Tag: anger

A reader sent me the following question, and gave me permission to post it and reply publicly here.

I found your Newsweek article from 2023, and it eventually led me here. I recently finished a 131,000-word manuscript using ChatGPT as a collaborator. While it’s not at a releasable quality yet, I’ve seen how AI can enhance creativity when paired with significant input.

I’m now breaking that manuscript into an into triloigy of 80,000-85,000 words for each book My process involves using AI to fill in smaller details while I focus on the larger creative elements. The result feels unique even compared to over 300 sci-fi books I’ve read.

I see a fair amount of backlash AI-generated work has.

Given your experience, I’d love your perspective:
• How do you handle criticism or backlash toward AI-assisted writing?
• Do you recommend addressing it directly, or letting the work speak for itself?
• Is using a pen name a good strategy, or does transparency have more value in this space?

AI is allowing me to channel creativity I wouldn’t have been able to do so otherwise. I have no idea where this will take me. Your thought would mean a lot as I continue this journey.

So I should preface this by saying I’m probably a very hard-headed person, or else the torrents of shame and hatred people have tried to rain down on me for doing what I am artistically would be maybe a bit too much to handle. Second, I also spent many years working in content moderation, and handling complaints for a platform. This habituated me to dealing with “anger at scale” and seeing philosophically but also very concretely how, no matter what happens in the world, and where you’re sitting in relation to it, there is no shortage of unhappy people who will come in and shit all over it. This is just what people do, and the world we live in. Everybody’s mad because everything sucks, and I’m obviously no different.

So I guess you could say I’ve had a lot of training and conditioning in dealing with this sort of vitriol. To the point where I pretty much don’t take any of it seriously anymore, and years ago gave up being the guy whose job is to try to somehow sort out and make sense of everyone else’s anger and frustrations. It’s just not my responsibility anymore – and it once was, so I know concretely and cleanly the difference, which might be harder to sort out if you’re new to this kind of extremely strong reaction what you’re describing is likely to engender.

So, more specifically, one concrete way I handle criticism is by not posting on social media accounts. If something of mine comes up on one of those networks, I might pop in as a guest and see what I can of the comments to understand what people are saying, and what their perspectives are, but I never try to engage people on those platforms, because it’s just not worth it. Angry people always feel they are right and justified in their anger. And they are emboldened when others do the same, so you can’t win in the places they congregate, imo. That’s why instead, I just write what I write here on my blog. Sometimes I respond to things I find elsewhere, but there are no comments here, so people can’t come here and dogpile me, and I am able to think in peace. People can, of course, follow links to email me directly. But I’ve never had a single person sit down to write me a thoughtful email that was angry or even a critique. Everyone who emails is curious and interested, so I take those kinds of communications to be much more important and valuable because they are person to person, and they are not social performance designed to enrage and attract likes.

I tend to address the criticisms directly when they seem interesting or spark a new way of thinking about these issues. And I agree there are issues with these technologies, a great many of them, and have spent a huge amount of time talking about them on my blog, in panel discussions, interviews, podcasts, etc. So yes, I think – for me, anyway – addressing them directly is important and necessary, and helps frame the conversation in better directions, even if these blog posts don’t garner likes on social media.

As to pen names, I think it depends on what your personal preferences and tolerances to criticism are. Because of my prior work handling complaints, moderating content, working in privacy/data protection, I didn’t put photos or video of myself online for years and years, and was extremely protective of my identity. Because I knew what kinds of horrible things people are capable of online. But then, eventually, I had the chance to talk about what I was doing, and if you want to play ball in the media, you have to use your face and your name, pretty much. Maybe there’s a way to get press anonymously or pseudonymously, but I think it be more difficult and greatly reduced compared to what I’ve been able to do by exposing myself and my person. I think also there’s something to be said for not being cowed, not being shamed or shouted down from the raging mobs, and simply being like, yeah, this is me, this is an art experiment I’m doing, etc. I’m not forcing anybody to like it, but I’m being true to my part of the dance, following my inspiration, battle testing the tools, finding the good and bad in all of it, and just sharing and being upfront about it.

That said, using another identity as a shield can be a very very good thing psychologically, and for other practical reasons. One benefit can be that it gives you a kind of mental distance – almost a ‘plausible deniability’ – for when the angry hordes come for you (and they will if you’re upfront about what you’re doing). This helps you to see that the people are reacting to the front you’re putting up about what you’re doing, and lets you get less hung up on reacting to like, oh they’re reacting to ME!! and they hate ME!! Like, okay, sure, they might “hate you” in the way that internet people hate everything, all the time, for any or no reason. But the people who complain most about my work haven’t read any of it, haven’t really read any of my articles or blog posts in any depth, haven’t listened meaningfully to my podcast or panel appearances, and haven’t actually engaged with anything I’m saying. They’re generally just reacting to a headline, and – dare I say – repeating popular talking points they heard elsewhere about why “AI bad” and how I’m just another example of ____[thing they already hate].

