Lukewarm Water: Sabotaging The Word-Machine

Hello!

This week has been a kind of bad one in terms of 'AI continuing to pollute literary spaces', so I was compelled to yap, as usual.

Enjoy your tea!

The Scandal in the Prose

It has been a terrible few weeks to be a labourer in the word-mines.

Just a matter of months after the infamous Shy Girl fiasco, artificial intelligence has reared its ugly head and stained another major element of the literary space. Two, actually. Nobel Prize-winning Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk is facing backlash for admitting in a public interview that she uses AI to expand and add details to scenes in her latest novel, and is now doing damage control to clarify that she did not in fact use LLMs to literally put words into her book. A nonfiction book about how AI is affecting our ability to verify information online has quotes from technologists and internet commentators that AI entirely made up. And while all that is happening, the Commonwealth Short Story Prize is under fire after a writer on Facebook publicly accused Trinidadian writer and Caribbean region winner Jamir Nazir of using an LLM to construct his winning story wholesale, leading others to be suspicious of at least two other regional winning stories.

Part of why this draws both my attention and my concern is because the Commonwealth Short Story Prize is of particular value to me. There are very few opportunities for top-shelf Caribbean short fiction to be awarded, and this prize is among them; I have entered several times and, while making the longlist still eludes me, it has remained one of the prize targets of my writing.

Or should I say 'had remained'? The understandable ire that the current debacle has drawn seems to have dampened the prize in the estimation of others throughout the Commonwealth. The Commonwealth Foundation itself is mostly at fault, giving what many consider a lackluster response to the backlash, essentially confirming that the only test available to them regarding whether a work is AI-generated is the word of the author. Ahem: 'author'. As for Granta, the publisher of the shortlisted stories, they insist that they just did a basic copyedit — the acquisition of the stories, after all, was supposedly already conducted by the Prize judges.

To be fair, the Foundation and the Prize's judges are between a rock and a hard place, and this is by the purposeful design of LLMs. Short of a confession, it's hard to pin overly purple prose, a dropped subplot or an attachment to one or another figure of speech or preferred punctuation solely on artificial intelligence — it turns out that lots of flesh-and-blood writers can love overwrought similes, cling to a favourite rhetorical device, forget major plot points mid-page, and become overly attached to em-dashes all by their damn selves. (Ask me how I know. For my part, I prefer anaphora than epistrophe, and love me a zeugma too — which probably makes me more annoying than an LLM.)

In fact, Shy Girl has already taught us one of the undeniable yet threatening excuses that can be offered: AI detection tools like Pangram, which played a recurring role in this comedy as it has in the last, is not entirely infallible, and there are as many likely false positives as there may be false negatives; not to mention that if we decry LLMs for their theft and plagiarism of text, isn't it already a point of hypocrisy to take someone else's work, however it may strain credulity, and run it back through the automaton to verify your suspicions? What happened to the option that has been free since the oral traditions: simply saying that the work is shite?

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Of course, this is not me necessarily defending Nazir's story. In fact, it is perhaps the scalding opposite: I may never be able to say with any surety that it is definitely AI-generated or even AI-assisted, but I can say it is meandering and lyrically saccharine, and I say so from experience. In a lot of ways, the story gets in its own way by trying to be more beautiful than it can be functional. Sometimes you just want the story to tell the story; sometimes the most artful your prose can be is in service of making sure the reader can follow the path it is laying out. I try not to be cruel to my peers in this craft, so I hope that this isn't taken that way, but it needs be remarked that the story struggles to keep a metaphor in its attention, gilds every clause to the point where they conceal more story than they reveal, and ends feeling like it is clawing for aesthetic rather than theme.

But it's not the only indicator we have to work on. Nazir doesn't have as robust a social media footprint as many other writers, but the parts that we can easily trace back to him are telling: he has several photos of his face which sadly aren't headshot-caliber, which makes the fact that his profile image for the Prize is obviously retouched by AI even more galling; beyond that, the rare social media posts that he does make include several AI-designed poem-images on Facebook, and several full-throated defenses of LLMs on LinkedIn.

One very obvious reason why this bothers me is because it sucks to be in the spotlight of something so bitter. Just as it was when the Shy Girl mess took place, so shall it be this week—the discourse about people behaving badly with AI is reserved almost entirely for marginalised people, and especially those who would otherwise be gatekept by industry spaces. I can only speak for myself, and I cannot even begin to imagine how poorly algorithmically curated my digital spaces are, but I feel like it obviously means something that I have seen more international literary commentators say anything about Nazir than Tokarczuk, that Mia Ballard seemed to draw more contempt for Shy Girl than white authors like Coral Hart who advertise AI 'courses' on their website and on social media specifically to encourage other writers to flood and contaminate the self-publishing ecosystem. This is not me saying Nazir doesn't deserve very stern commentary, and to be clear the first red flags about Nazir's output came from African writers (which is arguably its own can of worms) — but am I perhaps being hypervigilant to ask whether the Western literary community can only keep kicking AI when it's down once it's also the tragedy of a person of colour getting caught, even when dozens of white men are proudly trading on its ability to dilute real fiction?

