Usage of AI spikes in publishing Book bans continue to rise

BY JUDE BARRERA ’24 STAFF WRITER

With the popularity of chatbots like ChatGPT on the rise, the functions of artificial intelligence have garnered greater interest around the world. In the publishing industry, AI has been used in two distinct ways for content creation. On an individual basis, AI has been used to generate stories to send to magazines that are accepting submissions or to upload to self-publishing platforms. On a larger scale, companies have begun to use AI to create content for their websites.

When individuals create AI-generated stories to self-publish, there isn’t an employee to approve, deny or edit the books, leading to little quality moderation. According to Reuters, “over 200 e-books in Amazon’s Kindle store as of mid-February list[ed] ChatGPT as an author or co-author … and the number is rising daily.” As these AI-generated books gain more traction on social media, more creators are encouraged to follow suit. While some authors are upfront about the usage of ChatGPT and other AI tools, others decline to disclose the use of chatbots, “in part because Amazon’s policies don’t require it,” according to Reuters. A failure to disclose this usage makes it hard for people to discern what is or isn’t AI-generated.

While self-publishing platforms like Amazon put the pressure to sift through AI-generated work on the customer, employees at traditional publishing platforms must do this labor at unprecedented rates. Clarkesworld, a science fiction and fantasy magazine has been inundated with AI-generated submissions. In a blog post, Clarkesworld editor-in-chief Neil Clarke shared a graph detailing a spike in banned users throughout the year. In January 2023, Clarkesworld banned just over 100 users for fraudulent submissions to the magazine. On Feb. 15, when the chart was made, over 300 users were banned. Five days later, when Clarke updated his blog post with a new graph, it showed that more than 500 submissions were flagged for plagiarism. This flood of plagiarism led Clarke to close submissions for nearly a month. On March 12, the Clarkesworld Twitter account tweeted, “We quietly reopened submissions tonight. Already banned someone.” The labor involved in filtering through these submissions is not Clarke’s only concern. “I worry that this path will lead to an increased number of barriers for new and international authors. Short fiction needs these people,” Clarke stated in his blog post. While the industry learns to differentiate between AI-generated and human-made writing, resources to tackle fraudulent submissions are limited. Having to navigate a surplus of fraudulent submissions may motivate some publishers to place restrictions on or temporarily close them. Some publishers have openly embraced AI as a way to create more content without increasing the size of writing teams. Buzzfeed publicly announced its venture into AI content by producing AI-generated personality quizzes back in January 2023. These quizzes disclosed that results were generated by AI in the headline, and credited another writer in the byline. Unlike regular personality quizzes, these quizzes allowed users to type in answers to prompts, rather than choose from pre-selected answers. The result is that the generated result of the quiz will directly quote the user’s responses to fill out a template. Yet, according to Futurism, Buzzfeed has begun using AI to create “SEO-driven travel guides,” however only Buzzfeed’s AI tool “Buzzy” is named explicitly in the byline. The human employee that used the AI to create the article is not named in the byline, but rather later in a clarification note. Futurism noted that the employees credited in these articles are not part of Buzzfeed’s journalism staff, but rather “non-editorial employees who work in domains like client partnerships, account management and product management.” Futurism then pointed out two turns of phrase that were used repetitively within these articles. The phrase “I know what you’re thinking” appeared in seven different articles, and the phrase “hidden gem” appeared in 16 articles. While these phrases are common enough, all 44 of the travel articles with the byline “As Told to Buzzy” were posted within a week of each other. Both approaches to AI-generated content prioritize speed and cutting down labor, often at the expense of quality, and while differences between man and machine are still noticeable, every use allows AI to adapt.

“I wonder if the most significant changes wrought by AI won’t necessarily be the introduction of new tools and practices, like the large language models everyone’s up in arms about at the moment. Rather, there will be … a deep and lasting impact as existing technologies we use are ‘enhanced’ through the integration of AI components,” Lindsey Freer, head of Ed-Tech said. “So when we think about the impact AI might have on any given industry, it’s important to think about what tools that industry already uses, and how changes that are integrated into those technologies might further change that sector of our economy.”

BY AMELIA POTTER

STAFF WRITER

Book banning is no new concept; for several centuries it has remained a galvanizing issue within U.S. politics. According to the Harvard Library, the first recorded instance of book banning in the U.S. occurred in Quincy, Massachusetts, back in 1637.Recently, The New York Times has reported a drastic increase in book-banning efforts in schools within the United States.

This movement does not reflect the independent actions of individual parents, but rather “deep-pocketed organizations whose actions can change long-standing policies in a matter of months.” Since the beginning of the pandemic, the powerful scope of these conservative organizations has only risen. Their influence ranges from possessing local sway all the way to having a broad national impact. The Times reports that “over the past two years, they have become vastly more organized, well funded, effective — and criticized.” Within this recent explosion of censorship efforts, a report by the free speech organization PEN America reveals that a significant portion of these groups was formed after 2020.

School libraries have taken the brunt of this wave of censorship.

The New York Times cited a report done by the American Library Association which found that in 2022, “some 60 percent of complaints that the association tracked were direct- ed at books and materials in school libraries and classrooms.” Comparatively, public libraries received just 40 percent of challenges.

In previous years, controversies over which book titles were inappropriate for public school libraries mainly occurred on an individual level, between “a concerned parent and a librarian” and “resulted in a single title or a few books” being reassessed and possibly pulled. Now the wider pattern of book banning, as reported by The Times, results from an “influential constellation of conservative groups.” These Republican organizations, whose efforts have outpaced their liberal counterparts, work at all levels of the political spectrum. They portray their motivation as an attempt to protect the “innocence of children” against “indoctrination” and cite the “inappropriate” and even “pornographic” nature of the books in question as grounds for removal. The American Library Association reported via the New York Times that the targets of the bans are predominantly books “by or about Black or LGBTQ people,”

These conservative organizations are quick to denounce targeted books as “indecent or offensive,” and stretch this boundary to encompass books with no explicit indecency or pornography. Indeed, voices in fiction portraying the perspectives of POC and LGBTQ+ narratives are often unfairly antagonized. An in-