Castle Magus

A post on John Scalzi's Whatever blog.

Actually 11 thoughts, because he adds one more in the first comment. That one might even be the most important one, really.

I'm just linking to the blog, even if the comic associated with it (being part two of the previous comic, as implied by the title) is pretty cool so far.

Mainly, I just want to post this for Tycho's words about recent AI bullshit. And by that I mean I just want to copy and paste Tycho's words here, those relevant to the whole AI thing, anyway, because I mostly agree with them, without feeling a need to elaborate or anything. Besides, I've already posted about this shit.

(Links and italics are his [well, except that I inverted the italics below].)

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( Behind a cut, of course. )

A post on John Scalzi's Whatever.

The gist: Someone at the bottom end of the 1% is closer to someone with no money at all than they are to someone at the top end of the 1% who has billions of dollars, yet the person at the bottom end of the 1% is still in the 1%, so too often tries to live like the guy with billions of dollars. The whole thing is simultaneously utterly asinine but also makes sense that idiots with more money than brains would try (and fail) to live like that.

I read the whole post but only watched the video, at 2X speed, until about halfway in, bailing at the start of the shill. The post itself is more humblebragging about how John Scalzi and his family mostly don't do all the stupid shit that 1%ers do.

A post on WIL WHEATON dot NET.

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"Wil Wheaton on His Star Trek Family and His New Podcast Storytime with Wil Wheaton"

"Hi everyone, happy Tuesday! I am so excited for this week’s episode. I’m talking to the one and only Wil Wheaton! You know Wil from his roles as Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: Next Generation, Gordie in Stand By Me and his appearances on The Big Bang Theory. Wil is also a super-nerd and a prolific audiobook reader. He has a new podcast called Storytime with Wil Wheaton, where he reads a new short speculative fiction story each episode and I highly recommend it! We had such a lovely conversation— Wil is a deep thinker and one of the kindest people I know. I can’t wait for you to get to know him a little bit better! Stick around after the interview for the hindsight, where my producer Jeph and I talk about the episode, as well as some upcoming live podcast recordings, our new Patreon and oh yeah, time travel!"

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Apparently the only thing you have to do to get me to watch an entire hour and a half episode of your podcast is simply to have Wil Wheaton on as the guest for that episode. Like so.

Also, it's kind of funny, because I'm sure most other geeknerds (or is the proper term "nerdgeeks"? *shrug*) like me would know Katee Sackhoff from Battlestar Galactica. Here's the thing, though... I have never seen anything of Battlestar Galactica, either the 2004 version or the original show or anything else, outside of maybe an occasional clip on Youtube or something that I don't even remember now. (I always tend to get it confused with Babylon 5, as well, which is another geeknerd show that starts with the letter "B" and of which I have yet to see a single episode. How far in the toilet is my geeknerd cred now?) Nor have I seen any of that other nerdgeek stuff like all that Star Wars stuff mentioned on her Wikipedia page there. What I have seen a fair bit of her in, though, is Longmire, because there is an over-the-air TV channel which I don't recall the name of right now that my sister watches, and it airs a metric assload of Longmire episodes, back to back, on at least a weekly if not daily basis, and I see bits and pieces of it whenever I happen to exit my room to go the kitchen or something (also stuff like Stargate SG-1 and The Closer/Major Crimes and Rizzoli & Isles and NCIS and whatever else that channel [those channels?] tend to air, but that's beside the point). Beyond that, I have no other experience with pretty much anything Katee Sackhoff has done, unfortunately. At least as of right now. So far. Yet.

Okay, so...

There's a fair bit of overlap here with what Wil said in the Mayim Bialik podcast and what he has said on his own blog, but there's a lot of stuff that's new, too. That's one of the cool things about Wil is that even if he's telling largely the same story as one he's told before, elsewhere, he's still able to put a new spin on it. It's not just the same thing, over and over.

At one point, early on, Wil says that if he could give up all of his acting success if it meant that he would instead have a normal childhood where he had parents who weren't terrible, he would do it in a heartbeat. However, later on, about halfway into the episode, when asked about if he could time travel and change something, would he do it, he says that if he could go back and change the bad things about his childhood, he would not do it, if it meant that it led to him never meeting Anne, his wife. It was an interesting contrast. His acting career he would sacrifice in a moment, if it meant he could instead have had a good childhood with loving parents, but not his wife and her kids that he later adopted as his own. By the way, his stories about his wife's children, separately, asking him to formally, officially adopt them when they were each 18 was very touching.

