A small publisher for speculative fiction and roleplaying games is shuttering after 22 years, and the “final straw,” its founder said, is an influx of AI-generated submissions.
In a notice posted to the site, founder Julie Ann Dawson wrote that effective March 6, she was winding down operations to focus on her health and “day job” that’s separate from the press. “All of these issues impacted my decision. However, I also have to confess to what may have been the final straws. AI...and authors behaving badly,” she wrote.
Dawson founded Bards and Sages in 2002 as a place to publish her own supplemental content for tabletop role-playing games like Pathfinder. It expanded over the years into anthologies, novels, short story collections and a quarterly magazine.
“The AI problem is a time problem. If I was not dealing with a host of other issues, I'd fight through the AI either until the phase passes or the AI Bros gave up on bothering me. But with everything else, I just don't have the time,” Dawson told me. “The number of submissions have just flooded the inbox. And I don't have hours a day to deal with it. As an example, I haven't checked my business email in the last week. My submission inbox...despite the fact that we are no longer accepting submissions...has 30 emails in it.”
Dawson said that after more than 20 years of reading and writing speculative fiction, she’s become adept at spotting the differences between human-crafted writing and content churned out by a large language model like ChatGPT. She sees two types of AI-generated submissions, she said: the “hilariously obvious,” with missing words or repeated statements that the submitter didn’t seem to bother to proofread—and the “E for effort submissions,” where the submitter did seemingly revise the generated text, but has awkward sentence structures of unnatural word orders.
“It is soulless. There is no personality to it. There is no voice. Read a bunch of dialogue in an AI generated story and all the dialogue reads the same. No character personality comes through,” she said. Generated text also tends to lack a strong sense of place, she’s observed; the settings of the stories are either overly-detailed for popular locations, or too vague, because large language models can’t imagine new worlds and can only draw from existing works that have been scraped into its training data.
“The problem with AI is the people who use AI. They don't respect the written word,” Dawson told me. “These are people who think their ‘ideas’ are more important than the actual craft of writing, so they churn out all these ‘ideas’ and enter their idea prompts and think the output is a story. But they never bothered to learn the craft of writing. Most of them don't even read recreationally. They are more enamored with the idea of being a writer than the process of being a writer. They think in terms of quantity and not quality.” Another clue that submitters are using AI is that they send multiple submissions, even though the Bards and Sages guidelines state no more than one submission per person.
Dawson said there are no full-time employees at the press, and that it’s more of a labor of love than her primary income. Rights for authors who’ve published with Bards and Sages will be returned to them. But bad behavior by people posing as writers, and their infiltrating independent and small-scale publishers and communities, happens elsewhere, too—in February, I talked to fanfiction authors about how Etsy sellers have been ripping off their works in bound, printed form, and reselling them as physical books on the platform.
ChatGPT-generated writing is increasingly a problem for scientific journals and the peer review process. Google indexes AI-generated garbage and threatens the usefulness of Google Ngram viewer, an important tool researchers use to track how language is used over time. AI-generated books are all over Amazon, and in some cases, contain potentially dangerous misinformation. We see these big platforms try to moderate AI-generated content, but the closure of Bards and Sages shows how the influx of AI infiltrating every corner of the internet affects small businesses and publishers, too.