The Future of the Writing Business • by Bruce Bethke

I have two things on my mind this morning that are related although perhaps not obviously so. I’m also pressed for time today, so this is going to be more of a series of blunt blurts than a fully developed and cogent post.

The first is that just about everyone in the English-speaking world has their knickers in a twist this week because Puffin Books—a small division of Penguin, which is in turn a small division of Random Penguin House, or whatever it is that they’re calling that gigantic multinational publishing megacorporation these days now that a U.S. anti-trust court has blocked their assimilation of Simon & Shyster—excuse me, Schuster—and The Roald Dahl Story Company, which manages the copyrights and intellectual property rights to Dahl’s assorted books and other works—have released new editions of Dahl’s classic children’s books that include hundreds of changes, deletions, and amendations to the original texts as they’ve been known for decades. For example, in The Witches—surely you’ve seen the movie starring Anjelica Huston, even if you’ve never read the actual book—one of the key plot points is that all witches wear wigs, because underneath their superficially attractive appearance they’re all bald and ugly hags. But the new edition adds a line Dahl never wrote:

“There are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs and there is certainly nothing wrong with that.”

Cue the hue and cry and wailing and gnashing of teeth about “political correctness” and “creeping wokeism” and all that. But queue the wailers somewhere else, will you please? I’m on a deadline and trying to work here.

The second thing on my mind this morning is that just about everyone in the SF/F writing community has their already twisted knickers (Band Name!) in a double clove-hitch, because Clarkesworld has temporarily stopped considering new submissions due to the enormous number of AI-written spam stories they’ve received in the past two months. Now, you can either read what other people have to say about this development—and for Pete’s sake (no, not you, Mr. Wood), even ZDNET is covering this story—or you can cut the crap and read what Neil Clarke himself had to say about this. 

Please do so now.

And now that you’ve done so: neither of these developments should come as any sort of surprise to you. Censorship and historical revisionism have been with us at least since Amenhotep IV ordered the names of previous pharoahs and certain gods to be chiseled off monuments, and subsequently received the same treatment himself at the direction of his successor. We English-speakers even have a word specifically for changing the previously published language of a well-known literary text: bowdlerization, which comes from Thomas Bowdler, who published a series of “family friendly” editions of Shakespeare with all the naughty bits cut out more than 200 years ago.

[If you really want to get upset about censorship, though, go have a look what his English publisher’s translators did to the works of Jules Verne. The Jules Verne novels and stories you fell in love with as a young reader are not the texts as Verne wrote them.]

As for the business with Clarkesworld: this definitely should come as no surprise, as the genre fiction business has always had a surplus of people who think the hard part is coming up with ideas, and the way to make big bucks in genre fiction is by churning out shallow, stupid, derivative and formulaic work and putting as little effort into the actual writing of it as possible. Likewise, plagiarism has always been common. (I’ve been appalled by some of the things that have shown up in our slush pile. Seriously, did you think I wouldn’t recognize it if you retyped a story from Asimov’s I, Robot, changed four words, and claimed it was your own original work?)

What AI brings to the table is that it automates slap-dash writing and plagiarism. My experiences with DALL•E reinforce that perception. What DALL•E is doing is not generating original art; instead, it appears to scrape the web for images that match up to the keywords you’ve entered, and then does the visual arts equivalent of plagiarizing someone else’s execution of the idea, changing four words, and claiming it as original work.

Then slap your name on the resulting product, ship it off to a publisher, badda-bing, badda-boom: PROFIT!

I see a few obvious trend lines coming out of this Invasion of The AI Sci-Fi Writers. The first is that this probably means the eventual and well-deserved death of media tie-in novels, at least as a way for actual living writers to pay the bills. If you’re a publishing company that owns the book rights for an upcoming film or TV series, why bother to hire an actual living and probably troublesome writer to write the tie-in novel when you can just feed the shooting script into one end of the Novel-O-Matic machine and have it shit out an adequately acceptable media tie-in novel at the other end? Ninety-percent of the people who buy such novels won’t be able to tell the difference anyway.

The second is that it probably means the end of endless paranormal romance series, at least as written by actual living humans. Harlequin likely already has an entire division working on producing AI-generated novels to be published under corporately owned pseudonyms, and if you don’t think Amazon has already invested heavily in developing AI algorithms to generate direct-to-Kindle genre novel series based on the KENP metrics and sales and marketing data Amazon has been collecting for years, you’re deluding yourself.

The third is that this is probably going to lead in very short order to the return to the bad old days of submission guidelines that say “no unsolicited submissions,” “no unagented submissions,” or “query first before submitting.” The last time these were dominant forces in the market, it was stultifying. Basically, if you weren’t a Stephen King or a Kurt Vonnegut, you didn’t have a chance at breaking into pro-level publications. The new writers who are the lifeblood of the business, because they draw in new readers, had a really tough time breaking into major market publication, and as a result, the readers got bored and wandered off. One can only read so many “new” Kurt Vonnegut stories.

Coupled with my third point, expect to see publishers begin to include language in their contracts specifying that the work being put under contract includes no AI-generated content, and specifying punitive damages beyond merely cancelling the contract if the work is found to contain AI-generated content. After all, given the way these AI text generators work, by scraping the web and looting other people’s work, publishing such a work would open the publisher to plagiarism and rights infringement lawsuits.

Okay, I’ve run way over the time I’ve budgeted to write this column, so I’m going to skip trying to tie the censorship issue to the AI content-generation issue. Maybe I’ll be able to squeeze that in tomorrow. Instead, let me leave you with one thought: 

Every time you use your cell phone to send a text message, or use Google docs to write and share something, you are helping to train an AI in how to emulate your writing style.

I’m going to break off now, and get going on my afternoon task: getting ChatGPT to write an E. E. “Doc” Smith space opera novel in the style of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past.

That should give the f***ing thing a proper Captain Kirk-level nervous breakdown!  

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