Someone recently asked me to come up with a concept for publishing that would fix some problems in the industry, so here it is. It is an obvious concept that others have surely thought of and that may one day exist, but thinking through how it might work was interesting for me.
Welcome to The Hive!
The Hive solves a big problem. When modern software automates plagiarism and social spaces facilitate theft, smart, creative people may completely disengage because their work gets stolen or buried.This degrades our culture.
My first book was ripped off 8 times within 3 years and I could spend years attempting to get justice through the courts, but this requires a lot of money and time. I would have to pay lots of people to read lots of books and validate all of this analysis. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a place I could take my book that would validate this analysis for me with an automated tool? Wouldn’t it be nice if rip-offs could be part of a cultural economy that automatically gives credit to the source material?
- Individutopia
- Klara and the Sun
- The Midnight Library
- Uma And the Answer to Absolutely Everything
- The Red Labyrinth
- Piranesi
- Oona Out of Order
- The Actuality
- Agency
The problem is that the bad guys already have the tech to accelerate the creation of rip-offs. It can be as easy as applying a type of filter to a book in order to generate a detailed series of writing prompts that can be fleshed out with spun text taken from elsewhere. Within a blink of an eye, one can turn a single book into ten, genre specific rip-offs that pull different storylines or cross-sections out of a multidimensional plot in order to create a simpler, dumbed-down, single-dimensional product.
When such technology is proliferating in the hands of a select group of bad people, the only way to reduce the market distortion is to put the tech into the hands of everyone.
Initially, this just creates a bigger storm of rip-offs, but when people are able to identify when they are being sold AI-assisted material, original, human work has a fighting chance to be seen and valued. Culture has a fighting chance.
The key to making this work is to incorporate the AI rip-off technology into a platform that restores a fraction of credit to the original work whenever a rip-off is sold.
By combining Snapchat for books and music with automatic rights management, one creates an environment with tools that accelerate creation while giving fractional credit for derivative work. You get all of the sparkles without the tarnish of unfairness.
Now is the right time for this development because there is a significant new threat to the ability of publishers and artists to profit from original work. They are threatened by products that can and will bury them beneath a flood of rip offs that deny credit to the rights holders.
In The Hive, you find a suite of products for everyday creativity, play, and entertainment that make the other available tools look irrelevant.
- The ‘Happiness‘ space has basic writing and sharing tools
- the Google-docs family of products combined with some basic video/voice recording tools
- The ‘Fairness‘ space provides analysis of genealogy and plagiarism
- a government domain algorithm + Google’s database of books +agreement of publishers
- The ‘Creation‘ space has AI book and song splicing tools
- proprietary AI tools that splice and filter stories and songs.
- The ‘Conversation‘ space has chat bots based on authors
- a startup already does this.
- The ‘Dream‘ space provides packaging and marketing
- Ingram + AI that turns books into images or videos.
- The ‘Entertainment‘ space provides a place to be seen among your peers
- it is a basic social media feed.
This combination only works if the creators in the space are given credit for their contributions. When artists see that bringing their content into the space helps protect it and that it gives them a way to prove that someone else has stolen their content, they will all flock to The Hive.
When you submit new work to The Hive, you get a kick of happiness. It is a Happiness Machine. Through a Fairness Machine, you can see what influenced your work and you see the credit you’ve earned when others have used your work to create their own products. In a Creation Machine, you get access to a suite of AI tools that you won’t find anywhere else. In the Conversation Machine, you can chat with bots based on your favorite authors and if you use their words in your work, no worries, they will automatically be attributed. In the Dream Machine, an AI can turn your story into a video that you can use to market your work on social media or in the Entertainment Machine, a space that combines features of YouTube, TikToc, and Twitter.
More generally, The Hive is a space that gives people a sense of individuality, creativity, and connection.
While Facebook tends to make people feel unhappy, The Hive is based on individual and communal creation, not personal accolades stemming from privilege. If you bring a story to The Hive, it is your story and if others make a new version of your story, you still get a portion of credit for their product. Automated analysis of the genealogy of a work makes this possible in a way that has never been possible before.
This sort of product is only something that can be created at the top level because the suite of products required involves all of the best tools that, for example, Google has access to. It doesn’t seem like something that could spring from startup culture, although I understand the appeal of that narrative. People might not want to join a Google-brand hive mind, even if it solves some problems.
Overall, this suite of products could transform the entire publishing industry and it looks like a project that requires comprehensive, top-down management with access to ALL of the tools. It is basically a tool aggregator.
