I had good intentions of doing a "2022 in Publishing" wrap up video but ran out of time to film and edit. However, since I DID do all the work of putting the content together, here it is in blog post form for you to enjoy: papertiger.productions/2022-in-publishing/
Don’t lose heart! As an illustrator, I was where you were mentally a month ago when I posted my video on AI art. Since then I’ve predicted that legal action would likely be taken and those steps are already underway. However regardless of the result, the best thing all of us creatives can do is continue to improve our craft. There is a strong community that values humanity and as long as that exists, we will always have an audience! People will read your books because they like YOU!
I'm shocked that your video only has 2.2k views as of right now because it's such a well-reasoned and well-presented case for why people need to look into these issues a little further. I watched a very long video on the other side of the debate recently. The whole time I wanted to slam my head against my desk because the central thesis of the arguments presented hinged on the misconception that the AI is learning the art exactly as a human would and I was just like NO IT DOESN'T. I thought of dropping a short essay about it in the comments but in the end I just couldn't. It is ironic how artists get made fun of all the time for not being business/commercially minded but the second that we are, we get jumped on for it. But it is what it is. Thanks for stopping by and dropping all those words of encouragement! As you said, the most important thing we can do is to focus on getting better at our craft and finding communities that value it.
@@PaperTigerProductions yeah, the algorithm is rather picky 😅 Yes it is frustrating listening to the arguments they provide. From how the machine learns to “artists are crybaby gatekeepers.” And all artists learn from each other… which actually isn’t true. The best artists consistently study real life. I personally have experienced an amazing group of self published authors that have been an amazing support and flat out refused to use AI. They restored my hope in this profession, and I believe it will continue 😊
If people are just looking for a steady stream of art-as-entertainment-and-escape, then maybe an AI can churn out enough titillation, like AI-generated porn. But if people are looking for meaning, for soul, like having an actual relationship, then you can't have that without a real person. Art & stories with meaning, that reach into our souls, they can only be written by people.
Yep. 😔 The tools are pretty janky right now but they're only going to get better, and probably faster than we think they can. Which is why we've gotta start changing strategies now.
I've been thinking about this for a while now as a small indie author. And my conclusion is that it doesn't really change anything for me. There are something like 2 million books published each year. The math is such that even in my niche there are tons of books published each year, combined with all the books already out there. It's hard to be found now, it will be hard to be found later. Yes, someone might be able to publish a book a day or a book a week. But people already manage that sort of speeds anyway (even more so when it's multiple people writing under the same pen name). My issue will still be discoverability. And there it doesn't really matter if I'm up against 1 million or 5 million or 10 million books. It's all the same. Besides, I think there will be enough people looking for human created books, simply because they can be different. Middle Earth couldn't have been built by an AI, simply because there was nothing similar enough. Same with the Cosmere.
Discoverability is an absolute killer! On Middle Earth and Cosmere: I sure hope there is some other point of human originality I can rely on because if the answer to AI is "spend 20+ years worldbuilding" I am going cry. Then barf. Then cry some more, probably. Or maybe figure out how to get the AI to draw on the reputable portion of the established body of peer-reviewed scientific research as it rolls a random world building generator so I can cut those decades into a few seconds.
@@PaperTigerProductions True. 20 years worldbuilding is not the answer. I meant it more as "write original and high quality content." Only you can be you, and you've said it yourself, the thing which makes Sanderson Sanderson is that he is being his approachable self. Does this mean that there won't be any succesful AI authors? No. There definitely will be. But that doesn't change all that much. I'm now "competing" against authors who can put out a book a month or even every two weeks. This doesn't really change all that much. However, I do think that if your main marketing strategy is to put out a lot of books which follow genre tropes to the letter then you might suffer more than someone else. And the biggest problem authors (of all kinds face) is discoverability. Which takes time and effort. Having a lot of books helps of course, which is where AI can help. But having a lot of books doesn't automatically make you a bestselling author.
As long as traditional publishing takes a firm stance on human only writing I think we're ok for a while. If trad publishing starts letting authors use Ai that's when things will fall apart. Of course it remains to be seen what audiences will accept AI books.
Trad publishing is so broken right now. The editors and other rank-and-file staff might champion authors and artists but the ranks of middle and senior management and the executives are all profit-focused. Their entire business model is a numbers game. I can't tell you how many advances for books I saw during my auditing days where the advance is still sitting in their ledgers (though fully provisioned against and written down to a net nil value for their balance sheet) because the author either hadn't submitted their manuscript or the title didn't sell well enough. Somewhere in a board room, trad pub industry execs are gathering while their companies are on fire, trying to figure out a way for them to jump onto this. Why bother with human authors if you can just hire some starry-eyed interns as editors/prompt wranglers to churn out your next bestseller? As to readers...well. I'm not encouraged by what I'm seeing on book communities lately. Requests for reading recommendations seem to be getting more and more narrow. For every "recommend me a book that you would never have picked up but totally surprised you in a good way" post, I see dozens more "recommend me a book that has these very specific tropes, plots, themes, etc". The majority of readers like what they like and-unless prompted-don't see the point of reading more widely. If an AI book does all that, I very much doubt that they will care.
