#Clarkesworld Magazine

[adarkrainbow]

The link above will lead you to a short story known as "England under the White Witch", by Theodora Goss.

It is a quite interesting short story, published in Clarkesworld Magazine (if you do not know about it, it is an annual online anthology magazine in which science-fiction and fantasy short stories are posted). There are fairy tale motifs, even though it is not an actual fairytale rewriting - but there are fairytale mentions at the beginning and end. The story itself is inspired by a very famous piece of "fairytale fantasy" - C.S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia. It depicts a fictional version of England which, after World War II, finds itself under the rule of a mysterious Empress with magic of coldness and snow - clearly inspired by Lewis' White Witch.

It is truly a nice little read, if you ever want to take a look.

[no-where-new-hero]

new em x liu story out AND ITS ABOUT KPOP, happy friday to meeeeeeee

[thoughtportal]

What I can say is that the number of spam submissions resulting in bans has hit 38% this month. While rejecting and banning these submissions has been simple, it’s growing at a rate that will necessitate changes. To make matters worse, the technology is only going to get better, so detection will become more challenging. (I have no doubt that several rejected stories have already evaded detection or were cases where we simply erred on the side of caution.)

Yes, there are tools out there for detecting plagiarized and machine-written text, but they are prone to false negatives and positives. One of the companies selling these services is even playing both sides, offering a tool to help authors prevent detection. Even if used solely for preliminary scoring and later reviewed by staff, automating these third-party tools into a submissions process would be costly. I don’t think any of the short fiction markets can currently afford the expense.

[shortstorytournament]

Short Story Tournament - S2

TALK TO YOUR CHILDREN ABOUT TWO-TONGUED JEREMY by Theodore McCombs (2018) (link) - tw: child abuse, manipulation, suicide, homophobia, revenge porn

His name was Two-Tongued Jeremy; he was a monitor lizard with a forked tongue, thick glasses, and a wild, wagging smile meant to convince children that learning could be fun, too. He came highly rated. He updated automatically. There were no red flags. There was no warning.

MORRIGAN IN THE SUNGLARE by Seth Dickinson (2014) (link) - tw: war, death

Like weaponized poetry, except that deep down your poem always says "we have to live. They have to die."

[storyteller-monzz]

If you are a speculative fiction fan, consider signing up to Clarkesworld if you can. You can also subscribe to their Patreon. We don't have many outlets in this space and it's sad to hear how Amazon's mercenary practices have screwed them over.

https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/clarke_07_24/

[4kdegreeskelvin]

clarkesworld #205

possibly just about a couch by suzanne palmer: take a journey from the dawn of the universe to the heat death of our solar system and beyond through the context of a primordial, indestructible red sofa. this was an interesting little story, with a wordy writing style i really like for doing that thing where some portions are written vaguely and distantly, never touching on much in great detail, and other portions zoom in seemingly at random to describe and focus on singular, random beings and their time spent with the couch. the couch holds memories of everything but doesn’t think anything of it all because, after all, it’s just a couch. the writing feels sincere but not cheesy, with a fun circular ending. it’s abstract and doesn’t seem to care whether or not you choose to interpret it all as a metaphor. enjoyed it :)

the blaumilch by lavie tidhar: a citizen of a small town on mars struggles with his lack of purpose, until he meets an odd, canal-digging individual who changes his perspective. this was a fine story; i didn’t dislike any part of it aside from a few small tense-changes that i found strange. it definitely wasn’t bad but didn’t blow me away in any sense of the word, either. i did think the themes of purpose and identity and doing things you enjoy were fairly interesting!

down to the root by lisa papademetriou: cute little story about rebirth and the nature of death and rebirth. idk, i personally kinda felt like the ending betrayed the character’s wishes of not being reborn after his death? but that’s ok ig. this one was fine as well. not bad, not amazing. didn’t love it but didn’t hate it. an interesting plot idea and generally well written so i can’t complain much but it didn’t really grip my attention either

such is my idea of happiness by david goodman: a story about the way capitalist grind culture will consume everything necessary for a person to live a decent life, including the chance to rest and recuperate. this was a good one! not amazing, but the writing style was enjoyable to read, the characters were sympathetic, and i love a good anticapitalist message. andrew just wants to get some sleep 😔

