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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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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Fundraiser Ideas?

I am gonna have to take about a week off work for surgery soonish, without pay.  Since I live pretty close to the wire, it would be a lot more comfortable if I could raise about $500 somehow.  What would work for this purpose?  I’d rather not have to do additional outside work, like say, $500 worth of art commissions.  Maybe something arty, I dunno.  What would make you shower me with fliff like a stripper?
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Who Are We Occupying This Week?

Russia invaded Ukraine, which blows.  Murderous dickbags gonna murder.  Anyway, I’m supposed to stand in judgment of that, but I’m in a glass house.  Gotta check out the periphery before I throw Slava Ukrainis.  Who is the US military occupying this week?  Who are we raining mutilation and ruin upon?  How about our buddies, like the Saudis?  Israel?  I’ve lost track again.
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Baby Seal Attack

My old roommate Jed was more amused by the cruelty of nature than I could ever be, and coming from a rural place, was fond of anecdotes about city slickers being mangled because they were too affectionate or trusting with wild carnivores.  Once he told the rest of us a story about watching a video where somebody filming a baby seal got their face bitten nasty.

Around the same epoch of my life, I became acquainted with the Wu-Tang Clan’s first album.  In the song “Shame,” Raekwon the Chef says, “When you see me on the reel, formin’ like Voltron, remember I get deep like a navy SEAL.”  Perhaps because of Jed’s rude little tale, I really thought that guy was saying, “Remember I got teeth like a baby seal.”

It makes sense.  Like, a baby seal is cute, but harbors deadly weapons.  Beware, despite Raekwon’s good looks, he can hurt you.  But no, he was not likening himself to a juvenile pinniped.  All these years later, my dreams remain crushed.

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Those Go-Go’s

The video for “Head Over Heels” is clearly trying to be a romp, a fun showcase for fun girls’ fun personalities.  Belinda is spunky and chipper, Jane is sensitive and romantic, and the other ones…  What is it saying about them?  Red-haired bassist Kathy is just sorta there.  Mullety keyboardist Charlotte is a nervous dorkwad who is afraid you’ll shove her in a locker if she stops rocking.

And what is the video saying about drummer Gina, with her plaid shirt, secretive glances at Belinda, knowing smiles with Jane, and uncanny resemblance to future celeb Kate McKinnon?  She’s the lesbian.  Isn’t that a hoot?  Actually, I do think that’s fun.  I don’t object.  I’m just finding it noteworthy.  This is me noting it.

With Ecstatic Music On

That’s a Björk reference in the title to this post.  And she had an album called Post, so you know, approps.  I’m getting little episodes of mania, not necessarily rising to the level of needing treatment, but they give me glimpses of a worse life.  Insights.  I think this is a good example of the way mania messes with artistic types:  I have a novel to be writing.  So far it’s gone well, I was feeling the character and the action was compelling.  But as I have time to write on it this morning, I just want to listen to wild music, daydream about being a rock star.  Or at least doing cronchy electro-goth covers of The Go-gos, Danzig, Van Halen, and Madonna, doing videos for yewchoob where I act like a freak.  That’s what I’ll do with my life, yeah…  Fucken useless.
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Body High vs. Head High

I sometimes write about characters involved with drugs, but don’t know much from firsthand experience.  This is something I just randomly remembered from when I was in high school.  Sometimes people would talk about a body high or head high, more often the body high.  I feel like it was in reference to LSD.  That was in the ’90s.  Do any of you remember this, and can you explain to me what it means?

I suppose I could dig up the facebook for my old home boy Try-Anything-Once Todd and ask him, but I might need a facebook account for that, and no thanks.
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Who Are You? (Owl Impression)

Politics, amirite?  Hooboy.  This will be the last article in my attempt to top all categories of FtB articles, unless some sneaky fucker edges me out of one of the categories I already topped.  Get it, I’m a top.  I kid, you know I switch.  OK I’m probably a pillow princess but you know I got a bad back.  LL Cool J would rap about banging my girlfriend if I had one.  Remember that line?

OK, so politics, I know I’ve been thinking something about this lately, what was it?  Hm…  Oh yeah.  Last night while I was non-sleeping, I was trying to explain myself to the mute audience in my head, and felt the need to preface my arguments with who I am, politically.  I haven’t felt the need to put that into words much, so here it is.

I’m a personal anarchist.  I think society should have laws but that all people should be willing to break them, as needed, to suit our personal ethos.  Be willing to do the time for your crimes, but be willing to do the crimes you feel are most necessary.

I’m a socialist, maybe even a communist, at the end of the day.  No allegiance to the ghost of the USSR, no worries in that Charly.  I just know that in a world where every inch is owned by either the government or billionaires, there is no room for any person to truly meet all their own needs.

In the USA we live by that myth.  All our laws are constructed around an idea grown more absurd every day, that every person can work, and that the fruit of that labor can be sufficient to care for us through our whole lives.  If we, the poor, can’t have one fucking thing that isn’t fragile as hell, can’t have any social safety net to pick us up when getting worked at this rate inevitably breaks us, then the government needs to step up with cradle-to-grave social services, given generously and without stipulation.  And as far as the commune goes, that isn’t just breaking your back with a hoe.  I think all Hollywood movie-making and corporate art should ultimately be destroyed and replaced with artists working communally to make art for its own sake, profit as incidental rather than the sole motivating factor to make or do anything.  And tech and science and education and child-rearing.  There are many things that can be done communally.

The rich bore me as much as they oppress me.  Their idea of the good life, of what is worthwhile at all, it’s a cosmically bad joke.  I’d be OK with them existing, with their cheek implants and lambos, if they could just leave it at that and not suck us dry at every opportunity.  They can’t be trusted with what they have.  Class war now, babes.

I keed, I keed.  Or do I?  I do.  Unless..?  Ahaha, I had you going.  Or maybe…
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EDIT – I DID IT!!!! I’M NUMBER ONE!!!!  for as long as it lasts.