LLMs and the dwindling number of people who appreciate and value language
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I've been working in publishing for twenty-three years, which surprises even me. In print, I've published novels with two publishing houses and academic books with two. I've published with three audiobook publishers. My short stories and essays add at least seven book publishers to the list and dozens of magazines and newspapers. Since most things pass from the editor who acquired the piece to copyeditors, I've worked with a heckuva lot of people whose job it is to make my prose better. I appreciate these people very much. They keep me from going out into the world with my metaphorical pants down.
These days, some of them are doing a much poorer job of it. I believe that this is because they are not themselves doing it. They are outsourcing the job to algorithms that are deeply flawed. I am trying to hold the line on this, but there isn't anything I can do about changes that happen after text leaves my hands for the last time. This isn't supposed to happen, but it does.
I have a book, Agatha Christie and the Twentieth Century Woman, coming out in January from a major academic press, Bloomsbury Academic. It is based on my doctoral research and it is very important to me. Bloomsbury has published me before, in 2022. The copyediting and proofreading process has degraded markedly since then.
I have spent more time than I like to think about with the final proof of this book. The first round of errors that I've had to fix were related to a five-page sequence of material that I knew would be hard to lay out in a way that was accurate and looked good, so I included notes in the manuscript that were intended to help. The notes were ignored, which resulted in a mess. If a human had looked at the mess or (please God) at my notes, it wouldn't have gone so far, but as best I can tell, somebody fed it to an LLM and sent the resulting disaster back for my review. This would not have happened in 2022.
On the most recent go-round, it would have been logical for me to only review the passages where I'd asked for changes, but I'm neurotic. I read the whole thing yet again. I found that making the above changes had caused the kind of errors that no human or machine should have missed. A stray comma. A missing quotation mark. An extra quotation mark. But the flabbergasting thing was that there was an inexplicable change in a totally different part of the book: I had discussed the work of Mary Evans and, for clarity, added "(no relation to the author)" right in the text. On this pass (and not any of the previous passes), this was changed to "Mary Anna Evans (no relation to the author)." So an error had been introduced and, again, a human being would not have made it, because they would have realized by the parenthetical note what was going on.
This was so out-of-the-blue that I asked for a redline so that I could check each and every change that had been made. How else could I know if something weird had been done somewhere in those 250 pages at the last minute? Well, the redline of the editor's changes doesn't show the Mary/Mary Anna debacle. It's like it appeared out of the ether. The only conclusion to be made is that somebody ran it through an LLM after they finished the job and simply trusted the machine. Like an idiot.
And this wasn't the only snafu. Earlier in the process, my editor's assistant sent me a draft book description that will go out to retailers and reviewers and will be printed on the book jacket and the publisher's website. It was terrible in a way that's hard to describe. I had to rewrite it from front to back. For one thing, it had three sentences in two paragraphs that began with participial phrases that didn't quite modify the subject of the sentence. They were like the classic example--Walking down the street, the trees' leaves were colorful--but weirdly phrased when compared to the years of student errors I've seen. They were so weird and inhuman that they had a chalk-on-the-blackboard aspect. I looked it up and, yes, this is an AI tell. Also, this draft book description used my original title of the book instead of the one the publisher gave it. This was the final giveaway. Somebody had fed the book description I wrote for my proposal three years ago into an LLM, and this is what it spit out.
Within the year, this kind of bastardized language will be ubiquitous. People will stop noticing. Languages change, so is this a problem? Well, it is if the resulting text no longer says what the writer intended to say. And it's really a problem if the resulting text doesn't make any sense and the reader is forced to ignore it or live with the cognitive dissonance.
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Well, while I was typing that screed, I got an email from my editor's assistant with two very nice blurbs for the book. They are both highly respected researchers, and Mark Aldridge is one of the folks that the BBC calls when they need an on-air Christie expert.