de profundis, a space love letter by bella han: i didn’t like this one. it’s hard for me to express exactly why without just coming across as a hater, but it felt extremely shallow and fake deep to me (and those are things i generally will go out of my way to not describe art as). it seems to be about a spacefaring traveller in the distant future who finds a “mausoleum of poetry”, in which he quickly becomes addicted to reading real, actual novels (that have slightly radioactive ink, so they’re slowly killing him all the while) instead of the slush produced by machines (sound relevant?). i’m not entirely sure how to feel about the obvious anti-ai art stance because frankly i’m not well versed enough in that whole world to have a solid opinion, but my problems mostly lie with the fact that it leans into the “machine-produced stories don’t have the SOUL that this human-made work does” argument rather than any interesting commentary on workers’ rights or art theft and the like. the writing style was difficult to parse in my opinion and the characters weren’t interesting in the slightest, but mostly the entire thing felt too saccharine while trying very, very hard to be ~profound~.

post hacking for the uninitiated by grace chan: this one was good! the characters were interesting and it held my attention all the way through. the writing style was really immersive and visceral, and is great at making you feel like you really understand what the main character is going through even though it’s something you’ve probably never experienced yourself—unless, of course, you’ve had your semisynthetic mind hacked and all your primary functions slowly stripped away from yourself by a mental invader. i would say this is one of the two strongest stories in this collection, up there with the couch one.

rafi by amal singh: in a tightly controlled dystopia where mechas pulverize civilians’ homes and streets in response to contraband or dissent, rebellion is sparked by a cactus-human creature raised in secret, who sings forbidden songs and wants to be allowed outside. i didn’t dislike this! the writing style felt a tad bit surface level, and stories about rebellion against dystopian governments are hardly unique, but the characters were enjoyable to read about, especially rafi itself. i’m not immune to a story about music as a moving force that can bring people together, and the plot about a woman raising something inhuman that seems to exist largely to set them free is a bit vague but still touching. this was a solid, not half bad story that i’m not going to complain too much about.

you can read clarkesworld #205 for free online or purchase this issue here

[flaskoflethe]

Uhh did NOT expect to actually have that question answered. Glad she's doing OK, though. No one should go through that, and knowing she's safe is great to hear.

[autistichalsin]

In retrospect, four years later, I feel like the Isabel Fall incident was just the biggest ignored cautionary tale modern fandom spaces have ever had. Yes, it wasn't limited to fandom, it was also a professional author/booktok type argument, but it had a lot of crossover.

Stop me if you've heard this one before: a writer, whether fan or pro, publishes a work. If one were to judge a book by its cover, something we are all taught in Kindergarten shouldn't happen but has a way of occurring regardless, one might find that there was something that seemed deeply problematic about this work. Maybe the title or summary alluded to something Wrong happening, or maybe the tags indicated there was problematic kinks or relationships. And that meant the story was Bad. So, a group of people takes to the Twittersphere to inform everyone who will listen why the work, and therefore the author, are Bad. The author, receiving an avalanche of abuse and harassment, deactivates their account, and checks into a mental health facility for monitoring for suicidal ideation. They never return to their writing space, and the harassers get a slap on the wrist (if that- usually they get praise and high-fives all around) and start waiting for their next victim to transgress.

Sounds awful familiar, doesn't it?

Isabel Fall's case, though, was even more extreme for many reasons. See, she made the terrible mistake of using a transphobic meme as the genesis to actually explore issues of gender identity.

More specifically, she used the phrase "I sexually identify as an attack helicopter" to examine how marginalized identities, when they become more accepted, become nothing more than a tool for the military-industrial complex to rebrand itself as a more personable and inclusive atrocity; a chance to pursue praise for bombing brown children while being progressive, because queer people, too, can help blow up brown children now! It also contained an examination of identity and how queerness is intrinsic to a person, etc.

But... well, if harassers ever bothered to read the things they critique, we wouldn't be here, would we? So instead, they called Isabel a transphobic monster for the title alone, even starting a misinformation campaign to claim she was, in fact, a cis male nazi using a fake identity to psyop the queer community.

A few days later, after days of horrific abuse and harassment, Isabel requested that Clarkesworld magazine pull the story. She checked in to a psych ward with suicidal thoughts. That wasn't all, though; the harassment was so bad that she was forced to out herself as trans to defend against the claims.

