As the author who made the second rejected submission I can see the mods point, it doesn’t read quite the same as a fully hand written story. That said I did have to do a good amount of back and forth, both with retries and outright overrides, with the AI to both keep it on track and correct weird little mistakes or details it got confused on.
I think that if you take the time to do some serious editing and proofing to make it sound like a regular story that using the AI to help you essentially brainstorm and outline the story should be acceptable (I did not do that level of edits on my submission) as it can really take you in directions you enjoy but might not have thought of yourself
I think the best solution is to simply flag the AI-assisted stories. The use of AI will only increase. Maybe in 5 years (or less) authors will have perfected the skill of using the software so they can concentrate more effectively on other aspects of the story than those characteristics AI takes care of.
I’m not sure quality should be a defining characteristic. There are a lot of poorly (horribly?) written stories, sad to say, some by people whose first language is not English. Yet these remain.
As far as quality control goes, you might consider a democratic system. I don’t know how difficult a vote module would actually be to implement, but if the volume of incoming stories is already past the point where flagrant rule-breaking like mine(I was ignorant of the 1000 word rule, my apologies) can slip through, you’re going to need to find some way of managing it soon, and without staff, an automatic process is the only option left.
The SCP Foundation keeps vote counters constant and deletes anything that’s in the negatives after giving it 24 hours to accumulate votes. They’re a byword for high-quality writing, traditionally at least. I haven’t been there in years. But that wouldn’t be fair to the massive backlog… A temporary vote counter? If it’s in the positives at the end of 24 hours it gets to stay on the site and if it’s in the negatives it gets deleted? I’m rambling out my ass here, I know literally nothing about the traffic or the staffing or the moderation of GSS, to say nothing of the intricacies of coding this hypothetical system. I just found out that my favorite porn site has a forum community.
Thank you for your suggestions, I appreciate any constructive ideas.
However, with the rating system already in place, I don’t want to overdo it. And we still have the issue that the number of ratings are less than stellar.
What could be possible is to add configurable threshold for ratings (stories below that wouldn’t show up to the user). But that seems unfair to new stories, too.
I agree that tweaking the ratings system too aggressively could overtip things very quickly. And it would be too easy to game maliciously, too.
I’m a fan of minimal-change solutions… Meaning, I don’t think the solution should be larger than the problem, or create larger issues than the problem itself. And the problem remains: how do we prevent a theoretical onslaught of poorly-written AI stories from potentially flooding the front page?
The more I think about it, the more I like the idea of creating a master-thread for sharing and discussing AI stories, and aiming most of that activity toward the thread. I feel like diverting that creative energy, rather than trying to block it completely, would be more productive, and would keep people happier.
Rather than banning AI stories outright, maybe there could be a statement that (a) makes readers aware that a specific thread exists for sharing and discussing AI story drafts, and (b) encourages readers to only post those AI stories on the main page that they’ve really spent time revising or polishing.
I’d be curious to see if encouraging readers to self-moderate could preempt the issue without adding more work to Martin or the moderator team. Even if only 80% of the community pays attention to the guidelines, that would be enough, I think… After all, the issue isn’t “how do we block AI stories completely”. Rather, it’s “how do we prevent a flood of poorly-written AI experiments from overwhelming the Spiral”. If a couple bad AI stories get through, it’s not a disaster… because it’s not a flood. Even just reducing that flood to a trickle could be enough of a solution, perhaps?
As a submitter of one of the AI stories, I agree it’s gray area. I don’t plan on posting any more to be honest. It’s a decent chunk of work to get the AI to go in the direction you’d like and ultimately would be better to just write the story idea myself, fully.
There’s a level of enjoyment AS the writer with AI because it’s actually a back and forth. It’s fun to not know what the computer is going to throw back at you but as a Reader of the published story it’s ALL a mystery what the next line is going to be.
I support any stance Martin lands on but my vote as someone who’s used the tool a bunch now is: I encourage people to try the tool out. It can be quite… exhilarating to write your own smut with a computer helping out, but for publishing a story use AI tools as a concept tool for drafting, not the final product.
In my opinion - and I promise I’m 20 and not a crotchety old man - allowing AI stories on the site is sad. I’ve always feared the impact AI will have on jobs and on human life, but always at least hoped it wouldn’t touch the creative side of things. Now that I’ve been proven wrong, I’m a bit depressed, I have to say. I’m going to preface this by saying I’m certainly not a great author. I don’t even think I’m GOOD. I’m about as run-of-the-mill as can be - but I am trying to get better. But, that notwithstanding, I don’t want things I put hours and hours into - even if it’s just smut - sitting next to something a robot spat out in 2 minutes. If my passion projects are equivilent to something published by an AI story generator, I’m probably done publishing my things, because evidently they’re not worth much.
