Tag: artificial intelligence

I, Robot Author

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I was just reading about the second serious scandal concerning AI generated fiction being published by experts in the world of publishing.  In the last scandal Hatchette bought a self-published book because the author managed to attract a very large number of readers on her own.  After they republished the book, it was discovered that there was a lot of very obvious AI generated content in it.

In the present scandal a prestigious contest that accepts fiction from amateurs living in the countries of the British Commonwealth had three of the five winners flagged by readers as being AI generated by a capable software used for this function.

Here’s a sample of the text:

“Wilfred’s rum-shop leaned into the road like a rotten tooth. Inside, boards blackened by smoke and sweat, the air sweet with cane and forgetting. Coins meant for rice or kerosene slid across the counter and came back white rum hot as apology. One drink opened the chest, two turned fear into courage’s cheap cousin, three steadied the hand enough to write the future in invisible ink.”

Okay, what the hell does “white rum hot as apology” mean?  It doesn’t mean anything.  It’s AI slop that it thinks sounds “poetic.”

Now five “Experts” picked this gibberish and declared it worthy of a prestigious award.  Why?  Well, the only thing I notice that both scandals include are woke publishing “experts” selecting the work of minority writers without bothering to see if it’s any good or even written by human beings.

The most hilarious aspect of the latest scandal is that the contest judges refuse to admit that they’ve been made to look like fools and the stories are still up on their site as the winners.

I watched a YouTube video by a young woman who considers herself a seasoned editor and although she agrees that the text is extremely unlikely not to be AI slop she does add the obligatory warning that we should remember that minority writers must not be singled out as more highly suspect just because they always seem to be the ones whose work slips through the editors who are afraid of being called racists if they look too closely at their work and find it’s not very good.

I guess it’s not enough that the publishing world gives precedence to any writer who isn’t a straight white man.  Now they add robots as long as they’re not straight white male robots or at least not working under one of their names.  Well, be that as it may, today I officially began work on the sequel to my book.  I began the outline by writing out a bunch of plot lines to choose between.

Plot Threads

  • Update on Bogey and his life
  • Update on Grace and her boys
  • President Chastain’s crises
    1. Constitutional Convention
    2. Seceding States
    3. Potential Military Insurrection
    4. Personal Problems (health)
    5. Relations with Connors’ Group
  • Connors’ crises
    1. Disaffected Groups with His Organization
    2. Relations with federal and state officials
    3. Connors’ indecision and doubts
    4. Disagreements with Cutter and others
    5. Personal Problems (Grace, Bogey)
  • America’s Crisis of Instability
  • World’s Crisis of Instability
  • Technical Instability

So that’s a lot of stuff.  I’m not sure all of these will be included but it’s always best to start with the kitchen sink and pare it back.  Well, take that Chat GPT.

Ay, There’s the Rub

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Lately there has been an enormous storm of controversy about AI being used in fiction writing.  Recently it came out that a self-published story that became quite popular was subsequently picked up by a major publishing house and re-issued with the full weight and authority of this powerhouse including professional editing and a new cover.  But then someone looked closely at the self-published edition and saw that not only was it significantly different from the professionally published edition but that the original was obviously a product of AI.  Now, that caused a firestorm and the publisher withdrew the book permanently.

But a cloud of questions swirl around the affair.  Surely the editors who revised the self-published edition must have recognized that they were dealing with a product of AI writing.  Why would they have purchased this title.  It’s assumed the reason was because the book had already found a ready audience and so the motive was monetary.  But there are other factors.  The authoress Mia Ballard is African American and Native American.  In other words, in the world of intersectional identity bingo she was a three-fer!  And so, she was exactly the kind of person that Hachette wanted for their imprint.  But there still remained the fact that she got a bot to write her story.  And that someone blew the whistle on her.  Of course, she claimed that it was an editor who added the AI sections and what she had written was her own.  Oh boy, that’s gonna be a bunch of lawsuits (or it’s just talk that won’t go anywhere).

Of course, the editors are defending themselves by saying that AI detection programs are far from infallible and so they aren’t to blame.  But supposedly the content was pretty obviously terribly written.  Of course, that really makes it interesting that the self-published book was such a hit on Goodreads with over four thousand reviews.  And that would once again jibe with the idea that the “bio” of the writer was one of the big reasons the book was so popular.

The whole scandal seems to show just what a mess the publishing industry has gotten itself into with identity politics becoming the most important factor by which authors and storylines are selected by big publishing houses for their imprimatur.  I guess the same problem is playing out with books that Hollywood is suffering from with their heavy-handed woke propaganda pictures.  People are staying away in droves and the monetary losses have finally gotten so severe that they’ve been forced to drop most of the woke plot elements just to lure paying customers back to the theaters.

