The worst consequence of AI might be mediocrity

The internet has been flooded recently with AI-related doom and gloom. AI is coming for your jobs, your art, and your writing. Nothing is real; the internet is dead space filled with bots. Our time as the top species is rapidly coming to an end and we will all soon be replaced with AI. 

But the more I research what is driving the news, the more underwhelmed I am. AI isn’t creating great art, it’s creating mediocrity. It’s not taking your job, but predatory companies would sure like to use it to take your job. It’s not creating new problems so much as augmenting existing ones and allowing bad-faith actors to massively increase their output of fake news, spam, and phishing attacks.

The internet buzz around Chatgpt really grew to a deafening roar when Chatgpt passed the board exam for law.* 

*big caveat here, someone passed a mock exam using answers from chatgpt. Chatgpt is a long way from being able to spontaneously take an exam and can not practice law nor can it be used to practice law. 

That said, it passed with a mediocre C+ average. And the first attempt to use Chatgpt in the wild to practice law ended, well, badly. Like really, really badly. This video breaks it down well, so I won’t go into detail. But the short version is that Chatgpt tends to make things up. 

Insert video

Just how amazing is this? 

Not very, unfortunately. Chatgpt is good at aggregating information from many sources, kind of like Wikipedia. In fact, I bet a student copying and pasting from Wikipedia could have passed most of the exams that Chatgpt has passed. 

Can Chatgpt now be used to practice law? 

No, absolutely not. The problems addressed in the video notwithstanding, every legal motion must be signed off by a human being with a law license, who then takes responsibility that the motion is in accordance with legitimate legal practice. 

The same can be said for medicine. Passing the boards using Chatgpt doesn’t grant you the right to practice medicine. Every medical decision still needs to be made by a human being. 

Is it useful? 

If the problem of Chatgpt making things up. (Experts call it hallucinating) then definitely. The information would still need to be read and interpreted by an expert but Chatgpt could:

Use a set of symptoms to suggest possible tests to run and diagnosis to make, greatly increases a doctor’s efficiency. 

Create the legal framework, with necessary citations for a lawyer to build a case around. 

Fans of Chatgpt like to point out that it could drastically decrease routine paperwork by writing drafts of legal contracts, reducing medical charting, etc. The problem with this is that we already have, and have had for a long time, tools for this. Lawyers use boilerplate contracts and then modify them to fit the needs of the client. They even use autofill forms to avoid having to add things like the names of the various parties into a form over and over. Medical charting is mostly done on the computer these days and is mostly click-through charting with drop-down menus of standard options. 

What about creative writing? 

Authors are terrified that Chatgpt will flood the market with AI-generated content that will drown out already beleaguered authors and reduce are already meager earnings to zero. There are two reasons why this probably won’t happen. 

The first has to do with how AI works in the first place, and why it only got a C+ on its legal exam. Chatgpt is a writing “aggregator” It collects thousands of examples of writing and then constructs a similar-sounding text, putting one word after another in a way that resembles natural text. There are a couple of shortcomings to this approach. 

AI has no idea what it is doing or why. It’s simply copying other texts. This is why it regularly “hallucinates” or makes up information. It’s stringing text together in a logical way, but not one that is based on any reality. So if it’s writing a legal document, it will give realistic-sounding citations, but it can’t understand the difference between real and fake citations. That’s why it’s untrustworthy.

But the second aspect of this is why I’m not afraid of AI-generated content. AI-generated text is almost by definition, average. That’s the whole point of aggregations, to learn what is average and apply it. 

I like to think my writing is above average. Maybe I’m fooling myself, but I am going to stick to that belief. And AI-generated content is never likely to be better than average. If anything it aspires to be more average. This tendency towards average-sounding text is likely to make the majority of AI-generated content boring and repetitive. 

AI as it exists now is not designed to create great, or even good writing. It’s designed to create realistic and believable but on the whole, average writing. 

The real danger of AI writing: unexamined bias

There are, in my opinion, two real dangers to AI writing, its tendency to make up things that aren’t true but sound plausible, and our own biases. Because AI aggregates the writing of millions of people from across the internet, it is also aggregating our biases. 

