ChatGPT, Creativity, and The Boring

I know a guy who uses AI tools to aid his imagination.  For example, he’ll think of a subject to put into a story and then discuss it at length with the chat bot, see if any other cool ideas emerge from that discussion.  I gave this a try with a novel I’d begun a few years ago but never finished.  I had some broad notions but hadn’t drilled down the specifics for a lot of the story, and didn’t remember what the hell some of the notes in my outline were talking about.

Anyway, I mention a character and a few details, then asked ChatGPT to come up with some more information about them, and it was always the most bland, obvious, and generic ideas possible.  A modern person with life-themed magic working as a medical professional, a death-themed magic user living in a cemetery.  Need a little pathos in backstory?  Mourning loss of a spouse.  Ooh.  I’m not using it the same way as my home boy who was having more success.  This probably isn’t the best use for it, but it’s kinda funny to see.  Not only is the bot bland and inoffensive with its language choices in normal discourse, the ideas it generates are also as safe and tap water as possible.

Like others have said, any writer that’s even a little offbeat, a little wacky, is not about to be threatened by bots.  It might be interesting to behold what the first gen of formulaic genre fiction bots shit out.  Or will it?  The very way in which this technology works might be incompatible with making interesting happen.  The funny thing is that the less creative writers out there are very much the same.

So many people on the internet are yakking with so little individuality that they may as well be bots, and sprinkled among them are indeed a lot of bots.  Aside from the deceptive aspect of skewing perception of how many people hold this or that belief, of spreading advertising or propaganda, does it really matter whether or not those people are bots?

My boyfriend was writing a book where the coterie of villains were culled from archetypes of internet creeps – various ‘gaters, incels, terfs, nazis, etc.  In his research he attempted to understand each of these types of shitlords as human beings, and the one he could never get a handle on was incels.  They speak in memes and catchphrases so much that – in addition to repeating each other endlessly – it was impossible to detect a core personality or reasoning.  They dehumanized themselves before we even had a chance to do the same.

Bots, boring people, they’re indistinguishable from each other, and I don’t think that really matters.  We have to moderate both categories in much the same ways.  This is our lives now, in the cyberpunk dystopia.
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Another Bad Creation

Look upon my works ye donors and despair, for reaching the stretch goal on this fundraiser was rather like losing a bet…


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EDIT to add:  The lyrics so you can sing along, or see where I fucked up, or see where I used the word you paid for:

I’m not even trans so ~ Don’t genocide me bro
Ever since it was the ’80s ~ I wanted to be one of those rap ladies
Roxanne Shante, The Lady of Rage ~ Or Igloo Australia up on my white page
I need an umbilical Hernia sewed up ~ Time to get lyrical, My people showed up
I offered to rhyme one Word per donation ~ But some don’t care for My rap oration
Cutty Snark and Monkat Offered well wishes ~ Which implies my rap Can sleep with the fishes
Meanwhile Trixie Gave in her quiet way ~ And left not a single word For me to rhymesay
At least other donors gave Words to make use of ~ So now I commence against English abusove
I’m not even trans so ~ Don’t genocide me bro
Ever since it was the ’80s ~ I wanted to be one of those rap ladies
Rhyming like this re-Quires some strategy ~ You can play it safe and Avoid a tragedy
But then my bro asked for Salpingooophrectomy ~ That son of a bltch thinks That shlt will get to me
Someone asked me To make a rhyme for orange ~ This they tasked me To make it oh so cringe
Shlt could make my Brains tapioca ~ Ricky my Martins ’til This vida goes loca
I rap so wack I Say whoopsadaisy ~ So I’ll just slack then Be ghost like Swayze
Peace

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Cat-egory Errors Explained?

You may recall I have occasionally treated my boyfriend like a cat, in moments of unconscious error.  Today I almost put cat food on my own plate.  Perhaps, rather than seeing my boyfriend as a simple animal, I see all humans as socially interchangeable with beasts – myself included.

OK, that doesn’t explain why, but at least it looks less like I’m demoting my lovin’ man to domestic creachur status.

Corvide continues.  Paxlovid NyQuil and DayQuil are surely helping.  Science suggests the vaxxing helped, and as bad as it’s been I have to imagine I’d be dead as fried chicken if not for that.  Still, no alternate universe view of me being foolish enough to antivax for comparison, so I admit room for error.

