So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

A day that I’ve been saying would arrive for about twenty years now is starting to loom on the timeline, and it’s taking a lot of smart people by surprise when it shouldn’t have.

I’m talking about AI (artificial intelligence) creations – art appearing in visual, auditory, and textual forms. Such creations are in the news lately because we’ve hit a point where what they’re creating is pretty sophisticated. Not sophisticated enough though (yet) – Clarkesworld Magazine just stopped taking submissions because of a sudden upsurge in AI-generated stories, none of them actually publishable. But the quality of that prose will improve and already people are talking about how to create systems to distinguish between a submission written by a human writer versus a machine-generated one.

Speaking as a former Microsoft employee and long-time technologist, I’m utterly unsurprised. In 2005, I wrote “Zeppelin Follies,” a story about a future “writer.” (You can find the story in my collection Near + Far if you want to read it in its entirety.) Here’s a section:

I forced a smile and patted Fitz’s shoulder. “Be ye of good cheer,” I said. “I think I’ve got that dialogue problem I was having licked.”

Fitz, as I well knew, hated getting drawn into the technicalities, so when I started to explain how reducing the adverbial modifier minimum downwards had tautened the syntactical delivery, he backed out pretty fast. I spent a few hours testing it out, and was pleased with the results. 90% of writing is putting together the formulas, so once I had this one, and a slight problem with the scenery equivalence parameters solved, I’d be sitting pretty, ready to generate a manuscript to hand over to Mikka the editor. Around three, I took a break and went out to sit in the Plaza.

In “Zeppelin Follies,” the writers don’t write. Instead they create the algorithms used to generate their fiction. Will there actually be a point where AIs can generate prose sufficiently adept to construct something that’s an entertaining read? Absolutely, and I would suspect that point is much closer than current writers would like to admit.

But I think the question that most people are deluding themselves about is this: will AI art reach the point where it touches the human soul, the way a Georgia O’Keefe painting can make you stand and stare or the way an Ursula K. Le Guin can make you stop and think, and perhaps even copy it into your notebook to ponder over later? I believe it will, because the consuming human soul remains a constant in that equation, and it doesn’t require another, second soul to be involved in creating the thing we’re appreciating: we can pause for a sunset, for a scrap of birdsong, or to admire the Fibonacci curve inside a conch shell. The experience of the aesthetic depends on the viewer perhaps more than the origin of the viewed.

We would like to think that there is something inside ourselves that recognizes “authenticity,” a word that is a little nebulous. What makes the words coming out of a biological entity’s mouth “authentic” in a way something created mechanically is not? Is it the intent behind the creation? Or something else? We would like to believe that we are more than biological machines, whose actions are on some level as predictable as those of the mechanical ones. We move in a cloud of delusion, in fact, thinking ourselves unique in this universe.

As far as the consumption of what is produced by machines versus what is produced by human hands goes, there are things we buy to use, and there are things we buy to enjoy. We usually don’t worry about the “authenticity” of the dishes we eat out of, but at a certain economic level, we may worry about it as a status symbol, a way to display affluence by using handmade rather than mass manufactured goods. And I don’t know that most people worry too much about the authenticity of what they enjoy, unless they are a connoisseur of it.

I used romance writing as my example in “Zeppelin Follies,” because romances are notoriously formulaic. But the truth is that every genre has its tropes, and that’s something that an AI can use.

Some artists have stopped putting work up online in order to keep it from being fed to artificial intelligences to use. I don’t know that will work all that well, but it’s worth thinking about. But art is also meant to be seen, music to be listened to, text to be read, and we cannot make it so humans are the only ones seeing, listening, and reading.

I think that one way writers will be able to survive a while is by holding onto the overarching ideas of their properties, and the things that make them distinctive and enjoyable. This is one reason why I plan to keep writing books about bioship You Sexy Thing and its crew, because I hold the rights to its world and character. But will AIs create new properties, new worlds? Beyond question, although they will be made of the fragments of other properties, recombined and reworked. Which is, I would argue, on some level what literature is about, replying to the stories that have come before.