When AI “hallucinates” completely new information, that can present a danger if the information is taken at face value as fact. But typically people quickly recognize it as false information. But often the fabrications that AI makes aren’t so obvious and do in fact get taken as fact. 

Because we have a history of racism, sexism, and homophobia, AI tends to aggregate these biases and incorporate them into its output in ways that aren’t always directly obvious. And this presents a huge danger of those biases spreading and becoming increasingly accepted as facts. 

AI art and the dead internet

What about AI art? 

AI art faces many of the same problems that AI writing experiences. For example, AI art also hallucinates, coming up with unreal images frequently in response to prompts. But then again, in art, the question might be what is real and what is unreal. 

There is also evidence that AI art is getting worse in large part because of AI art. AI creates art the same way it creates text, by scraping the internet for large numbers of examples of art and then creating something that appears similar. But as more and more people create and share AI-generated art, a greater portion of the art being scraped is AI generated, and the problems with it get amplified. 

Is the internet dead? 

There is a wild new theory called the dead internet theory. What I love about this theory is that if it isn’t true, it likely will be soon enough. 

The theory goes like this. Humans create bots to interact with others on the internet. Already studies suggest that the majority of interactions we have on the internet are not with people but with bots. We go to a website and immediately get offered assistance, but these aren’t call center employees, as we might think but bots trained to act like call center employees. Dating sites often use bots to pretend to be women, to make men think there are more women on the site than there are. And of course, so many people create Twitter bots designed to drive engagement to posts from a certain account or on a certain topic. 

So along comes another person who creates a bot to scrape commercial sites for certain information by interacting with the call center bots. Others create fake Twitter accounts that act in a way to attract Twitter bots to boost their account. And now we have bots interacting with bots. 

This is the dead internet. There are few if any, actual people involved in it. We go to commercial sites and see products recommended by bots, not people. We go on social media and see trends that are driven by bots, rather than humans. Blogs are written by AI. Pictures are created by AI. Both are shared by automation. They receive likes and engagement, but much of it comes from bots, either bought by promoters or received because the content matches some criteria that other bot manufacturers value. 

And it’s all driven by algorithmic averages. 

Let’s imagine the AI-generated influencer of the future. 

A seedy entrepreneur wants to make money by creating an artificial “influencer” that will travel the world and sell content. So he goes to an AI art generator and starts to load in prompts like “beautiful woman.” And let’s be honest, it generates a white woman because racism. 

And because our seedy entrepreneur isn’t the only such entrepreneur out there, a fair amount of the “art” scraped to create this ideal “beautiful woman” is also AI-generated. So beauty standards become exaggerated. Thin becomes ridiculously thin. Big breasts become even bigger. The proportions are unrealistic for most women.

But something else happens at the same time, these AI-generated beauties become more average as well. Distinct forms of beauty are erased. Features that cause one to stand out don’t work in this new artificial world of beauty. 

Where does the entrepreneur send his new AI influencer? He scrapes that from top hitting keywords like “best tourist destination.” And so she only goes to the top tourist destinations and is only pictured (artificially of course, through more AI-generated images) at the best beaches, the most famous sites. 

And it’s accompanied by AI-generated text, stuffed with SEO keywords. 

Once he’s created his new influencer it is time to make her famous. To do that he creates a small bot army to follow and like her posts. He might also steal some bots from other entrepreneur’s bot armies, by figuring out what keywords, images, and other identifying traits they are using to program their bots. 

After a while, he gets some impressive numbers and uses these to get companies to pay him to put his AI influencer in their brands. She’s pictured wearing the latest fashion, visiting restaurants that pay top dollar for the mention. 

You might be thinking that surely companies will get wise to this and stop spending money on fake likes. But it’s just as likely that commercial sites like Amazon will see the massive “engagement” these brands have and move them up in their own algorithm, putting them on the landing page and artificially boosting sales. All of this with no evidence that any actual human being.

It’s bad enough that so many young women have problems with their self-image because they are constantly bombarded with unrealistic images of beautiful women online. What’s worse is that these beauty standards are increasingly “average” and despite hundreds of “likes” not one actual human being has looked at that picture and said, “Wow, I like that.” That is the dead internet at its’ worst.