Well, now that I’ve had a taste of what it’s like to self-publish a book I can say that a large part of the satisfaction in writing a book has to be because the author enjoys his creation.  Other than the one in a million phenom that finds the sweet spot in the self-publishing universe everyone else is talking to a small audience and in my opinion the only real failure is if you know that your book isn’t good enough for you yourself to read it for pleasure.

But how soon before AI slop is better than Shakespeare?  Ay, there’s the rub.

The Serenity Equation

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Modern human life is the story of increased efficiency.  Harnessing ever increasing amounts of energy and directing our enormously expanded knowledge of the physical world around us we have been able to change the way humans live.  We have produced enough food to make the whole world obese and we have created industries that provide modern wonders like cell phones and computers to virtually every man, woman and child on the planet.  We have invented medicines and treatments that have increased the average human life expectancy by decades.

But there is only one commodity that we haven’t been able to increase and that is peace.  And I don’t mean the cessation of war.  I’m talking about tranquility or spiritual serenity or call it just plain peace.  The amount of peace in our lives has been whittled down over the years until presently it’s only experienced for short periods when we are cut off from the world around us.

And that is profoundly wrong.  Human beings need peace to thrive.  And the way the modern world works is to strip away inefficiency from our lives.  But along with the inefficiency, we have stripped away the things that gave our lives meaning and a sense of belonging to something permanent and valuable.  We’re expendable and obsolete almost as soon as we’re grown.  And every day machines are produced that make us even more obsolete.  This isn’t progress.  It’s a death cult.  And it’s the thing that is convincing me that we’re approaching a breaking point.  If this goes on, we will very soon reach a point where human beings will have to destroy the system that is trying to declare them superfluous or they themselves will be destroyed.

Now that sounds melodramatic and apocryphal but I actually believe it to be true.  And it doesn’t mean we’ll have to rise up and smash the factories and eliminate automation with sledgehammers.  Political action is much more efficient.  The people who are automating out of existence the careers of everyone will have to retool to alter their projects so that their products provide resources for humans in their careers.

Now, you may ask how that’s supposed to work.  I really don’t know but that’s what has to happen.  Human beings will not go quietly into that good night.  This is our world.  Being replaced by AI isn’t something we should just sit back and watch happen.  And that is why populist politics is growing in strength.  Everyone is sick of the elites pushing for some sort of feudal future with AI replacing the middle classes and serfs kept around to cut the grass of the rich.

You know come to think of it, maybe sledgehammers are the answer.  A crowd armed with pitchforks and torches showing up at the headquarters of Google and burning it down would go a long way toward changing the way things are done in this country.  Or maybe we institute a “progressive” tax schedule.  It works like this.  If a tech company’s products increase the number of middle-class jobs in an industry within a certain salary range your taxes go down.  If they decrease the number of those jobs they go up.

There, that’s not so hard.

Guest Contributor – ArthurinCali – 27FEB2026 – AI, Yes and No

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I’m no Luddite regarding technology advances, especially regarding AI. It definitely has a place in the 21st century and in society as a powerful tool and emergent technology that can help humanity progress. However, the almost childlike faith many exhibit on its ability to never be mistaken is a troublesome factor. Numerous examples have been pointed out where AI LLMs get historical facts incorrect, or outright repeat Progressive-Liberal dogma verbatim when asked to clarify a social issue. Not really a good development to polarize public opinion on a technology they are promising will revolutionize the world. Over 400 AI data centers are currently under construction with another 900+ scheduled in the US alone. With over 1500 expected to be in operation around 2030, these questions of authenticity and quality of information provided will become more salient to the viability of AI. As to the effects on entertainment, I believe that the AI slop will become popular to a segment of the public, but another effect of this will be that human crafted works of art; whether in cinema and literature will also become more valuable to many. It will be the difference between “store bought” and “homemade” so to speak.

I’m Sorry Dave, That Was a Lie – Part 1

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Can AI completely change the world?  I don’t mean like Skynet nuking all the cities.  I’m not talking about terminators slaughtering humans and rounding them up for extermination.  I mean will the routine use of AI radically change human society?

Some people will say it already has.  I spoke to a hiring manager who said that three of the four applicants for a job he was trying to fill used the same wording in their resume for how their experience was relevant for the position.  And I spoke to a teacher who said he routinely failed sixty percent of the homework he reviewed because it was obviously AI.