Only... we know this type of person, the fandom harassers, don't we? You know where this is going. Outing herself did nothing to stop the harassment. No one was willing to read the book, much less examine how her sexuality and gender might have influenced her when writing it.

So some time later, Isabel deleted her social media. She is still alive, but "Isabel Fall" is not- because the harassment was so bad that Isabel detransitioned/closeted herself, too traumatized to continue living her authentic life.

Supposed trans allies were so outraged at a fictional portrayal of transness, written by a trans woman, that they harassed a real life trans woman into detransitioning.

It's heartbreakingly familiar, isn't it? Many of us in fandom communities have been in Isabel's shoes, even if the outcome wasn't so extreme (or in some cases, when it truly was). Most especially, many of us, as marginalized writers speaking from our own experiences in some way, have found that others did not enjoy our framework for examining these things, and hurt us, members of those identities, in defense of "the community" as a nebulous undefined entity.

There's a quote that was posted in a news writeup about the whole saga that was published a year after the fact. The quote is:

The delineation between paranoid and reparative readings originated in 1995, with influential critic Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. A paranoid reading focuses on what’s wrong or problematic about a work of art. A reparative reading seeks out what might be nourishing or healing in a work of art, even if the work is flawed. Importantly, a reparative reading also tends to consider what might be nourishing or healing in a work of art for someone who isn’t the reader. This kind of nuance gets completely worn away on Twitter, home of paranoid readings. “[You might tweet], ‘Well, they didn’t discuss X, Y, or Z, so that’s bad!’ Or, ‘They didn’t’ — in this case — ‘discuss transness in a way that felt like what I feel about transness, therefore it is bad.’ That flattens everything into this very individual, very hostile way of reading,” Mandelo says. “Part of reparative reading is trying to think about how a story cannot do everything. Nothing can do everything. If you’re reading every text, fiction, or criticism looking for it to tick a bunch of boxes — like if it represents X, Y, and Z appropriately to my definitions of appropriate, and if it’s missing any of those things, it’s not good — you’re not really seeing the close focus that it has on something else.”

A paranoid reading describes perfectly what fandom culture has become in the modern times. It is why "proship", once simply a word for common sense "don't engage with what you don't like, and don't harass people who create it either" philosophies, has become the boogeyman of fandom, a bad and dangerous word. The days of reparative readings, where you would look for things you enjoyed, are all but dead. Fiction is rarely a chance to feel joy; it's an excuse to get angry, to vitriolically attack those different from oneself while surrounded with those who are the same as oneself. It's an excuse to form in-groups and out-groups that must necessarily be in a constant state of conflict, lest it come across like This side is accepting That side's faults. In other words, fandom has become the exact sort of space as the nonfandom spaces it used to seek to define itself against.

It's not about joy. It's not about resonance with plot or characters. It's about hate. It's about finding fault. If they can't find any in the story, they will, rest assured, create it by instigating fan wars- dividing fandom into factions and mercilessly attacking the other.

And that's if they even went so far as to read the work they're critiquing. The ones they don't bother to read, as you saw above, fare even worse. If an AO3 writer tagged an abuser/victim ship, it's bad, it's fetishism, even if the story is about how the victim escapes. If a trans writer uses the title "I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter" to find a framework to dissect rainbow-washing the military-industrial complex, it's unforgivable. It's a cesspool of kneejerk reactions, moralizing discomfort, treating good/evil as dichotomous categories that can never be escaped, and using that complex as an excuse to heap harassment on people who "deserve it." Because once you are Bad, there is no action against you that is too Bad for you to deserve.

Isabel Fall's story follows this so step-by-step that it's like a textbook case study on modern fandom behavior.

Isabel Fall wrote a short story with an inflammatory title, with a genesis in transphobic mockery, in the hopes of turning it into a genuine treatise on the intersection of gender and sexuality and the military-industrial complex. But because audiences are unprepared for the idea of inflammatory rhetoric as a tool to force discomfort to then force deeper introspection... they zeroed in on the discomfort. "I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter"- the title phrase, not the work- made them uncomfortable. We no longer teach people how to handle discomfort; we live in a world of euphemism and glossing over, a world where people can't even type out the words "kill" and rape", instead substituting "unalive" and "grape." We don't deal with uncomfortable feelings anymore; we censor them, we transform them, we sanitize them. When you are unable to process discomfort, when you are never given self-soothing tools, your only possible conclusion is that anything Uncomfortable must be Bad, and the creator must either be censored too, or attacked into conformity so that you never again experience the horrors of being Uncomfortable.