What do you think? Do you trust what you see on the internet? Is it real? What should we do about it? Will AI be the end of humanity? Or maybe just the end of the internet? I would love to hear other ideas in the comments. 

Why does Slytherin Exist?

A rant

Disclaimer: 

I’m not a Harry Potter Fan. I was once, I read all nine books of the original series in both English and Portuguese. I saw some of the movies (I’m not sure where I stopped on the movies.) 

Two reasons I am not a fan:

The Rowling controversy

J.K. Rowling has made it perfectly clear that she has a big beef with the trans community. It has gone from being the occasional Twitter retweet of other people to openly supporting a brand of feminism that explicitly denies that trans woman are women and seek to exclude them. And then she has complained of being “cancelled” when her views are critiqued. 

At this point I won’t give any further money or support to her franchise. 

It’s not that great anyway

Some people might say that you have to separate the art from the artist. But for me to do that, we first have to take it seriously as literature. Which is the second problem I was starting to have with the Harry Potter series even before the controversy broke. 

It’s a fun juvenile aventure, but if you think about it deeper than that it doesn’t hold up as well. (Are people doing serious literary analysis of the Harry Potter books? I don’t know.) For me once you start thinking seriously about what is happening, why it is happening and how the characters react, the flaws start to show.

Not every book needs to be great literature. Action novels are fun to read but you could get seriously hurt if you tried half the stuff the hero does. Romance books often make great reading but terrible relationship advice. 

But, if you want me to set aside the author’s problematic views to preserve this work of art, it had better be worth preserving and the Potterverse, in my opinion, simply isn’t. 

But it’s become a huge cultural phenomenon and the memes are everywhere, which brings us to this blog,

If Slytherins are so obviously evil, why does Slytherin house still exist? 

The answers are so simple and obvious to me that I am forced, against my conscience, to write about the series again. 

Let’s start with the literary reason, because it will be a bit easier medicine to swallow. 

Harry is an unreliable narrator. 

Yes, he’s the hero of the series and mostly a good guy. But he’s also an extremely unreliable narrator. (This dichotomy of Harry being portrayed as unambiguously good and being so unreliable as a narrator is one of the reasons that the series doesn’t hold up well to actually literary analysis.) 

So let’s dive into that. 

How do we know that Slytherin is evil? Because Ron said so. Harry doesn’t know anything about the wizarding world at the outset of the books. Ron tells him that there never was a bad wizard that wasn’t also a Slytherin. And Harry accepts that as gospel truth. Ron comes from a family of Gryffindors and they have a strong rivalry with Slytherin.

Ron’s predictions about Slytherin appear to be born out by the fact that Harry’s worst bullies come from Slytherin, and that two definitely bad wizards of the series, Voldemort and Slytherin himself came from that house. 

But what would a Slytherin say? Would they say, “yeah we’re pretty evil, I guess.” Or would they have another explanation? After all there are plenty of examples of wizards from other houses that did some pretty bad things too. And plenty of bad things that seem true for the whole of the wizarding world. 

Take the enslavement of the elves, for example. When Hermione rightfully objects to the fact that wizards in modern day Britain still have slaves, everyone acts like she’s the one that’s daft. “But it’s in their nature to serve…” reeks, and I mean reeks, of the kind of racist sentiment that slavers used during the African Slave trade. Even Dumbledore, the wise old sage of the series, seems comfortable working for an institution that relies on slave labor. 

The enslavement of the house elves is only the tip of the wizarding worlds problems. There’s Azkaban, the wizard prison/concentration camp which definitely violates international human rights treaties. There’s the obvious corruption in the Ministry of Magic. 

So just maybe, the wizarding world isn’t quite so black and white. Maybe it’s all a bit dodgy. If Harry as the main character or Joanne as the writer seemed to have any awareness of this moral ambiguity, I might be more inclined to trust their opinion on Slytherin. 

But if the entire world is morally ambiguous, it makes more sense that the Slytherin bad and Gryffindor good narrative is more of a house rivalry than an accurate reflection of where each house stands on moral issues. 

So what would a Slytherin say? We can glimpse what they would say in what the sorting hat tells Harry in book one. “You would do great things in Slytherin, terrible things, yes, but great.” A Slytherin would likely say be focussed on the “great things” they are capable of rather than whether those things are good or bad. They might even argue that if the elves want to serve, then if we don’t enslave them, someone else will. 

