Quote:
Originally Posted by Critteranne
Even before ChatGPT, there were lots of sites that provided writing prompts. There were also books full of writing prompts -- from print books published by traditional houses to indie books. I found these a lot more useful because they were generated by people. Even when the sites were automated (like RPG prompt sites), the suggestions came from fans and not from a bot scraping the Internet.
The AI tools we have now are creating "content" (eww, that word) by scraping existing things from the Internet. Some of its wordage comes from copyrighted material (such as articles on websites). Some people have learned that when you enter a sample chapter into certain sites that are supposed to just rate your text, their text is then being scraped.
That is more than murky. That is the Swamp of Sadness, and we have already lost Artax. 
For a magazine that has been around since 1966, they could do better. According to Duotrope, this magazine accepts voluntary "tip jar" payments as part of its submissions process. |
AI is just a tool, though, and not all bad. I agree that human-generated prompts can be more useful, but AI can help too.
As for the low pay rate, I get that zines have tight budgets, but writers should be fairly compensated, especially for a long-running magazine. The "tip jar" payment system is an interesting approach, but there's room for improvement.