"Life is too important to be taken seriously." - Oscar Wilde. Writer, raconteur, shitposter. They/he. Squeezes du jour: Arcane, Hazbin Hotel, Amnesia: The Dark Descent, &c. Asks open. ā¢My Writingā¢ ā¢Amnesia: The Dark Descentā¢ ā¢Don't Starveā¢ ā¢Fashion and Aestheticsā¢
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Over twenty years ago my big brother got me a job at a Taco Bell in the St. Louis suburbs-West County. He warned me that it was the āgay Taco Bellā, but since I was coming from the āgay Howard Johnsonāsā I wasnāt shocked. It turns out it was the black trans women Taco Bell complete with black trans women in management. And theyād worked out an arrangement with the local teen Narcotics Anonymous group so that twice a week we would shut down the drive thru and the dining room and exclusively serve 60+ teens in various stages of recovery. And many of the women I worked with were in various stages of being out or transitioning and they were from all generations from teens to over 50. One woman I worked with had a regular corporate job presenting as a man 9-5 Mon-Fri and then came to Taco Bell and worked 6pm -2am Friday and Saturday night so she could be herself surrounded by other black transwomen in those stolen weekends. And we had customers come from all over the metro area because they knew they could be themselves in the dining room. I only worked there from 1999-2001 but for young me, this was a vital, formative experience. Some of the girls came from north city all the way out to the āgay Taco Bellā on Manchester in west county because they heard it was safe to work there. Like- I know times have changed but they havenāt changed much in 20 years. Iām still convinced that for lgbt youth, finding a job at your cityās version of the āgay Taco Bellā is key to survival.
Iāve been spinning like a chicken on a spit ever since I heard about the whole āAI generated story places in renowned Commonwealth Writing Prizeā scandal and now has come the time to regale you with my Opinionsā¢ļø about the matter, because itās hit on some thoughts Iāve had for a while re: how I approach writing, both fanfic and original fictionā¦ and thoughts Iāve had as a reader. long read, strap in.
tldr scandal speedrun: story by Trinidadian writer Jamir Nazir just won the Caribbean regional prize at the 2026 Commonwealth Short Story Prize ie one of the biggest short fiction awards in the world (almost 8000 entries this year) and was subsequently published on Granta's website, as all regional winners are. readers start flagging that something is off, and it quickly becomes clear that the story is almost certainly AI generated, and obviously the press and wank started up, media coverage, and my all time favourite part: Granta editor Sigrid Rausing uploads the story into an AI to ask if an AI wrote it and then puts out a statement that pretty much says āprobably, but guess weāll never know!ā (SORRY THIS PART IS SOOOO FUCKING FUNNY TO ME LMFAO š)
much of the earlyish discourse has focused on the AI detection question, what does this mean for literary prizes going forward, how do we verify human authorship. some responses have been very good/interesting (the Africa is a Country piece especially). what I want to yap about is what the judges' response to this story tells us about how postcolonial writing is read by the institutions that gatekeep it and readers who dismiss it (and this puts it perfectly with Arundhati Roy as an example), what the judging panelās language reveals when read as a critical object in itself, and why the failure mode here is so damaging. tldr: the story is dogshit and so clearly AI generated you can even see the AIās āthoughtā process, but the mainstream reactions are slagging off the wrong thing, and for reasons that have little to do with AI.
it has been actually infuriating to watch a significant chunk of the online reaction use this nonsense piece of writing as a launching pad for a much broader dismissal. someone posts the bench-men sentence or the sunrise-over-a-sink sentence as evidence of AI, and then in the replies someone else will say some shit like "well this is just what postcolonial writing is like" or "I've read prize-winning stuff that reads exactly like this". and suddenly we're not talking about Jamir Nazir anymore, we're talking about whether this entire mode of writing, postcolonial literary fiction, global south prose āin generalā, varied and distinct language plays associated with everyone from Roy to Walcott to Kincaid, as somehow inherently gaudy, unmoored, purple, a performance of profundity that collapses under scrutiny. sheer vim against styles of writing unfairly and lazily judged as āfloridā and āoverwroughtā, ie people calling for the clinical manicuring of prose through a lens of anti-AI progressivism.
and this rage has very little to do with AI or this AI generated story, and a lot more to do with the epistemology of reading across cultural difference:
what assumptions are you making when you encounter prose that doesn't do what you're used to, and how do you distinguish between:
this is doing something I don't have the framework to follow/yet
and
this is doing nothing
the uncomfortable answer is that a lot of people, at levels high above the average reader mind you, being prize judges and all, don't make that distinction. they experience the unfamiliarity and name it as failure, as excess, as incoherence, as the literary equivalent of noise, without asking whether the problem is in the text or in the reading, or they fall prey to a manifestation of ātrim the fat cultureā (good post on this).