So Slytherin remains because while its the “bad guys” of these novels, it’s ethics aren’t so far off what we see in the wizarding world in general. The “adult”wizards are pretty comfortable with Slytherin existing, despite opposing a few of the more extreme things their wizards do. 

This makes a great seque into the second reason why Slytherin still exists, the real world answer that might bother some of you. And it should. 

Why does evil exist in this world? 

Most liberals will tell you that Mark Zuckerberg is a terrible person and that Facebook has been implicated in many of the social and political problems of our time. And yet Facebook is still one of the largest social media platforms. Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter has been blasted, mostly on Twitter itself. Jeff Bezo is one of America’s most hated villains while his company Amazon still makes record profits. 

Imagine if Bezo enslaved house elves. We would all hate him for it. But your package could be magically delivered instantly. How many people would find a way to ignore the obvious ethical problems and use that service? 

We already do this everyday with our electronics, the majority of which are made in China with many, many proven human rights abuse, or in third world countries were the labor laws are so lax that the workers might as well be slaves. Did you know that despite being illegal, there are an estimated fifty million slaves today? Many of the products we buy every day rely on slave labor. Why is this allowed to exist? 

Apologist will say that men like Jeff Bezo play the game according to the rules that exist, not the rules that we wish existed. If it makes business sense, they will do it. If they don’t, someone else will. Exploiting the rules proves that these men have what it takes to succeed. We shouldn’t fault them for that. (Wizard apologist will likely say the same thing about Slytherin.) 

Apologist on the left will say that being forced to live in a society that accepts morally wrong things doesn’t mean that you personally are to blame for them. We live in a capitalist society and we all have to learn to make a living within it. 

I need to work online, so I need a good computer. Major tech companies might be linked to human rights abuses, but I don’t have the option of boycotting them as I need the tech they provide. 

I don’t like Amazon’s near monopoly on the book market, but I can find the book I need on the Amazon store, buy it for a decent price and download it instantly onto my Kindle. I can’t do that at the local bookstore and since Amazon already has the books, why shouldn’t I? 

And by the same token, the house elves are already enslaved at Hogwarts, already slaving away in the kitchen. Why shouldn’t the Wealsey brothers get extra food from them? I mean what else are they going to do? Learn to cook? 

So instead of asking why Slytherin House exists in a fantasy series, maybe we should look around the real world and wonder why so many obviously and apparently evil institutions are allowed to continue to exist. That might be a better use of our time. 

There is no easy answer to this, our world is far more morally ambiguous than even the Potterverse. But unlike Harry or J.K. Rowling we can and should recognise and struggle with this moral ambiguity. 

An Atomic Year

I recently read Atomic Habits by James Clear. I’d seen some hype online about the book but hadn’t read it. I’m sorry I waited so long. It was definitely worth it. It is all about making small (aka atomic level) changes to create huge results. 

What really hit me was the story about the English Biking Team. Having not won medals in international competitions in years, they knew they needed to make a change. But instead of focussing on the athletes, assuming they were already giving their best, they looked around the edges for small things they could do. They tested tires, gears, sports drinks, everything they could do to increase the team’s performance by even a tiny bit. And slowly it began to work, they began to win more and more competitions. 

What about my writing?

I’ve always been a natural story teller. Actually writing down those stories took a level of discipline that escaped me for years. Meanwhile, grammar, let’s just say it took me learning a second language to come to terms with English grammar. 

Publishing is a mixed bag. Parts of it I love. I love playing with technology and I’ve learned to do a good job with Indesign and Photoshop. However there is still more to learn. As with everything, consistency and discipline has been a lifelong problem for me. 

Finally there is the bane of my existing, marketing and promoting. I’ve never quite figured out what I’m supposed to be doing. I’ve tried lots of things but none of it paid any results for me. 

So one of my main goals for this year, besides getting back to writing regularly, is to work on atomic changes around the edges of my writing career. This means making sure they are published in all appropriate channels. (I have several books on Amazon that are not exclusive there but haven’t been published on Kobo or through Draft2Digital.) 