“This excellent book is thoroughly researched, highly original and an essential read for anyone interested in the Queen of Crime.” - Dr. Mark Aldridge, Solent University, UK
“This remarkable book is a gold mine of insight into Agatha Christie, and will no doubt shape vital critical conversations about the Queen of Crime and her authorship. Excelling in its investigation of archival material rarely examined, Evans’ book is highly recommended for scholars, academics, and Christie enthusiasts seeking new perspectives on Christie’s writing and its complex, evolving context.” - Dr. Charlotte Beyer, University of Gloucestershire, UK
This one, from an editor of a major journal in the field, came in a few weeks ago:
“Evans’s new monograph on Agatha Christie presents a new and exciting approach to studying Christie’s novels within their socio-cultural context. Using published and private material, Evans shows how Christie’s representation of women and the law (including aspects of women’s visibility in the legal system, (sexual) transgression, and property rights) remains up to date during her long writing career and allows readers to read contemporary zeitgeist through Christie’s works.” – Kerstin-Anja Münderlein, University of Bamberg, Germany
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This is what the tech oligarchs wanted and due to our unresponsive politicians, it's what they got, carte blanche. AI should have been regulated from the get-go but too many of the world's population couldn't believe they had a new super human toy to play with and we all know what it's like to take toys away from children.
Humanity's collective knowledge should not be owned by a handful of technology developers who seemingly care very little for our collective history. They've been given free rein to swipe the entirety of human effort with no strings attached.
Sorry this has happened to you Mary Anna. I do believe we are at the point where it is nigh impossible to discern what is real and what is not.
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I worry that people are so used to reading AI, especially anything longer than a social media post, that they start picking up all the tropes AI uses. For example, ending a paragraph with the flourish, “that’s not X, it’s Y!” and all the myriad other tells.
I worry that people are so used to reading AI, especially anything longer than a social media post, that they start picking up all the tropes AI uses. For example, ending a paragraph with the flourish, “that’s not X, it’s Y!” and all the myriad other tells.
I get electric jolts up my spine when I read, "Sit with that for a moment."
Urrrrggh.
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This is what the tech oligarchs wanted and due to our unresponsive politicians, it's what they got, carte blanche. AI should have been regulated from the get-go but too many of the world's population couldn't believe they had a new super human toy to play with and we all know what it's like to take toys away from children.
Humanity's collective knowledge should not be owned by a handful of technology developers who seemingly care very little for our collective history. They've been given free rein to swipe the entirety of human effort with no strings attached.
Sorry this has happened to you Mary Anna. I do believe we are at the point where it is nigh impossible to discern what is real and what is not.
@Bernard I agree with everything you wrote, Bernard.
They have indeed swiped a good chunk of human effort. I think the Anthropic settlement which, although it was a billion-and-a-half dollars, feels like they're throwing us a bone. When it came through, I thought that perhaps all the AI companies were going to at least have to throw us a bone, but I see no sign of it.
The way the settlement was written, books were thrown out because of restrictions on the pub date and because our publishers sometimes neglected to register our copyrights. We've always been told that registration is just a formality and it's not necessary to defend our work in court, but the settlement was written in such a way that it matters. Our contracts are written in such a way that the publisher is responsible for registering the copyright, but has no liability if they didn't. Because of details like this, the database of stolen work includes 24 of my titles, but only eight of them qualified for the settlement.
It isn't known yet how much the lawyers will take, but the judge sent their request back and told them they couldn't have the huge percentage they wanted. Whatever makes it through that gauntlet will be split (50/50, in most cases) betwen the writer and the publisher. (Yes, the same publisher who cost me many thousands by neglecting to register some of my copyrights.)
I think my settlement check will be in the low five figures, but it really should be approaching six.
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@Bernard I agree with everything you wrote, Bernard.
They have indeed swiped a good chunk of human effort. I think the Anthropic settlement which, although it was a billion-and-a-half dollars, feels like they're throwing us a bone. When it came through, I thought that perhaps all the AI companies were going to at least have to throw us a bone, but I see no sign of it.
The way the settlement was written, books were thrown out because of restrictions on the pub date and because our publishers sometimes neglected to register our copyrights. We've always been told that registration is just a formality and it's not necessary to defend our work in court, but the settlement was written in such a way that it matters. Our contracts are written in such a way that the publisher is responsible for registering the copyright, but has no liability if they didn't. Because of details like this, the database of stolen work includes 24 of my titles, but only eight of them qualified for the settlement.
It isn't known yet how much the lawyers will take, but the judge sent their request back and told them they couldn't have the huge percentage they wanted. Whatever makes it through that gauntlet will be split (50/50, in most cases) betwen the writer and the publisher. (Yes, the same publisher who cost me many thousands by neglecting to register some of my copyrights.)
I think my settlement check will be in the low five figures, but it really should be approaching six.
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I think my settlement check will be in the low five figures, but it really should be approaching six.
And it’s taxable as ordinary income so after you split your money with the publisher, you split it again with US/NJ.
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That explains the writing I have encountered that makes me wonder who told a high schooler they could write?
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