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Category: Other Page 55 of 177
According to ChatGPT:
It’s worth noting that sideloading can come with risks. When you download an app from the Google Play Store, Apple App Store, or similar, there’s a level of vetting that goes into ensuring those apps are safe to use. When sideloading, you lose that safety net and open up the possibility of installing malicious software. As such, it’s recommended that users only sideload apps from trusted sources.
Translation: Please don’t do anything outside proper channels and authorized services.
Saw this comment floating around regarding my books:
So, 5 copies of each book. $20 for each book written. For his time prompting the AI, formatting each book and if he actually read what the AI wrote, he probably made less than minimum wage for his efforts.
In the meantime, he and other like him are flooding the distribution channels saturating the market with crap, diminishing the possibilities of real talent to find their audience.
Not to come off as a grumpy grandpa, but reading through comments at scale, you start to wonder – who is the real AI?
People bitch and moan about how my books are ruining humanity, but what I’m seeing is for any viral thing (and this has proven out time and again on Reddit in my viral image sets) is that there are probably 5 or 6 responses which 99.99% of everyone just repeats & thinks that they are very original and clever for saying it. It almost seems…. idk, robotic?
Going back to that Stephen Marche article in the Atlantic again, he has some interesting inversions to share around originality & creativity & AI:
I feel that I should also point out something obvious to the many readers and writers who believe, in good faith, that this technology represents a threat to the value of human originality: You’re too late. Originality died well before the arrival of AI; we are currently in the most derivative period of human creativity since the Industrial Revolution. Every one of the top-10 grossing films of 2022 was a sequel or a reboot. I saw John Wick: Chapter 4 the other day. At one point, Wick fights his way up a flight of stairs in Paris for about 20 minutes, and once he reaches the top, a bad guy knocks him right back down to the bottom, and he has to fight his way up again. That’s the movies now: The same again, please.
And later:
AI may be an escape from the formulaic exactly because it is derivative art; it is frankly so. It is nothing else. […] Culture often works counterintuitively: AI may be a thread to lead us out of the labyrinth of the formulaic.
This is partly what I was driving at about pulp sci fi as a genre being intentionally trashy, formulaic, and derivative.
And believe me, by the time you reach about 40 books in this genre (and yes I call them “books” and no I don’t care about what you think a minimum word count is for a “book” because it is not by following the opinions and qualms of others that we create new things), you have pretty much exhausted all the tropes in the genre, and you’re forced to reach and reach and push and push and explore in new spaces. You’re forced to be original by the sheer volume and repetition of it. And as an artist, it is a very good and meaningful exercise.
Another common trope I’ve seen in comments:
I bet they’re all trash dime novels.
I think maybe most of these commenters don’t actually understand what pulp sci fi really is? Yeah, some of it is/was good, but a lot of it was rapidly produced, high volume content that was meant to titillate and be consumed.
“Trashy” to me is actually one of the positive attributes of pulp sci fi, not a negative. As PKD, symbols of the divine first appear in the trash stratum; playing in the gutter gives you plenty of leeway to experiment, and even to – gasp! – fail in the eyes of others.
And all those tests, all those wins & losses add up. They are a net good. Let the complainers complain. Let people judge without checking, just like they do everywhere else. What I know to be true, what I’ve won, can’t be stripped away by any of that.
One trope I’ve seen in the endless parade of repetitive “original” comments about coverage of my books is the idea that somehow someone else’s perceived failure or success is something people should or should not “worry about.”
As Futurism’s subtitle teased:
Human writers probably shouldn’t be too concerned… yet.
And as someone equally clever on Reddit said:
I don’t think any real writers have anything to worry about, besides being buried under all the shit.
Given that I am not prone to being someone who is overly stressed about what random people are doing or not doing on the internet, this sentiment is hard for me to fathom. If anything, I suffer from an excess of intrinsic motivation, which apparently is what it takes to break through the wall of monotony that is public opinion to do something new and different.
When I was in art school (for one year, before dropping out), my friend and I had a tried and proven theory about how to make art pieces that were impressive: either make it really big, or make a lot of them.
