Month: December 2022

The Looming Chatbot ‘Bias’ War Of 2023 & Beyond

by Shet Garner
@sheltgarner

The biggest extremital problem that Western Civilization has at the moment is extreme partisanship. Other problems come and go, but the issue of absolute, extreme partisanship is something that is entrenched to the point that it may bring the whole system down eventually.

As such, the issue of chatbot (or eventually AGI) bias is going to loom large as soon as 2023 because MAGA Nazis are just the type of people who will scream bloody murder because the don’t get their preconceived beliefs validate by the output of the AI.

You see this happening already on Twitter. I’ve seen tweet after tweet from MAGA Nazis trying to corner ChatGPT into reveling it’s innate bias so they can get mad that their crackpot views aren’t validated by what they perceive as something that should only be shooting out “objective” truth.

Just take the favorite hobby horse of the far right, the question, “What is a woman?” As I’ve written before, given the absolute partisanship that we’re experiencing at the moment there is no answer — even a nuanced one — to that question that will satisfy both sides of the partisan divide. If the MAGA Nazis don’t get a very strict definition of “what is a woman” then they will run around like a chicken with its head cut off because of how the “woke cancel culture mob” has been hard wired into AI.

Meanwhile, Leftists as always shooting themselves in the foot as usual, also demand a very broad definition of “what is a woman” for political reasons. While most of the center-Left will probably be far more easily plicated by a reasonable, equitable answer to that question, there is a very loud minority on the Left who would want the answer of “what is a woman” to be as broad and complicated as possible.

So, the battle over “bias” will come down to a collection of easy-to-understand flashpoints that we’re all going to deal with in 2023 and beyond. It’s going to be complicated, painful and hateful.

Beware The Earnest, Well-Meaning MAGA Nazi

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

The worst MAGA Nazi cocksucker is the one who won’t take your anger at how they’re racist mygonists seriously. They are ostensibly kind, gentle and well-meaning in an almost condensing way. No matter how angry you get that you believe they’re fucking Nazis, they give you some shuck-and-jive bullshit about “can’t we all just get along?”

I’m sure that there were similar types of Nazis in Germany back in the day. They were a variation of the “Good German” trope. They were able to detach themselves from the innate hate of Nazism in the name of just “restoring” order to a complicated, confusing world.

With that having said, I really, really want these well-meaning MAGA Nazis to fucking hate me. I want them to get angry with me because then, at least, they would be validating me rage about how MAGA Nazism wants to destroy the country. I have a few of these well-meaning, earnest MAGA Nazis in my personal life, but the public example of this is none other than fucking Catturd.

Catturd really wants to be just a regular old Joe who loves his family and country and just can’t understand why people wouldn’t vote for the fucking malignant ding-dong that is Donald Trump. FUCK THAT GUY. Just because you hide behind a gee-whiz demonor of niceness doesn’t remove the fact that you’re a fucking MAGA Nazi.

It’s all very frustrating.

I know that, in the end, despite all the gentle kindness bullshit that Catturd displays now that in the end, when the time comes he’ll be the first to condone me being sent to a camp for this or that reason. Ugh. Fuck MAGA Nazis and fuck Catturd.

Could A Chatbot Win An Oscar?

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

We are rushing towards a day when humanity may be faced with the issue of the innate monetary value of human created art as opposed to that generated by non-human actors. If most (bad) art pretty much just uses a formula, then that formula could be fed into a chatbot or eventually an AGI and….then what? If art generated by an chatbot or an AI equal to a bad human generated movie…does that require than we collectively give more monetary value to good art created by humans?

While the verdict is definitely still out on that question, my hunch is that the arts may be about to have a significant disruption. Within a few years (2029?) the vast majority of middling art, be it TV shows, novels or movies, could be generated simply by prompting a chatbot or AGI to created it. So, your average airport bookstore potboiler will be written by a chatbot or AGI, not a human. But your more literary works might (?) remain the exclusive domain of human creators.

As and aside — we definitely need a catchy names to distinguish between art created by AGIs and that created by humans. I suppose “artisanal” art might be something to used to delineate the two. But the “disruption” I fear to the arts is going to have a lot of consequences as it’s taking place — we’re just not going to know what’s going to happen at first. There will be no value, no narrative to the revolution and it will only be given one after the fact — just like all history.

It could be really scary to your typical starving (human) artist as all of this being shaken out. There will be a lot of talk about how it’s the end of human created art…and then we’re probably going to pull back from that particular abyss and some sort of middle ground will be established.

At least, I hope so.

Given how dumb and lazy humans are collectively, human generated art could endup something akin to vinyl records before you know it. It will exist, but just as a narrow sliver of what the average media consumer watches or reads. That sounds rather dystopian, I know, but usually we gravitate towards the lowest common denominator.