I had a go at the AI Dungeon tool. Actually, it was quite fun to experiment with. It feels like having a role play partner take your ideas and run with them.
As a story writing tool I didn’t see a whole lot of value in it. It’s like brainstorming with a highly distractible partner. When the AI turns its attention to sex, its language is very clichéd, as if it’s churning out a pastiche of the world’s second-rate erotica. It can be hot, but I feel that the erotic charge comes more from the ideas or fantasies you supply to the AI and the fact its output is random (like a role play partner’s would be) than the quality of the words and output it comes out with.
So, I wouldn’t expect too many new AI-assisted stories coming from this…
Apparently my post at AI Generated Stories - #10 by anarchomegalomaniac - Site Feedback - Community for Gay Kinky Stories was wrong – AIDungeon switched to GPT-3 even before I wrote that (they sure move fast!). It’s producing somewhat better content than GPT-2 but not better by a huge amount. It’s kind of disappointing actually, I was expecting a much bigger differential. If that’s the extent of the difference that a 100x bigger model makes, then it’s not going to be a real creative collaborator until GPT-20 or something, unless some fundamentally different approach does way better.
Ive been following this thread for a while and it got me to actually try using AI Dungeon. After the success of Derek Williams AI assisted story (allow for the first 3 as he gets used to the AI, its actually really hot. I’ve found that having the AI add suggestions to my story really enhance & develop my own style. I’m more intetested in sitting down and writing, and enjoy letting the AI throw me new thoughts and curve balls. Once I have a structure and plot I like, I then copy the text into word and edit, correct and embelish the story. So it’s very much my story, but the AI has impacted where the story goes. My feedback has grown enormously (I had stopped writing due to overly negatove feedback in sharing my photo stories) but this has brought be a new way to write. So please dont write off AI as a writing tool. Where a story is purely gwnerated, thats not cool. But as a clever word processir which aids the writer, I think its gold.
I’d like to chime in on this topic and offer my opinion purely as a reader. I personally don’t really care who ultimately wrote the story as long as the story is good and I’m able to “enjoy” it. I know that quality cannot be the sole qualitative judgement as to whether a story is published on this site or not. I’ve had to slog through stories that were poorly written, sintex keeps changing, and the writer not even follow precedent that he set earlier in the story and this is from writers who have English as their first language. But I continued to read the story despite all that because the idea that the writer was trying to implement was good enough or intriguing enough to keep me interested. As to implementing a rule that the story must be written entirely by you, I just don’t see how something like that could be enforced without self-disclosure of the author. And if the story is Well written I don’t see what it matters if an artificial intelligence wrote more than half of it or not because the story itself had to come from the mind of a person. A good example for why this is a silly rule is this, for years and years I refused to read James Patterson novels not because they were poorly written not because I didn’t like the subject matter but because he gets all the credit for being the World’s best-selling author yet he doesn’t even write more than 50% of his books on his own. More than 50% of his books are written in collaboration with another writer. Now of course there’s no telling how much of the book is written by Patterson how much is written by this collaborating author there’s no telling who came up with what ideas I realize that but ultimately does that really matter? When I did finally start reading his books I found I enjoyed them and I realized I was denying myself good novels simply because I didn’t like the writers technique. Now I don’t think that an AI will ever be able to write stories without the aid of a person inputting certain subject matter. If you really think about it as authors yes you want to keep the purity of the art form But ultimately the consumer doesn’t really care where it comes from as long as it does what it’s supposed to do and in this case it’s supposed to titillate readers with stories of erotic adventures etc etc. I personally don’t want to be denied any good story simply because of the source or potential source of the story. Now of course this particular site is not owned by me it is not edited by me and it is not in any way shape or form controlled by me but I would hate to see some other site that does allow the artificial intelligence written stories to be published start leaving this site in the dust do you? Of course that’s assuming that the AI becomes talented enough to write well written stories so I don’t see that as a looming threat at the moment. Anyway that’s my two cents as purely a reader of the stories. Any misspellings syntax errors or words added to the sentence that I may have missed are solely the blame of my voice to text application. Oh wait does that disqualify this opinion to be published?