Writing Blog Number 2

20240401 News

News

A bit of bad news for writers crossed my computer the other day.

People are having their work stolen by bot-farming sites and then on-sold as AI creations. Not just scraping, but stealing wholesale.

Reputable publishing firms are growing increasingly concerned about such things because (a) it is stealing, and (b) genuine work is now being flagged as AI-created, thus ruining a writer’s reputation.

It seems most of these are based out of Russia and China, and so are out of reach of authorities in the countries where the authors tend to reside.

Lacking the ability to stop this, writers and publishers are now in the unenviable situation of no longer doing electronic submissions or storing their work in the cloud – it is going to be all snail mail submissions.

Few publishing firms are equipped to handle this, and the USPS may also not be able to cope with such an influx of mail., especially so many C4-sized envelopes (or whatever the US equivalent is).

Only a handful already insist on postal submissions, and this does make it awkward for international authors, as postage to another country is huge.

Of course, people who support technology think this is a great leap forward, having work stolen by computers. They are wrong. And that only leaves one thing left for me to say:

Look at the starting letters of each paragraph.