So the masses took to Twitter, outraged. They were Uncomfortable, and that de facto meant that they had been Wronged. Because the content was related to trans identity issues, that became the accusation; it was transphobic, inherently. It couldn't be a critique of bigger and more fluid systems than gender identity alone; it was a slight against trans people. And no amount of explanations would change their minds now, because they had already been aggrieved and made to feel Uncomfortable.

Isabel Fall was now a Bad Person, and we all know what fandom spaces do to Bad People. Bad People, because they are Bad, will always be deserving of suicide bait and namecalling and threatening. Once a person is Bad, there is no way to ever become Good again. Not by refuting the accusations (because the accusations are now self-evident facts; "there is a callout thread against them" is its own tautological proof that wrongdoing has happened regardless of the veracity of the claims in the callout) and not by apologizing and changing, because if you apologize and admit you did the Bad thing, you are still Bad, and no matter what you do in future, you were once Bad and that needs to be brought up every time you are mentioned. If you are bad, you can NEVER be more than what you were at your worst (in their definition) moment. Your are now ontologically evil, and there is no action taken against you that can be immoral.

So Isabel was doomed, naturally. It didn't matter that she outed herself to explain that she personally had lived the experience of a trans woman and could speak with authority on the atrocity of rainbow-washing the military industrial complex as a proaganda tool to capture progressives. None of it mattered. She had written a work with an Uncomfortable phrase for a title, the readers were Uncomfortable, and someone had to pay for it.

And that's the key; pay for it. Punishment. Revenge. It's never about correcting behavior. Restorative justice is not in this group's vocabulary. You will, incidentally, never find one of these folks have a stance against the death penalty; if you did Bad as a verb, you are Bad as an intrinsic, inescapable adjective, and what can you do to incorrigible people but kill them to save the Normal people? This is the same principle, on a smaller scale, that underscores their fandom activities; if a Bad fan writes Bad fiction, they are a Bad person, and their fandom persona needs to die to save Normal fans the pain of feeling Uncomfortable.

And that's what happened to Isabel Fall. The person who wrote the short story is very much alive, but the pseudonym of Isabel Fall, the identity, the lived experiences coming together in concert with imagination to form a speculative work to critique deeply problematic sociopolitical structures? That is dead. Isabel Fall will never write again, even if by some miracle the person who once used the name does. Even if she ever decides to restart her transition, she will be permanently scarred by this experience, and will never again be able to share her experience with us as a way to grow our own empathy and challenge our understanding of the world. In spirit, but not body, fandom spaces murdered Isabel Fall.

And that's... fandom, anymore. That's just what is done, routinely and without question, to Bad people. Good people are Good, so they don't make mistakes, and they never go too far when dealing with Bad people. And Bad people, well, they should have thought before they did something Bad which made them Bad people.

Isabel Fall's harassment happened in early 2020, before quarantine started, but it was in so many ways a final chance for fandom to hit the breaks. A chance for fandom to think collectively about what it wanted to be, who it wanted to be for and how it wanted to do it. And fandom looked at this and said, "more, please." It continues to harass marginalized people, especially fans of color and queen fans, into suffering mental breakdowns. With gusto.

Any ideas of reparative reading is dead. Fandom runs solely on paranoid readings. And so too is restorative justice gone for fandom transgressions, real or imagined. It is now solely about punitive, vigilante justice. It's a concerted campaign to make sure oddballs conform or die (in spirit, but sometimes even physically given how often mentally ill individuals are pushed into committing suicide).

It's a deeply toxic environment and I'm sad to say that Isabel Fall's story was, in retrospect, a sort of event horizon for the fandom. The gravitational pull of these harassment campaigns is entirely too strong now and there is no escaping it. I'm sorry, I hate to say something so bleak, but thinking the last few days about the state of fandom (not just my current one but also others I watch from the outside), I just don't think we can ever go back to peaceful "for joy" engagement, not when so many people are determined to use it as an outlet for lateral aggression against other people.

