I AM AN EEL. WITH A GUN.

if you’re white and wanna write a poc character and feel awkward about it i implore you to ignore any twitblr stuff treating it as a massive ethical burden and instead come in more with the same mindset you’d have if you wanted to write about idk firefighters but didn’t know anything about firefighters so you do... research. Like fuck off with the weird kinda creepy calls for spiritual introspection you’re not writing about god damn space aliens you’re writing about humans and if you think you need more perspective of different life experiences just read?

If I were writing about firefighters I'd also, in addition to just reading about them, take advantage of Our Blessed Internet to ask actual firefighters about how shit works. I'd do the same for a minority I'm not a part of.

I remember when there was this LiveJournal community where you could just ask about anything you needed for your novel - medicine, professions, vehicles, how things function in country X - and people who knew something about that would answer.

We need to bring this back.

And apparently just this summer they DID bring it back - it's called Little Details and it's on Dreamwidth!!!!

Remember, a world where everyone stays in their own boxes and only writes about their own narrow demographic is straight up a goal for racists. If you ever find yourself attempting anti-racism so hard you've looped back to "functionally the same thing racists want", stop, take stock, and ask yourself where things went wrong.

I call upon the fan fic writing gods to bless you with the perseverance to finish one of your unfinished drafts. 

May your fingers dance along the letters upon your device with ease, may the devil of distraction stay far from you, and may your work not need much editing.

I pass this blessing upon every fan fic writer out there.

As it came to me I give it to you.

I <3 dog motifs. I <3 dog symbolism. I <3 dog imagery. I <3 devotion to the point of pain. I <3 unconditional love even in the face of violence.

“I don’t know how to reconcile that my favorite piece of media was made by someone awful.” Because they’re a shitty person who made something good. It’s not that rare of a phenomenon. Shitty people make good things everyday. A piece of art being made by a terrible person does not make its effect null and void and making good art does not redeem a terrible person. People who are irredeemably nasty can say something true and honest on occasion. To reevaluate a work after finding out more about the artist’s horrendous biases and actions and still find things that are honest and true even when consuming it through a critical lens, that is a beautiful thing. If the artist’s actions and words completely destroy it for you and distort the meaning you once found, it’s okay to feel a sense of mourning and loss at that.

This is not to say that you should continue to lavish social and financial capital on the artist because you enjoy their art but to say that enjoying art made by horrible people does not mean you are in some way unclean.

'do you think you're superior for not using AI in your work' thank you for asking! yes i do

I got the Top 4.47% on this English Vocabulary test

I’m in the last 47.33% 

I shouldn’t have taken that test

hell yeah.

Top 5.99% baby

ya gotta know it first to abuse it properly

LET’S GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

I'm a disabled and chronically ill writer. I can't write every time i want to. I can't use a keyboard or handwrite for disability reasons. The only way i can write is by typing in the notes app on my phone. This is also painful and i can write a few hundred words at most.

Isn't it interesting how i still wouldn't consider using AI to write my stories instead? If the only way for me to write my stories is by using voice to text and i can write only a single word everyday i still wouldn't choose AI

Fuck AI and fuck you for pretending to care about disability people just so you can steal art made by disabled people

AI ASSISTIVE is not what we are fighting against.

Its AI GENERATIVE bullshit that's stealing our jobs and passions.

There is nothing wrong with using AI to ask for a prompt or an idea (I.e., asking ChatGPT for a writing prompt). There IS something wrong with asking AI to write a book, printing out the response, and publishing it, claiming that YOU wrote this word for word.

Because you didn't.

When you ask for a writing or art prompt, you're giving yourself a TOOL. A TOOL to help your brain imagine something. You are able to use the prompt as a basis for a story or image that YOU spent time and energy and imagination to create.

But if you ask AI to generate something, all you're doing is thinking of a prompt and throwing it at a robot to make "art". It takes a few seconds.

AI is robotic. For now, it has no soul.

I'd rather have a work of art made from a prompt given by AI but realized by a human than a work of "art" made from a prompt given from a human but realized by AI.

This is not my point at all. AI is hugely problematic in many many ways. One of them being that it steals from people. ChatGPT is not an exception.

The point of this post is not "Don't say you made it when it's AI". The point is that you should not be using AI. There is no reason to use AI. If you need prompts there are countless of writing and prompt specific blogs on various social media that you can look through.

Don't use AI. All AI is stealing from people. From actual artists and writers.

There's no good excuse to use ChatGPT for anything, including writing prompts, which incidentally is still generative AI.

Soul, or lackthereof, isn't why AI like this is bad.

It's built and trained on the theft of work other people actually put thought into, including prompts, and it's disastrous for the environment, which is pretty significant given we're in climate crisis.

It's also already collapsing around itself.

Writing is difficult when you're disabled, just like everything else. The last thing I need or want assistance with is using my words to tell my story.

And given the horror stories of disabled tech being 'repossessed' by companies going bankrupt, being surgically removed or just rendered redundant, AI and its tech bros are the last thing I want anywhere near our community.

