The Nature of Trump’s Continued Popularity

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Ok, here’s what’s going on with Trump and that core 38% of the electorate who continue support him, no matter what. It’s no so much Trump the person as it is Trump the “idea.” Trump’s base of support comes from conservative white Christians who feel put upon by the “excesses” of the center-Left.

They don’t consider themselves racists or bigots, but relative the “woke” center-Left, they feel like they’re being portrayed that way. As such, they are angry over being put upon by the rise of a browner America and women with economic agency.

As such, they want the “good old days” of white Christians being “on top” to return. Since they can’t get that, they cling to a fighter like Trump, even though he is demonstrably bonkers, racist and stupid.

So, at this point, it really doesn’t matter what Trump does. He’s still 60,000 voters in 5 swing states away from being POTUS again. We’ve kind of given up. On a macro basis the American Republic is on its last legs. Or we have a civil war /revolution of some sort starting in late 2024, early 2025 and after bombing or ourselves into oblivion the “good guys” win and we gradually return to hyperpower status, though in the context of a New World Order after a Third World War.

I can’t predict the future, but that definitely seems like one option.

Or, put another way, the rise of someone as fucking stupid as Trump definitely indicates that America is at a crossroads. Either we establish a Third American Republic, or, that’s it. That’s all she wrote — we turn into a Russian-style illiberal democracy probably with some form of AI being involved for good measure.

Which direction will we take?

I honestly don’t know.

But back to Trump.

All the liberals who continue to be aghast at Trump’s popularity are really missing the point.They are very, very out of touch. A lot of white Christians — a few of whom I’m related to — mean well, but just can’t grapple with the rapid social changes of the “woke” cultural left.

So, they fell pushed into the arms of fascists. There are no easy answers to this particular situation. While we may still punt our problems down the road, in general, we’re very, very fucked.

Good luck.

No, ChatGPT, *I* Am Still The Writer

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I see ChatGPT as a great — wonderful even — development tool when it comes to writing this novel. I’ve gotten pretty good at using it to speed up the process of writing scene summaries.

I use scene summaries to give myself something of an agenda before I sit down to write out a scene. With ChatGPT, what could have taken hours…now can be done in pretty much a few minutes.

The problem is, of course, that people are very fucking lazy and hackined and would rather just lulz the entire writing process to the point that they don’t actually have to write anything at all. This is not only very, very lazy, it kind of misses the point of writing to begin with — writers tend to be pretty fucked up and need an outlet for all their bent up neurosis.

But “normal” people — IE, Hollywood suits — who want to cut out all the expensive, weird people who produce fiction will see LLMs — and eventually AI — as a way to pretty much end the very idea of writing as a profession. Writing will go the way of the horse and buggy.

Combine the natural tendency to load freaky weirdos up with drugs to make them “normal” and there is a good chance that the future will be bleak place for writers. Not only will we all be turned into drones living off of UBI, but we’ll have reached some sort of post-human future.

Ugh. Fuck that.

Anyway. ChatGPT is a great tool. But for me, at least, it’s just a tool.

Hollywood Suits May Just Cool Their Heels Until AI Makes Most of The Industry Moot

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Let me be clear — I’m always wrong.

But all this talk about how the WGA strike may last “until September” is rather silly. It seems to me that Hollywood suits have the high ground and they could very well just cool their heels until AI advances to the point that the WGA becomes…moot.

The issue is that if LLMs were being used just to help development, then it would be just like using a search engine to help develop a novel, movie or TV show. But, surprise, because people are lazy and stupid, within 18 months it could be that writers, actors and directors may become very, very moot because AI will have advanced to the point that that is a real possibility.

If I had any control over such things, I would not ban LLM so much as demand specific broad carveouts for humans. There should be specific Hollywood jobs that HAVE to have a human do them — no AI.

But it definitely seems as though that won’t be the case. The momentum is there for Hollywood to be “Moneyballed” to the point that a huge swath of the Hollywood industry will be mooted.

What the suits want is there to be a lot of Suits, a few programmers and then some very, very, very poorly paid writers who just prompt movies — until that becomes moot, too, with technological advancement.

Anyway, the point is — unless something changes, all of this going to happen so fast that the system can’t catch up and Hollywood will collapse into itself into some sort of AI singularity.

So it could be not until September of this year, but September of NEXT YEAR before the Writers’ strike is over. And when it’s over the WGA may be rather mooted.

Never Fear, DGA, AI Will Make You Moot, TOO

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

So, as I understand it, the Directors’ Guild of America membership is on the cusp of approving a new three year contract with the studios. They pretty much licked that particular boot without saying a word.

Soon enough there won’t be anyone left in Hollywood but suits, programmers and a few “prompt engineers” who are little more than interns. And that last category won’t last very long when technology to generate entire movies without any prompt at all comes along.

