Welcome to this week’s installment of The Never-ending FAQ, the constantly evolving adjunct to our Submission Guidelines. If you have a question you’d like to ask about Stupefying Stories or Rampant Loon Press, feel free to post it as a comment here or to email it to our submissions address. I can’t guarantee we’ll post a public answer, but can promise every question we receive will be read and considered.
This week’s question isn’t one question, per se, it’s more a concatenation of a lot of somewhat related questions that have come in, all dancing in circles around the topic of artificial intelligence and its application in our world of fantastic fiction. For example:
Q: Do you use A.I.-generated art?
A: Yes. Sometimes. If it suits the story. Mind you, we don’t generate the images ourselves. We buy the images from the same stock art libraries from which we buy most of our non-A.I.-generated art. Somewhere, an artist did get paid for creating that image of a guinea pig bounding gracefully over a fence as if it was a steeplechase horse. (Which, if you know anything at all about guinea pigs, is absurd.)
If you want to argue that since A.I. was involved, that isn’t art: well, the person who created the image identifies as an artist. Take it up with them. I don’t feel it’s my place to tell an artist which tools they can or cannot use.
As a sidebar: it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find stock art that was not created using some elements of A.I. Even something as simple as a photo of a child holding a puppy: nope, odds are that image was at least enhanced using A.I. to massage the color and lighting. A.I. software has become part of the professional photographer’s tool kit, as common as filters and darkroom techniques were a generation ago.
Er, I hope this doesn’t come as a shock to you, but shooting a photo is only the start of the creative process. Do I need to explain film processing, cropping, burning, dodging, retouching, and everything else that could, back in the days of film, be done to alter an image between the moment the negative was exposed and the time the print was finally seen? Especially when in the service of agitprop, a photograph rarely embodies the complete truth.
Q: How do you feel about the use of A.I. in writing fiction?
A: I’ve ameliorated this question: usually it arrives in more confrontational form, from someone demanding that I take a strong position against AI-written fiction.
That’s easy. I’m against AI-written fiction. Because so far, most AI-written fiction I’ve seen totally sucks. There have been a few bright and shining exceptions: for example, I used to be a huge fan of the Postmodernism Generator, before they monetized the site and made it unreadable with inline ads. (Hence this link to the Wikipedia page about it, rather than to the actual Postmodernism Generator itself.)
However, I think that as with photography, writers will in time come to accept AI as just another tool to enhance their writing. In this past year we’ve gone through a bad patch, with a large number of imbeciles using things like ChatGPT to flat-out generate “stories,” which they then try to pass off as their own original work.
Such stories are usually easy to spot and dead on arrival the moment they show up in our slush pile. Put bluntly, a quick glance at the first paragraph reveals immediately that the suckage is off the scale. In this, the stories actually pass the Turing Test: they’re indistinguishable from something that might have been written by a human, albeit a really stupid human, probably a college sophomore, and very likely one who’s been smoking way too much weed.
Science fiction writers like to cite the Turing Test. They don’t seem to understand that the Turing Test does not prove intelligence. It merely proves that the evaluator can’t tell whether the results were produced by a human or a machine. If the output of the machine is sufficiently stupid and irrational… Well, there you go.
This probably explains why it’s so easy to train AI chatbots to be barking-mad racists.
Q: Before you wandered so far off-topic, you said writers will in time come to accept AI as just another tool to enhance their writing. How so?
A: I don’t think Microsoft will give you a choice. If you use Word, you’re going to get AI shoved up your nose. At first it will come in the form of AI-enhanced spell-checking and grammar-checking. Then, in traditional Microsoft fashion, it will leak into everything else, including places where it makes absolutely no sense at all, and you won’t be able to shut it off. If you do somehow find a way to disable it temporarily, it will re-enable itself every time Microsoft pushes out a new software update. Eventually, you’ll just surrender and let it do its thing.
To be honest, though, if AI-assisted spell-checking can understand context well enough to sort out homophones, it will be an improvement over what humans routinely send us. In that case I for one will welcome our new robot overlords.
Q: We’ve received a lot of questions lately about our recently released AI-narrated audio books, mostly revolving around the hows and whys of why we did them and what the process entailed. This is another question I stayed up too late last night trying to answer, only to decide it needs to be covered in an article of its own.
A: Ergo, I’ll write and post that article another day. In the meantime, we have the following audio books available. Why don’t you take a few minutes to listen to the free samples and tell us what you think of them, and which you prefer?
AI-generated “Virtual Voice” narration
Emerald of Earth
The Midnight Ground
Hart for Adventure
The Recognition Run
The Recognition Rejection
The Recognition Revelation
Living Human narration
The Counterfeit Captain
The Fugitive Heir
The Fugitive Pair
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3 comments:
Hi Bruce,
I had a listen to the AI commentary on "Emerald of Earth" and it was very good, I have to say. But it is a little robotic.
For comparison I listened to "The Counterfet Captain" read by Heidi Cox and it's clear that a good human narrator is far better.
Richard
Richie,
Thanks for taking the time to give them a try and make the comparison. I wish more people would do that before they express an opinion.
- Bruce
I listened to all of the samples, and I have to say, Virtual Voice is an enormous leap beyond what "text to speech" could do just a few years ago. I still prefer the human narrators, but much of that could be tribal - if the story is engaging, the reader fades into the background.
O tempora, o mores!
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