Expert prompt crafting!

A sci-fi magazine has cut off submissions after a flood of AI-generated stories - https://www.npr.org/2023/02/24/1159286436/ai-chatbot-chatgpt...

> The science fiction and fantasy magazine Clarkesworld has been forced to stop accepting any new submissions from writers after it was bombarded with what it says were AI-generated stories.

> The magazine officially shut off submissions on February 20 after a surge in stories that publisher and editor-in-chief Neil Clarke says were clearly machine-written.

I got some pretty interesting sci-fi type results for that in Stable Diffusion. It helped to negative-prompt titles, text, words, etc

I'm so mad you made this comment before me.

This breaks immersion for a lot of people, me included. It's one of the biggest issues I have with lots of sci-fi (moreso than most other types of speculative fiction) novels. Just asserting a fact this fundamental and building your world around it only works if societies, culture, technologies, and history are build around it. Humanity's history with tools and automation are millenia old. To alter this would require a lot of changes. We've been automating, forgetting, copying, and maintaining technologies for as long as our history.

Alien technology encounter stories satisfy some of this for me, as the injection of a foreign, advanced technology makes sense in this framework, much like how ancient peoples would discover technologies built by neighbors or rivals they didn't communicate regularly with.

To some degree I agree with your last point. Before the idea of aliens, writers like Plato and Thomas Moore would posit some undiscovered island where they could imagine a culture unlike their own existing, which like with aliens, gave plausibility as to why that culture would have a different history and traditions than their own. Of course they, like many speculative writers today, were really writing about how they wished their own society worked.

Hmmm. Good observations. I hope this doesn't break my interest in the Warhammer universe, lol, which I believe probably suffer from a lacking "origin story"

It's like asking "would you believe in homeopathy if doctors all told you that it was correct?"

To which the answer is "Doctors believe things for reasons. You can't just flip a switch and change what doctors think without changing the entire world so that homeopathy is actually true, and that would be such a weird world that science in it would be unrecognizeable."

(And since I'm not ChatGPT, I can answer your entire question: "Such a story would have an incoherent world. I could imagine someone writing a story that takes place in an incoherent world, but you wouldn't be able to get useful insights from it.")

> Doctors believe things for reasons. You can't just flip a switch and change what doctors think without changing the entire world so that homeopathy is actually true,

Doctors and scientists have believed false things en masse before, sometimes for hundreds of years at a time. You are confessing to an inability to imagine the real history of the very social practices (science and medicine) that you see yourself as somehow defending here.