Castle Magus

A post on John Scalzi's website.

"It's 2026 and this special flavor of gilded age we live in at the moment means that what qualifies as 'selling out' has an extremely high bar. Making a living was very rarely 'selling out' in any era. I think these days the phrase should be mostly reserved for writing things you absolutely don't believe, for the sort of people you would in fact despise, with the result of your work is you making the world worse for everyone. Avoid doing that, please.

"Short of that, get paid, have those experiences and develop new tools. All of it will be useful for the art you do care about. That’s not selling out. That’s learning, with compensation."

"Today in 'Things that "AI" has ruined':"

A post, on John Scalzi's Whatever.

"If you're a scammer who uses 'AI' to try to defraud actual humans, please die in a fucking fire, thanks. For everyone else, sorry a flood of spam has ruined book clubs. It's awful for every one of us."

In this dispute, on the one side, is an AI company, which, simply by virtue of being an AI company, is inherently, intrinsically, and innately scummy, as could be observed by anyone following all this crap for the past few years.

And yet, in this confrontation, the AI company is the fucking good guy hero in comparison to the other side, on which we have the true epitome of putrid scumbaggery: the Donald Trump """"""""""administration.""""""""""

That's the state of the world we live in right now.

(EDIT)

Follow up article: "Trump orders federal agencies to stop using Anthropic technology in dispute over AI safety"

Of particular disgust: "The move is likely to benefit Elon Musk's competing chatbot, Grok, which the Pentagon plans to give access to classified military networks, and could serve as a warning to two other competitors, Google and OpenAI, that also have contracts to supply their AI tools to the military."

The fucking last thing we need is fucking Grok, of all fucking gen-AIs, being given "access to classified military networks." Imagine if Skynet wasn't just a stereotypical genocidal "evil AI" but was also a racist, neo-Nazi piece of shit on top of that. That's Grok. Do we really want Elon Musk and his gen-AI Mini-Me to have "access to classified military networks"? I mean, no, we don't, not any more than we'd want any of these other AI bros in charge of them, but if we had to give an AI bro "access to classified military networks," Phony Stark is probably by far the worst choice of all. I mean, just look at how much shit Elron Mustard managed to fuck up when he was "merely" the head of DOGE. Oh, and what happens if Sissy SpaceX and Dumbshit Jackass get into another pissing contest again? Something to ponder.

(/EDIT)

Full headline, because barely even half of that shit fit in Dreamwidth's subject field: "'Pulp Fiction' Writer Says It Was 'Impossible' to Get His Movies Made Until He Started an AI Production Company: 'Just Put AI in Front of It and All of a Sudden You're in Production on Three Features'"

*weary goddamn motherfucking sigh + facepalm + smdh*

So, note to self (and hopefully note to anyone else reading this): avoid any new movies that involve Roger Avary in any way from now on, I guess. (Besides, even ignoring the AI dumbshit, anyone in 2026 CE who willingly appears as a guest on "The Joe Rogan Experience" deserves to be shunned, just for that alone.)

Of course, given that the three so-called """""features""""" in question here are "'a family Christmas movie that'll be in theaters this holiday season,' a 'faith-based movie for next Easter' and a 'big romantic war epic,'" I think I would've been quite safe from ever seeing any of these, even if I hadn't known they were made with AI.

What's more insidious, of course, are all the other """""movies""""" that are most assuredly being made like this, except by slightly smarter scumbags who don't proudly boast about doing it beforehand.

Is there any way to speed it up, though? It's happening too slowly, as far as I'm concerned.

Wow, they even somehow managed to tie Jeffrey Epstein directly into modern video game industry bullshit.

Here is a Google search for "Epstein Kotick" for what it's worth. I don't plan to do very much digging here. I already knew Bobby Kotick was evil. I don't really need further confirmation of that long ago established fact.

"This is a weird and difficult topic. Curious to hear your thoughts."

---

When Charles Cornell was talking about the AI-generated playlists in restaurants, I couldn't help but think about when I walk around in Food Lion, because the only time I ever notice the music at all is when they're playing a song I've heard before, be it Michael Jackson or New Kids on the Block or the Bangles or whatever other 80s/90s stuff they typically play in there. If Food Lion started playing AI-slop, I'd probably stop noticing it altogether, unless it was something exceptionally bad/stupid.