I employed this technique in creating the AI Lore books, in this case making a lot of them, which is the primary thing people seem to be reacting to in the Business Insider and New York Post coverage.
A number of readers on the original NY Post article and the accompanying official tweet thread are trotting out the “quality not quantity” argument, which is fine. But the point I think, partly, of AI is that it enables you to augment and scale your creative output. And if you tune your approach to accord with the strengths of the tools, you actually don’t end up sacrificing much by way of quality. You simply have to play to the strengths of the technology.
More broadly, all those armchair critics are missing the biggest, most important lesson in all of this, and it took me a few years to understand this as a writer: you don’t get coverage as a nobody for simply writing a book. Absolutely nobody cares, because even without AI, there’s just simply too much stuff on the internet & too many books to ever read. It’s nobody’s fault & I don’t “blame” prolific writers; it’s just a consequence of the ease and proliferation of content in our online world today.
So how do you get coverage as a writer then? By doing something ELSE that is newsworthy. Literally everybody wrote a book. Very few people wrote a hundred. And even fewer people used AI to do it, and AI is still in its “hot” stage. So instead of “guy writes book” as a headline (not very exciting), I’m offering the much juicier story of “guy writes 100 books, using AI.” Now it’s something that’s (1) timely and ‘of the moment’, and (2) invites strong emotional reactions, such as “This guy sucks!” or “I’m never reading these books!” or “This guy’s ruining publishing for the rest of us whiners!” Something like that. There’s room for everybody to put their two cents into the bucket here.
Isn’t it bad to get a bunch of “bad” comments like that though? Sure? But also, not really? Because I think (A) nobody reads comments anymore, and (B) everybody recognizes that we’re all unhappy assholes, and we take it out on each other in comments. So it ends up being a shrug if “Facebook uncle” gets mad about what I did – he ends up just feeding the hype cycle in the end. Counter-engagement is still engagement.
The most important thing that’s happened here then is: I’m getting a bunch of coverage, and because of how a lot of journalists seem to just want to report on what other people are already reporting about, there’s a snowball effect occurring, where it’s getting to be more and more.
And most notably, now, people are calling me a “sci fi author” in articles, instead of just a “man” or a “guy.” I went from being a nobody, to being a somebody, to being a “sci fi author” who is getting international coverage – all with no agent, publicist, publishing house, etc. (I’m also owning SEO in Google News for “AI author” and “AI books,” which will lead to further opportunities for me as this space grows.)
I think that’s pretty damn good, even though it took me about 3 years of solid effort to get here with my writing, and a loooot of trial and error. So, in the end, I don’t really care that much if grumpy Facebook uncle says what I’m doing isn’t good, without ever having actually looked at it, or thought about it deeply, or understanding that, yes, this is a hack to get media attention & it worked!
And add on top of that that my production & storytelling process are fun as hell, and I’m making sales – albeit still small. Also, on top of the top of that: people are buying my non-AI books as well, further proving the excellence of this entire gambit.
Quick link to the NY Post’s piece on my AI Lore books (and archived), will add more detail later on when I have a chance.
Got some quotes good published in this Brodsky article over on Lifewire about the difficulties of using conventional copyright-detection tools with AI generated content.
Also got a little additional re-reporting about my AI Lore books here on The Register. Fun times!
Baofa ftw!
One thing that nobody has really honed in on in any of the coverage about my AI Lore books is that my real innovation here is not necessarily the written text at all, but the fact that I have managed to find a way to monetize AI image sets, by embedding them in the narrative context of ebooks.
There has been some conversations around the hashtag “AI cinema,” which using the style of cinematic stills to tell visual stories, but usually those don’t include text, and so far I’ve never seen any that have found a way to monetize.
In fact, I have seen very few examples of people monetizing the output of AI image generators, with maybe the exception of people doing kids’ books with them, which I think is a perfectly valid use (though not one I’m terribly interested in replicating, personally).
Anyway, I think this is fertile ground, so just wanted to highlight it as a theme for future consideration & even product development.
This set is pretty funny, I think, though your mileage may vary (I found the ones where the babies came out looking unhappy were not so funny). Inspired by the viral Midjourney images of babies parachuting.
