In Today’s Journal
* Admin Note
* A New Short Story
* Another View on Generative AI
* Of Interest
* The Numbers
Admin Note
The Journal Website (by WordPress) is getting more and more iffy. Yesterday I was unable to upload the two Traits charts even though they’re small files.
If you currently view TNDJ on the website, I strongly recommend that you switch over to reading it in your inbox or on the Substack.
A New Short Story
“Mistaken Identity” went live yesterday at 10 a.m. on my Stanbrough Writes Substack. Go check it out.
If you enjoy the story, please click Like. That helps with my Substack algorithms. Then tell Everyone else. (grin)
Bradbury Reminder
Today is Saturday. Just a reminder to get your Bradbury Challenge story info in to me before the Journal goes live on Monday.
Another View on Generative AI
a guest post by Sean Monaghan
I’m feeling concerned about the advent of AI into the creative sector. … As a writer I’m feeling it as editors and slush readers at magazine to which I submit find themselves awash in AI-generated stories.
Apparently these stories are fairly obvious, but they still take time to work through. Sometimes it might not be for a page or so that it becomes clear that a story has been generated by AI.
But these are early days. I’ve seen the rapid improvement in the quality of AI art, and I suspect that better AI writing may not be far away.
I have seen some pretty memorable quotes lately, which have seemed to crystalize some of the general concerns about AI in the creative realm. I quite liked this one:
“The underlying purpose of AI is to allow [the] wealthy to access skill while removing the skilled from the ability to access wealth”
The art is amazing, but I’m struggling with the moral side of [using AI], let alone with the lawsuits. From what I see, these companies have effectively stolen artists’ work.
The companies are in the business of creating derivative works, which is something protected by copyright. But the companies claim ‘fair use’ (it’s not) and it seems the onus is falling back on the artists to prove that the works are derivative.
Copyright exists to protect the rights of creators so that they can generate income from their intellectual property. This includes the rights to derivative works.
A musical version of one of my science fiction action stories may bear little resemblance to the original work, but it’s still a derivative, and I will have received a licensing fee from the musical’s creators.
In general, it seems to me that AI companies are creating derivative works without paying such licensing fees.
For all my books I have used licensed art, generally from Dreamstime, and on occasion from Pixabay. [Ed. note: I also recommend checking out Unsplash.] For a brief period I had some AI images on covers.
But when I realized how they’d been generated, I pulled their availability and changed out the covers for properly licensed art before putting the books up for sale again. All of this is relatively inexpensive, but I’m clear on the licensing.
I found another quote, from Elena Perez (@thisiselena.bsky.social) which to my mind nicely sums this up:
“Imagine if people went to retailers and just took stuff and called it ‘generative shopping’ and then, when the retailers said that’s illegal, people said ‘regular shopping is too expensive so we have disrupted it’ and then the retailers were like ‘Oh! Carry on, innovators!’”
I know that the online graphics and text site Canva, which has an AI generator, have used their own library for training, but it appears that they have also gone beyond, and they state that they cannot guarantee that their AI creations do not violate copyright.
Similarly Adobe have firefly, which is fun, and based on their own stock collections, for which the contributors were compensated.
My suspicion with that one, though, is that it was an ‘opt-out’ in updated T&C, rather than an ‘opt-in’. Too easy for that kind of thing to slip by.
To me this is bears comparison to Napster (which outright stole musicians’ recordings) and Spotify (which compensates musicians with money calculated at tiny fractions of a cent).
Musicians I know are generally not fans of Spotify but what are you gonna do? Adobe and Canva are like Spotify, while it seems to me that MidJourney, Wombo, Dal-e and their ilk are like Napster.
For most of my books, there is legally licensable art readily available. Sometimes it’s imperfect, but it does the job.
One of mine in particular, Tramp Steamers, is a space adventure novel set on a world where trade is plied by vessels that ride anti-gravity fields over vast prairies. If you google the art of Ian McQue, you’ll see where I got the idea.
Ideally I would have licensed one of his images for my cover, but as a little indie writer, that’s outside my wheelhouse for the moment. But there was nothing that compared available from the regular art sites I use.
Ultimately I made my own cover, using my Bryce license. It’s way too amateur, of course, and so I’ve looked more deeply into getting an AI image using my Adobe license. I even had a go, and the results were far better. But that niggle inside me about how the actual creators are being compensated didn’t sit well.
I am so, so tempted, you know.
But with all those lawsuits and all these industries being disrupted in, I feel, a lackadaisical and even immoral way, tempted as I am, for now, I’m going to wait for the dust to settle.
Talk with you again soon.
Of Interest
So you want to be an indie author – now what? This will probably be helpful to some of you.
The Numbers
The Journal…………………………… 150
Writing of Blackwell Ops 37: Temple-Schiff
Day 1…… 2012 words. To date…… 2012
Day 2…… 2487 words. To date…… 4499
Day 3…… 4597 words. To date…… 9096
Day 4…… 2790 words. To date…… 11886
Day 5…… 3430 words. To date…… 15316
Fiction for February………………….. 20796
Fiction for 2025………………………. 142151
Nonfiction for February………………. 6360
Nonfiction for 2025…………………… 38340
2025 consumable words…………….. 173981
Average Fiction WPD (February)…….. 2971
2025 Novels to Date…………………….. 3
2025 Novellas to Date…………………… 0
2025 Short Stories to Date……………… 3
Novels (since Oct 19, 2014)…………….. 107
Novellas (since Nov 1, 2015)…………… 10
Short stories (since Apr 15, 2014)……… 274
Short story collections……………………. 29
Disclaimer: Whatever you believe, unreasoning fear and the myths that outlining, revising, and rewriting will make your work better are lies. They will always slow your progress as a writer or stop you cold. I will never teach the myths on this blog.
Writing fiction should never be something that stresses you out. It should be fun. On this blog I teach Writing Into the Dark and adherence to Heinlein’s Rules. Because of WITD and because I endeavor to follow those Rules I am a prolific professional fiction writer. You can be too.