Anyway, if the day comes where Youtube serves only AI-generated videos, that will be the day I never use Youtube again.[1]

(EDIT) Oh, and he makes that same fatuous comparison between humans taking inspiration from others and AI just straight up being trained on stolen material and how it's "what we all do" (even though I don't think he actually really believes it, even as he's saying it). AI is not "taking inspiration" from what is fed into them. They're just using what's fed into them and spitting it back out again. Same as with "art" and "writing," AI "music" is just the generative AI spewing out what is the most likely expected thing, based on whatever prompt it has been given. (/EDIT) (EDIT 2) This comment under the above video is a pretty good rebuttal to the notion that AI theft is "just inspiration." (/EDIT 2)

And as far as people wanting or not wanting to go see a live "AI music" concernt... like... people have been going to fucking vocaloid live concerts for at least a decade now. People pay cash money to go see Hatsune Miku projected onto a screen, "singing" whatever. Hell, that shit was on the fucking Late Show with David Letterman over a decade ago. ("It's like being on Willie Nelson's bus.") But even for vocaloid stuff, that was still ostensibly created by humans... at least for now. Oh wait, no, never mind, vocaloid stuff is already being AI-generated, too. Herp derp.

Man, I will be so, so glad when this fucking AI bubble bursts. That said, Charles Cornell is probably not wrong, here. As much as some people (like me) complain about it, most people really just don't give a shit at all, one way or the other.

[1] - Hell, I'm almost to that point already, just based on all the other stupid bullshit Youtube has been doing lately. It has already been over two years since the last time I ever actually logged in to my own Youtube account, for example, and if they ever remove the ability to watch videos without being logged in, that will be the day I kick them to the curb forever. (Or else find yet another workaround that allows me to continue sticking it to The Man™. *eye roll*)

When I say "I want the AI bubble to burst," I'm not even saying I want all the generative AIs/LLMs to go away. It's mainly that I just want all the slimy AI bros to go away. AI shills say shit like "yeah well, when the dot com bubble burst, did the Internet go away? No. AI is here to stay so fuck you," or "you're a hypocrite if you ever criticize AI even a little while participating in societyusing the Internet. Ha ha gottem!" or "*sea lion noises*"

I don't necessarily want gen AI/LLMs gone when the bubble bursts, any more than I wanted dot coms gone when that bubble burst or wanted the entire concept of blockchain to disappear when the NFT bubble burst. I just want all the stupid, shitty, shilly, slimy, smarmy AI bros to go away, like how (most of) the dot com bros and NFT shills went away. I just want people to stop being so hyperbolically goddamned asinine about it.

Went to the grocery store tonight and was planning to get a taco salad from Wendy's on the way home.

"Sorry, we don't have any salads at all tonight. We don't have the bowls for them."

So... I decided to go to Bojangles instead and just get a sausage, egg, and cheese biscuit. They have "AI" taking drive through orders there, now. Urrrrgh. So, after the AI tried to upsell me on shit I didn't want, both before and after I placed my order, I got to the window.

"Um, we only have sausage and cheese tonight. Will that be all right?"

Just to note, Bo-fucking-Linda didn't say word one about there being no egg available.

So... now I'm eating a sausage, egg, and cheese biscuit, sans egg. It's... not too bad, I guess. Not great, but not inedible. *shrug.* They did, at least, knock some off the price. And I think I got more sausage than I would've otherwise (though I'd have preferred egg to extra sausage). The thing I've got is two sausage patties with cheese between them, in a biscuit.

Silver lining, at least I'm having a better night than whoever warranted a firetruck, the little SUV that follows the firetruck, and an ambulance that went by, sirens blaring, while I was sitting in the Bojangles drive through.

At this point, whenever some dumbshit video game company says they want to go all in (or even just a little bit in) on "generative AI"/LLMs, it has the same negative, braindead energy as when a lot of those same companies went all in on DRM and blockchain/NFT bullshit. Sure, DRM badware seems to be here to stay, unfortunately, but you don't hear too many game company honchos hyping blockchain or NFTs so much anymore. LLM/AI is just as tulip mania-ish as all that shit, though.

Full headline, because yadda yadda: "'Tasks that previously took 2-3 hours can now be completed in 10 minutes': Falcom is the latest developer to buy into the AI hype machine"

Yet another video game company for the shitpile, I guess. *weary sigh*

"We are using AI to brainstorm scenarios and do research." Huge red flag, right there. "AI is also used to correct typos in the scenario." Um, that's what fucking spellcheck (itself a form of rudimentary "AI," at least in the same sense that LLMs themselves are "AI," anyway) is for, you dim bulbs. You do not need to use a goddamned LLM for that.

Oh, and as for you, Eurogamer, it's "Ys" (pronounced like "geese," except without the "g") not "Y's" (and it's definitely not pronounced like "wise" or "why's"). Also, Eurogamer, having the sentence "It is worth noting that this is a rough translation from Japanese to English using Google's in-built browser tools, and therefore the intricacies of this statement could be off," is pretty damn odd, in an article calling out others for the use of LLM/AI, I've got to say.