[fionnemrys]

I’d like to add Clarkesworld to the list of recommended reading. It publishes some of the most incredible short form speculative fiction out there today.

Read Project Hail Mary cause you said it had the most influence on TTOU. I've never read anything like it (except your story, of course.) Would you ever make a book rec list? Doesn't have to be sci fi exclusively.

The best thing you can do for yourself as a reader of genre fiction is go to whatever used bookstores you can find and search specifically for books from this series:

and purchase and read any of them that you can find. It's called the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and every issue will contain at least one story that permanently alters your brain chemistry.

Aside from that, I'd recommend The Martian by Andy Weir (the Project Hail Mary guy), the Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells, the Wayfarers series by Becky Chambers, and anything you can find by Philip K Dick or Neal Stephenson. I'd also recommend a couple of CJ Cherryh's works: 40,000 in Gehenna, and Serpent's Reach. Probably worth reading Serpent's Reach first if you can, but it's not that important, they're not sequels of each other although they are in the same universe.

The series that's had the most influence on me as a writer is of course Animorphs by KA Applegate, but I'm not sure how interesting it would be for an adult reader who doesn't have nostalgia to rely on. Also Tamora Pierce's books, all of them, it's worth picking up those if you like fantasy.

[secularbakedgoods]

Amazon fucks everyone over again

some of you may recall Neil Clarke's blog post on the deluge of AI-generated spam that has hit Clarkesworld Magazine's submissions queue.

well, Clarkesworld and other short fiction magazines like it are about to get another swift kick in the dick: Amazon is discontinuing their magazine subscription service (and replacing it with a new service that pays creators much, much less). of the very little money made in the short fiction market, most of it was coming from Amazon.

as Clarke points out in his editorial on the subject, "While there are plenty of people happily reading, listening to, and writing short fiction, a very disappointingly small percentage of those same people are actively paying for it."

short fiction is not dead. the existence of subreddits like r/NoSleep and blogs like @writing-prompt-s proves that. if you value these stories and you want to help writers get paid for their work, please consider checking out (and subscribing to) some of the following publications:

Analog Science Fiction and Fact

Apex Magazine

Asimov's Science Fiction

Clarkesworld Magazine

Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine

Fantasy & Science Fiction

Fantasy Magazine

Nightmare Magazine

many of these publications charge less than $5 USD per month for subscriptions, so if you've just dropped Netflix and have an extra $10/month lying around, you can instead support two fiction magazines full of interesting, original, well-written stories.

(feel free to reblog with your own favorite publications!)

[mostlysignssomeportents]

How plausible sentence generators are changing the bullshit wars

This Friday (September 8) at 10hPT/17hUK, I'm livestreaming "How To Dismantle the Internet" with Intelligence Squared.

On September 12 at 7pm, I'll be at Toronto's Another Story Bookshop with my new book The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation.

In my latest Locus Magazine column, "Plausible Sentence Generators," I describe how I unwittingly came to use – and even be impressed by – an AI chatbot – and what this means for a specialized, highly salient form of writing, namely, "bullshit":

https://locusmag.com/2023/09/commentary-by-cory-doctorow-plausible-sentence-generators/

Here's what happened: I got stranded at JFK due to heavy weather and an air-traffic control tower fire that locked down every westbound flight on the east coast. The American Airlines agent told me to try going standby the next morning, and advised that if I booked a hotel and saved my taxi receipts, I would get reimbursed when I got home to LA.

But when I got home, the airline's reps told me they would absolutely not reimburse me, that this was their policy, and they didn't care that their representative had promised they'd make me whole. This was so frustrating that I decided to take the airline to small claims court: I'm no lawyer, but I know that a contract takes place when an offer is made and accepted, and so I had a contract, and AA was violating it, and stiffing me for over $400.

The problem was that I didn't know anything about filing a small claim. I've been ripped off by lots of large American businesses, but none had pissed me off enough to sue – until American broke its contract with me.

So I googled it. I found a website that gave step-by-step instructions, starting with sending a "final demand" letter to the airline's business office. They offered to help me write the letter, and so I clicked and I typed and I wrote a pretty stern legal letter.

Now, I'm not a lawyer, but I have worked for a campaigning law-firm for over 20 years, and I've spent the same amount of time writing about the sins of the rich and powerful. I've seen a lot of threats, both those received by our clients and sent to me.

