Artificial Authors

I blogged a while back about advances in artificial intelligence (also here), and I’ve since had a fair bit of fun putting different prompts into ChatGPT and seeing what it comes up with. Not that it’s come up with anything particularly good, but it’s definitely come up with things that are amusing or surprising, considering the source. (This reminds me in many ways of the reaction a child gets for saying something that seems like a child wouldn’t come up with. There’s a lower bar to clear to make someone impressed.)

But I’ve been surprised to see how fast people are pushing the AI envelope, when it comes to creative writing. There have been multiple articles this past week about how some short story magazines are being inundated with submissions written by AI, and how Amazon has a number of books already up that are openly written (and even illustrated!) by AI. (And who knows how many of them are written by AI, but the “authors” are trying to conceal the fact.) Having seen what AI looks like, I didn’t think anyone would be trying to use it for creative projects just yet, but I suppose I shouldn’t have underestimated the willingness of some to try just about anything to make money.

What are my thoughts on this? I actually think that for traditionally published authors, this is going to work out very well for them. If you’re trying to self-publish, things just got a lot (lot) more grim.

Speaking as a reader of many an ebook, I have already noticed that it can be very difficult to tell what might be good and what might be bad, in terms of quality, when it comes to self-published works. Because of that, I’m very reluctant to try anything that’s not published by a traditional imprint. I’ve got a limited amount of time and attention, and I don’t want to waste it reading things I don’t enjoy. With the advent of electronic self-publishing, it felt like just about anyone was coming out with a novel.

Mind you, some of those novels were definitely good. Even great. (The Martian is exhibit A of this, for me.) But even with how “easy” it was to publish a book, there was still the big obstacle of actually writing the book. Even someone churning out pages and pages of drivel would still take a lot of time to actually come up with that drivel, so there was a sort of self-cap on the amount of books that could flood the market.

AI does away with that limiting factor. Now, one person could theoretically “write” a book a week (or even more). If they got it down to a science, they could have AI come up with the cover, the title, the text, and then format the whole thing. In that case, they could “write” as many books as they feel like. It just depends on how many times they want to click the Enter key. Then, the limiting factor becomes how fast Amazon will let someone put a book up for sale, and if they limit that in any way.

So where before, someone might be churning out four books a year on the outside, now a single person could make 200 a year. 300? 400? Many. And they don’t have to worry about actually having any skill. I read an interview by a person who was happy that the 30 page picture book about squirrels he’d “made” (written and illustrated by AI) had made $100 already. It’s not a huge leap to then wonder if he could make $100 per book, why not write 300 books? Then he’s bringing in $30,000 his first year, and it only goes up from there!

Naturally, this isn’t going to scale well. It’s going to end up with ebook spam that almost entirely gets ignored. I expect editors are going to be hating life for a while, until they can reliably come up with a way to filter out AI writing. Even then, they’ll be in an arms race of sorts as “writers” try to come up with ways around that filtering. If Amazon chooses to try and be pickier about what they publish, the same situation will happen there. (I’m not sure that they will, since Amazon makes money either way, but they might, if it makes people stop going to Amazon for anything.)

But once an author has made it through the gauntlet and gotten a book professionally published? I would think things will be a bit brighter for them, mainly because I see more and more people turning to reading only professionally published works. They’ll let the editors be the gatekeepers of quality, and rely on that filtering process (and the review process that’s also been developed) more than they have right now. In other words, the worse the self-pub industry gets, the better things look for the traditional route.

I could be wrong, of course, but I’m not losing any sleep over it right now. It’s funny: it seems like the more advanced our technology gets, the more we’re turning back to how things used to be. Right now, for example, I’m getting tired of having to subscribe to 10 different streaming companies to be able to watch what I want to watch. It feels like it might be nice if someone were to bundle all those companies into a single service, and then I just have to pay one bill. When that happens, we’ll be back to cable TV.

In the meantime, having read a fair bit of AI-generated text, I can safely say I’d rather do just about anything than read an entire book written that way. What do you think?

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, as well as PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking this DON’T GO TO SLEEP Amazon link. It will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

Physical is Cool Again

I was talking to Tomas this morning, and he was telling me all about the “new” camera he got in Slovavkia. It’s actually an old Russian one from communism, completely manual (no batteries, etc.), and he’s a big fan. (Well, he will be once he gets the camera fixed. He just had his first roll of film developed, and it looks like there’s a hole somewhere inside it that’s letting light in on the pictures. All of his shots have this huge christmas tree-shaped splotch of white in the middle of them. He’s pretty sure he can fix it.)

