So reader, this time, picture the awesome but belaboured SFF Editor, Eugen Bacon (find her stuff here!), buried under a pile of hundreds of submissions, at least half of which are AI created. It’s still happening and will for the foreseeable short term while ass-hats think there’s a quick buck to be made somewhere for doing it and while aforementioned drowning submissions editors have yet to find a workable solution that costs nowt. Trust me, none of these publications are anything other than labours of love.

And that’s just this week.

But down to the important stuff. What was the answer? Which was the AI? If you have no earthly clue what I’m talking about, then check out the previous post HERE, catch up and make your own guess, then join us back here.

Shall I keep you all in suspenders for a little bit longer, while all the Johnny Come Lately’s get caught up? Besides I’ve got a little bit to say about this and there’s kind of a making of take too that I think is interesting. Ok.

No Robots Were Harmed in the Making of this Content.

Once I’d decided to try this as an experiment and I’d gotten over whether I had the bottle to carry it out (what if the AI was *brilliant* would I need to give up writing completely?) I then had to set up some rules.

Firstly, I thought I’d pick an easy and generic title that the AI could get it’s transistorised head around. No point in playing the game if it was too easy, right? I figured the AI would be well into meta ideas of what’s real and not. I wasn’t wrong.

Secondly, I thought I’d keep it short, so I could belt something out to follow the AI, without it becoming a huge great thing and getting in the way of my ‘making a living writing’.

Thirdly, in terms of keeping it fair, I wrote mine at a bit of clip and edited for spelling and grammar, but I didn’t hugely revise. I dread to think how much the AI might have edited, but my instinct is not at all, if it’s so bloody clever! I’m imagining that’s something it can do as it goes along.

So with my rough crazy ass plan in hand (anyone who knows me, will find this place terrifyingly familiar and be slowly shaking their heads at this point!) I faced the computer, found the ChatGPT page on the website and with a few pleasantries, I asked it if it could write me the 150 word story.

Reader, it took 8 seconds. Eight freaking seconds. I suppose that’s what you get for being a supercomputer with a particular leaning towards lazer focus. The next bit, was where I need to make a confession. I read the AI’s story first before I did my own. It was a lot more like a story than I expected, which to be honest, was briefly terrifying. But I was defending the human race here, or at least the Sci-Fi authors of the human race and I was not going down without a fight. My second admission, without going full on Kobayashi-Maru here was that I had a bit of a think about it. In my defence, I had to go out in the car, before my right of reply was begun and in that time I had abandoned one story idea and picked the final one.

When I got home I got my ass in the chair and wrote like my career depended on it. I doubt it did, but it made me feel more heroic, sue me. It took me 20 minutes. Then another 15 to edit it. And what you saw in the last blog post, was the result.

The AI? One of my friends in the comments suspected sneakiness and that I’d written both, but no. The AI was piece A. I was piece B. Most of you guessed right too. I was very impressed with the certainty of the guesses. I was slightly perturbed that some of you thought I’d be offended if you thought I was the robot (surely you know I don’t take myself that seriously and I’m pretty difficult to offend). The robot, however? Let’s just say, be *really, really* polite to Alexa and Siri for the next few weeks.

What Was the Point of All That Then?

Well partly, it was in solidarity with all the poor people in the editors chair. They’ve got to pile through all of this day in day out. The latest new joy that the Twenties have to offer. When does the Twenties get to do Roaring? Did the 1920’s take this long to get going before flappers and jazz and speakeasies? God I hope so. So big love to the editors and slush pile readers out there. I’m so sorry. If any of you genuinely have any workable solutions to this, I’m sure they’d love to hear them in the comments.

Another reason, though, was I was genuinely curious. Sci-Fi me, wants to live in an Iain M Banks world of Minds, where it’s all a side-by-side with humanity journey to the stars and the AI’s treat us as curious but lovely cousins. As opposed to the Sky-Net alternative. I’m an optimist. I want the AI to be nice and not a threat. I think with all historical game changers like this, it’s both.

Do I think we’re all out of a job as Sci-Fi writers? No, I don’t. And that’s not just because I don’t think the AI is ‘there yet’. I think the best things that human writers do, even when pretending to be robots, is express humanity, emotion, metaphor, beauty. I don’t think any AI I’ve spoken too yet understands those things and I don’t think they ever will. I think emotion about something and how we express that, is something that’s uniquely human. The AI’s will get better at parroting us though. They’ll get better at using metaphor, in the same way that they’ve become better at drawing hands, but there is still something that is uniquely weird about AI creations that makes them stand out.

And I like them for that. I like the idea of Blast Theory composing a perfect world for cats. I like the peculiar, haunting art that the art AI’s make, but the best I can do in that department is a passable stick man, so maybe that areas for others to comment. In the writing world, the AI thing is also odd. Not nearly as fully formed and very much following what seems to be a ‘this is how you write a story’ formula, rather than actually being able to write one? Almost like primary school writing from very young humans as they learn what a story actually is, what it means to tell one, the weight and expectation and joy and disappointment of ‘Once Upon a Time’. The AI writes more in a ‘this happens, then this happens, then this other thing happens’ style, with no real concept of narrative through line. It can describe characters having emotions, but it has no idea what those might really be. It’s curious to read and I can see a place for it. It isn’t half bad at writing book blurbs, so I think copywriters might have to watch out.

Do I think they should all be turned off? No, like nuclear reactors, they’re a tool. If used properly, they can be hugely useful. But in the hands of people who don’t think a ‘book’ needs any real content, as some step in a get-rich-quick scheme? That’s got consequences, at least one of which is p*ssing off every submissions editor in the world. Which means that authors, especially new voices and the unrepresented ‘indies’ in the publishing world get drowned out in the noise. And trust me, it’s noisy enough out there already.

I do think they should stay in their lane. These massive AI’s are the progeny of big educational establishments on the whole and I think they’ve got a responsibility to watermark their output in some way to make it easier to sieve out. It would avoid abuse of magazines where the people who submit these have already lied about the story. Every publication in 2023 says ‘no AI’s writing or being used to help writing content’. It’s a form of fraud on one level. Which leads us to the second issue: copyright. This is already a thorny and under-policed area but when any random can type ‘write me a space opera in the style of [insert name of famous author]’ then are you abusing them? There are books being input to these AI’s as we speak. If the AI then churns that straight back out wholesale, who wrote it? Who owns it? Obviously the creators will say ‘no-one’ or we didn’t realise, but that’s where we need to get all Asimov on them and call for rights for content creators and responsibilities for the AI platforms. It just might take a minute, in the twenties, we’ve got a lot on.

Let me know any thoughts, stuff you agree with, disagree with in the comments. Thank you for playing. I promise, I won’t be using any AI’s to write any of my stories, your reading eyes and ears are safe with me!