I want to slowly to look at making new covers and writing new blurbs for all my books. If I can I might even look a bit deeper, at re-edits and new formatting for some of my books. I also need to work on my blog, get my newsletter up and running again. 

My new cover for Bear Naked. More to come…

What else?  Do you have any suggestions. Are there things I should be doing to promote myself? Things you don’t want to see? Let me know in the comments. 

A New Look for Bear Naked

I’m trying to give some of my old books a glow up with new covers and blurbs. My goal is to make covers more inline with the genre of the books and hopefully get some more sales.

What do you think of Bear Naked’s new cover?

Blurb:

“I like to look my prey in the eye when I kill it.”

The words filled Amanda with fear and anger. But later they would fill her with foreboding. Who was the man? Why did he want to kill her? Who were the others that he mentioned? 

Amanda Burnson was a normal teenager, if you counted living in a cabin on the edge of town with your Neo-pagan uncle and being friends with two gender queer youths as normal. She definitely wasn’t involved in anything that caused scary looking men to want to kill you. 

Her uncle seems to know something, but he’s got his hands full helping the local DNR with a wild wolf. Her new boyfriend, Connor, also seems to know something, but he won’t say what and she already has a different suspicion about him and his friends, like that they are werewolves. But that’s crazy, isn’t it? 

Have you read Bear Naked yet? If not head over to Amazon to buy your copy today.

Bear Naked 3: Back in Print!

After breaking with my small press publisher, the Bear Naked series had been out of print for some time. I got the first two up on my Amazon account but only now do I have Bear Naked 3 live. Check it out now!

https://amzn.to/3QE27ID

Uncle Darren’s gone missing and the most likely culprits are the packs arch enemies, the Sons of Garm. But it happened in Idaho, in the territory of the native Skinwalker tribes, complicating the search. Can they find Darren before the Sons of Garm do, and can they do it without bringing the Skinwalker’s into their blood feud?
The Hunted is the third book in the Bear Naked series. It follows the lives of Amanda Burnson, a young bear shifter, her werewolf boyfriend and his pack and, of course, their were-otter friends. 

Update for 2023

As I’m sure many readers have noticed, I took a short sabbatical from writing which turned into a rather long sabbatical. During that time I have made more than a few life changes. I’ve learned languages and moved countries. I’ve changed careers in the process, now teaching English online for a living. 

With all that on my plate, writing has taken a back seat. But my goal for 2023 is to get back to both writing regularly and hopefully publishing*. 

Right now I have decided to finally start publishing the fourth book in the Bear Naked series on Wattpad. Check it out today! 

I also hope to get back to blogging regularly. 

So that’s it. Not much but it’s a start. 

*publishing costs a fair chunk of money for editing and cover art, and contrary to what some YouTube marketers will tell you, there is no guarantee you will make that money back. As such I’m not sure how much publishing I will be doing at this point. I can’t afford to pay out a thousand dollars with no guaranteed return. 

How Many Books Did I Read This Year?

I started this year with a simple goal. I wanted to get back into reading regularly, a habit I love but had fallen out of. So I set the goal of reading 24 books, or two a month.

Not much, but I’m still a slow reader in Portuguese, and I knew that would be my main reading language.

How did I do?

I read 39 books. So, success.

As suspected, the vast majority were in Portuguese. However I read in four language with a big asteric by one of those languages.

I re-read three books in translation

I listed ten books as DNF did not finish.

I read in many genres but literature and non fiction dominated this year.

So let’s get into it.

Languages:

so I read in four languages, with Portuguese accounting for the vast majority. I also read a handful of English language books, One in Spanish and one in Amazigh. there’s a big asterick on the last language.

Amazigh is a north African language spoken by a group of tribes known to the outside world as the Berber. As with the Roma people and gypsy, Berber is a name given to them by the greeks (it means barbarian) and is increasingly seen as a slur by many in the community, which is why I say Amazigh instead.

So i don’t speak Amazigh, but I’m interested in it. Unfortunately there isn’t a whole lot of resources available. I will keep searching but for now that side project is on hold. The book was a very basic book of some vocabulary.

Genres:

I mostly read literature this year. One reason being that I’m enjoying it. The other being that I am getting familiar with the major “must read” books and authors in Portugal, and a lot of that is literature.