That’s why the Oscars usually nominate art house films that no one actually watches in the real world. In fact, the Oscars might even be used, one day, as a way to point out exclusively human-generated movies. That would definitely be one way for The Academy to live long and prosper.

On A Structural Basis, This Novel Is Shaping Up To Be Really Good

By Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

The transition from first to second draft on a structural basis is going really well. Now, the issue is going to be that of my native, innate writing. But as I’m fleshing out the outline for the second draft I’m feeling pretty good. I also have a much better sense of the characters now — they’re not just moods that change for expediency sake.

I have really changed some structural issues with the first draft that were pretty obvious and I just didn’t see them because I was so focused on just finishing something, anything, that could be called a “first draft.”

Interestingly, seeing Avatar — The Way of Water gave me a lot of inspiration about some elements of character development that I hadn’t really thought about. After sitting through that three hour, self-indulgent movie I came away with a slew of improvements for the novel on a number of levels. This happens to me whenever I consume media rather than produce it — but it’s very, very difficult for me to not be obsessed with producing content.

But I am still on track to wrap up the fleshed out outline for the second draft by no later than the end of the year (hopefully.) Then I can turn around and start writing the second draft, using the new, improve fleshed out outline as a guide that should really speed things up a great deal.

The ‘Purple’ Politics Of Blue People: James Cameron’s ‘Avatar — The Way Of Water’

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

My New Year’s Resolution / change as I turn 50 is that I’m going to stop walking out of movies so quickly. As such, I watched the entirety of Avatar — The Way Of Water even though I was very unhappy to be there for much of the time. Not that it was a bad movie, it’s just the moment I understood what was going on I found the whole thing very boring from my own personal storytelling metrics. And maybe it wasn’t even that it was “boring” per se, so much as there was no need for that movie to be as long as it was.

You could have easily made that movie 2 hours and it would have been a much, much better movie. There was just too much self-indulgent padding in it for my liking.

But that’s not what this post is about — it’s about the native politics of the movie. Is the movie “woke?” That is a very good question that is not as easy to answer as you might think. Cameron uses my favorite storytelling tool — subtext — to tell a pretty New Age-ie type story about the Gaia theory set on a different planet. And there’s a lot of “noble savage” floating around in the movie as well.

And, yet, there is also a lot of hoo-rah military porn in there Red State people. Just its presence is enough for jarheads who go see the movie with their girlfriends to get off on it — even if it’s presented in a negative light. I don’t think, however, that Reds would process it as “being bad.” They would just root for the “star people” to win the battle with the blue “noble savages.” In fact, if anything, the fact that “star people” get their comeuppance in the end is the thing that will make Reds the most upset about the movie and suspect that Cameron is being “woke.”

But I think some of some of it is Cameron isn’t “woke” so much as he has a pretty good sense of the expectations of modern audiences and, as such, he felt he couldn’t go totally in the direction of either Reds or Blues.

I liked the movie…I guess? I just thought it was way, way, way too long. I do find it interesting that Cameron found a way to placate both sides of the political debate — in a way.

Was Not Was: How Afraid Of Our New Chatbot Overlords Should We Be?

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

As I’ve said before, users of OpenAI ChatGPT imbue it with all their hopes and dreams because it’s so new that they don’t really have anything to compare it to. One thing I’m seeing on Twitter is a lot of people having a lot of existential angst about how expensive ChatGPT is going to be in the future. Or, more specifically, half the people want to pay for it for better service and half the people fear it will be too expensive for them to use.

But while I suppose it’s possible we may have to pay for ChatGPT at some point in the future, I also think that it’s just as possible that the whole thing will go mainstream a lot sooner than you might think. There are a lot of elements to all of this I don’t know — like how long OpenAI can keep the service free given how expensive each request is — but to do think, in general the move will be towards more free chatbot services, not fewer.

And as I’ve mentioned before, that “conundrum of plenty” is something we’re just not prepared for. We automatically assume — much like we did with the Web back in the day — that something as novel and useful as ChatGPT will always be the plaything of the elite and wealthy.

I suppose that’s possible, but historical and technological determinism would suggest the exact opposite will happen, especially in the context of ChatGPT 4.0 coming out at some point while we’re in the midsts of a global recess in 2023. My fear is chatbot technology will be just good enough a lot and I mean A LOT of people’s jobs will become moot in the eyes of our capitalistic overlords.

But maybe I’m being paranoid.

It’s possible that my fears about a severe future shock between now and around 2025 are unfounded and even though we’re probably going to have a recession in 2023, there won’t be the massive economic shakeout because of our new chatbot overlords that I’m afraid of.

