What Is Happening to Publishing?(resobscura.substack.com) |
What Is Happening to Publishing?(resobscura.substack.com) |
I've gotten it 60-70% ready, and I really don't know if it'll have an audience in a post-AI world. I never meant to strike big with it, but I'm now wondering if thousands of hours of research and writing can amount to more than a novelty gift I'd give to friends.
The act of writing and building is, in itself, humanity's grand narrative for trying to understand the world. The journey itself is inherently valuable. Isn't the ability to organize our thoughts, pass them down to the next generation, and continue that narrative exactly what makes us uniquely human?
Even if only a few people around you end up reading it, those few could be deeply inspired to go on and build an even greater world. Please don't stop. I'm rooting for you.
And that's precisely the issue here. For a while, the internet allowed you to find an audience, just like that. Start a blog / podcast / YT channel, keep going, get enough attention. You could then approach a traditional publisher and tell them "hey, I'm kind of a big deal", or you could self-publish and rely on the word-of-mouth from your followers.
Now, how would that work? If you have a blog, AI answers will summarize it without attribution and not send anyone your way. Even the "references" cited in AI answers often point to AI-slop blogs, not the original source. The articles we discuss on HN are often AI-written too. So yeah, it's about reaching the audience, but you're now competing with machines that produce an endless stream of human-like text, good enough for most consumers, practically for free.
So if an author abstained from using LLM in the writing process - isn't then new, original, not yet on the market book ending up in the LLM training data corpus even before it hits the market?
Mixed metaphors which sound nice at first glance, but slip away from meaning like an echo chasing itself off a cliff.
Similes that catch in your mind like river trouts tangled in the roots of a redwood tree.
Metaphors are generally used to transfer the qualia of one experience into another. When the referent has no qualia, that is, you've never in your life experienced "river trouts tangled in the roots of a redwood tree", it's a failure of a metaphor. You can quibble about how special this or that metaphor is, which I've already given an example of with the "playing with how nonsensical the metaphor is", but when all the metaphors are broken that way, all the time, the writer is not "breaking the rules because they've transcended them" or anything like that, the writer is breaking them in the bad way that the rules were put there to stop and the writer should consider taking a Writing 101 course.
Though anyone taking a Writing 101 course should be aware that as near as I can tell, completing such a course is prima facie proof that they are overqualified for the vast majority of modern writing jobs.
Personally, I find it incredibly easy to spot AI-generated text in Korean, but catching it in English is much harder for me. That being said, they still have very distinct, overused patterns. You constantly see words like 'ultimately' or 'structural,' and they rely heavily on highly formulaic 'X is Y' sentence structures.
"Likewise, he discovered that the contrast of two seeming opposites was a common feature in haiku. Ginsberg used this technique in his poetry, putting together two starkly dissimilar images: something weak with something strong, an artifact of high culture with an artifact of low culture, something holy with something unholy."
I think some of these broken metaphors could be turned into some sort of haiku-like poem, especially if we ignore the requirement to reference a season somehow, though it would still take some sort of additional work to add something to tie them together more thoroughly than the metaphor does, some third component a poet uses to glue the two bits together in some interesting way.
tree roots sheltering
river trout find safety but
growth is treacherous