Well, I hurt my hip last weekend–wrenched the muscles around it, or strained them, I was hecking swollen for a while. I was getting better, but then today the treacherous desk chair at work almost escaped from under my arse and I only escaped shattering my coccyx by wrenching my entire body up from the sitting-crouch position. I yelped, startling everyone else in the office. Sigh. That chair needs to be chained to the desk I swear.
But enough of my health problems, I’ve been thinking of writing! Yes, this was supposed to be a blog about writing, and maybe even feature some of my writing, as well as being a kind of general journal, the way I used to blog back in the day before social media sucked out all our brains. Anyway, it’s interesting how people read these days. It’s all very cliquish, like “my wife only reads romances” but on steroids. And apparently a lot of those romances involve werewolves, which I don’t remember being heavily featured in said genre back when I was reading a pile of old paperbacks with their covers removed (they used to do that to unsold books, they’d send the covers to the publisher to get paid back; you weren’t supposed to sell the books after that but my parents somehow ended up with a pile of them). I don’t think Barbara Cartland wrote *one* werewolf romance novel. Probably a good thing.
Social Media being the hive of scum and villainy that it is, it is of course riddled with the sort of people who have zero artistic talent and possibly no souls but they do love money and being paid attention to, so they’re always touting the latest horrid gadget or idea that is designed to turn human beings into mindless producers and consumers (which somehow these “entrepreneurs” don’t see themselves becoming), and the latest one is novels “written” by “artificial intelligence” (the first word is the only word that counts). Apparently you can put a “prompt” into these things, and they will pump out paragraphs or maybe even whole “stories”. This seems to have had a sad side effect of ending the amusement that is “make a sentence out of your phone prompts”. Fun thing isn’t fun anymore thanks to the greedheads.
Anyway, it seems unlikely that fake computer-bot “novels” will replace ones written by a regular meat person using thoughts from their own brain. What is more concerning is the tv and movie industry, which has already been formulaic forever, and studio owners have always basically hated their writers (and actors and directors and probably everyone they employ, and if they don’t want to come off this way they really need to change the way they treat everyone on the fucking planet, at BASE — anyway rant over). So there’s a certain idea being looked at rather too closely that is basically “how about we ditch all these whining babies who insist on being PAID so they can do things like EAT and LIVE and get us an AI program to write all our movies!” And there might be just enough people willing to go out and see one more rendition of Superstud vs. the Joker or whatever. It’s only the general contempt the American movie industry has for animation of any kind that has kept them from replacing actors too, but they have also noticed that animated movies do real well…
Actual writers and artists don’t understand why anyone would want to use AI instead of writing, painting, etc, with their own hands something they came up with their own brains, but these are not artistic people. These are greedy people, even if their greed is only for the supposed cachet a real artist gets. Also envy plays a large part in this — many of these AI-promoting people are absolutely rancid with envy of creative people. They know we have something they don’t, they don’t really know what it is, but it gives us some sort of… aura. I guess? Sometimes I’ve thought that I might have gotten along better in life if I didn’t have a brain that was making shit up all the time about people who didn’t exist. On the other hand I’d probably be a terrible person who fed prompts into an AI and called the results “my best-selling novel!” Brrr! Do not want.