So, anyway, I don’t know if this is inspiring or even helpful or not, but it’s at least a true accounting of my experience. Your mileage, as ever, may vary.

Anyone else have any questions, feel free to email me, and assuming that’s okay with you, please provide permission to use the text of your email publicly. I will redact any personally identifying information from the text of your inquiry.

Cheers!

The Problem With Conspiracy Theory

By Tim B.

On 14 September 2021

In Other

Okay so here’s a quick run-down of what for me is the exact problem and “danger” in conspiracy theories and their use in modern analysis or whatever (I hesitate to call a lot of it “analysis”). Because I essentially agree with the basic idea of, you should test reality, ask questions, go and find out what is your truth, and how you can mesh that with the truth of others together fruitfully. (Whatever that means)

So in a nutshell, here it is. Contemporary conspiracy analysis online hinges on a single point:

1. Things are not what they seem.

And then there seems to be an in-built conclusion most people who get into that funnel find as the next logical step:

2. And it sucks.

Then, a lot of people just get stuck there. They know to ask questions. But they don’t necessarily always know which ones are the right questions that might lead them to fruitful personal & inter-personal experiences.

So they settle on simplistic lowest common denominator thinking, where they choose a convenient enemy & assign the cause of sucking to them. And we end up with the third corollary in the series:

3. Because group x.

If the average contemporary conspiracy person didn’t get stuck on step 2, they almost definitely get stuck on step 3. Because humans seem to have an in-built basic need to identify & maintain enemies. Or if not a “need,” per se (I would argue we can live without it), then at least a desire to blame badness on some “other.” And that’s what rises into varying shades of step 4:

4. So we should vote out/remove/jail/eliminate/prevent group x from y.

This desire to change the conditions which suck flows out of number 2. The recognition that things suck and we should try to change them is NATURAL and HEALTHY. And we can find healthy expressions of this recognition coupled with desire in things like voting people or parties out of office, pursuing them for legal violations, etc. Or we can find the ever-more-popular anti-social variants of wanting to randomly jail people or eliminate them because of “reasons.” Which are obviously hella shitty.

However, I think there is an alternate path one might take through the above steps, but one which branches off after 2) And it sucks, or even branches off earlier at number 1) Everything is not what it seems.

I would argue that the path of the psychonaut & allied practices might be like:

1. Yes, things are not what they seem.

But then go to:

2A. And it’s awesome

Or also recognize that:

2B. And it’s sometimes awesome and sometimes sucky

And then there is I guess we could call it the “Human Potential Movement” conclusion based on this that sets up an alternate to 3 (where we don’t land on “enemies” as a conclusion):

3B. And we have the power to change it.

With an alternative path of action to vanilla conspiracy step 4:

4B. We can change it by applying our imagination and will to effect changes within the field of consensus & personal reality

Which also seems to be the occult or “magick” perspective, though also that of, say, the entrepreneur, and the practitioners of the secular magics of growth-hacking and self-improvement.

There’s a saying in the Gospel of Thomas, I believe number 113, which I’ll paraphrase: The Kingdom of Heaven is laid out upon the earth, but men do not see it.

In terms of phildickian gnosticism (small “G”), people recognize and attempt to fight against but then become even more entangled by the Black Iron Prison. When really, simultaneously, we also live in the paradisaical Palm Tree Garden. But it’s hard to remember it, and to stay there, or to have the openness and imagination to see it again and again. But it’s always there waiting to be re-discovered, if you do forget or lose the tracks in the forest or the trail up the mountain, so to speak.

Granted, things do often and especially lately seem to massively suck. I want to recognize that at the root of today’s experience that drives people into conspiracy stuff in the first place. It’s good and healthy to recognize that, and to try to take steps to overcome it within the field of your own life & experience. I might even say it’s essential…

The bad part for me comes down to the failure of imagination to just say that everything sucks and to stop there, or to chase false “solutions” where you pin the blame on people you don’t like, and then attempt to leverage them out of the picture. That’s not freedom. That’s being chained to reaction and fear, and stopping short of finding real answers that might challenge those reactions and fears down to their very core, and find out they aren’t substantiated, or even that those reactions and fears are themselves not what they seem, but something much more malleable in the face of mind and will and the action of applied imagination.

Also, personally speaking, I recognize my position is somewhat of a fantasy. That clinging to hope is a fantasy. But long term, I find it a much more fulfilling and personally tenable position to hold that the contrary that says it sucks, and is caused only by bad people I don’t like. I can’t live like that day to day. Hatred and anger take too much damn energy to maintain. My position might be equally a fantasy (though at least not a dark one), but it’s an infinitely easier burden to bear day after day as we go through this thing called life.

Questionable content, possibly linked

Tag: anger

Ask An AI Guy: Handling Criticism & Pen Names As An AI-Assisted Writer

The Problem With Conspiracy Theory