^^^^

As the others on the thread said, I do not want LLMs/generative AI anywhere near my community. I also really hate that some pro-generative AI orgs keep trying to use our community as a "shield" to hide the fact they're ableist. To sum it all up:

Of course list is not exhaustive. I'm sure others will think of other things that harm our community that I didn't list above.

Point is, LLM/Generative AI is a scam by tech bros to flood the world with shit and make it harder for us to find one another and create community with one another. It's a thrift for them to get a fast buck at the expense of everyone else. I hate that they are trying to force it down our throats.

Make sure you say "I wonder what they're doing right now..." about your comic relief friends every now and then so the episode can cut to their B plot

The opposite of a mansion murder mystery where everyone present is a bounty hunter who really wants to take credit for the murder and the detective has to find out who really did it

Assistant: "What about the gunpowder found at the scene?"

Detective: "I thought about that as well! But as you can see from the bullet wound, it was clearly done posthumously."

Assistant: "Remarkable find! But why would someone shoot a corpse?"

*Bounty hunter 'Gun shootman' tossing his hat on the ground and stomping it as he rips up the contract he hoped to cash in on fulfilling*

Femme fatale: his ink bottle was knocked over detective. I dont know if that means anything but its all i could find. *coquettishly turns and shows off ink stains on dress*

Detective: The victim was murdered in the lounge actually so i don't think there should have been any ink there at all

Femme fatale: *takes off heels and throws them through the glass window*

In the end it’s revealed that the “victim” died of natural causes

Putting someone's tags here because YEEESSSSSS

I think my favorite genre of fanfiction is when the author says something like "this was meant to be 3 chapters but it's actually going to be 5" in the notes at the end of a chapter and you can look up at the chapter count and it's like 15 or something

'i should draw' 'i should paint' 'i should write fic' 'i should read' 'i should embroider' 'i shou-

*stares at a wall for 8 hours*

the issue with writing for yourself is that you will get sucked into rereading your own fic over and over and pretend it’s “editing,” but really you’re just reading because it’s exactly what you want to read. because you wrote it. for you.

🔊🔊 END STAGE DISCOURSE!! END STAGE DISCOURSE!! WE HAVE ARRIVED AT "FICTIONAL SEX IS COERCIVE BECAUSE CHARACTERS ARE BEING FORCED TO DO THINGS BY THE AUTHOR"!!!! 🔊🔊

My favorite professor, shout out Glenn, would interrupt students who were saying "Well XYZ clearly felt--" and go "No, backtrack, scratch that. They are a character. Not a person. They don't have any thoughts other than what the writer clearly specifies on paper they have. Don't give agency to nonliving things, they are not real, they never were real, and it is dangerous to lose that line."

He was a sweet man and raised in the Midwest so interrupting people hurt his very soul, that's how dangerous he felt the idea of losing the line of fiction was.

He notably also taught a course called Bible in Lit which I took and those lines came back a lot.

Noo haha don't project the mechanics of negative past experiences into a blanket rule that all good things are false and fleeting babe haha don't perpetuate your own suffering by fulfilling your own prophecy lol your sooo sexy

I don't care about data scraping from ao3 (or tbh from anywhere) because it's fair use to take preexisting works and transform them (including by using them to train an LLM), which is the entire legal basis of how the OTW functions.

To be fair some of us don't object to our works being used because "OMG my style! my copyright!" My style is not that unique.

I want to do my part to sabotage the production and refinement of LLMs because I hate LLMs.

Okay I mean this very seriously because you and I have talked over the years and we both know we're not stupid: why do you hate LLMs?

Most of the time when people talk about why they hate LLMs what they mean is that they hate how LLMs are being used, and I can absolutely agree that there are a lot of LLMs being used really badly. Please know that I am mentally inserting the "el problema es el capitalismo" meme here.

But the Goblin.Tools magic to-do list is the function of an LLM (that is a website full of free tools created for people with ADHD; it is run on donations by a developer with ADHD who created this tool to help other people).

Replit, the IDE I was using for my most recent coding class, uses an LLM-based AI tool to suggest corrections to your code and highlight errors, teaching baby programmers to recognize errors without having to comb through long programs by hand or relying on having a more experienced programmer nearby to help you figure out where you're fucking up.

There are definite problems surrounding the use of AI search engine results or replacing customer support positions with chatbots, but saying you hate LLMs because OpenAI is kind of shit is sort of like saying you hate web browsers because Google sucks. An LLM is a tool. There are different models trained on different data sets.

So what I'm frustrated by in a lot of these conversations, and what I'm asking you, is "is it the tool you're upset with, or how it's being used, and if it's the tool: why?"

What bothers me are the misconceptions people have about it. It's like they say a film of Clever Hans (a horse who could follow cues from the audience or its handler, used to perform math and other tricks) and announced that henceforth, everyone who needs a calculator should get a horse.

It's a horse. That's it. At its *best*, it tells you the answer you want to hear. But most horses have no skill in this and trying to cram them into applications is dumb.

I am tired of and irritated by the pro-horse hype.

I'm absolutely right there with you about being tired of the pro-horse hype.

"AI" has very few practical applications for people who aren't already using it and quite a lot of impractical applications for people who have been misinformed about its capabilities, which is an awful lot of people because there are a lot of companies making a lot of money lying about its capabilities right now.