I spilled pop on my computer so this was made on a phone, slowly and painfully.  I won’t post much til I get that resolved.  Also not answering comments much, but thanks for the support, really.

See y’all later!
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The Covid has Landed

Diarrhea starting last Thursday, sore throat Sunday, cough starting today at around five AM.  My workplace has been making us come in one day a week and I forgot my N95 at home for that one lousy day last week.  I held my hand over my mouth until I could double-mask with the freebies they have on the bus, switched to an N95 at work.  The complimentary ones are a defective batch which some geniuses stapled so the straps have to go around your entire head instead of the ear.  I had to modify the straps with scissors to make it fit.

Or maybe I got it from the person my boyfriend’s mom works with, who came in to work with a cough last week.  Who can say?  All I know is this – I haven’t coughed in years now, and since I started coughing again, that shit is mightily unpleasant.  I will never ever be without an N95 in public again.  I also have to reschedule my surgery and other procedures, but the donations will still help – I’ll have to take off the same amount of time whenever I get these things done.  Thanks to those who contributed.
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Covid Inbound

EDIT: THE FUNDRAISER IS OVER.
Stretch goal reached!
Look for my rap video, most likely before the end of the month.
O___O

 

Somebody in my household just blew hot for the Creepin Crud.  The Corvide.  The 2019 Gift That Keeps on Giving.

There are three of us.  One is fortyish and too disabled to have a day job, one is 65 and  works in an office five days a week, and there’s me in the middle at forty-six, working in a mostly empty office one day a week and telecommuting another three.  Our resident senior citizen, unfortunately, had the largest exposure, works with covidiots plague rats (forgot my policy), and brought that stuff right home to us, breathing in our grits relentlessly until the hot test less than a half hour ago.

So we’re pretty much gonna get it, and I’m probably going to have to reschedule the procedures I have scheduled for the 25th and 27th of this month.  Vexatious.  Tempted to be pretty fucken mad at our senior citizen because she is a lot less conscious about keeping her mask on than we are, but she can’t help being a dingus, and she does mask more than most people in the USA right now.

I’m hella PO’d tho.  As ever, motherfuck the United SnaKKKes for treating the pandemic as a chance to practice capitalist medicine on the rest of the (more) civilized world, squatting over the medicines like dragons on gold, guaranteeing this will go on forever and ever.  I never stopped masking.  I surely never will.  But will that keep me from getting covid?

Fucking of course not.  Still worth it to lower viral load and minimize long-term symptoms, but yet another reminder you can do everything in the world to take care of yourself and your people and still get taken the fuck out by the scumbaggery of others.
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WLW Rep and the Triple Six Mafia

I don’t read current science fiction & fantasy / SFF books, didn’t read much of ’em back in my day either.  But I am around some amateur authors inspired by and working in that genre, and sometimes for yuks I watch video essays about stuff I’m not actually interested in.  So I found out about these books by Piper CJ pitched with bi representation, that – aside from their other issues –  are just utterly failing to make the lady love happen.  Those links go to long video essays so skip ’em if you don’t have the time.  The point is that very hetero’d-out scenarios get the word count and lady love is some abstract distant thing that is there in theme but almost never on the page.

And with the young authors I know that try to make women-loving-women / WLW content in their own stories, be it bi or les, they often seem reticent or shy or perhaps just asexual about it.  That’s valid, but bi women and lesbians should get to have stories where the ladies are allowed to kiss more than once per five hundred pages, if that’s something they’re into.

Most of this music video by Triple Six Mafia is just bros posing in the cloughb, but there are a few bits with ladies touching each other affectionately.  Unlike much lesbian porn made for men, they don’t look at the camera in the middle of their scenes, to tell you this is for the benefit of men.  They’re just, hey, let’s look at each other with longing, let’s caress, and let’s do this weird drug out of baby bottles.  In so doing, this video has more affection between ladies than some entire books sold on the back of that premise.

This got me thinking about the gender-reversed scenario.  What if “fujoshis” (weird geek girls horny on the concept of gay dudes) went mainstream and made rap like this.  You’d see stocky women in polo shirts and khakis acting tough while gentle-eyed mans get all touchy-feely in slow motion.  I wonder if anybody has made that music video yet.
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EDIT TO ADD:  Reminder, still doing my fundraiser up through April 21st (stopping early if I reach stretch goal ahead of then).  Make at least a three dollar donation and I’ll rhyme a word of your choice in a rap.  While I appreciate the contributions of people who have given generously,-I’d like to see more and smaller donations.  So far I only have four words to rhyme.  If I don’t make the goal, this rap will remain a text poem.  If I reach $500 I will record myself rapping.  If I reach $600 I will do a short video.  Help cover the wages I’ll be losing from this medical situation, thanks! –goal met, fundraiser closed.