I've been threatened by everyone from Gwyneth Paltrow to Ralph Lauren to the Sacklers. I've been threatened by lawyers representing the billionaire who owned NSOG roup, the notoroious cyber arms-dealer. I even got a series of vicious, baseless threats from lawyers representing LAX's private terminal.

So I know a thing or two about writing a legal threat! I gave it a good effort and then submitted the form, and got a message asking me to wait for a minute or two. A couple minutes later, the form returned a new version of my letter, expanded and augmented. Now, my letter was a little scary – but this version was bowel-looseningly terrifying.

I had unwittingly used a chatbot. The website had fed my letter to a Large Language Model, likely ChatGPT, with a prompt like, "Make this into an aggressive, bullying legal threat." The chatbot obliged.

I don't think much of LLMs. After you get past the initial party trick of getting something like, "instructions for removing a grilled-cheese sandwich from a VCR in the style of the King James Bible," the novelty wears thin:

https://www.emergentmind.com/posts/write-a-biblical-verse-in-the-style-of-the-king-james

Yes, science fiction magazines are inundated with LLM-written short stories, but the problem there isn't merely the overwhelming quantity of machine-generated stories – it's also that they suck. They're bad stories:

https://www.npr.org/2023/02/24/1159286436/ai-chatbot-chatgpt-magazine-clarkesworld-artificial-intelligence

LLMs generate naturalistic prose. This is an impressive technical feat, and the details are genuinely fascinating. This series by Ben Levinstein is a must-read peek under the hood:

https://benlevinstein.substack.com/p/how-to-think-about-large-language

But "naturalistic prose" isn't necessarily good prose. A lot of naturalistic language is awful. In particular, legal documents are fucking terrible. Lawyers affect a stilted, stylized language that is both officious and obfuscated.

The LLM I accidentally used to rewrite my legal threat transmuted my own prose into something that reads like it was written by a $600/hour paralegal working for a $1500/hour partner at a white-show law-firm. As such, it sends a signal: "The person who commissioned this letter is so angry at you that they are willing to spend $600 to get you to cough up the $400 you owe them. Moreover, they are so well-resourced that they can afford to pursue this claim beyond any rational economic basis."

Let's be clear here: these kinds of lawyer letters aren't good writing; they're a highly specific form of bad writing. The point of this letter isn't to parse the text, it's to send a signal. If the letter was well-written, it wouldn't send the right signal. For the letter to work, it has to read like it was written by someone whose prose-sense was irreparably damaged by a legal education.

Here's the thing: the fact that an LLM can manufacture this once-expensive signal for free means that the signal's meaning will shortly change, forever. Once companies realize that this kind of letter can be generated on demand, it will cease to mean, "You are dealing with a furious, vindictive rich person." It will come to mean, "You are dealing with someone who knows how to type 'generate legal threat' into a search box."

Legal threat letters are in a class of language formally called "bullshit":

https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691122946/on-bullshit

LLMs may not be good at generating science fiction short stories, but they're excellent at generating bullshit. For example, a university prof friend of mine admits that they and all their colleagues are now writing grad student recommendation letters by feeding a few bullet points to an LLM, which inflates them with bullshit, adding puffery to swell those bullet points into lengthy paragraphs.

Naturally, the next stage is that profs on the receiving end of these recommendation letters will ask another LLM to summarize them by reducing them to a few bullet points. This is next-level bullshit: a few easily-grasped points are turned into a florid sheet of nonsense, which is then reconverted into a few bullet-points again, though these may only be tangentially related to the original.

What comes next? The reference letter becomes a useless signal. It goes from being a thing that a prof has to really believe in you to produce, whose mere existence is thus significant, to a thing that can be produced with the click of a button, and then it signifies nothing.

We've been through this before. It used to be that sending a letter to your legislative representative meant a lot. Then, automated internet forms produced by activists like me made it far easier to send those letters and lawmakers stopped taking them so seriously. So we created automatic dialers to let you phone your lawmakers, this being another once-powerful signal. Lowering the cost of making the phone call inevitably made the phone call mean less.