this is not an accusation of bad faith reading necessarily; it is just what happens when you read without the relevant context and without the intellectual curiosity to notice that you're missing something and attempt to find it. telling, however, is how quickly that experience of unfamiliarity, in this particular case, became a generalisation. not "I find this story's specific metaphors incoherent" but "I find this kind of writing incoherent", as if āthis kind of writingā is a stable category and not just something this AI slapped together. a sliding from the fraudulent to the traditional that happens with striking confidence, and one which you do not see applied with the same ease to, say, Western European modernism, where the response to difficulty tends toward "I need to read more Woolf to understand Woolf" rather than "yucky stinky Woolf is AI-slopā.
anyway. here is my favourite sentence from the shitty AI story:
"she had the kind of walking that made benches become men."
and like itās my all time favourite sentence ever because like. what does it mean. what is it doing. why is it there. what decision was made in its construction and to what end? and I just could not come to a conclusion because the real answer is that no actual decision was made, because decision-making requires an engagement with the writing, requires a reasoning for the sentence to exist in the way it does, and this exists across all literary prose styles, from the sparsest to the lushest. the bench-men sentence is difficult to interpret, but not in a āthis is difficult to interpret which makes the reward of interpretation sweeterā way, it is difficult to interpret in a āthere is nothing under this sentenceā way, and that is made very clear when even the slightest interpretative pressure is laid on the story.
anyway, turns out the judges of one of the worldās biggest literary competitions did not apply that pressure. caribbean regional judge Sharma Taylor described Nazir's language as "sublime ā precise yet richly evocative ā conjuring vivid, lush imagery with remarkable economy" and like man this isnāt to dunk on Taylor personally but i think that sentence, in being a diagnostic object, is in itself a diagnostic object as to the whole scandal here: itās evaluative language that doesnāt touch the text itself, a string of compliments whose terms donāt require a unique object. "precise yet richly evocative" is a sentence that could describe anyone from Chekhov to MT Vasudevan Nair.
what it cannot do is tell you what is precise about Nazir's objectively vague, dreary sentences, or where exactly economy manifests in a story that opens with three subordinate images somehow being unable to create even half an image. the judges either didn't notice or didn't give a fuck, and imo the honest interpretation there is that the evaluation was matching the text against a prior model of what this kind of writing is supposed to feel like, rather than what it actually does.
the main vulnerability of this kind of matching-against-model judging criteria is that it can only flag deviation from the expected shape, not absence within it. a story that inhabits the expected form, even hollowly, passes muster. a story that does something actually unexpected might fail on those same grounds, whether or not it's extraordinary. the AI machine got through to the prize list not because it fooled sophisticated readers into thinking they were reading a great work of literature, but because the reading operation in use did not require that experience of reading great literature to complete successfully. you just needed the vague shape, and the machines are good at making vague shapes.
what shape?
seemingly lyrical, lush, image-dense, located in rural poverty or landscape-as-metaphysical-weight, threaded with folk memory and unresolved grief, incantatory, myth-grabbing, rum shops, zinc rooftops, zinc-hair. what the AI has done is precisely what it is built to do: grab tiny scraps and fragments from actual prize-winning postcolonial stories and shoved them all together into an amorphous, senseless mass, knowing what it is supposed to do but not knowing how to do it. and so to me the most astounding/horrifying aspect of this scandal is how the judges who one can safely assume, based on their credentials, are very familiar with āworld literatureā, proved unable to tell the difference between a form inhabited and a form vacated.
