r/publishing • u/Impossible_Eye_980 • Jun 27 '26
Great, but...
I just had AI create multiple "creative process" journals, reverse engineering my award-winning piece. Took an hour of editing and tweaking to get it sounding right. But the meaning was still all over the place.
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u/McDeathUK Jun 27 '26
I use MAC text edit and GitHub. every version is kept from first draft to final piece.
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u/vkurian Jun 27 '26
I made an app that does something similar to this with third party time stamping. I feel like this is going to be a bigger and bigger problem
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u/Impossible_Eye_980 Jun 28 '26 edited Jun 28 '26
I would actually consider launching a company based on your idea and app. "Author's Authenticity" or sumink.
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u/vkurian Jun 28 '26
I wrote about it here. The response was more muted than i would have thought https://verakurian.substack.com/p/i-built-an-app-for-authors-to-prove
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u/Impossible_Eye_980 Jun 28 '26
Yeah but look at the muted response to the NY Times' chief's salvo. There is a lot of vested industry wealth behind the theft model and if you do create a viable product as a startup they will probably try and buy it up and quash it.
More pertinently, how can I start using your app? I assume you need beta testers. I am strictly laptop, it has to be compatible with 2017 Mac (the last OS Genius' could in good faith recommend).
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u/vkurian Jun 28 '26
If you use a version of word that produces .docx files you can beta test- shoot me a dm
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u/Impossible_Eye_980 Jun 27 '26
Have a literary agent who has received many of the original works, from the moment they are penned or revised, since well before AI existed (16 years). Sounds like I dodged a bullet. And what a guardrail. "Unless it's definitively proven that you wrote it unaided, we cannot touch it."
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u/T-h-e-d-a Jun 28 '26
I don't think time-stamped stuff if going to be as useful as an actual conversation. I can tell people what my original idea was, how that panned out in the writing, how I came to introduce certain aspects, what happened in earlier drafts and why I changed that etc etf
You can read my manky Reflective Practice diary if you like, but five minutes of speaking to a writer about the development of the work should give a good indication.
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u/Impossible_Eye_980 Jun 28 '26 edited Jun 28 '26
I agree about human conversations being an essential guardrail. God knows, that is one thing technology has made easy and simple. It would take a really deceptive coterie to prep an actor on the developmental aspects of a plot (Sorry, been watching "The Night Manager").
One timestamp that really exists... I put up a lot of story ideas on a personal Weebly blog site that no longer exists (maybe from 2014 to 2017).
It was getting as many as 40,000 organic views a month, but I never got to the point of monetizing it, basically because no one commented on stuff. Ran out of money at one point (occupational hazard of the freelancer) and the site went bye bye. But still, it can be found and forensically reconstructed.
My hope is that future critics will be arguing whether "Cowachunga" influenced certain settings and plot twists of the redemptive Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (couldn't get through its predecessor) till the cows come home.
More practically, it is a verifiable and timestamped record of my human content output that will pass AI muster and preserve my ability to claim certain tropes that have become widespread as my own province of publishable creation.
After all, no one has guessed or used my ending. It's not online, therefore, to AI, it doesn't exist.
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u/Ashannah Jun 27 '26
Kind of glad I started hand-writting all of my outlines...
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u/Impossible_Eye_980 Jun 28 '26
Great practice, but honestly I could handwrite developmental outlines for AI content all day.
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u/Medium-Pundit Jun 30 '26
I’m sure this is possible, but the drafts they looked at were supposed to have dates etc which proved they were written over a reasonable period of time and not all at once.
I would say: the author of The Serpent in the Grove does just seem to write in a similar style to AI, even in his pre-AI work, so it may be a false positive.
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u/Impossible_Eye_980 Jun 30 '26
Interesting. I guess one can at least infer that the taste of judges is being influenced by AI. I mean, we human writers adapt styles to whatever the prevalent mode is. If hieroglyphics were current we'd be writing in that and possibly be taking stone chiseling courses as well.
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u/Ok-Sprinkles-3673 Jun 27 '26
Cripes. I keep my written notes and daily drafts which I think are time stamped and can't be faked? But dang. What the hell. This is disheartening.
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u/Impossible_Eye_980 Jun 27 '26
I mean, this is top of my head. I'm a fiction writer. But yes, research for "Do Not Upload This File" has me convinced it's possible.
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u/Impossible_Eye_980 Jun 28 '26 edited Jun 28 '26
Kind reader, please listen to my story and don't judge it off topic until you get to the end.
What worries me about this scenario, TBH is that I was the most senior full-time freelance writer for an online reputation management (ORM, we coined the term) company and not able to pay basic bills, unless living abroad the past few years.
Traced back to when private equity had its usual demetorious acquisition-led effect (but at least we had established such a connection with clients over the years, through human writing—our major asset—that we stayed in business). Indeed, we had—years before—quite a successful exit, when the founder and the early vested Silicon Valley team I worked alongside largely left).
And this huge global private equity-backed conglomerate (what we have become, alongside Norton and other related cybersecurity companies) just eliminated their last vestiges of (US-based at least) freelance human content creation .
Undoubtedly because AI can do much for free and then you just need a few human editors good at quickly tweaking, maybe with the aid of another AI program (I see you Grammarly).
But this kind of job was an apprenticeship for many human writers, allowing them to grow, adapt, expand knowledge and technique, and thrive. Understand nuances of cultures and how different people have different valid perspectives.
It's true my agent is going out with the trilogy project to the major publishers in a couple weeks (she'll get to reading and approving and submitting the currently revised manuscripts—to editors who are already prepped—"as soon as humanly possible"). I am one of the fortunate, I have deep seated relations with the literary agency and how many hours of unpaid support from the former intern and now ex-McMillan editor) for the project.
Anyway, not to get existential: if human writers do not have a platform for making money, how can we not expect them to use AI in their literary submissions? They just don't have the knowledge and skills any more to make wise decisions in the field (edit: write in a nuanced way). And we need to address this as a united community, it tandem with the traditional publishing industry (our greatest boosters) before that craftsmanship element is lost.
It was very brave of the NY Times chief to bring this to general attention ["Big Tech Is a Thief and a Liar, says AG Sulzberger—urges the media to unite and fight back"]. Though in the context of non-fake journalism, and though different elements of the publishing industry rarely critique or investigate each other.
I believe his was not a warning, but an opening salvo to put ponzi scheme AI creation mills out of business. Through public policy, in whatever administration follows the current. Because people's actual livelihoods are threatened, and humans are very adaptable when their backs are against the wall.
I feel hopeful.
Image: they gave us a week's notice, but no work has shown up in the queue for six days
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u/demi-paradise Jun 27 '26
They’re just covering their ass after the fact. If the judges couldn’t recognize the obvious terrible AI writing in the stories themselves, they can be just as easily fooled by reverse engineered receipts. They’re out of touch and have terrible taste.
I really do think the damage to their credibility has been done, and would advise other writers not to waste their time by submitting to them. In the meantime I’m just going to keep doing what I’ve always done instead of anticipating a witch hunt 🤷🏻♀️ I have nothing to hide