What's it worth?
Creativity versus free content
The above photo is a metaphor for the constant maze that writers and other creatives are forced to navigate. This week’s soul destroying news is about what people are willing to pay for the hard work, skill and talent of others.
First, and most directly affecting writer income, several writers this week have posted the update that UK magazine Take a Break have decided that they won’t be paying their regular writers for the stories they publish. Instead, they’re just going to use AI - future stories will appear with the author ‘the fiction team’. Now, I’m not a contributor to this magazine and never have been, but a lot of writers rely on these small streams of regular income to keep their heads above water. Not only that, but are we truly accepting that AI can replace the creativity of humans? Thriller writer Nicola Martin did the research and actually read the stories from a recent issue and delivers her damning verdict here. Essentially, if you like stories that cover familiar storylines, with predictable outcomes and characters who stay two dimensional, perhaps you’ll enjoy them.
It seems crazy to me that any publisher would turn to the mediocre, ‘done before’, even to save the small wages that human writers expect for their work. I get that you might think it’s safer to go the tried and tested route, but most of the big fiction bestselling books at the moment are anything but. Caro Claire Burke’s Yesteryear, has been an attention grabber because it’s not like anything else. It takes a current obsession and turns it into a speculative nightmare. Women’s Prize winning novel The Correspondent by Virginia Evans, is an epistolary novel, of the type that is hardly in fashion. And yet it’s sold millions worldwide. I cannot imagine that the people composing AI prompts have the imagination to even try to get it to create something new and interesting. If they did, surely they’d be struggling along like the rest of us, trying to write something original.
Part of the issue is the expectation of free content. Writing is just another form of content to a lot of people. I can blame Amazon for some of this. Why pay £7.99 or more for an e-book when you can wait and at some point it will be on offer at 99p. But it’s everything. AI is embedded in the art we look at online, at the photography. Part of my new job is finding good images to send out with holiday quotes - a stunning view out over a beach, or an iconic building, that sort of thing. We have a log on to one of the companies offering stock images and you have to actively tick a box to make sure that no AI images sneak in. Some of them are wild and very clearly not real, but sometimes it can be hard to tell. It’s so easy to steal a real image and play around with it, ‘creating’ a new one that might fool people.
On the topic of ‘free content’, anyone using Instagram may want to update their settings asap. Meta have this week launched a new AI image-generation feature that includes the function to use photos from any public Instagram accounts without having to seek permission. Essentially, unless you opt out, anyone at all can take your photos and content and do what they want with it. Plus you don’t even get notified so you won’t know if someone has taken one of your photos and done something malicious with it. You can turn this off by going to the Settings and activity tab on your account. If you scroll down a bit you'll see ‘Sharing and reuse’ in the section headed ‘How others can interact with you’. Clicking there, you’ll see there are various permissions to allow people to share your posts and stories (something that can be quite useful if you want your content to go wider in a controlled way). You probably want to turn off ‘Allow people to reuse your content on Instragram and with AI features at Meta’. Obviously, Meta aren’t spreading word of this widely in case everyone opts out, so feel free to share the news yourself!