and I really donāt like bringing up my literary/academic credentials (derogatory) etc etc on here anymore, because it at times positions me in an uncritical way I donāt intend or enjoy and I spent my early months in fandom realising just how very uncomfortable I was with the image I inadvertently curated as a result of coming straight from that sort of literary-academic space. so to put it very basically: I have spent my academic career broadly specialising in the very style and period of postcolonial literature that this AI story is attempting (badly) to emulate. my focus has always been south asia but i have also worked extensively with caribbean lit especially early on, and iāve been taught/examined by some very well known caribbean writers and literary scholars, etc etc. ie iām just trying to say that this post isnāt just me talking about a vague grievance with literary cultures but something iāve been neck deep in for 10+ years now, ie i do know my shit and am not just knee jerk wanking, even though frankly i donāt think i should have to explain my background because way too many people are being way too confident with the āi have been writing for THREE BILLION years and they gave ARUNDHATI ROY THAT BITCH the booker prizeā atmā¦
anyway after that, and very abruptly, the story takes a hard pivot to what it actually is, which is not an apolitical portrait of India, not diasporic literature about the Indian subcontinent, not even an Indian novel about Kozhikode, but a Kozhikodan novel about India, down to the style: my writing in general tends to lean on carnivaleque and incongruous tonal whiplashes between ālowbrowā humour, abject tragedy and direct critical fourth-wallfucking commentary, but that whiplash is turned all the way up to 100 in Prayers and the humour especially is taken to borderline slapstick levels, and that style is evocative of Kozhikodan literary cultures (seeāwritings of Vaikom Muhammad Basheer, who is mentioned in the story in that Comrade Maedhros lies claims they are great buddies lmao), only that most writing from the region is in Malayalam, etc.
do I personally enjoy every single one of these authors? no, I would probably cagefight two of them at least. what I am saying though, is that that their writing isnāt some kind of incomprehensible mess that nobody aside from their little tiny id-group can understand, not amorphous or vague or too overwrought to comprehend. their prose, all differing styles, can be rich, lush, playful, meandering, yes. but they are not unclear: theyāre so clear that the positionality of the authors, their class and caste backgrounds, their educational and migratory trajectories, are often painfully evident (hence the cagefighting). the reason i used those aspects in my fic to signal towards a particular kind of globally lauded postcolonial literature is because those signals are clear, not confusing.
ie it is not a case of āglobal southā writers being incomprehensible, it is a case of readers walking into a garden with a few flowers they havenāt seen before and immediately going ādamn, look at this jungle. canāt navigate it but iām sure itās great, ok byeā then turning the fuck around and writing the travelogue anyway. which is to say, applying a colonial reading practice to postcolonial writing.
and thereās a similar, though differently approached, aspect in globally renowned caribbean anglophone writing: a history of deliberate formal difficulty. where the difficulty isnāt some ambient mystery or marker of āseriousā literature but a formal consequence of a model of storytelling. eg. Selvon's Creole narration in The Lonely Londoners was a decision with costs+purposes about what it would mean for Moses Aloetta's interiority to be rendered in standard English versus in a voice that had not been, at the time, admitted to the Anglophone literary canon, rather than being the inevitable default of a Caribbean writer. Harris's dissolving frames in Palace of the Peacock are not difficult because Harris was apathetic to comprehensibility but because the Guyanese historical consciousness the novel examines does not easily resolve into stable subjectivity.
form is so often part of the argument across literature, across the English canon itself, and normally in literary criticism, ādifficultyā is approached epistemologically alongside aesthetically. this is common knowledge yet the first part is something that appears to be hard to grasp for people reading and commentating on āworld literatureā.
what is this form doing that another form cannot?
you can answer that question for Harris and Selvon and Ghosh and Roy and man, I think heās so fucking annoying sometimes, but you can even do it for Rushdie. you cannot do it for "coffee and cocoa leaned wild on a slope that wanted either rain in teeth or none at all". and this impossibility has nothing to do with foreignness or excessiveness but because the question, when applied to this AI generated piece of writing, has no answer.
and likeā¦ what does that tell us about what the judges were evaluating? imo it tells us they were at least in part evaluating surface-level compliance. compliance with recognisable genre conventions and an expected register, and so with the right signals of āauthenticityā. and in the case of āGlobal South literatureā, these conventions include an emphasis on the rural, the embodied, the rooted, the mythical.
an AI is very good at compliance because compliance is, quite literally, what AI does: every LLM is trained on the corpus of what has been rewarded before and thus it reproduces the patterns of that reward. if the judges were themselves rewarding compliance with a known type, then of course the AI passed with flying colours, because they were, in effect, running the same operation as the LLM model: matching input against a predetermined template instead of engaging with the work itself.
and so imo the question that should haunt every future Commonwealth Prize shortlist is not "did an AI write this?" but "what model of literary value are we using to judge Anglophone literature?ā, and āwhy the fuck are we doing that???ā
bc if your aesthetic criteria are vague enough that a sentence like "the grove isn't a ledger; it's a mouth ā it closes only when it's satisfied" reads as "vivid, lush imagery" delivered with "quiet authority," then your judging criteria is less criteria and more vibes. you are literally just playing a high-stakes vibes-based game of Pin the Tail on the Mango whilst wilfully ignoring how vibes are precisely what AI large language models are the best at faking.