But what he was really excited about was having actual honest to goodness pictures that he could hold and feel. Or at least, that’s how I’d understood it at first. As we talked more, I realized he took the film in to get developed, and they gave him back the negatives and then digital scans of the negative, so he still doesn’t actually have pictures he can hold in his hand. But he does have something that feels much more real to him.

Of course, when I was on my mission, all I had was a physical camera that took physical pictures, and since then, the trend has always been toward more technology, not less. When digital cameras arrived, it was so exciting that they didn’t need film. That I could take as many pictures as I wanted without having to worry about getting one wrong. I could see the results right away. Phone cameras have only made that more extreme, with people taking multiple shots of just about everything, simply because it’s so easy to delete the ones you don’t want. (Or don’t delete them at all, since digital storage is so cheap.)

Likewise, Daniela got an instant camera for Christmas. (Like a polaroid.) She was also thrilled with the idea of having tangible things instead of just purely digital. That’s right in line with other trends: LPs in music, fancy leather bound books, etc. More and more, it seems like people are acknowledging that yes, they could have something digital, but what they’d really like is something tangible, at least of the things they’re big fans of.

Brandon Sanderson has made a lot of money with this principle, issuing deluxe leather editions of his books 10 years after they’re published. And fans gobble them up. I’m surprised more authors aren’t doing it. Scratch that. I just googled it, and they are. I just hadn’t paid any attention to it. If people really love something, they want to show that love in a way that lasts.

In a way, this is nothing new. How many people would buy t-shirts at concerts or musicals or events, to prove they were there? To have something physical they could wear and show to others as a way of declaring what sort of a person they are. What music they like. Sure, you can like a page on Facebook, but who actually looks at those?

It’s interesting that for years, the assumption seemed to be people would keep moving toward digital, until all physical things were gone. Now, in a time when AI can begin to approximate many of the same things that humans could make, it makes sense that there will be a continued focus on the artists behind the art. On going to concerts. On interacting with them online. Taking actual pictures. Buying prints.

I do wonder if the disposable nature of many things will continue to decrease. Will we get to a point where most paperbacks just aren’t published, because people either want the deluxe leather versions of the books they love, or just the digital version so they can read it? Actually, I doubt it, simply because not everyone can afford deluxe leather versions. People will want a way to show what they’ve read. To connect with it in a way digital ones and zeroes can’t.

Food for thought . . .

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking this DON’T GO TO SLEEP Amazon link. It will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

Facebook and Me

I’ll be honest: I’m getting very close to just giving up on Facebook. Cory Doctorow had a great essay the other day about how websites go from being useful to abusive to dead (a process he termed “enshittification,” which is pretty accurate, if crude). It’s worth reading the whole thing, but in a nutshell, he describes how first websites focus on providing as useful of a service for as cheap as possible. The site needs to set itself apart from everything else out there, and so it focuses on attracting users.

Once it has those users, it monetizes them in order to attract investors, because sites ultimately want to make money. Once it has enough investors, market share, and advertisers, then it shifts to getting as much money out of them that it can. Raises advertising rates and sales fees. This continues to the point that everything falls apart, because there comes a time when people aren’t willing to keep doing business with them.

That’s where Facebook is with me right now. I’ve held on for much longer than many of my friends, mainly because I used FB as a vehicle for posting my blog, and because I enjoyed seeing updates from my remaining FB friends. It’s also still useful as a place to organize groups and events. But even that is becoming less and less helpful.

Facebook just doing what it used to do. I have no real control over what I see in my feed, and it’s getting dominated more and more by ads and promoted posts. Likewise, FB is showing my posts to my friends less and less. I don’t get updates about events or group postings unless people are paying for those to appear in my feed. It doesn’t help that so many people left because they were sick of what FB was doing to their relationships, and how toxic much of it was becoming.

The only thing keeping me around right now is that I’m not sure where else I’d go. It’s a real shame, because the thought behind the original Facebook was a good one, and honestly, it’s one I would consider paying for out of pocket, so that I could stop being the product and instead just be the customer. Then again, I don’t know how many other people would be willing to pay $5/month to get just the updates from their friends that they want. A social network only works if there are enough people on it to make it social.

Really, I’m not looking to meet friends online. I’ve got friends in life. I want to keep in contact with them, and FB was a good tool to do that. It’s becoming increasingly clear that it won’t always be.

Ironically, I’d love to have other people’s input on this, but most of the people who read this read it on FB, so it turns into an echo chamber. How can I find out what other people do to keep in touch with folks if I can’t get their attention to ask? But it’s still worth a stab.

