Fun With AI

ai users are so conditioned to writing unnecessarily verbose prompts that they even write their memes like that. pic.twitter.com/2Dj0lOJRo7

— George Crudo (@GeorgeCrudo) August 28, 2023

As I've noted here now and then, I've resumed writing for literary web zines after about a 15-year break. One thing that didn't exist in the earlier time was AI. AI is very political, and the literary web zines are almost unanimous in forbidding the use of AI. According to the UK Guardian,

The self-published zine has long been central to cultural revolutions, from queer activism to Black feminism and the riot grrrl punk movement, producing titles such as Sniffin’ Glue and Sweet-Thang along the way. But now the traditionally analogue art form faces a new shift: artificial intelligence.

AI may seem incompatible with the these cult DIY booklets, but some creatives, designers and artists have begun to experiment with the technology, causing alarm in parts of the underground publishing world. It has been their Dylan-goes-electric moment.

Wait a moment. I'm olld enough to have lived through Dylan-goes-ekectric. It was a nothingburger. I asked the oracle, "What was Bob Dylan's first electic album, and how did its sales compare with earlier albums?" It answered,

Bringing It All Back Home, released in March 1965, was Bob Dylan's first album to feature electric instrumentation. The album was split structurally: side one featured him backed by a full electric rock band, while side two retained his traditional acoustic sound.In terms of sales and chart performance, Bringing It All Back Home significantly outperformed all of his earlier albums, marking a massive commercial breakthrough.

. . . While the shift to electric rock alienated purists within the contemporary folk scene, the gamble proved to be a highly lucrative turning point that transformed him from a niche folk icon into a massive global rockstar.

There's been no such turning point among the web literary zines. A typical policy is absolutely against its use:

We will not consider AI generated works, whether in part or in full.

I asked the oracle, "What are typical AI novel writing products, and why are they used if publishers forbid them?" It answered,

Sudowrite, ChatGPT, and Claude, which writers use to brainstorm, outline, or draft text despite traditional publishers banning fully machine-generated prose due to copyright and quality risks.

. . . Independent creators face heavy output pressures on online marketplaces, prompting some to risk using automated text.

Hack or no, it's hard to make any kind of money as a writer. A lot of the market for writing is in genre fields like romance, science fiction, and fantasy, where characters, settings, and action are formulaic and stereotypical. They don't pay much, but they pay something -- why not automate the job and make a decent hourly wage? One problem is that if the genre publishers acknowledge this, it's an insult to their readership. But that's simply how it is.

The way AI large language models work is they digest huge volumes of writing and calculate the probability of one particular word following another. Thus they can compose understandable prose, generate plots, and imitate style. In this post, I asked AI to create a typical Lydia Davis micro fiction, and it came up with something so close it was unintentionally satirical. Amazingly, an AI detector rated it human-written -- this may have been because I asked AI to imitate a particular human writer.

I asked the oracle, "Can you write me a typical 100 word micro fiction that would appear in a literary web zine?" It replied,

The kitchen smelled of burnt toast and her mother’s cheap lavender water.

Elena unrolled the blueprint across the grease-stained counter, weighing the corners down with a salt shaker and a half-empty jar of honey. The ink was fading, a grid of rooms that never came to be. Outside, the midday freight train rattled the windowpanes, blurring the neat lines of the master bedroom.

She traced the hallway with a sticky index finger. Ten years ago, they called this a fresh start. Now, it was just paper. She folded it twice, tucked it into her coat, and left the front door wide open.

Then it said, "I can draft a matching 25-word author bio to accompany it." I told it to go ahead:

Elena Vance is a writer from Los Angeles whose short fiction has appeared in several digital journals. She explores themes of forgotten spaces and family inheritance.

I asked it, "Can you come up with a better name for a lady micro fiction writer than Elena Vance?" It answered,

Here are several distinct name options for a lady microfiction writer, grouped by the "vibe" or literary tone they project:

Maeve Thorne – Short, punchy, and memorable. Ideal for writers who focus on precise, striking prose.

Selah Glass – Elegant but slightly fragile; pairs perfectly with ethereal or experimental writing.

Arden Wells – Gender-neutral and classic; carries a strong, sophisticated literary presence.

Unfortunately, I fed the story above into the free GPTZero AI detector, and it flagged it as 100% AI generated. Nevertheless, I think AI is trying to tell us something. I'm still trying to think out how you could write a story about AI that a literary web zine would publish.

UPDATE: "Can you write me a 100 word micro fiction as though Mark Twain had written it?"

The old hound, Buster, possessed a theological mind and a deep reverence for the dinner bell. When the town preacher asserted that all righteous creatures would find eternal rest in the hereafter, Buster thumped his tail against the porch planks in absolute despair.

To a dog who spent his earthly days chasing elusive rabbits and dodging the cook’s broom, the prospect of sitting perfectly still through eternity sounded remarkably like a permanent stay at the county pound.

He closed his eyes, let out a heavy sigh, and decided right then to commit some small, comfortable sin before supper.

GPTZero also flagged this as AI-generated.