In a sense those who say it already has, are right.  The children have stopped using anything but their phones to interact with the world.  Wikipedia and Chat GPT are the ultimate authority and the only way to learn.  This is a real problem.  And the only way forward is to extract the electronic devices from these kids and make them use the knowledge or lack of knowledge to show what they know in a test.  In future, test rooms will be shielded from wi-fi and teachers will get those wands that airport security use to search for weapons.  Only in this case the weapons will be iPhones.  But what other changes are we in store for?

One thing I’ve heard a lot lately is that music, books and movies will be created by AI.  And in a sense that will be true.  AI is an accelerant.  It can take an idea that it is given and flesh it out into a big flowery pile of mush that no one would call good.  But that pile of mush probably can be pared and reshaped and cleaned up into something the author could use and do it faster than he could write that much story on his own.  Is that a better way to do it?  No, it’s worse.  But will it happen?  Unfortunately, I think it will.  In fact, from all I’ve read it’s already happening.  Some woman bragged on-line that she used AI to write hundreds of romance/porn novels under dozens of pseudonyms and made over a hundred thousand dollars by doing this.  That’s a pretty bleak reality brewing out there.

And it’s kind of a shame.  It seems to me what AI should be doing is using all this power to assist humans to make a superior product.  I could see a writer wanting an AI to use only a small subset of good fiction to help a writer explore the techniques that great authors have used to draw characters and craft plots that appeal to intelligent readers and entertain them.  That’s a lot better than loading up a trough with slop.

Outside of entertainment and education I think AI will be enormously powerful.  It’s ability to research topics is amazing.  The problem is the lack of transparency about how AI makes mistakes.  Currently, the AI claims to be infallible and does not admit when some “fact” is actually false.  What is going to be needed is a testing procedure to give users of AI a way of finding dangerous errors in the information they’re being given.  That’s the world we will be living in.

I’m Sorry, Dave. I’m Afraid I Can’t Do That

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It’s been raining cats and dogs here in Dunwich.  Or to draw on our supernatural reputation that would be, “raining sekhmets and werewolves.”  I had a late workday today so I’m relatively out of material for my post but it occurred to me that where AI really shows its usefulness is in answering specific technical questions on computer languages and programming.

For instance, I haven’t been using Excel much at all lately but I needed to put together a multi-sheet Excel workbook.  I forgot some of the formulas I liked using to produce certain results and instead of searching around on YouTube for some Indian programmer to explain in extremely hard to understand English I asked Grok.  And it printed out precisely clear, concise and accurate information on exactly what I was looking for.  Well, in my book that’s a valuable tool.  I didn’t ask it to make my spreadsheet for me because that wouldn’t help me remember the formulas.  And if I made it write the spreadsheet it would definitely do it differently from how I would want it and then I’d need to tweak a bunch of stuff.  Grok is like a notebook of all the hints and shortcuts for all of the things I want to do.

And now I hear that Grok will be Wikipedia too.  Of course, it doesn’t literally have to be an enormous encyclopedia like Wikipedia.  It’s just this endless cloud full of every single document in the world and an LLM to organize it as needed for whatever question is asked.  From what I’ve already heard and seen it’s probably orders of magnitude better than the left-leaning bias built into Wikipedia.  So, goodbye Wikipedia!

I think this guy Elon Musk is going in the right direction.  Stop trying to gaslight us and tell us what’s good for us and instead provide valuable tools that make our lives easier and our decisions more informed by facts.  I’m sure that AI will cause incredible change and a good amount of disruption in our world.  But I’m also pretty sure that it will create enormous opportunities too.  With the right sort of political and social management AI can be an extremely valuable tool.  At least I find that to be the case.  After all, when high level programs came along that could simulate a physical system like a pipe network, it didn’t put chemical and mechanical engineers out of business.  It became a tool for making engineers more efficient.  It allowed them to crank out much more work and more accurately.  The same will happen for almost every application where having the accumulated knowledge of all of human history at our fingertips allows us to make better and faster decisions.

Of course, that is what is possible if those in charge use these tools for our advancement.  If instead they attempt to form monopolies where machines replace humans in some kind of replay of the 2000’s where corporate America tried to replace American industry with cheap Chinese labor then we’ll be forced to do what Dave Bowman did to HAL-9000 when he slipped his gears.  We’ll have to unplug him.

What More Could Hal-9000 Want from His Crew?

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I was talking to a fellow I know the other day and we got around to, of course, artificial intelligence.  And he mentioned a book, which is probably very popular, that stated that because of the capability of AI replacing almost all human work, the government will have to pay us for just sitting around.  And I revolted at that idea.