Why are you still using Facebook? What else are you using instead of it? Is it a place that does more than videos and/or pictures? I’m a big fan of the written word . . .

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking this DON’T GO TO SLEEP Amazon link. It will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

(One) Problem with Artificial Intelligence and Writing

Back in October, I wrote a post about how artificial intelligence has started to be used for art. Paintings. Writing. And at the time, I really only thought of it from that stance. Would AI ever be used to write books? Could it ever write a good book? I was doubtful about that, though I recognized it might be an issue in the future.

However, I failed to think about it from the angle of writing web pages on a massive scale. And that’s actually a real problem.

People make money off websites by ad sales. The more views a site gets, the more money the site makes. The more pages a site has, the more views that site will garnish, plain and simple. And so if you want to make money, you’re incentivized to have as many pages as possible. But what if you can automate the process? Set up an AI to write pages about anything and then post them online? Suddenly, you can churn through thousands of pages a day, and (theoretically) you can start making all the money.

If one person does this, that’s quite annoying. Someone just spewing poorly written articles into the ether. But if many people do this? That becomes seriously problematic. Remember when telemarketers were just a general annoyance? Think of how many spam calls you started to get as soon as those telemarketers could be replaced with robots? Think of how much spam you get in your inbox, since people can program computers to just send the same message out to countless people?

The internet is already glutted with information, much of it of questionable quality. That’s the result of lots of people writing lots of pages over the years. Now, if one person can tell a machine to write 1,000 articles a day, that’s 365,000 pages a year.

Our current search infrastructure isn’t set up to handle that kind of flood. Already, as I’ve searched for articles about simple things (how to do something in illustrator, for example), and I’ve been taken to pages that made me wonder if they’d been generated by AI. It’s already hard enough to find good information. It will be much more difficult with so much chaff out there.

What’s the solution? I’m not sure, but my gut says we’ll start seeing a swing away from using search engines as much, with people instead going to a few trusted sites they use for different topics. This is also problematic, since it will put more power into the hands of a few companies, who can then go on to abuse that power as they see fit, since the path for smaller companies or writers to challenge those behemoths will be more and more uphill.

Anyway. Food for thought. Have you already come across an article you think was done by AI? Do you think you will? I haven’t really talked to many people about this idea, and I’m interested to see if other people have different takes.

Thanks for reading!

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking this DON’T GO TO SLEEP Amazon link. It will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

3D Printing: Commonplace?

Now that I’ve been working with 3D printing for as long as I have (and seen what Tomas was able to get done with it before he left), I’m getting to the point that it’s becoming more difficult to impress me with different makes. I was at a meeting the other day where an item was presented that had been 3D printed, and I’d actually just been looking at that item on Thingiverse a few weeks earlier. True, it takes some knowhow to calibrate a 3D printer and to arrange things so that the prints are clean, but more and more, it’s to the point that 3D printing something is about as difficult as laser printing something. I commented to a friend that no one congratulates me when I print off an agenda from online, but that’s typically more complicated than printing something 3D. I wrote the agenda myself, after all.

That said, if you’re out there making your own 3D models, then I am still more than a little impressed.

By making this observation, I’m not meaning to put down the people who continue to be wowed by the technology involved in makerspaces. If you’ve never seen what they can do, or (better yet) used one yourself, then printing off a file can seem like a creative, involved endeavor. It’s just that I feel sheepish when people are impressed with something that basic. As if I’m taking credit for something difficult that wasn’t hard at all.

The same thing happens for me when I help people with computer issues. They’ll be struggling with something for a long time, and then I step in and get it done with a few key clicks. On the one hand, I’m happy I could help them out. On the other, I feel bad that they spent so long trying to get something done that should have only taken a minute or two.

Not that I’m immune from the phenomenon. After all. I regularly take my car in for routine things like oil changes, and I happily pay them good money to do something that I know (in theory) isn’t that hard to do myself. A good YouTube video would probably show me everything I need to do. But I’ve never done it, and so it continues to be something I don’t really understand.

When 3D printing first came out, I wasn’t sure if it was something that would ever be anything more than a gimmick. Now, I view it as something that will inevitably become as commonplace as laser printers. Things like basic tools and components will be easier and easier to come by. If you need a part to fix something in your house, chances are you’ll be able to get it without any shipping involved.

The more people can get accustomed to what’s out there, the better for them. It’s not magic, and it’s not even very difficult. But I can see why it may seem that way. The sooner we can get people to understand it, the better.

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking this DON’T GO TO SLEEP Amazon link. It will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.