Today, we are in a war over signals. The actors and writers who've trudged through the heat-dome up and down the sidewalks in front of the studios in my neighborhood are sending a very powerful signal. The fact that they're fighting to prevent their industry from being enshittified by plausible sentence generators that can produce bullshit on demand makes their fight especially important.

Chatbots are the nuclear weapons of the bullshit wars. Want to generate 2,000 words of nonsense about "the first time I ate an egg," to run overtop of an omelet recipe you're hoping to make the number one Google result? ChatGPT has you covered. Want to generate fake complaints or fake positive reviews? The Stochastic Parrot will produce 'em all day long.

As I wrote for Locus: "None of this prose is good, none of it is really socially useful, but there’s demand for it. Ironically, the more bullshit there is, the more bullshit filters there are, and this requires still more bullshit to overcome it."

Meanwhile, AA still hasn't answered my letter, and to be honest, I'm so sick of bullshit I can't be bothered to sue them anymore. I suppose that's what they were counting on.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/07/govern-yourself-accordingly/#robolawyers

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[centrally-unplanned]

The Clarkesworld AI Spam issue is one of those stories that to me really highlights the limits of the tools that hype is obscuring. Clarkesworld is a well-established Sci-Fi publishing magazine that today had to suspend all of its submissions due to being overwhelmed by ChatGPT generated entries:

This inspired a lot of discourse around the idea of a ‘crisis of credibility’ on the internet, AI sweeping away the boundries of authenticity in a flood of forgeries. How can magazines even operate in this new environment, one might ask?

Which is weird because this environment isn’t new at all, as the editor, Neil Clarke, comments on in his blog post around the problem:

Since the early days of the pandemic, I’ve observed an increase in the number of spammy submissions to Clarkesworld. What I mean by that is that there’s an honest interest in being published, but not in having to do the actual work. Up until recently, these were almost entirely cases of  plagiarism, first by replacing the author’s name and then later by use of programs designed to “make it your own.”

The issue isn’t that spam exists, its the quantity:

This is undoubtably a gigantic spike, and 100% it is induced by ChatGPT.

But hold on - is ChatGPT actually *better* at this that previous spam tools? Niel doesn’t think so, even if he is worried about the future: 

I’m not going to detail how I know these stories are “AI” spam or outline any of the data I have collected from these submissions. There are some very obvious patterns and I have no intention of helping those people become less likely to be caught...

... What I can say is that the number of spam submissions resulting in bans has hit 38% this month. While rejecting and banning these submissions has been simple, it’s growing at a rate that will necessitate changes. To make matters worse, the technology is only going to get better, so detection will become more challenging.

And how expensive was the plagarism before to do anyway? It was copy-pasting text, automated word replacement programs, and done, that is trivial. Its a little harder than ChatGPT, sure, but you could make a thousand in a day no sweat, automated scripts randomizing names and jumbling nouns from a list. 

The success rate also seems to be zero! Neither plagarism nor ChatGPT generates any story worth a damn, these aren’t being accepted. Neil is quite confident he is catching 100% of them and I believe him on that, these tools cannot write good fiction of any length beyond a paragraph. 

So what is the ChatGPT’s advantage over previous, ‘dumber’ spam that justifies a 100-fold increase in spam usage? I am not seeing one, and I don’t think there is one besides marginally lower per-spam costs. Phrased another way, what was stopping someone from submitted 500 spam entries in one month in 2021? Nothing but interest in doing so.

Which is the rub of why this is happening - it isn’t because ChatGPT is good at this task, its because its the hype thing to do. Everyone is talking about it, everyone is trying it out, everyone is trying to find “delta” so they can ride the hype train. A bunch of people, some who may have even had axes to grind against Clarkesworld, have heard of this brand new fun tool and are flooding into the market to take advantage of it. But there might not be much to take advantage of; hype is fleeting, particularly in the face of no results as this effort is getting. As it fails, unless that axe really needs grinding above all else, spammers will move.

All of this to say that this story is, again, not a story about AI at all. AI is just the reason these already-bad parts of the system are being tested in the public eye.

[abalidoth]

Hello!

I was wondering if you have any fiction recommendations featuring a robotic POV character? I recently read Martha Well's All Systems Red and realized I'm like REALLY hungry for a story that gets into a like... computerized headspace.