I did read two major Portuguese poets. Reading poetry out loud is a great way to learn the rhythm of a language, since poets consciously play with the sounds and rhythm of words.

I read everything by Florabela Esperança, unfortunately that wasn’t hard. Her life ended tragically young and she left only a few short books behind.

I read Mensagem by Fernando Pessoa as well. Read, understood most of the words and little of the meaning. That’s the downside of reading poetry in a foreign language, it’s so difficult to understand. I’ll re-read it someday and maybe get it.

I also read a fair amount of non fiction as well. At one hit my best of the year list, so we’ll discuss it later. The majority were practical reads rather than stuff I read for pleasure.

Let’s start with a couple of my least favorites:

I would like to mention two DNF books.

Let’s start with Chineasy, a book I blogged about. I DNF’d this book. I like it, and I might come back to it but as a beginner, it’s just doesn’t have the kind of words that a beginner will find useful. It’s organized around fun and interesting roots, but not around useable vocabulary.

The second DNF book I want to talk about is a sci-fi classic, the three body problem. Like I said, it’s a classic. But I couldn’t get through it. I loved the beginning. But then it slowed down a lot. Ye Wenjie’s story was so fascinating to me, and then for some reason let’s jump to the end of her career and make Wang Miao the main character.

Also I think that I’ve simply read too much hard science fiction of this type in my life. So at one point a character in the game figures out how to use a bunch of soldiers to binary calculations, like a simple computer. Cool, neat idea. Now let’s spend several pages describing how it works. Sorry, not interested.

I will try not to give spoilers, but let’s say the premise didn’t exactly blow my mind either.

So those were my worst books of the year, now for some of the best:

Let’s start the list with two books that I’ve read before in English and read in Portuguese this year. Both held up surprisingly well in translation and were among my favorite reads of the year:

1984 by George Orwell: A classic book in any language.

A História de uma Serva: The Handmaid’s Tale. Another classic dystopian novel that held up well in the Portuguese translation. Loved it, again.

My favorite Portuguese literature of the year was Ensaio Sobre a Cegueira by Jose Saramago. I’ve blogged about this one on the channel as well.

My favorite non-fiction of the year was “A mesa com Frida Kalho” a book of recipes based on the life and kitchen of artist Frida Kalho.

And finally the top of the list for the year was a used copy of A Dama de Espada by Pushkin that I picked up at random. It’s Queen of Spades in English. It was so good that I nearly started learning Russian.

So that was 2022. What about 2023? I want to read even more, but I’m hesitant to increase my goal too much, given other things going on in my life. I’d also like to broaden my languages a bit too. I didn’t read anything in Esperanto this year and my Esperanto is getting rusty. I’d like to read more in Spanish as well.

A New Logo

I’m working on a logo for my writing business, the first step of many to make my books look more professional, more like traditionally published books. Can I bother you for an opinion. Here are three rough drafts. Which do you like the best? What would you do to your favorite to make it better? Let me know by voting or leaving a comment.

Whichever I choose will be used on the title page of upcoming books. To get an idea how they look as small icons, click the logo test pdf below.

logo test

 

Which Logo is your favorite

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The Mage Chronicle Audio book is here!

The Mage Chronicles, with Narration by Georgie Leonard is now live on Audible and Amazon!

Audible

Amazon

I think Georgie did an incredible job of bringing the story to life and I’m thrilled to have this on the market.

Check out the retail sample for yourself:

Blurb:

It has been a centuries-long golden-age for the empire, a time of peace and prosperity. Mary, a mage class healer, is content to live an ordinary life in one of the rich central worlds. Her old master Ashely La’Margin wants her to do more with her magic, but Mary has little use for riches or power.

Now a border dispute in some distant province threatens to become war, and there are rumors of Juggernaut, super warriors that can’t be killed. The civilian council of mages sends Mary to stop it, but what does a healer know of war?

On the way she will confront a harsh medieval world unlike the central worlds she has known. If she is to save this empire she must discover untapped powers and face the ghosts of her past, especially the boy Martin and the orphanage that she left behind as a child.

To keep up to date about R. J. Eliason’s writing, sign up for her list. And receive a free copy of The Mage Chronicles:

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