The best science fiction i📖s based on reality. The reason you can look back at so many sci-fi stories and go, “omg Isaac Asimov/George Orwell/Charlie Brooker predicted the future!!!” is because the writers don’t just make things up. Before they even start writing, they’re up to date with the latest experiments detailed in science journals and technologies being developed by governments.
A friend of mine is certain that Brooker had inside intel on former British Prime Minister David Cameron’s schooltime pig-shagging antics before he wrote his Rory Kinnear-starring PM pig-f***ing episode of Black Mirror. It wasn’t prescience, it was research. Whether that’s true or not, science fi♑ction creatives are readers and researchers first, and writers second.
In recent years, science fiction films, novels, and, to some extent, games have tended to move in two directions: climate apocalypse or AI. Sometimes both. While some authors – I’m particularly enamoured with Emily St. John Mandel&rs꧒quo;s pandemic-predicting novels at the moment – eschew these trends, they’re the exceptions that prove the rule.
But it’s those AI stories that have come full circle. Stories about AI becoming sentient or taking over the world have been staples of the genre for years, but in the real world, AI is taking oꦗver from the wriꦬters themselves.
Clarkesworld Magazine, a literary journal for the speculative fiction genre, has hit the headlines this week because editor Neil Clarke has been inundated with spam submissions. He’s had to close submissions due to the amount of AI-generated stories he’s received. Prior to the last three months, the highest number of prospective writers he’s had to ban in a month is about 30. This month alone he’s banned over 500 submitters, and he explained exactly what’s happening on : “Prior to late 2022, that was mostly plagiarism,” he wrote. “Now it's machine-generated submissions.”
It’s almost a sci-fi plot in itself, but I’ve got some advice if you’re ♈thinking about ‘training’ an AI to write a story for you – give up. You’ve already lost. Writing🗹 is an art, a craft, and AI cannot replicate that, no matter how many prompts you feed in. And I’ll tell you why.
It begins with the research I mentioned at the start of this article. An AI’s research consists of trawling the internet for results that match the inputted prompts. But instead of using them to inform꧟ its ideas and the thesis of the story, it plagiarises them and uses 🐼them as the actual content. There are no original ideas, and there is no authorial intent.
You can shout, “death of the author!” until your lungs give out, but can a computer program die? My point is thus: an AI writer c𝓡annot have a system of beliefs, it cannot impart meaning into the words it churns out. It can reiterate other peoples’ ideas, and probably trawl through enough journals to not contradict itself, but that is no substitute for actually making a statement. No matter how much you read between the lines, or how many ideas are accidentally imparted in its plagiarised words, an AI can’t create an idea. It can copy and regurgitate, but it can’t think, and therefore it can’t create.
If you’re using an AI to write your science fiction stories for you, or🧸 any stories for that matter, you’ve already lost. Plugging in the words “robot,” and “racism,” and copying out the words the AI has trawled the internet for does not make you a storyteller. Worse, it might write the script to Detroit: Become Human.
Writing interesting stories is not just about putting words in the right order –🤡 although doing that well is important – it’s about creating with purpose, intent, and meaning. Science fiction is a warning against potential futures and a commentary on the present day, and rehashing other ideas cannot, by definition, create something new.