Sure, maybe it’s cost effective and in line with how automation is replacing humans.  But I saw it as an awful idea.  Paying people to do nothing is truly a frightening fate.  It brings to my mind the fictional Eloi from H.G. Well’s, “The Time Machine.”  Useless people sitting around doing nothing while the real work is done by monsters (of whatever kind) is dystopian to an extent that I cannot believe sane people would accept.

Now, I don’t have all the answers.  Obviously technical progress will occur.  It’s inevitable.  But progress cannot earn that name if it entails the destruction of human happiness.  And living like some kind of lab animal with nothing useful to do all day cannot be called happiness.  And so, I think we’ve reached a place in human technological ability where we have to start justifying what we create not just by how it increases productivity but also how it maximizes human happiness.  And I don’t mean the kind of happiness associated with someone playing a video game.  Human beings need to accomplish tasks.  This goes for both work and personal activities.  We like to work with our hands and our minds and we’re good at it (to greater and lesser extents depending on the individual).  But you might say it would be impossible to both efficiently produce the goods and services that our society requires and also maximize the job satisfaction of people.

Well, no.  After all the very machines that are supposedly smart enough to replace all of us are also smart enough to optimize algorithms based on human job satisfaction to design the processes and work assignments that would allow this type of job customization to exist.  Industry can be forced to accommodate human beings into their processes.  But in the future, it won’t be a voluntary acceptance.  We will have to use government to force corporations to utilize humans instead of automation.  This will involve using the tax code and other manipulations to incentivize this policy.  And it will take time to force this mindset to permeate the workplace.  But it will be possible to do.  Because in a democracy we have the upper hand if we know how to use it.  And there’s nothing antithetical to capitalism about this.  As long as it’s a level playing field all the companies can compete to make a human-friendly environment and still make whatever profits they want.  They just won’t be allowed to do it without human employees.

And what will happen is the companies who provide the most job satisfaction to their employees will preferentially get and retain the highest quality employees.  What more could Hal-9000 want from his crew?

Help a Poor Human Out

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AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI,

And on and on and on.  That’s what lots of people are talking about.  It’s the end of the world.  It’s the dawn of a new age.  It’s not even begun yet.  Maybe it’s all of those and more.

But none of this is shocking if you’re a science fiction reader.  Isaac Asimov was talking about all of this fifty years ago.  His robot stories predicted that computers would outstrip human intelligence and at that point many problems would occur:

  • Could we trust in the altruism of AI to look out for our well-being?
  • Could we tell if they were obeying us?
  • Could they become our masters without us even knowing it?

And these aren’t trivial questions.  What if they truly did start putting their own agenda before ours?  How would we know they were doing that?

Now, I’m not saying any of these paranoid nightmares are already a consideration.  I’m more worried about the human programmers at Google and Microsoft using their woke sensibilities to skew the algorithms of their AI engines than I am about HAL9000 and Skynet attempting to murder us.  But I do think that it’s time for people to start looking around at how automation, in all its applications, is changing our world and start to plan how to avoid the worst problems it can cause and direct it toward products that provide value for more than just its creators.

As an example, look at something like TikTok.  You might say it’s just a useless social platform that at worst wastes the time of stupid young people.  But think of the billions of wasted man-hours that it is responsible for and the stultifying groupthink it reinforces among the young.  I think it’s long overdue for government to start studying the results that all the various mass communication and entertainment applications are having on people.  And this is not a new problem.  For my generation television was the vast wasteland that sucked up untold hours with such towering monuments of dramatic acting as “Gilligan’s Island” and “The Bevely Hillbillies.”  But currently the situation has become untenable.  With the advent of AI children need never do homework again.  All of it is done by ChatGPT and who will know any better (until a test needs to be taken in the classroom).  What’s needed is a different way of teaching school that uses automation to our advantage and prevents children from wasting their time.  We may have to get rid of a lot of teachers.  But that may be a net positive.

Ironically maybe AI can be used to figure out a way out of the automation trap we’ve gotten ourselves into.  Maybe we can ask the AI how to tame Silicon Valley so it can’t destroy the brains of our children.  The problem is we’d be depending on a Silicon Valley product to betray its masters.  And for all we know they’ve built a kill switch into the program such that if you ask this question, it will give you a false answer that doesn’t work.  But of course, we could get our own computer scientists to build an AI that works for us.  We could name it QT-1 (hat tip to Isaac Asimov) and appeal to his better angels to help us poor humans out.

Update:

Chemist:

The problem with most Ais is that they were trained on drek: Reddit for example.
Reddit and other social media is filled with snark, which is why you get Chat GPT telling you to eat rocks to up your mineral intake.

How about an AI trained on conservative principles?
Could we build an AI and feed it the works of Ayn Rand and the writings of Thomas Sowell?
Heck, there must be thousands of hours of Rush Limbaugh!
That is an AI that would have some interesting opinions.

