In Whom Do You Place Your Trust?

In the days of my youth – and much of my time now, as an old person, is spent remembering youthful years – people who wanted to have their books published either had to go through the rigours of a publishing house, with or without an agent on their side, or pay a vanity press to publish the work for them. Vanity presses advertised in what we would call the gutter press, the yellow press, the tabloids; those publications with little intellectual depth, plenty of not necessarily serious advertising, and a high readership; something which has, sadly, not disappeared from the world to this day. A few years ago things changed drastically.

The internet appeared and the possibility to reach millions of people with a well-placed web site, and a good story. Paper publishing, including the news media, felt threatened, and some who did not manage to change their ways, or who had been wobbling on the edges of the pit, vanished. Those who did change their ways, who adapted to the new media, managed to gain a good foothold, but were faced with a battle against a new breed of news medium: weblogs; citizen journalism; vlogs; podcasts. Suddenly it was as easy to publish your short story as it was a longer work, online, and promote it for pennies. The stress and strain of finding a good publisher disappeared, the costs of paying a vanity press with it. And then things changed again.

The internet grew, expanded into toasters and refrigerators, and the presence of well-written, well researched works became secondary to consumer commercialism. What was published became less well researched as those who had monetized their weblogs, and other internet sites, turned to advertising to support their costs. Any advertising, since the internet was a free agent, and the consumer laws of one country did not necessarily apply in another, regardless of where the potential consumer was. The content became secondary, split into bite-sized snippets between the sales pitches. Major players in the supply scene moved into instant publishing, taking over from where the vanity presses had been king, and doing the entire spectrum of work, from uploading of the text, formatting, illustration, to printing and distribution. And that with barely any human interference. No editors, no copywriters, no proofreaders; just a writer and a potential market. And then the technological world moved on again.

We entered into the era of Artificial Intelligence. Suddenly it was not necessary for anyone to write their own words, to come up with a plot and a cast of characters, there was an app for that. And it made no difference if the subject matter was designed to be historical, philosophical, fiction or romance: AI could do it, and AI did it. The human end, which had been removed from the publishing side with instant print systems and publishers, was removed from the creative, the writing side. We went from a system where the experts decided what would be good to place on the market – Hemingway, Austin, Dickens, Barrett-Browning, Doyle and many other names – to a stage where anyone who could upload text from a machine to another would be published, regardless of content, regardless of worth. We entered the advanced world of AI Slop. Not just in publishing, in the traditional books and news media sense, but in everything else too. And are we better off for it?

Undoubtedly not. But we are also now faced with the problem of discerning what is AI Slop, and what has been created over many hours by a real person using pen and paper. We have to be able to read between the words and style of writing to see if something is true, or whether it has been created as a money-making enterprise, for political grounds, or just to push a certain theory and raise hackles and tension. Can we trust that news story making headlines on our monitor? Can we trust our eyes, watching a video of some event or other? Who and what remains reliable? Could we be going back to the old, tried and trusted means of getting our news and reading pleasure?

For many there can be only one way forward: a return to the way things were. In the past we knew who to trust, understood the difference between a serious publisher and a vanity press; between an investigative newspaper and a populist tabloid; between an expert with an educational background and an ill-formed opinion. Those people, those companies are still there. If we wish to avoid the depths of misinformation, the loss of intelligence, the lack of truth, we need to take our business back to where we know the chances are far better of receiving what we need. We, the consumers, need to return to those publishers who showed their merits before the internet, before the growth of AI Slop and misinformation, of paid opinions catering to the mind of a billionaire or major concern rather than to facts and the truth. We are those who hold it in our hands, with our clicks, and our wallets, and our time online. Where we turn our eyes, our minds, our money, is where growth will be found, and what better way to save our own minds and form our future than to ditch what has become sour, polluted, infested with the grime of ill-earned wealth, than to return to the fruits we know were sweet and pure.