Yeah. As a sci-fi author, I have strong opinions about this. Made an authortube video on the topic: https://youtu.be/THVpdcgTYrQ
But tl;dr: Gatekeepers in big/mainstream publishing have outsourced their slush-piles to underpaid interns, most of whom are young and ambitious women. They tend to like certain things. Also, big/mainstream publishing is chasing data trends, like all other big businesses, which leads to a staleness cycle where they only publish what worked in the last two years. They're afraid to take financial gambles on unproven ideas or new IP.
The good sci-fi these days is mostly indie and mostly underground, IMO. You really have to dig for it. Personally, I find good stuff via Reddit r/powerprogression, but even there, you may have to dig to find gems that speak to you.
I joke that I'm a male author and reader, even though I'm female. The first book of my epic series (which is fully published) is Majority: Torth Book 1.
The who cares era is just a symptom of the unaccountability machinery of our era.
It's hard to care or be passionate when you are certain that anything you produce which is worthwhile or original will be crushed, lost in the ocean of slop.
...Or just ignore AI and use your human creativity to write an amazing story. Something that is NOT a stale echo of another story. Something that adds to a global conversation/debate or examines a concept/premise a fresh new light, rather that parroting ideas that have already been expressed ad nauseam.
And if you can't think of anything new? Maybe the creative fields aren't for you. The world doesn't need more writers. There are much easier ways to earn a living.
I don't agree, imo being asked questions still draws creativity from yourself. It also help to clarify your thoughts.
It's like pair programming or rubberducking. The goal isn't to wait until someone else tells you what to write.
But I agree that a lot of people are copy pasting from chatGPT until it works
You can use your human creativity to come up with an outline of a story, then have AI do first drafts of chapters according to your outline. It's tremendously faster to go back and rewrite the AI draft than it is to generate a first draft by hand and to be honest for most writers the quality will be better.
That doesn't mean you don't painstakingly labor over characters, story flow/pacing, events, meaning, etc. It just means you're never stuck with writer's block - though you might get stuck with storyteller's block, which AI can also provide suggestions to help push past.
> You can use your human creativity to come up with an outline of a story, then have AI do first drafts of chapters according to your outline. It's tremendously faster to go back and rewrite the AI draft than it is to generate a first draft by hand and to be honest for most writers the quality will be better.
It's also tremendously crappy and less creative. If all you want to do is an outline, just publish that instead of fattening it up with AI slop.
Also, your idea is great if you always want to be a terrible writer and develop your writing skills poorly, and just care about volume of output. IIRC, real writers say the writing part isn't actually the hard part, but for some reason that's what you want to automate. The hard (and creative) part is the thinking you have to do when you're figuring out what to write.
There are books I've read where I seriously wish the author just published an outline, with maybe a bit more exposition around world-building (yeah, they were sci-fi). And that was human written stuff, reading AI slop would an even bigger waste of time.
I've known literally dozens of published writers and I can tell you that the reason that pro writers say that putting the words down on paper is not the hard part is because they've trained themselves to mostly vomit on the page, then edit it to where it needs to be. Writers that try to write good prose out of the gate get blocked, almost always. It's a basic piece of tradecraft that people who write for a living all know.
The process is outline, trash draft (who gives a shit who does this) then refine until you can't bear to read your work anymore and neither you or anyone you share the work with has critical points that don't have very solid counter arguments. Most wannabe writers have notebooks of worldbuilding and story arcs but can't even get the trash draft done.
I have a 6 book contract with Podium, my debut was in the top 100 books of 2023 by Kirkus, and I am nowhere near quitting my day job.
I've paid attention to the publishing industry for years. Like all of the arts, it's oversaturated and there's a lot of churn.
IMO, writers who earn a full-time living as authors fall into three basic categories. They either a) established themselves as blockbuster bestsellers with the Big Five before Amazon democratized the marketplace, circa 2010 and earlier, b) they established themselves as blockbuster bestsellers as early adopters of the Amazon Kindle marketplace, circa 2011 to 2016, or c) they own an advertising agency, are married to someone who owns an advertising agency, they are slick marketing gurus, or they are major social media influencers.
There are exceptions. I see interesting innovations in the web serial space, where I play around. I sell advance chapters on Patreon. Some authors do earn a full-time living that way.
But in general, yes, it is very tough to be a professional author or an artist or a musician or an indie game developer these days. Everyone wants to be one.
I also see cynical authors and artists using AI to 100x their content production so they can nickel and dime their way into top seller spots. The algorithms boost anyone whose works consistently sell and bury everyone else.
I love rational fiction. Yes to Methods of Rationality, Mother of Learning, and also Paranoid Mage and a few others, including Majority by Abby Goldsmith.
100%. I see a lot of originality in web serials and fiction by indie authors. I've more or less stopped reading books that were curated by the Big Five publishing houses.
The cons of thinking in public:
- Everyone judges you.
- Everyone can snap to a potentially wrong assumption about you or your motives.
- The conversation can shift to a meta discussion about you as a person, or some other factor, instead of the argument or proposal you were originally concerned enough to publicly post about.
Thinking in private allows greater freedom in some ways, although you do exchange power for that freedom. There is a lot of power in public opinion.
I explore this theme very in-depth in my web serial, which I just recently launched on RoyalRoad! Torth by AbbyBabble.
But tl;dr: Gatekeepers in big/mainstream publishing have outsourced their slush-piles to underpaid interns, most of whom are young and ambitious women. They tend to like certain things. Also, big/mainstream publishing is chasing data trends, like all other big businesses, which leads to a staleness cycle where they only publish what worked in the last two years. They're afraid to take financial gambles on unproven ideas or new IP.
The good sci-fi these days is mostly indie and mostly underground, IMO. You really have to dig for it. Personally, I find good stuff via Reddit r/powerprogression, but even there, you may have to dig to find gems that speak to you.
I joke that I'm a male author and reader, even though I'm female. The first book of my epic series (which is fully published) is Majority: Torth Book 1.
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