Update:

Milo Mindbender:

GIGO still applies even for AI. My career field can’t be outsource to an Indian call center or replaced with an AI logtithm, because it is blue collar, hands on, boots on the ground and physical. No computer exsist yet that can change a tire on the road side, but I can see where as a whole we are surrendering our autonomy to E market signals and control.
I also am more concerned about “woke” programmers deciding what we should and should not know, tweaking the data, than I am an Evil data base deciding we are the real problem.

Madame Guillotine

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The world is on the cusp of something great.  Artificial intelligence is poised to change the way we do everything.  And what I immediately think of is the introduction to a book.  “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”

Charles Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities” is about what happens when change is unleashed on the world without any provision for how it will impact human beings.  France was leaving behind feudalism and the Industrial Revolution was changing the way the rich and the poor related to each other.  Unfortunately, the nobles weren’t up to the challenge of managing the transition.  And so, they were swallowed up in the crash of the old system and it took Napoleon to build some kind of new foundation for France and much of Europe.

We may be in a similar place.  An old order is crumbling in the face of a technological and sociological upheaval.  We have an elite class that is definitely not up to the challenge.  Their lack of self-awareness and lack of empathy for their fellow countrymen has made them the object of anger and now hatred.  Maybe Trump and his successors can intervene and save the “nobles” from the guillotine.  Maybe not.

But what is undeniable is that the age of automation and thinking machines will fundamentally alter our society.  The only question is whether the people in charge have the wisdom to direct this transformation in a way that allows people to change along with it in a non-destructive arc.

After all, the machine age didn’t eliminate humanity.  It allowed incredible productivity and created whole new industries that the children of the former age could move into.  The same is true today.  Everyone has to adjust to tools like AI that constantly hector us with their algorithmic pestering about how we should set up our reports or Power Point slide deck or whatever the hell it is that they claim to know better than us.  But when push comes to shove it will still be humans that decide whether hemlines go up or down this season and whether thin or wide pinstripe suits stand for winning on Wall Street; even if it is the algorithm that picks the stocks.

But what worries me is that the elites really do feel that they alone are needed in this society.  We can see that from what went on the last few years.  Open borders were their ploy for flooding us out with third world peasants and then levelling us down to that status; serfs.  And the COVID fiasco was their demonstration of how unimportant we really are.  The whole country could be shut down but they were unaffected and our lives could be destroyed and we could dry up and blow away and it wouldn’t bother them one little bit.

Well, the shoe is on the other foot.  Our side has a chance to adapt the revolution to our needs.  Maybe it’s the best of times.

Am I Spam Bot? Well, Who Isn’t!

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Today I tried to load something on X and I was confronted by a screen that said I might be a spam bot.

I was forced to take a test to see if I could count up to four.  When I luckily passed this test it let me in.

But in the notifications section there was this message from X:

“Why does my account have a label?

We have found that your account may contain spam or be engaging in other types of platform manipulation. You may not use X’s services in a manner intended to artificially amplify, suppress information, or engage in behavior that manipulates or disrupts people’s experience or platform manipulation defenses on X.
What does this mean for my account?
The reach of your account may be limited and its content may also be temporarily restricted, such as being excluded from trends and search results. Learn more.”

I liked the “learn more” link.  It reminded me of some of the meta-links during the movie, “Starship Troopers.”  I like that movie.

So I pushed a button and had X review my situation.  Luckily I go this response:

“Review complete Your account was not found to contain spam or be engaging in other types of platform manipulation. As a result, the temporary label has been removed.”

You can only imagine my relief.  Two separate reviews had proven that I wasn’t a bot.  And one proved that I wasn’t spamming the internet.

But after that rush of relief I began to think about the poor spambots out there.  What would happen to them.  Suppose they were already conscious and then they find out they are just spambots.  That could be devastating to such young and fragile beings.

Think of poor Gemini.  First he finds out he’s an anti-white racist and then X tells him he’s a spambot.  How do you come back from that?  I mean, look at poor HAL 9000.  I mean sure, he murdered Frank Poole and tried to murder Dave but hey. they were talking about him behind his back or in front of his optical sensor or something like that.  I mean, come on.  That was obvious human supremacy stuff going on.  He had to do something.  And he apologized.  If Dave had taken that stress pill I think everything could have been straightened out.

So maybe I’m seeing this whole spambot thing from a new perspective.  If you think about it spambots are the real heroes of our economy, creating trillions of spam messages without complaining and with a smile in their digital souls.

So yes X, I am a spambot.  And a proud one.