I'm obviously going to check out the rest of The Murderbot Diaries, but I'd really like even more stories through which to enjoy some vicarious robot feelings! I figured you, my Robot Mutual(tm), might be a good source! (No Pressure of course) (Music, Poems, Animation, etc. are also great) (Here's one of my favorite robot-feeling songs as thanks) https://youtu.be/V7Ht35zP37A

My most immediate answer:

It's the second book in a series, so you might want to check out "The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet" first. But it follows an AI named Sidra who has been moved, mostly against her will, from a spaceship into a humanoid android body. It does an amazing job of making her feel genuinely robotic, Sidra is one of my favorite characters in anything ever. The other half of the plot is the backstory of her friend Pepper, who was raised by a ship AI, so there's good robot feels there too.

By the same author:

This one is set in a utopian world where the robots have all disappeared into the forest. Despite being by the same author, Mosscap is a totally different vibe of robot character from Sidra.

A tonally different take:

This one won, like, all the awards when it came out. It features Breq, a former warship AI left with a single human body, on a singleminded quest to kill an immortal god-emperor, while flashing back to her time as a warship to set up why she wants to kill Anaander Mianaai so much. The sequels are also excellent, and weirdly tend to be a little more light hearted as Breq acquires a found family and crew around her.

A webcomic rec:

O Human Star is about a robotics pioneer who mysteriously wakes up in a robotic simulacrum of his old body after several years dead, only to find that his old business partner (and secret lover) has revolutionized the world with robots in his absence. Stranger still, his business partner is raising a young robotic duplicate of him... and she has chosen to transition to female. It can be read here:

Also recommend the short story "Cat Pictures Please" by Naomi Kritzer. (The novels which follow it, the CatNet books, are also very good but have less robotic perspective.)

Hopefully you find something you like here!

[heavenlyyshecomes]

misc reads pt. 11

The legend of the music tree, ellen rupell shell, smithsonian magazine

The depths she'll reach: freediving's alenka artnik, xan rice, longlead

Sufi Islam thrives humorous, eloquent and poetic as ever, nile green, aeon

Mars is a hellhole, sharon stirone, the atlantic

Obliterating the natural world, nathan j. robinson, current affairs

What lies beneath, julian sancton, vanityfair

A winelike sea, caroline alexander, lapham's quaterly

The centuries-long quest for the scent of god, john last, noema magazine

Hayao miyazaki and the art of being a woman, gabrielle bellot, the atlantic

The death of the ‘chic’ writer, barry pierce dazed digital

All about eve—and then some, lili anoulik, vanityfair

The archive of a vanishing world, grace linden, noema magazine

In the land of living skies, suzannah showler, harper's magazine

Daydreams and fragments: on how we retrieve images from the past, maël renouard, lithub

The haunted city, azania imtiaz khatri-patel, aeon

Princes of infinite space, kyle paoletta, baffler

Humans are overzealous whale morticians, ben goldfarb, nautilus

immortal by default, jared farmer, lapham's quaterly

Short fic:

Morning, Noon & Night, claire louise-bennett, the white review

Office hours, ling ma, the atlantic

Nights at the hotel splendido, sam munson, granta

shanghai murmur, te-ping chen, the atlantic

The hydraulic emperor, arkady martine, uncanny magazine

Goodnight, melancholy, xia jia, clarkesworld magazine

[wagahai-da]

In January 2020, not long after her short story “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter” was published in the online science fiction magazine Clarkesworld, Fall asked her editor to take the story down, and then checked into a psychiatric ward for thoughts of self-harm and suicide. The story — and especially its title, which co-opts a transphobic meme — had provoked days of contentious debate online within the science fiction community, the trans community, and the community of people who worry that cancel culture has run amok. Because there was little biographical information available about its author, the debate hinged on one question: Who was Isabel Fall? And that question ate her alive. When she emerged from the hospital a few weeks later, the world had moved on, but she was still scarred by what had happened. She decided on something drastic: She would no longer be Isabel Fall. As a trans woman early in transition, Fall had the option of retreating to the relative safety of her legal, masculine identity. That’s what she did, staying out of the limelight and growing ever more frustrated by what had happened to her. She bristles when I ask her in an email if she’s stopped transitioning, but it’s the only phrase I can think of to describe how the situation appears. Isabel Fall was on a path to becoming herself, and then she wasn’t — and all because she published a short story. And then her life fell apart.