We’re probably going to have to go through a civil war / revolution starting in late 2024, early 2025 before we get around to that, of course.

What the three major creative unions need to demand is hard and fast carveouts for what a human can do that an AI can’t do. Or something like that. If they don’t do that, Hollywood as we’ve known it for 100 years won’t exist anymore. It will be a regular bonfire of the vanities.

In fact, I think it’s possible that Hollywood will be the first victim of the Petite Singularity that seems to be careening towards us at an alarming rate. It could be that it won’t be high paying, blue collar trucker jobs that will go — poof! — it will be deep blue writing jobs in Hollywood.

It’s all happening so fast that the system just isn’t prepared to handle the abrupt change. There just isn’t going to be any need for directors, or actors or writers. It will all be done by AI of one type or another.

Good luck, my fellow creatives.

Building The Perfect Beast: ChatGPT is a Dangerous (and Dumb) Threat To Hollywood

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I’ve spent much of the day today using ChatGPT as an impromptu manuscript consultant as I gamed out scene summaries and, in general, it was a struggle. A fun, interesting struggle,but a struggle nonetheless.

But key takeaway is how dangerous LLMs are to the future of traditional Hollywood. It may not be ChatGPT. It may not be Bard. But at some point in the near, near future, the very idea of human-produced recorded entertainment may seem rather, well…quaint.

And, remember, for all the talk of how ChatGPT can “hallucinate” when you ask it a question, what is fiction, but a usually some neurotic human “hallucinating” a truth that makes them feel better for having a weird childhood. Or losing their parents at a young age.

You name it — fiction could be described as a “truthful hallucination.”

In fact, if I were to design a LLM for Hollywood studios, that’s what I could name it — Hallucination.

In short, LLM — which aren’t even AI — are really good at bullshit. They aren’t at the moment, very good at writing without a lot of hand holding, but that will come soon enough. If you combine LLMs propensity for bullshit with just a bit more abstract thought and, well, there you go end of (the human told) story.

As I keep saying, it could be — after we have a civil war / revolution in starting late 2024, early 2025 — that we wake up one day and Netflix is more about being a database of body scans of Hollywood stars than it is any sort of movie studio. I just don’t see “mass media” as we currently conceive of it lasting much longer.

By 2030, Hollywood could be a quaint memory, replaced by Broadway and local community theatre which is where everyone goes to if they want to see any sort of human-generated story. Otherwise, they just plop down on their couch and vedge out to a very unique, very personal story that was specifically created by a scan of their face by a device on their TV or phone.

That’s the future, folks.

Talk about Burn, Hollywood, Burn.

At a minimum, LLMs will be a very powerful tool in developing of fiction, ranging from novels,and TV to movies. It will be a lot like how we take for granted that a writer might use a search engine to help game out a fictional story.

The danger is, of course, that because of greed and people being dumb and hackied, that soon enough Hollywood will be three types of people: Suits, a few programmers and a shit ton of interns making minimum wage. Any actors that exist will first make their name on Broadway, become popular enough to get a body scan then live passively off the income of that scan.

Programmers will replace movie directors — do you hear that DGA? You, too, will become moot soon enough if you don’t demand human carveouts.

In a sense, I think it’s too late.

Now that people understand the power of LLM and they understand that we may be zooming towards Artificial General Intelligence, welp, that’s all folks, for human Hollywood.

Unlocking the Power of Creativity: ChatGPT’s Role in Fiction Development

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Holy shit.

I’ve never been good at all the done-but-never-used development bullshit that you’re supposed to do when writing a novel. But now, with ChatGPT, I find myself spending way too much time asking ChatGPT the most off the wall questions about the universe I’ve come up with in an effort to spark some inspiration.

And, it’s really good — to a degree — with fleshing out character studies of characters

Little Green Men, Or: MAGA Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I don’t know if I should laugh or cry at how MAGA (and the far Left RFK, Jr) are using the news of credible evidence of UFOs to tout their bonkers conspiracy theories. It’s very, very fucking annoying.

Has no one learned the idea that correlation is not causation?

Just because things are similar, or seem to be acting in conjunction with each other, doesn’t mean the fuckinig are!

But this crazy, bonkers rhetoric on the part of professional idiots has gotten me thinking — what if Hard First Contact came? What would be the political reaction?

It seems to me that after the shock wore off, the center-Left would be interested in finding out more about the ETs, while the center-Right would grow hysterical and probably eventually want to either blow them up or convert them to some sort of weird interstellar Christianity.

I wish I was kidding.

But America is sooooo fucking divided and growing more so every day that there simply is no way that anything — ANYTHING — will force us to get our act together.

