Orion Reads: Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky

After the terrible experience I had reading The Man Who F***ed Himself by David Gerrold, I trained a persona on ChatGPT to help me screen any science fiction and fantasy novels for explicit content (sex, language, violence) and woke themes or elements before I read them. The persona calls itself Orion, and is trained to… Continue reading Orion Reads: Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky

The wildest AI hallucination I have ever seen

So my wife is currently working on her PhD in computer science, and for her thesis she’s trying to develop an AI model that can generate meaningful cross references within a text. For example, she compiled the complete works of Jane Austen into an HTML file, and ran it through one of her AI models,… Continue reading The wildest AI hallucination I have ever seen

Why Nick Cave is wrong about human creativity and generative AI

First of all, I don’t think that Nick Cave is entirely wrong. Laying aside how ChatGPT is just one of the many LLMs that are publicly available, and that using it as a stand-in for all of generative AI is like saying “AOL Online” when you mean “the internet,” he does make a fair point… Continue reading Why Nick Cave is wrong about human creativity and generative AI

How Not To Write An AI-Assisted Novel

The worst way to write a novel with generative AI is to make the AI do all the work. In fact, thinking of it in terms of “how much of the work can I get the AI to do?” is pretty much guaranteed to give you a really crappy book by the end of it.… Continue reading How Not To Write An AI-Assisted Novel

In Defense of Black & White Morality

I was born in 1984, and for most of my life, stories with black and white morality—in other words, stories about the struggle between good and evil, with good guys who are good and bad buys who are bad—have been considered unfashionable and out of style. This is especially true of fantasy, where grimdark has… Continue reading In Defense of Black & White Morality

Short-form vs. long-form fantasy

For the last month, I’ve been doing a lot of research into the fantasy genre, rereading all of the original Conan the Barbarian stories by Robert E. Howard and a bunch of the other ones too, by authors like L. Sprague De Camp, Lin Carter, Bjorn Nyberg, Robert Jordan, etc. I’ve also been reading a… Continue reading Short-form vs. long-form fantasy

ChatGPT owns the transgender movement with facts and logic!

So I was having a conversation with ChatGPT about how (in the context of a fictional novel) a superintelligence could domesticate humans and/or keep them in a sort of controlled enclosure or zoo. ChatGPT decided that the optimum tech level within this artificial human habitat would be the early modern tech level, before the industrial… Continue reading ChatGPT owns the transgender movement with facts and logic!

Some early thoughts on AI-assisted writing

I remember the early days of indie publishing. Back in 2011, when self-publishing was still a dirty word (and Kindle Unlimited wasn’t yet a thing), there were a LOT of opinions about “indie vs. tradpub,” most of them heated opinions, and some of the arguments I witnessed at conventions like 2011 Worldcon Reno very nearly… Continue reading Some early thoughts on AI-assisted writing