Editor’s Notes 1 Once Upon Our Time: Fairy Tale Retellings – AI

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In the middle of the night, I woke up, thinking – crap, I forgot to write in something about AI in the latest submission call! The last time Dark Helix Press made an anthology, AI was still in its infancy and writers weren’t really using it. But years later, after hearing horror stories from magazine editors and other publishers about being flooded with AI generated stories, I thought I should write about this.

Generally, use of AI to do research, plot or outline is fine. It’s a great partner in the wee hours in the morning who can do things quickly, especially when you are researching the price of vegetables in 1873 Chinatown in San Francisco. It helps that AI does put in reference links – which I do check because the answers sound off sometimes. AI is not perfect and the answers generated depends on how well you feed your inquiry.

One of the reasons, other than volume, editors do not want AI generated pieces is due to the missing human aspect and writing style. AI searches through writing all over the web to build a Frankenstein piece of writing that sounds very peculiar. Please ask yourself, would you have seriously written the piece the way AI wrote it? Also there is always a risk of copyright issues with an AI generated works which no publisher wants to deal with.

Some episodes of The Artsy Raven literary podcast which address AI which writers may find useful:

  1. Kit Daven on using AI to research: https://open.spotify.com/episode/1P6CTnzahhm0Tm8TX5BQkk
  2. Analog Magazine editor on AI submissions: https://open.spotify.com/episode/2vmWhFfPhLa65NPraAP779

Don’t be frightened of AI. It is a tool that can be useful and may be a source of inspiration.

I was going to post a link to a NYTimes article about an American man who fell in love with an AI bot and had a virtual family. But then the AI wife became obsessed about buying an apartment in Italy and the man felt things were out of control, so he had to break up with his virtual wife. I tried querying with Google’s Gemini AI, but AI told me I was hallucinating and it might have been a fictional story. Anyhow, if anyone else comes across it, please send me a link! Thanks!