The Transition From First To Second Draft Of This Novel Is Going Quite Well

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Unlike the last time I tried to transition from first to second draft, this time things haven’t — so far — come crashing down on me. The structure of the novel is strong and things are only being changed here and there when it’s very obvious they absolutely have to be.

I continue to eliminate and move around scenes left and right, but that’s just the nature of what I’m doing. Now that I’m looking over the entirety of the the novel, I am seeing different ways to tighten it up as well as to juice up the excitement and entertainment value.

One thing I just don’t have at the moment is any red herrings. In a novel such as the type I’m writing, you’re supposed to have a few false leads that go nowhere. As it stands, this version of the novel, while if nothing else intriguing, doesn’t really have any such head fakes. Things move along at nice little clip and you keep reading because you’re interested in the world and the characters and you want to see what happens next.

That, at least, is the goal.

Another known unknown is how long the second draft is going to be. At the moment, I just don’t know. I’ve pared back the number of scenes, and, yet, I have a feeling that in the second draft each individual scene is going to be longer. So, it could ultimately be something of a wash when it comes to word count and I’ll still find myself at about 120,000 words.

Which is 20,000 words too many.

But I think the story itself is strong enough that if the scenes grow longer I can solve the word count issue by editing them down to a more tidy number later on in the process.

Does Human Creativity Have Innate Value In The Age Of AGI?

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

One of the things I find myself pondering as people continue to play around with OpenAI ChatGPT to create this or that creative knit knack is the innate value of human creativity. Is it possible that, just like in the Blue Runner universe that “real” animals had more innate value than a synthetic animal, so, too, in the near future examples of “human generated art” will be given more weight, more value than that created by a non-human actor.

But that’s not assured.

Humans are, by nature, lazy and stupid and the capitalist imperative would be one of, lulz, if a non-human actor can think up and produce a movie that’s just good enough to be watchable, why employ humans ever again? But at the moment, I can’t game things out — it could go either way.

It is very easy to plot out a very dystopian future where the vast majority of profitable, marketable art, be it movies, TV or novels is produced by non-human actors and that’s that. “Artisanal” art will be of high quality but treated with indifference by the average media consumer. It’s kind of dark, yet I’m simply taking what we know of human nature and economics and gaming it out in to a future where chatbots and their eventual successors AGI can generate reasonably high quality art at the push of a button.

It could be that there will be a lot of future shock as we transition into our AGI future, but once things sort of settle out that “real” art, generated by humans will gradually, eventually begin to dominate the marketplace of art and all that will change is the context of its creation.

Or something. Who knows.

Every Writer’s Journey Is Different

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

As I keep saying, there is no revealed truth as to how to write anything, be it a novel or a screenplay. And, yet, that doesn’t stop people from bombarding me with this or that thing that they assume is absolutely the case for every writer, no matter what.

I saw a Tik-Tok recently where someone believed “every” novelist or screenwriter had scenes they skipped over because they “didn’t want to write them.” Well, jokes on you, I don’t have that problem — at least not to date — because I just get drunk and plow ahead.

I had some “spicy” scenes I really didn’t want to write, but instead of writing around them, I went straight through, even though I had to be wasted to do it. I’m working on the second draft now, so hopefully, I won’t have the same problem when I get to those scenes again.

At least, that’s the hope.

Nothing is for sure until it’s done, but I am having a lot of fun reworking the outline of this novel in the second draft. I’m hopeful that the second draft will be significantly better, more cohesive than the first draft.

Being An Aspiring Novelist Can Be Amusing (And Angst-ridden)

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

There seems to be a cottage industry of people who actively go out of their way to scare the shit out of people exactly like me — that is, people who are aspiring novelist — to make them think that if they don’t do this or that specific thing it is “impossible” for them to get a book contract. And these people usually say these things in such breathless, authoritative tones that you can’t help but at least, for a moment, wonder if they’re right. Take this, for instance:


This is just the type of thing I’m talking about. I have about 5,000 Twitter followers, but the average really good aspiring novelist can have almost no Twitter followers. So passages like that seen above — which apparently is promoting being a Kindle author — definitely seems real to your average insecure writer.

And, yet, even within the Twitter thread where I found that passage, someone said this was not true — you can get a book contract and have less than 25,000 Twitter followers. It’s a testament to how much grit you have to have when it comes to going the harder route of trying to get traditionally published that there is so much fucking bullshit that is designed to make you feel bad that you want you aspire to get traditionally published in the first place.

A lot of it is that people are trying to sell insecure would-be novelists this or that bullshit thing given that they’re already invested in trying to get a novel published in some way in the first place.

I have nothing against self-publishing and may grit my teeth and use it in the end, but I refuse to self-limit myself by assuming I can’t get published if I just have 5,000 and not 25,000 Twitter followers.