If the world isn’t ready for The Hive, the next logical step is to upgrade Amazon’s plagiarism detection tools and let them filter out 90% of all of the books they have ever published. They could’ve done that from the beginning if they had wanted to and my guess is that they didn’t because their BookBub/NetGalley rip-off generator pay-to-play system kept thousands of would be online scammers, money launderers, and white collar criminals busy. Now they can do what they want with them. They can have an army of Mechanical Turk slaves if they want.
The Hive sounds like a nicer place to end up.
But will artists want to trust an algorithm instead of an agent who offers to protect their work? Given the impossibility of defending their work on the internet, I think they will want the assistance of a heavy hitter — an algorithm that determines when their work is original and when it is a rip-off.
I think this might be the only way to create a thriving cultural space on the internet that isn’t buried beneath the noise of bots and low-quality rip-offs. If the whole internet looked like Reddit, heaven help us!
The launch strategy for this suite of products could be quite fun and could give people who have been victimized a feeling of optimism. Music tracks coming from the black community have been ripped off for decades (Led Zeppelin) and The Hive would finally provide a space in which they could automatically get credit for their work without having to fight for it in the court system.
People would go ‘apeshit’ — in a good way.
This is really about how we want the publishing industry to look in the future, because the alternative to The Hive is for authors to go out on a legal crusade to find derivative works and claim them as their own. The Hive offers a gentler alternative and makes it a lot easier for an author to use automated tools to prove that their work has been stolen or that it is original. This is important for publishers and artists who have to compete with automated rip-offs of their catalog.
The Hive makes sense for people who want to defend their existing catalogs and it also makes sense for new authors who are trying to break in to the system without having their work stolen before they can make a name for themselves.
At the moment, options for authors are deficient in many ways. Say you are a frustrated worker and you quit your job to write a book. It happens. Life is like that sometimes.
When you start to write your story, you are confronted with an array of possibilities. The old publishers are on the left and the online publishing spaces are on the right. Amazon does a bit of both.
The online publishers offer instant gratification as an online portrait of your hopes and fears is created, freeing you from their irritating buzz. Earning anything from these buzzing thoughts is not in the cards unless you are a content generation machine because the marketplace and algorithms reward quantity over quality and every time you publish something, there is the risk that someone else will steal it, spin it, and add it to their portfolio. Your signal will never rise above the noise and if it does, it is probably an illusion created by bots.
Most people don’t write anything that is worth stealing and their experience is generally therapeutic.
If you have talent, however, you will be victimized in this system.
So what do you do?
You can’t take the situation personally because the competition isn’t interested in art or culture. Amazon offers a great way to create a paperback book that you can give to your friends, but unless you plan to publish a new book every day and pay for reviews, your book will disappear beneath an avalanche of stolen or low quality content. These people pay to play.
But these games are played by the rabble and you want status symbols. If you are already famous or if your daddy is someone important, then the big publishers are an option for you. Otherwise, you will just end up prostituting yourself in some way to their gatekeepers.
So what do you do?
If you are a talented person, you will avoid the internet and do some gardening or embroidery. Let the boys play on Reddit and wonder why women don’t want to visit their swamp.
Still, the garden feels isolating and it is nice to feel connected to a larger culture. We search, but find nothing of value on the internet. We disengage. Culture localizes and that isn’t a bad thing. It just isn’t terribly profitable for internet companies.
One would think that an enclave of culture could be preserved within the publishing industry, but I’ve been disappointed by the books they produce. When there is a swamp leaking into everyone’s office via the internet that givest them their targetting metrics, the cultural products they produce stink.
They produce books that are targeted at the lowest common denominator and reading feels like a waste of time. It isn’t fair for me to pick on Michio Kaku, but he seems like a smart guy who is playing to the crowd, so I think it is fair to ask him: why are children being encouraged to conflate science, religion, and philosophy into one big, meaningless lump? What happened to thinking outside of the box, nuance, and subtlety? Are they not allowed access to these tools in our current, polarized cultural climate?
This sort of stupidity gets enhanced because publishing houses have given a small group of swamp dwellers access to technology that enhances their productivity at the expense of people who do not have access. They did this because they profit by concentrating their marketing efforts on a few brands. This helped them compete for attention within a noisy internet marketplace.
On the left we have a kleptocracy with access to bots and on the right, we have artists and readers with no bots. They are at a profound disadvantage. If this industry selects 200 authors who generate 10% of the revenue, these 200 books should be AMAZING. We should be in a cultural golden age. Why do I not feel like this is a golden age?