The other bothersome thing is how this is being presented by some as revealing the alleged hollowness of the 'pretentious', 'woke' literary community. There is undeniably a lot of elitism in prize spaces, but implying that this particular issue is simply one of writers too out of touch with the common reader to be able to catch bad prose reads more like bitterness than real critique. AI-generated fiction is in multiple genres in multiple forms of publication, and large swaths of the public are eating it up sight unseen. If it is somehow the habit of the 'elite' 'literati' to not be able to tell when a piece of fiction is obviously AI — if the 'common man' is better than this — then you'd figure LLM-assisted writing would die on the vine elsewhere, that there would be little to no AI-voiced fast-movie recaps of Fight Club or entirely digitally fabricated self-help videos about becoming an alpha male. On the internet, fraudsters are using AI to create whole people, and concealing their artifice with faux video compression and bad audio. All people are infallible, at the end of the day — if I can give grace to the old lady commenting on TikTok who thinks this is a video of a real Black woman selling real handwoven blankets, I should be able to give the same grace to a fiction writer who is briefly bamboozled by flowery prose.

But what does that mean about these actual awards and their legitimacy? Very little, in my estimation — there were other kinds of narrative fraud before AI, and the only part that matters in this instance is that AI has made that fraud cheaper and more difficult to confront. I don't think I agree that the Short Story Prize is dead — severely wounded and refusing medical attention, surely about to lose quite a lot of blood, but still capable of being saved, and worth saving. We should obviously be concerned that AI will continue to improve until these issues become harder to catch, and we should also be concerned about the potential for the witch hunts for the next plagiarist to become more brutal in the light of harder-to-compile evidence.

But what about the act of publishing and being acknowledged overall, then? If the fate of the future is that more literary fraud like this will become not only commonplace but more invisible, and more publishers and prize foundations will be even more vigilant in the attempt to save their own face, how will we prove in the future that our words came from our own heads? Do I have to film a timelapse of my computer screen every time I write? Do I have to submit every version-history snapshot of my Google Doc? Would you prefer I submitted in handwritten pen, instead?

This is the real tragedy at the heart of controversies like these: a future where, barring any surety one way or the other, it's much easier to err on a lack of faith in the writer every single time. Claiming "I may not always be able to tell that bad prose is AI, but I can always tell that good prose isn't" is easy now, when this is what LLMs look like at their current best, but tomorrow they will be tricksier still.

The thing that AI rots the most is not that it is robbing the words out of the hands and mouths of real writers, or that it empowers cheaters to take rewards from real working writers who often need the financial reward of a prize to justify even staying on the creative path. It's that it will eventually erode trust in the reputation of curated spaces like edited magazines and juried awards, to the point where the alternative is to refuse curation at all. Your favourite magazine's editor will refuse any work they can't be absolutely sure of. The last few awards in a developing region dedicated to specifically culturally relevant work will not consider it worth the trouble to defend the work they select.

If that is not the world we want, then we can only defend the dignity of writing from one's own mind. It will sting just as much as it does right now, and it may not triumph every time, but I can think of no other way to let the cheaters know that we despise the incuriosity and fraud of AI so much that it is no longer profitable to try. And in the interim, even if it is just a matter of celebrating your own taste, it is now more worthwhile than ever to praise the writing you do know has come from the heart and the mind of the writers you adore and trust, and encourage those with room to grow to find their voice the old-fashioned way, the way that never dies, the way that will always be there with you even when your laptop battery is low.

Tasting Notes

Given the fact that I am commenting on a prize I have openly admitted to entering several times without making the longlist, most of my commentary may sound like sour grapes, so in order to balance that out, I'm pleased to add that two-time Caribbean region winner and 2022 judge Kevin Jared Hosein has far briefer, more critical, and more necessary things to say about the issue.

Beyond that, we need to reiterate first and foremost that relying on AI to solve what non-creatives consider small problems like making art is in fact dulling our capacity for the kind of lateral thematic thinking that is vital to survive the world in other parts of our lives. This is more critical than simply reiterating the research that confirms that 'using AI is accruing severe cognitive debt' — not working out the muscles required to actually develop your own opinions and your own tastes, working consistently in text to learn how to express yourself authentically, and being patient with yourself to edit both those opinions and expressions, will only disadvantage you.

My primary school lessons teacher (what I guess the Americans among you would call cram school) once opened an English lesson by saying "If you start every story you write with 'It was a dark and stormy night...', then on a clear and sunny day you will not be able to write." This is truer for AI than anything: if you can only tell the story you think everyone needs to read with an automaton backing your words, then when the battery dies you will have nothing. The rest of us writers run on soul. And replenishing that is easier: with good food, good company, and the wealth of other people's real stories.

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Today's Tunes

Vaundy | tobu toki (fly away)

https://www.youtube.com/embed/LVCwdZoUFQ8?rel=0

Hey, did you know the author of Fullmetal Alchemist has a new manga out—and it just got an anime a few months back?

