41 Comments

I’m an anthology series editor (my anthology series is Best Microfiction) and the Clarkesworld story is sobering for those of us who read hundreds of submissions each year. We can no longer know for sure what is or isn’t robot written.. and I’m sorry to say that creative writers are training it to write fiction that simulates their particular style so well it’s often impossible to tell it apart. I’ve been surprised that other editors aren’t out there talking about this. Thank you so much for saying what you have here about the nightmare at large, and for putting it right. It’s just incredible that corporations are expecting us to gobble this crap up and feel some kind of utopian gratitude..

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Excellent close read, I like how you bring in just a sliver of sarcasm here and there without becoming annoying.

A ghoulish side note. Remember the inventor of the Segway? Didn’t he die by directing one of those fucking things over a cliff while using it?

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May 16, 2023Liked by Lincoln Michel

AI is the latest result of the uber-capitalism, anti-human, monetize-everything trend that has taken over society in my lifetime. It is the saddest future imaginable. I’m grateful I will be dead before life as lived by humans is a thing of the past.

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I love to write. There is no pleasure in having a machine write for me.

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Great writing and ideas, thanks.

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It's going to get rid of journalism and most writers and artists, and personally I can't wait.

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Just because the models are trained on vast amounts of data/creative work doesn't make the achievement of these creations any less interesting or profound. Maybe the Chat-bots shouldn't have been made available and turned into a commercial product in the way they have, but to argue that there is no achievement here seems kind of amazing. As a sci fi writer aren't you more preoccupied with how precarious it's going to be writing any sci fi about the human future with the nature and extent of ai advances so unclear? The spamming of submissions is bad and sad, but surely the less interesting question here.

Given how bound up American sci fi is with the atom age and the space race, it seems very interesting how ai might affect the genre.

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More evidence of California trying to colonise the world. Good luck with that.

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Just as I’m getting into my career as a writer ... this! How can I turn the future of AI around so that I can make it work for me in a productive ethical and creative way?

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AI is FOMO at its best

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Thanks I finally understand what’s the strike all about

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Sigh.

Look, I get that "don't believe the hype" is a good approach to reading about new technology, and that we should be wary of the Wired Magazine techno-libertarian-utopian THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING mindset. But the actual bias we should be aware of in writing about A.I. is, to steal a phrase from TVTropes, "most writers are writers." And thus, we are inundated with articles wherein journalists say A.I. is bad because it might obsolete journalists. I know a lot of artists who will scream your ear off about how Stable Diffusion is EVIL PLAGIARISM BAD because THE EVIL CAPITALISTS will use it to steal their jobs [sic!]... and then laugh, laugh, laugh, at the funny memes where the Pope is wearing Balenciaga, or share videos where Trump and Obama are playing Amogus over voice chat, because those ostensibly don't threaten their livelihoods. That the deepfake technology which lets you press a button and generate an audio track of Amtrak Joe doing the scat from "Freak on a Leash" can be (nay, WILL BE) used to disinform and propagandize voters come 2024 is a secondary concern to them, vs. "will I get hired to create a Nicktoon?"

If you want to see this bias in action, look no further than this very Substack! From Lincoln two months ago in "The Library of Blather" --

"I should probably wrap up here by saying LLMs and other “A.I.” programs will certainly have their uses. It’s easy to think of many potential benefits. But most of them—more accurate Google translate, better word processing grammar checks, cleaner automatic transcriptions of audio recordings—are merely improvements on existing functions."

Who could possibly object to "cleaner automatic transcriptions of audio recordings" as an unambiguous social good? How about every single stenographer in the USA? Autocaption tech maxed out at ~90% accuracy a decade ago, which sounds great, but is actually unusable for most purposes. (That last sentence is 20 words long - replace two of them chosen at random. Does the sentence still make sense? That's 90% accuracy for you.) This has not stopped many companies from angling to replace court reporters with a business model that is, basically, "put an Alexa in a courtroom and send its output to some ESL speaker in the Philippines making $2 an hour." This is quite bad for stenographers (for the reasons Lincoln lays out in THIS piece) - but speech-to-text tech is only on your average writer or journalist's radar as a tool for making a Ctrl+F-able copy of an interview you recorded on your iPhone, so the decimation of stenography as a profession doesn't register for them.

(Or maybe it does, and they don't care? After all, journalism is a CALLING, and writing is an ART, but stenography is mindless secretarial work, allegedly. It's neither mindless nor secretarial, actually - imagine playing piano and coding simultaneously - but since the average stenographer is a woman over the age of 40, people assume it must be low-skill work. Media professionals seemed pretty ambivalent re: automation when they thought it was only coming for factories and the retail sector.)

Yes, yes, of course a Substack about writing is going to focus on how A.I. effects writing - but the myopia of mainstream A.I. reporting is real and bad and obscuring the actual effects A.I. is going to have, good and bad, on society.

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And yet, you wrote and are distributing this essay on a seamless electronic network of interconnected computers that was the domain of a few eccentric nerds 30 years ago. My point here is that while sometimes tech hype under delivers, other times in massively over delivers and completely restructures society in the process.

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