@@PaperTigerProductions Writers aren't the only ones in trouble. Sure, the publishers can just use AI instead of taking on writers, but the AI tools will be available to the readers, so just like the publishers won't need writers anymore the readers won't need publishers anymore. They'll have their story-generating app on their phone and just prompt whatever they want to read. In the end, the real winner will be the ones making those apps. And further down the line, say fifteen years from now, this will happen to movies as well. Everyone will be a creator, but no one will know how to create. And soon enough the AI will be able to prompt itself with better ideas than what people can come up with, and so in the end humanity will be reduced to an enormous audience with no one on stage but the machines. It's not hard to see where we're headed and what the future for our species will be like. None of the most typically dystopian futures will fit the bill, rather I think it will be like HG Wells imagined the future of humanity in The Time Machine. Indeed, we're turning into something like the Elois - docile, infantile little creatures. And we will love it.
@@malmtobias Brave New World was actually top of mind for me-not so much its specific themes per se, but that moment in the book where you realize that "Hug me 'til you drug me honey / Kiss me till I'm in a coma / Hug me, honey, snuggly bunny / Love's as good as soma" is considered the pinnacle of great art in that society.
In my own writing, I've come to appreciate how using AI can increase the speed of my output, and it often will make suggestions to me on elements of a given story that I hadn't thought of. I'm not so concerned about being replaced: 1: As you pointed out, visibility is out the window. The market is already so saturated that newcomers like myself have no real way of being visible simply by offering a product. And 2: if the AI's products are indistinguishable from those of a human's, it seems to me that a human would be as equally likely to buy a human's story as that of an AI's. The real challenge there is scale: AI just creates faster. I am concerned about what happens when the developers of the various AI services out there decide that since their software is making substantial contributions to authors' manuscripts, won't those developers want a cut of the royalties?
The scale is what worries me because it means that old "pick two" paradigm (quality, time, cost) that constrains human works can't be applied. We're going to have to find some other factor to differentiate on. Perhaps it's the "human" factor or the "community" factor as others have brought up. But on a pure numbers basis, AI works will drown out human works simply by virtue of being able to produce faster. Re: the royalties, it'll be very interesting to see where things go with the current litigation already happening with Stable Diffusion and MidJourney, as well as GitHub and OpenAI.
I explained this to my old parents of the AI and books. They were pissed and said they’d stop reading if the book they were reading was AI and not made by humans. There might be hope
Deviation from plot patterns is innovation literary genres strive for. It requires a lot of time and education, which would be mostly wealthy and white. AI, in my theory, would squash ownvoices and dealing with diverse authors
Fortunately, the AI needs to be prompted right now. So, right now I think we'll be okay because our ideas are essentially our own. That being said, there is something to say for many, not the vast majority I would say, but many who would be more adverse to supporting "Human" content. Which most people, define as created completely by a human without the assistance of Artificial Intelligence.
Yeah, I foresee this going the same way as branding and market position for manufactured goods: organic, locally sourced, artisanal, handmade, ethically sourced, 100% carbon neutral, etc. Just add "Made without AI" to tags like "Made with 100% recyclable paper" or "Made in Australia" or "Made from 100% organic cotton".
"We are screwed..." Wonder if AI will ever had the chance to say that line 😬 Jokes aside, we are already merging human intelligence with AI more and more and only ignorant people would think that they can stop that. But I quite like @SparrowSprings comment about community values, I predict the stronger presence of AI will be the necessary evil to bring humanity closer in the digital era that has caused so much disconnection due to the lack of human presence.
😅 You're 100% right on the merging of human intelligence with AI; I already feel like I can't function without my phone most days. I've got my fingers crossed for your prediction!
I believe the idea of Amazon adopting a search bar to generate book prompts is unrealistic. This would require millions of proofreaders and content editors to ensure the accuracy of the customized product. You'll need fact checkers as AI is not as accurate we like to believe. Take Grammarly for instance, it's been out for over a decade and still doesn't catch a lot of my errors. I still work with human editors. Even if companies were to work with human editors and AI fact checkers etc., I'm not sure they'd be able to match the speed of whale readers generating daily prompts to satisfy their voracity. It sounds good in theory but there are too man obstacles in this doomsday scenario. Just my two scents.
All good points! I feel like what we'll probably see is a stratification in readership, where you'll see one audience that won't really care too much about factual accuracy and those kinds of aspects. I'm especially curious to see if that would happen for whale readers, and whether it would affect easily they might DNF something.
I think AI will soon be able to write a good boring novel, but AI doesn’t seem to be good at Being novel. I haven’t yet seen any ai create something new. They are still parrots. That’s not to say they won’t improve.
So the novel thing is really interesting. I was fascinated by David Epstein's book, Range, because he made a pretty strong that a lot of what we see as innovation comes from people with deep knowledge in multiple, often very different domains because it allows them to make what seem to be incredible connections but because they're so steeped in those domains, it's so obvious and logical to them. Right now, Gary Marcus (in this article posted on his Substack: garymarcus.substack.com/p/form-function-and-the-giant-gulf) has shown that AI doesn't have the faintest understanding of what it is ingesting and outputting. But if/when AI ever gets to that level of understanding, it's going to come up with really good stuff. Unless we somehow also unlock the secrets of longevity so that we too can live long enough to attain mastery in thousand domains.
An AI that can understand what it’s putting in and out might actually be a true digital person and be protected under legal codes because you can keep people as corporate slaves…I think
@@PaperTigerProductions YES! This is what I do! Not in my fiction necessarily, but in conversation, through my wide reading practice! Make those CONNECTIONS! Love this conversation, Deborah! And I appreciate the wordplay, Jim!
