Many magazines have closed their submission portals because people thought they could send in AI-written stories.
For years I would tell people who wanted to be writers that the only way to be a writer was to write your own stories because elves would not come in the night and do it for you.
With AI, drunk plagiaristic elves who cannot actually write and would not know an idea or a sentence if it bit their little elvish arses will actually turn up and write something unpublishable for you. This is not a good thing.
the splash damage this stuff is causing to the cultural commons is going to be extremely hard to quantify, and undo
I’ve been pondering it for a little while now and even just spitballing on axes of bitrot/vc-exhaustion/etc, we’re going to have all this useless space-filling shit on our collective doorsteps for 5~15y
there appears to be some amount of hope ito things that auto-blacklist sites, etc. but since we don’t have real transclusion (and other source-strong models of hosting/serving), provenance problems are going to remain at a nasty prominence for quite a while too
and the fucking shitheads that push this may never be brought to account -_-
It’s already too late for a lot of places, imo. DeviantArt for example is overrun by LLM-generated sludge and no amount of cleanup will undo that; and that site has been a staple of amateur and upcoming artists for decades. The same seems to be happening to Pixiv (which is big in Japan), too. Search engines are also full of generated SEO spam and it’s getting worse, with image search being close to useless unless you do implement some sort of blocklist. Which, for that use case, luckily already exist and aren’t bad (shameless self-plug), but it’s still a manual step you have to take and won’t help my grandma who’s looking for cookie recipes.
The silver lining might be that a growing number of people are willing to try decentralized solutions. I’ve seen more non-techies come over to Lemmy, Mastodon and Misskey as a result, but it’s still sad to see, especially because this will ultimately lead to tons of older content becoming either lost or needles in a shitstack you can’t ever hope to recover.