anyway, like I said in my intro, this scandal is already sliding into a secondary discourse in which āOrientalā¢ļø opacity/incomprehensibilityā is being treated as the general category, of which this AI-generated confusion is just the most recent instance. you can watch it happening in real time, unbearably prolonged: people who rightly found the Nazir story incoherent, reaching way too easily for other examples of postcolonial prose they also apparently found incoherent or āpurpleā, prose that is, in fact, doing things they just didn't know how to follow. the AI story has handed a lazy, sneering and dismissive reading practice the veneer of clinical diagnosis.
that is the horribly ironic thing here. reader after reader, openly admitting to doing the exact same lazy, apathetic reading of postcolonial literature as the literary prize judges they are (rightly) criticizing have done with this AI story, have been doing for human-writing from the global south for all this time. āewww this is what that writing looks like when a machine does it" (correct) is sliding so so so easily into "ewww this is what that writing looks like" (not correct). dog after dog, chasing tail after tail.
and that slide, from a machine having āsuccessfullyā impersonated prize-winning prose, to a panel of judges who clearly weren't really reading, to the genre itself being defined as imitable machinery, is imo the most damaging thing to come out of this whole affair, and the people most hurt by it are the writers who have fuck all to do with Jamir Nazir, who is clearly just a chancer who fucked around and found out.
because somewhere in those 8000 entries, there is a writer, possibly many writers, who solved their riddle, who knew what every sentence was doing, who had made the thousand small decisions that constitute a story, and whose difficulty (if their story was difficult: difficulty is subjective and not a default, as we have established) could easily be accounted for. that writer did not win, because the judges were not looking for them. and now, in the aftermath, the interrogation of the incident continues to refuse to ask the questions that would have found them.
I first thought it would be blowing smoke up my own ass to finish this post with a quote from my own story. and then I remembered that this is my circus and you are all my monkeys, so I will indeed be ending with a (spoiler-free, context-unnecessary) quote from the final chapter of Prayers, from one of the ficās multiple fourth-wall breaches, this one explicitly addressing both the character of Maedhros, a gay Muslim man in postcolonial India, as well as the attritional impact of global Anglophone prize cultures on ānational literaturesā, explaining the structure of the story and touching on the reading-practice I talk about in this post, this cold, dismissive flattening based on the readerās refusal to comprehend the unfamiliar. Emphasis obviously made just for this excerpt:
Humanity has tried many times, with fanfare and floodlights, to hold the great white shark within glass walls. When a young female was placed in the Steinhart Aquarium in San Francisco, its keepers marvelled for a day, two days, then watched as she rammed herself against the tank walls, snout bloodied and refusing food until her body yielded to exhaustion. In San Diego, one was found dead within two weeks. More recently, in a public aquarium, a six-foot juvenile circling its tank like a condemned spirit, colliding with the corners until its skin peeled raw, was released after months only to die on the way back to the sea. Each attempt ended the same: a slow unravelling, a remarkable animalās vast strength curdling inward, its shimmering blue-mapped body drifting in a pale echo of the life denied to them.
I do not deny they are vicious creatures. But it is not viciousness that makes it impossible for them to survive in the aquarium. The old fables and new films, the man-eater, the blood-frothed wave, the lurking fin, have all mistaken the matter entirely. The thing that kills the great white shark in captivity is the billowing cage: the narrowing circle of water, no current to guide their gills, the confiscation of the horizon. In captivity they turned to self-excoriation, scraping themselves to ribbons on the glass, starving in protest, dragging their bodies into stillness. As if potential had been so thoroughly written into their marrow that the denial of it was a kind of murder. What we mistake for noble resilience is in fact the beginning of a long derangement. A creature built to know the endless universe, driven into madness by the closing-in of incomprehensible walls.
And so we, in our hunger for marvels, have reduced an oceanic immensity to an ornament, a sole symbolic bangle on a slender wrist, a riddle turned spectacle. In that act of enclosure, the essential vastness of the creature is stripped away, its thousand-mile wanderings and salt-scored pilgrimages compressed into a parody of itself in a ghost story projected on glass.
What is offered to the crowd is no shark but the space where a shark once was: a wonder gutted and repackaged, its enforced silence masquerading as our unspoken understanding even as a scream writhes in every bubble.
As we behold the captive great white shark, Arwen, we do naught but applaud its absence in our lives, gild the blade which vanquished its truth, and heave a sigh of relief for the barrier between ourselves and the beast. We build shrines to the wonders we swallow whole. We raise gardens tomorrow from the cities we raze today.
