position to weather all of these changes. I've been cautious and methodical, so I could actually survive a lot worse than this. Thus I'm fortunate enough that I can keep bringing TLS toward its conclusion, pretty much no matter what. ^-^

The overall trend is just a bit melancholy. I'm glad I took various steps I have in the past to expand my creative output, because paths are drying up and putting all your eggs into one basket is increasingly not viable except for the extremely lucky. Wherever there's an attention economy, chokepoints appear, and these mean that you see creators being banned or simply disappearing. As a creator you tend to assume that other paths will remain open for you, but often that isn't the case. It's always been easy for creators to get trapped in a specific niche, so this narrowing is just another step in the same direction.

This is the sort of thing that I want to guard against. As I've said before, I'm passionate about being a creator. I absolutely don't take my supporters for granted and I'm grateful that you've given me so much. Please just bear with me as I navigate increasingly difficult waters.