Going Viral on Twitter

I’ve just had a tweet go viral and it has prompted me to try to revive this website. Here’s a link to the tweet in question.

I’m watching the numbers skyrocket with a mix of satisfaction and dread. I’m glad it wasn’t something terrible, but I feel especially weird that I’m getting more engagement than the Clarkesworld tweet I was quoting. And while I’m alarmed about and keeping abreast of the issues surrounding machine learning software and creative endeavours, I’m not an expert on those things.

Why couldn’t it have been something about sword-fighting, which I am a legitimate expert on?

Still, I am an expert on being an aspiring author dealing with barriers in the publishing industry, so why not?

There’s a lot to talk about on the subject of “AI” and the arts, and a lot of replies to my tweet addressed things like copyright, taking jobs from artists, the quality of AI “creative” work, whether the issue is actually the software itself or just late-stage capitalism, and so on. As always, my mind spirals out after all of these threads, but I’m going to rein it back in and focus on barriers for authors.

So first off, there are already massive barriers for anyone who wants to make a career of writing, and like the future, those barriers are not evenly distributed. There are inherent barriers, like needing to develop skill/craft, which have their own subset of barriers, like needing to pay to survive while you develop your craft. I’m lucky in regard to survival, but my ADHD set me back decades.

There are societal barriers to publication, like systemic or individual discrimination, unrecognized language and cultural biases, challenges of submitting/querying across international boundaries. A lot of these get tied up with perceived or imposed market concepts where the publisher asserts that there’s no market for X, when maybe they just don’t understand that market, or maybe the industry has reinforced a narrow picture of the market.

All of these barriers affect individual writers differently and to a different degree, but there are also legitimate individual barriers. Even with treatment, my ADHD limits my productivity. I am proud of how much I write, but there is a hard limit. Someone with chronic pain may not be able to spend much time performing the physical task of writing. Someone with anxiety may struggle to submit their work for evaluation.

And then there are the barriers imposed on authors by the industry. Some of these are unavoidable. Whatever means of submission a publisher uses, writers have to have access to that platform. Some people don’t have reliable internet access. Some people have internet but not physical mail. Every additional requirement that a publisher adds is an additional barrier.

A lot of these barriers are tiny for most people, but that doesn’t make them tiny for everyone. That’s what I mean when I say they aren’t evenly distributed. If you require a self-addressed stamped envelope to be included with submission (old school, I know), that’s a bit of a hassle for people in the same country as the publisher, a bit worse for countries with close ties, and scaling up to impossible for some. I’m Canadian, and I used to occasionally buy mail vouchers in lieu of stamps for the return envelope when sending things to the US. When I lived in New Zealand, it was significantly more difficult, and the postage was much more expensive. I am sure there are places it would have been impossible.

Technology has lowered a lot of barriers. Almost no one requires snail mail anymore, so my example issue is moot. But now we have a barrier for people who still depend on physical mail. But for the most part, publishers have lowered barriers. Of course, lowering barriers increases competition. That means that those of us with more privilege have to compete fairly with those with less privilege. Good.

But now we get to the issue of “AI” generated stories. This is a technology that can lower barriers, but right now it’s being used to lower the barrier to flooding the market with spam. I feel like there could be a nuanced discussion about “AI” used as an assistive device to overcome individual challenges. I use grammar checkers. My ADHD means that I sometimes skip over a word and don’t notice, so it’s nice to have it pointed out to me. I also frequently choose to ignore my grammar checker because I like “incorrect” grammar better.

But that’s not the current issue. Clarkesworld is being flooded with machine-generated stories that are only good enough to fool his detection tools into accepting that they might have been written by a human. Someone has to look at each of these stories and reject it. Clarkesworld is famous for their fast response time, and they cannot keep up with the deluge. These stories aren’t really competing with human authors, but they are creating barriers.

Screening these stories takes time, so it costs money, in addition to the cost of automated screening tools. Genre magazines don’t make a lot of money (I’m pretty sure a lot of them cost more than they earn already). Any increased costs cut into their budget to pay authors, which means less pay or fewer stories bought. Or they just go out of business and there’s one less market.

There are means of dealing with spam submissions, but every single one of them is a new barrier to authors. Reading/submission fees, writing progress trackers, closed lists of approved authors, and so on, all add a burden to writers submitting their stories. Some of the solutions I’ve seen proposed just replace the time spent screening spam with time spent verifying credentials. Neil Clarke says that automated detection tools aren’t up to the task. They could be improved, but it’s an arms race that the detection tools will always lag behind on.

And all of the barriers created by spam countermeasures will affect marginalized authors more than privileged authors. I truly admire that Neil Clarke at present refuses to consider options that will exclude people from submitting. Right now that means that one of the best genre markets for aspiring authors is closed.