Which makes me ask – will an AI be able to look, for example, at Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and come up with something that is not a reworking, but an original thing that speaks to the Tales? That I’m not sure of. But I’m definitely looking forward to seeing what happens when one tries.

So this morning one of the items that’s been hovering in the wings for a couple of weeks now finally went out, which was the announcement of the game writing qualifications. Since there there’s been a lot of stir and some questions about it. So here’s some answers.

Q: Hey, I’m a SFWA member! Why didn’t I know about this earlier?

A: I’m not sure. We publicized the vote before and when it happened, we had a SFWA chat hour devoted to it, and we’ve been talking about it on the discussion forums for over a year, I think, including calls for people to serve on the committee and make recommendations.

Q: Where did these qualifications come from?

A. From the Game Writing Committee, which researched the question first of whether or not we should put the issue to vote and then what form the qualifications might take. We included some game writers on the committee (its members are Jennifer Brozek, Steve Jackson, Richard Dansky, Rosemary Jones, Noah Falstein, and Jim Johnson with Matthew Johnson as the Board Liaison); the SFWA Board used their overall recommendations as the starting point.

Q: What are the qualifications?

A: Here you go. You can find them here too.

Games in any medium may be used for qualification so long as the game has a narrative element, is in English, and in the science fiction, fantasy, horror or related genres.

Prospective members working on games may qualify by showing a sale or income in one of three ways:

By making at least one paid sale of a minimum of 40,000 words to a qualified market, or three paid sales to qualified markets totaling at least 10,000 words. Game publishers may be designated as qualified markets using the already established process and criteria used to qualify fiction markets.
By showing they have earned a net income of at least $3,000 from a game that includes at least 40,000 words of text (not including game mechanics) over the course of a 12-month period since January 1, 2013. Income can be in the form of advance, royalties, or some combination of the three.
If no word count is possible, such as work done for a video game, prospective members can qualify based on one professionally produced full-length game for which they were paid at least $3,000, and with credits to no more than two writers clearly shown on the work.
Note that money from crowd-funding campaigns can be used as part or all of the required income once the game has been delivered to backers, but the amount that can be claimed cannot be more than the net income from the number of games produced and delivered to backers (calculated by the number of backers multiplied by the minimum tier which receives a copy of the game.) Work done for salary is not eligible.

For membership questions not answered above, please contact Kate Baker, SFWA Director of Operations, at operations@sfwa.org.

Q: Why don’t game instructions and mechanics count?

A: Because we consider them nonfiction.

Q. Why don’t multi-book contracts count?

A. Actually, they do. They are not considered “salaried” but often given with contracts w/ advances.

Q: Why have you excluded work done for salary?

A: That was built into the original set of requirements and in talking to the committee, it seems to me to be an oversight. Looking back through discussions, the original thinking was in practice salaried writers are unlikely to qualify because of the rule against works by more than two authors.

So are we re-examining this in light of the many people pointing out the issues with it? Yep! The Game Writing Committee, the SFWA board, and a couple of staff members have all been mailing and talking back and forth about it most of the day.

Do I think it will get changed? *shakes magic 8-ball* All signs point to Yes — but I cannot say definitively. We’re discussing things right now, and I’m pushing to tweak that part.

Q: Why did you put this out if it wasn’t perfect?

A: Because this is how we make it perfect, by putting it into action, seeing how it works, and adjusting accordingly. It’s what we did last year when admitting indies and that also remains an ongoing process. If you’re a SFWA member who wants to help with that process or a non-member who wants to provide useful feedback, mail me at president@sfwa.org.

Q: Will there be a gamewriting Nebula Award?

A: Not at the 2017 Award ceremony, but stay tuned for further developments…

Q: Do you, personally, support gamewriters joining?

A. Dude. I’ve been playing D&D since I was 11 and that was the ancient, original set that came out right after Chainmail. I worked in a book/game store for close to ten years. My bachelorette party was a Call of Cthulhu scenario that turned out to be Paranoia by the end. Of course I support this. I love gaming, and a good game is a work of art. I’m really looking forward to what this change brings.

ETA: I tweaked a couple things to make them clearer. I cannot say what the Board discussion will result in, but we are certainly paying attention.