Oh, and the short story they were talking about is Wikihistory. I'm glad Wil mentioned it because it gave me an excuse to read it again (this will be the fourth of fifth time now). In fact, I literally paused the video, then went and read it again, before returning to the video. It's definitely as good as he says it is (though he did get some of the details about it wrong, i.e. there was no "baby Schlimmel" or whatever).

And the fish story is this one or one of several like it told by Michio Kaku.

Finally... I haven't gotten around to it as of yet, but I think I'm going to start actually making the time to go through It's Storytime with Wil Wheaton now. Perhaps even getting started right now, in fact.

"There's always going to be shitty people in the world, that's just how it is, but we can choose whether we're going to be one of them."

A post on John Scalzi's website, in which he ruminates about the foreign sales of his books and also once again rightfully castigates SCROTUS IMPOTUS Trump II and his mind-numbingly idiotic tariffs.

Link to comic.
Link to blog.

Yeah, just to be clear, I'm making a post about this Penny Arcade comic more for the associated blog (and similar things) than for the comic itself. There are even mentions of John Scalzi there.

It seems like common sense to not use fake quotes from real people in promotion of your book, but since Mr. Scalzi had to write this post about it, I guess it's not, at least for some people.

Found this video via scissorsevered, here.

It's pretty god damn spot on.

"The irony that we're automating the production of art instead of the jobs everybody hates shouldn't be lost on us."

(But then, what's funny/weird is that they actually are trying to use AI to automate the shitty jobs, too.)

"Thoughts are swarming my mind like a nest of cyber-rats."

I haven't tried Sudowrite, and I probably won't try Sudowrite, because it's rather a bit pricier than the alternatives like NovelAI or HoloAI (both of which I have tried) or whatever. I don't doubt that it's better, given that it's using GPT-3.5/4, rather than the less powerful (at least for now) models used by those others.

But ignoring those specifics, just generally speaking, my take on novels/novellas/whatever written by AI is this: as long as you are completely upfront and transparent about the thing you wrote with an AI being written by an AI, then I'm fine with it. You say, "Hey, look at this cool thing that this AI wrote for me," then I'll probably take a look at it and be, "Oh, that's neat."[1] I've certainly done that myself, after all. And honestly, I'd rather read a fair-to-middling story written by an AI or a human/AI collaboration than read piss-poor dreck written solely by a human.

However, if you show me a thing and then say, "Hey, look at this cool thing that I wrote," I don't care how amazingly good it might or might not be, if I find out that you actually didn't write it, but instead it was written mostly or entirely by an AI, then I'm going to be way more blasé about it, at the very least. More likely, though, I'll be actively antipathetic toward it. Or, rather, toward you. Just as I would be if you came up and said, "Hey, look at this thing I wrote," and it turned out that another not-you human was the one who wrote it.[2] And, let's be honest here, anything you get an AI to write for you, at least for now, is going to be the equivalent to something written by not-you humans, given that these AIs are trained on the writing of not-you humans. Even if you supply it with samples of your own writing, it's still going to be pulling from the writing of other not-you humans (unless, somehow, it's an AI that was trained solely on your own writing and nothing else).

TL;DR version: I think there's a place for AI-written stuff. And I think there's a place for human/AI collaborative efforts, as long as the human is honest about it. I don't, however, think that there's a place for humans passing off AI-written stuff as human-written stuff. Or, at least, I don't think there should be a place for it. And I'm not sure how I feel about humans directly profiting (whether it's monetarily or "just" reputational or whatever) off of the "work" of AI, regardless of whether the human is upfront about it or not, given that AIs are trained on the works of other, not-them, humans (willing/knowingly or, as is most likely the case, not so). If I had to say how I felt about it, I would say it feels a little hinky to me, at very best.

[1] - Disclaimer: I have not read The Electric Sea, and I'm not sure I'm going to. I'd guess that it's still worthy enough of an "oh, that's neat" and all, but I'm simply not all that interested in reading the whole thing myself, at least not at the moment. There it is, though, for anyone else (or even myself, later) who may want to give it a read.

[2] - Just take a look at my review of Reality Hunger: A Manifesto by David Shields if you want to see how I feel about the subject of plagiarism (or almost-plagiarism or plagiarism-in-everything-but-name). Essentially, I felt strongly enough about it that it's one of the few books on Goodreads for which I wrote an actual review as opposed to just leaving a star rating. Not to put too fine a point on it, I'm not a big fan of plagiarism, whether it's wrapped up in pretentious bullshit or not.

An article on NPR about fan fiction.