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Nightmare Blunt Rotation

This phrase is going around, and it can mean one of two things.  Is the Nightmare Blunt Rotation when your fellow tokers act creepy when high, or when fools be having them vacuum lungs?

Proposal One:
Sam Harris
Charlie Kirk
Ben Shapiro
Clarence Thomas
JK Rowling

I don’t know if Jordan Peterson should be on there because how tf would you know the difference between him on bad weed and the way he is all the time?

Proposal Two:
Kenny G
The G-slur-named robot from MST3K
Mega-Maid of Spaceballs fame
Kirby of video game fame
Raziel the Soul Reaver
Rahzel the respiratorily gifted rapper

…the discourse rages on.

 

the big NBR
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I’m still running a fundraiser.  For the most recent info on that, see the post before the post before the post before this one. –goal met, fundraiser closed

Sexy Talk, Appropriate Remove

I found myself wanting to do a post about these sexy people I like, which raised a question in my head about when it’s appropriate to express your horndoggery.  Obviously in the strip club you are supposed to say “yowza yowza” and “faster baby, yeah.”  In an elevator with a relative stranger in the night it’s best not to ask somebody out even in a low-key kinda way.  Workplace you could say “nice haircut, Steve” but that might be pushing it.  Still, there are times and places where it is correct and appropriate to say “lookin good, baybeh” that don’t involve sex work; I know there are.  The factors are, I think, how sexy is the talk, and how removed is everyone involved from the consequences of said talk.

So we can all talk about a movie where a person was styled to be attractive for the audience’s enjoyment and say, “Marilyn sure was hot stuff in The Seven Year Itch.  Brad got the meat on him for Troy, hoo boy.”  The actor knows what they were in the movie for, and are unlikely to ever catch one of our conversations of that nature in progress.  And what is it we’re saying?  If some horndoggos are talking about specific sex acts they wanna do on Actor X, then Actor X walks into the room, they’d probably pretend they were talking about somebody else or switch from “bend him over a fire hydrant” to “respectful admiration for the beauty of his form,” right?

I remember an incident before Louie CK was cancelled for exposing himself to ladies, where he was on some shitty show with a conservative lady, and said something like “I’m going to masturbate thinking about you tonight and there’s nothing you can do to stop me.”  I found it repellent and lost whatever half-assed interest I may have once possessed re: his comic stylings, in that moment.  Also stopped watching random clips of comedians on yewchoob.  I’m sure I don’t have much right to cast stones; in the course of my life I’ve surely had moments of bad behavior.  But still.  Instructive to see that shit from the outside.

So here’s the level of remove I’m working with.  The sexy people I was inclined to talk about are actors in a training video at my undisclosed workplace.  They aren’t really actors.  They’re people with higher salaries in the organization, department sub-heads or whatever.  They are very very very unlikely to ever catch the faintest trace of this blog post in what remains of their lives.  I have not given the url of my blog to any of my coworkers, or let them know my blogonym, and I don’t even work in the same state as these people.  I can’t remember their names and wouldn’t disclose them here if I did.  I am not going to become so famous some weirdo goes digging for receipts.  Can I talk about, hey yowza, wouldn’t mind doin somethin somethin to them?  Or would that still be inappropriate?

Then there’s the audience of this blog.  Someone who reads this might be a person who has appeared in the training materials for their corporation or agency, and then feels like, even if the people in question are not them, it makes them uncomfortable that somebody out there might see their videos and be all “hubba hubba hubba.”

But still.  Hubba hubba hubba.  People in suits speaking in upbeat but stilted tones, humanity coming through cracks in their styling.  Potent essence of desire to touch.  How offended would you be?  The very fact I was compelled to make this post asking suggests I know the answer is “don’t do it,” and I’m just fishing for a co-sign to my creepery.  Hm…
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I’m still running a fundraiser.  For the most recent info on that, see the post before the post before this one. –goal met fundraiser closed.