With so much filtering, why isn’t the product better? The thing is that the filter is an illusion. If you want to control this system with the least amount of effort, you create a bottleneck and you start recycling and spinning material with bestselling brands. So, to fix the problem of low quality culture, one must target the mechanism that filters out and feeds those 200 authors, replacing it with something better. There is a broken link in the chain.
But first we must understand what that broken link looks like. Copyrights are still respected when a 400 page novel by a well known bestseller is turned into a 100 page screenplay, so why are these bestsellers using detailed,10 page screenplay or book outlines from unknown authors as though they are in the public domain?
If you write down the page numbers when the same thing is happening in two books, and plot them out in a chart, you will find that a book that has copied from another book will show a characteristic pattern of points arranged in a diagonal pattern, showing that the same thing is happening on roughly the same page in both books. Some authors are more creative about how they rearrange the sequence of stolen ideas, but when the collection of ideas is very unique, it is hard to understand why these publishers and authors are so brazen about denying these thefts.
These bestselling authors defend indefensible products and create groups of victims:
They know that getting justice is almost impossible — or at least prohibitively expensive in the US and easy to thwart by paying off corrupt judges. The judge in The DaVinci Code case was subsequently given a sweet publishing deal and while that may not have been a pay off, it is surely a conflict of interest for a judge with publishing ambitions to rule on a case involving a major publisher.
Perhaps the situation will be different when confronted with an example of a single, unknown author who has been ripped-off 8 times within 3 years.
In the links below, the overlapping plot elements are detailed.
- Individutopia
- Klara and the Sun
- The Midnight Library
- Uma And the Answer to Absolutely Everything
- The Red Labyrinth
- Piranesi
- Oona Out of Order
- The Actuality
- Agency
When plot elements occur in the same order in both books, they are arranged in a diagonal line within the charts below.
Each of these books filtered out a single dimension of my novel’s multidimensional story and this dumbed down the product, making it boring for anyone with more than half of a brain. The reviews of these rip-offs that were not paid for frequently complained that the books were trite and boring.
What worries me is that cultural collapse occurs when smart people disengage as idiots armed with AI tools take over. This can be especially dangerous when they believe the predictions of tools that are not validated over the time-scales with which they use them to make predictions — but that is a whole other problem that I’ve written about elsewhere.
In this article, I’m focusing on kids and how shoddy cultural products limit their potential and their ability to experience what life has to offer.
I’m hopeful though. With ubiquitous AI modified products, kids may forget what it feels like to make original, human work, but tools that explain the genealogy of work can help them distinguish between work that comes from their own mind and work that comes from an online AI. When we create mirror images of ourselves on the internet, it is sometimes difficult to remember who we are without those tools.
I’m hopeful because there will always be some people who remember basic principles and don’t get lost in whatever new Wonderland is offered by technology.
I’m hopeful because we all have an innate sense of what genuine, human creativity feels like.
I wrote this silly poem to illuminate the difference between original and derivative work. Creating original, human work feels different than working from a template and re-shaping or texturizing it. We can go around punishing everyone who draws from other people’s work rather than from life or we can embrace those people and create a space for them. By creating a space where the genealogy of work is analyzed and everyone can play with AI splicing tools, we could actually protect original, human work from being buried in an avalanche of rip offs.
Of course, any new online environment carries with it unintended dangers. We have seen the impact of fake news spread by foreign governements, but can The Hive protect us from such dangers?
I think it can because The Hive is naturally compartmentalized.
If information wants to spread, it has to work its way through a labyrinth and this gives someone who protects The Hive time to slow the information down if it is causing problems.
People have a right to know what is going on in the world so users should be allowed to visit foreign parts of The Hive, but they shouldn’t be allowed to have an impact there unless their footprint has spread from its origin in an organic fashion. As in, you may observe other parts of the hive, but you may not advertise there unless approved. You have to find out about the foreign parts of the hive by word of mouth. It is a basic safety principle to prevent the spread of bad information. Localized information preserves quality control metrics.
So… that’s the story I told myself about what the world would look like with a new, improved publishing system. I hope you enjoyed it.
….
The image in the header is from Water World.
I was making this article out of ppt slides and it isn’t customary to worry about copyright in material that is meant to be used as a visual aid in a semi-academic, imaginative talk that is not selling a product, so I apologize for not having tracked down all of the links to the photographs used. It just isn’t practical…. without The Hive.
Kirsten Hacker 
Bravo! Exceptional analysis of the problem.
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