I read somewhere that Clarkesworld Magazine closed submissions due to an influx of AI generated stories. I don’t know if that is true or not, but if you look on their site, they do say “We are not considering stories written, co-written, or assisted by AI at this time.”
I don’t think that we should be surprised by this. I think it is a natural evolution of the technology. People like shortcuts (myself included) and want to be able to make money. It is natural that people will rush to see if ChatGPT can be that shortcut.

Hopefully, this rush to the shortcut will settle out into some authors who would be ok on their own are able to polish their work with the help of something like ChatGPT. Perhaps, in the future, publishers will require that your submission has been processed by a service that has parameters set to help with the easiest parts of writing. Then the editors and publishers can focus on the meaty parts of writing.

I did take a few pokes at ChatGPT to see if it was capable of writing a story I would want written. At first, I thought it might do an ok job at it. Then I realized that the story it was writing felt a bit formulaic and hollow. I don’t know that a formulaic story is inherently bad. It just isn’t what I thought I wanted to write.

I suppose that the more like real human speech the chat bots become, the more likely that will be able to create a story that is worth reading. Does it start with children’s books?  As I child, when I learned about poetry, I was taught that it was simple rhyming sentences. Later, when I was introduced to more complicated poetry, I didn’t enjoy it as much, because it didn’t fit the pattern I was expecting.  Will chatbot writing result in children who don’t like to read human sourced writing?

I don’t believe that will be the case with future generations. But we should probably be aware of the possibility and seek ways to counter any trends in that direction. Perhaps we can find a way to get the bots to tell us if our children stop using their imagination?

What do you worry about?