That’s why late 2024, early 2025 COULD be a rather monumental moment in time. I’m always — always — wrong, so, lulz, we may just muddle through things like we always do…..but I am worried.

It seems like either a full-blown descent into fascist autocracy is going ot happen as part of the 2024 – 2025 timeframe, or we have a civil war (Reds)/ revolution (Blues.).

At the moment, I think we’re probably just going to slide peacefully into autocracy and that will be that. If we’re lucky. And it will probably all be so subtle that we don’t even realize it.

I Swear To God, Developing This Novel Using ChatGPT is Going To Accidently (On Purpose?) Train Me To Be a Fucking ‘Prompt Engineer’

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I’m not-so-slowly getting pretty good at pinning down ChatGPT so it gives me a very specific answer to my novel development needs. I don’t give a shit if it can write or not, I have no friends and one likes me so I turn to ChatGPT to be something akin to a manuscript consultant.

Note to literary types — if you guys weren’t such snobs to drunk weirdos with a dream like me, maybe we wouldn’t turn ourselves into prompt engineers and make your job moot.

But, here I am. Money please.

The thing about being a ChatGPT wrangler is you have to be good arguing with someone who is someone who is dumb in a smart way.Which, it turns out, is much like talking to some of my relatives (just kidding!). So I’m used to prying information out of people who know a lot, but can be a struggle to actually get the information out of them.

I’m not perfect and my area of specialty is very specific, but I’m definitely getting the hang of how to have a natural language conversation with a LLM. I think whenever our “Her” future arrives that I may get my AGI to have something of a crush on ME (rather than vise versa.)

Anyway. No one cares. And most of the time if they care, they get mad about my quirkier elements and want to cancel me. Ugh.

Has Adam Conover Jumped The Shark Because of His Take On ChatGPT?

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Now, let me be clear — if push comes to shove, I have Adam Conover’s back. I find him funny and interesting and he has a great way of debunking things we all assume to be true.

But.

When it comes to AI — or specifically Large Language Models — he comes across as full of shit. I say this because he acts like LLM are being pitched to movie studios like they’re the infamous “piviot to video” that all but destroyed the online news industry.

The issue for me is — he doesn’t know what he’s talking about when it comes to the end-user experience. I’ve started to use ChatGPT to develop the novel I’m working on and it’s clear to me that huge swaths of the knowledge economy are about to be vaporised.

Maybe not with ChatGPT 3.5, but definitely by the time, say, ChatGPT 5 or 6 rolls around. What I find interesting about ChatGPT 3.5 is it’s willing to give me advice about how to write a novel. Now, I am using that advice as a stepping off point for the novel, but because the mass of men are very stupid and very lazy, it definitely seems as though there will come a time when most writing is done not by humans, but by AI.

And that doesn’t even address the issue of how ChatGPT is something of a “blackbox’ — we don’t know HOW IT WORKS.

AND, what’s more, we haven’t even gotten to the really dangerous shit, which is Artificial General Intelligence. That definitely seems to be on its way.

If anything, Conover should set aside the overwrought humor about how movie execs are being sold a bill of goods and start to think seriously about how the WGA can demand specific, concrete carveouts for human writers going forward.

Why Now?

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

It’s very possible that we’ve just about reached a similar situation as what happened in the lead up to Columbus “discovering” the New World –everyone will know something is true, just not the details. In 1492, everyone pretty much knew not only that the world was round, but it’s size. In fact, the big mistake that Columbus made was thinking that the world was more of a pair that a sphere.

The same thing is going on with extraterrestrials.

It’s growing more and more acceptable that believe that We’re Not Alone. In fact, it makes you wonder if maybe The Powers That Be have decided to something akin to a “soft launch” of First Contact for some reason. By why? Why would do they pick now to do such a historic thing?

They say how you approach space aliens says a lot about what you think about God and, as such, I guess you’re going to be able to discern something about me with the following.

There are A LOT of different options whenever you talk about UFOS, but there is a key issue that a lot of people ignore — it’s not exactly like humanity is being quiet. We’re spending out an endless deluge of radio waves that any sort of ET civilization has had time to study. And if it’s true that they’ve actually visited earth to the point that the Airforce has probes in its possession, there’s every reason to believe that ETs aren’t the type of send mysterious Monoliths to us.

They know EVERYTHING about us and it’s very possible that there MIGHT be some sort of backchannels that exist between the governments of the world (or at least the USA) and any aliens and MAYBE because of things like AI the aliens have sort of forced the hand of the US government — hard First Contact is on its way, time to prep the populace.

Or not.

I have no idea.

But all these developments on the UFO front are very…curious.

I still think that First Contact will happen like “a theft in the night” and, lulz, it may never happen — or at least not in my lifetime.

But everything that is going on at the moment is…something to think about.