I am still slowly working my way through Daemons of the Shadow Realm, but I am enjoying it a lot. It is not in today's What's On TV? because, among other reasons, I am still trying to... grasp it. I feel like a lot of it is very deliberately working towards a particular quality of conflict in the same way FMA:Brotherhood did—watching two siblings (especially the blonder of them) slowly work their way through a complicated understanding of the rules of their world and how they are impacted by those rules before being thrown headlong into the politics of various competing factions—but this time by allowing us to not be sure at all which, if any, of those factions are trustworthy at all. In fact, a lot of elements of this anime are incredibly similar to Arakawa Hiromu's magnum opus in this way—children coming into baffling power by way of tragedy; concealing the truth of those children's family and youth in order to shield them from the foregone nature of that tragedy—while also being intriguingly unique enough in terms of its power system that I am curious what daemons are meant to indicate about the world in the ways that alchemy as both a science and a weapon did for FMA. Plus, despite my personal hangups about how they are typically percieved and portrayed in both media and real life, I am a bit of a sucker for twins, especially when they are obviously dissimilar.

All of this would have already hooked me to watch the anime, of course, but then Studio Bones decided to sweeten the pot by having one of my favourite artists on the OP. 'tobu toki' is probably my favourite anime opening of the year so far—to the point where I think listening to it on repeat when it came out potentially helped me break a part of the story I was writing at the time? Which has happened before, but exceedingly rarely.

Of additional note: in keeping with the whole motif of pairs that is core to the show, I guess someone on the committee decided it would be fun to have two different versions of both the OP and ED for the season, each sung by both Vaundy and yama, the ED's original artist. This is fun because not only do I get to share two versions of the same song with you, but I personally find it kinda hilarious in its own way that yama's version of this song is the only one with an official video. Enjoy.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/vCrZrKbg-Us?rel=0

Whatcha Playin'?

Destiny 2

This one is a different speed than the usual—there isn't a lot of television that immediately strikes me as worth talking about (at least until I finally dig into some anime I have been compelled by a friend to finally watch). Instead, dearly beloved, we are gathered here to pay our future respects to the game Destiny 2, which has announced today that it will be releasing its final phase of live-service content in June of this year.

This is bittersweet for me. I got into playing Destiny 2 quite a bit later than most others, and I also hadn't actually played it except for the rare Gambit match in several months. But it was quite undeniably one of my very favourite games of the last decade or so. I enjoyed its story, there was some layer of depth and wonder lingering within its lore, and of course, it was quite a bit of fun to essentially be a mercenary blessed with elemental fantasy powers and fighting aliens in deep space for the good of all Traveler-blessed creation.

But the truth is, Bungie had not been treating its player base with the greatest respect. After quite a bit of low communication, several terrible content delays that fans considered mostly lackluster, and the company almost entirely shifting focus to develop Marathon (a seemingly very good game that is absolutely struggling to maintain playership parity with other titles in its extraction-shooter ilk), fans have been either entirely burnt out or clinging to the hope that there would have been an announcement this month of new content, new and more and bigger and more regular drops of something, anything at all.

So a lot of players seem incredibly hurt by the alternative: that soon there will be a little more, and then no more at all; that D2 will earn its final triumphant sendoff just like Destiny 1 before it, and hopefully be free to focus on making other things as great as the Bungie team has done in the past.

The optimist in me is hopeful that this means sometime soon—not very soon, maybe in eight months or something—they will announce that they've gone back to the drawing board and have something truly kickass planned for another instalment in the series. I want to believe this not only because Destiny is what I want more of from them (I was dogshit at Marathon during the beta and that was just in the tutorial; Bungo pls I do not have the mental fortitude for extraction-shooter PVP), but because between Sony's seemingly domineering leadership of the company and the unfortunately dwindling response to Marathon (which is still despite my own frustrations quite a good game with an aesthetic I imagined would have hit it off with fans much better than it had); Bungie will have to make something soon if it wants to keep being the cash cow Sony thought it was when they acquired it.

I for one am willing to wait for whatever. I would like to learn what I'm waiting for sometime soon, but I can wait. I think that the Bungie team is very talented at both design and story. I think if they were to create something else—another Destiny, or something brand new—it would have the potential to be astounding with enough time and care dedicated to the effort itself and not the rush to please investors or the pressure to woo players. We shall see what the future holds. In any case, it was nice while it lasted, and I for one will be coming in June to pet Archie and say goodbye to the universe I adore.

Per Audacia Ad Astra.

The Leaves

So that’s all for today.

Don't forget that Hugo Awards voting is still open! Don't just do it because I'm a finalist for Best Poem—do it because the Best Poem category deserves to be a permanent part of the award's history, and your support reinforces that poetry is a valuable part of the genre.

A reminder that you can help keep this newsletter and the rest of my work afloat by supporting me on Patreon, buying me a coffee on Ko-fi or sending a donation via PayPal, or by buying one of my small game projects over on Itch!

Today's question is for my fellow writers: what is the recurring element of your writing that you think will not only always distinguish your work from AI, but will always mark your work as yours? I don't do it often, but I really do love me a cheeky little sylleptic zeugma.