But perhaps there is light on the horizon for humanity. Perhaps one day, we will learn how to keep the great white shark in a cage. And in turn, maybe it will learn how to rasp itself down for the onlooker and pace circles into borrowed water, each turn narrower, each wall closer than the last. What is witnessed is not the beast but its mutilation, a spectre stripped of horizon and turned inward on itself, a hollow spectacle mistaken for a radiant life.
The tank allows for neither possibility nor invention, and so the tale of the great white shark contracts into a pattern of bruises, the persistence of a body against limits it was never meant to know. The water becomes a neverending sentence, telling the story of a ruin that can only end in its own undoing. I wanted to be a writer, Arwen. I have always wanted to be a writer. You know that. You have always known that. And yet anything I ever write will only ever be an un-writing of the things other people have already written of me. Even my letters to you.
It is amazing, now that I think of it, what desperation can do to a story.
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random PSA, I know a lot of people use duckduckgo as a Google alternative search engine, but it always kind of annoyed me when I was using it because it felt like No Name Brand Google
I have switched to using Startpage.com and vastly prefer it. for one thing, instead of displaying an "AI summary" at the top of the search results (unless you turn it off, yes I know), it displays the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article, with link, whenever it finds one that's relevant.
also a waaayyyyy better sense of design than duckduckgo
also private, European based, least annoying search I've used lately (RIP old "don't be evil" Google)
i have one of those, scraped from multiple different rec posts:
Search Engines
Infinity Search is an alternative search engine with a special focus on privacy
DuckDuckGo is a popular search engine for those who value their privacy and are put off by the thought of their every query being tracked and logged. Uses bangs, ![site] for in-page search (sells your data to microsoft and draws from fucking bing)
WolframAlpha is a privately owned search engine that allows you to ācompute expert-level answers using Wolframās breakthrough algorithms, knowledgebase, and AI technology.ā A data search engine.
Boardreader is a search engine for forums and message boards. It allows you to search forums and then filter down results by date and language.
Based in France, Qwant is a privacy-based search engine that wonāt record your searches or use your personal details for advertising. Uses ā&ā as a bang search.
Another privacy-based search engine is Search Encrypt, which uses local encryption to ensure that usersā identifiable information cannot be tracked. Metasearch across multiple engines.Ā
Offering unbiased results from several sources, SearX is a metasearch engine that aims to present a free, decentralized view of the internet. Can be self-hosted.Ā
Gibiruās tagline is āUnfiltered private searchā and thatās exactly what it offers. Requires AnonymoX Firefox add-on for privacy.Ā
Disconnect allows you to conduct anonymous searches through a search engine of your choice.
Swisscows provides fully encrypted searches to protect your privacy and security. Built-in violence/porn filter cannot be overridden.Ā
MetaGer offers āPrivacy Protected Search & Findā through its anonymised search. A plugin will allow it to be made a default.
Gigablast is a private search engine that indexes millions of websites and servers real-time information without tracking your data, keeping you hidden from marketers and spammers. Variety of filtration and refinement options for searching.Ā
Oscobo is a search engine that protects your privacy while you search the web. By not using any third-party tools or scripts, your data is protected from hacking and misuse. Has a Chrome extension to allow use in toolbar.Ā
https://search.marginalia.nu/ an independent DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you perhaps weren't aware of in favor of the sort of sites you probably already knew existed. Use old-school searching rather than query-based for the best results.Ā
https://www.mojeek.com/Ā
https://wiby.me/ - Itās goal is to index as many personalized websites as possible, and NOT commercial sites.Ā
https://4get.ca/ it works a lot like SearX, but honestly better. It doesnāt have its own index, but pulls from many others. I think itās the best for research, since it allows you to search for answers from different indexes, is easy to configure, add free, and avoids censorship as much as it can.
https://www.searchenginemap.com/ for more on how search engines relate to each other.
https://yep.com/ is a crawler
https://www.etools.ch/ retrieves from Google, Mojeek, Bing, and Yandex, like Searx
https://www.dogpile.com/Ā
https://searxng.org/ (next gen Searx)
https://luxxle.com/ - possibly conservative?
https://presearch.com/ - good for academic?
https://kagi.com/smallweb - free/randomised Kagi.
Other Searchers
www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.
www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.
https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.
www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.
http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.
www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.
www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free.https://cosine.club/ is an electronic music similarity search engine
generative AI literally makes me feel like a boomer. people start talking about how it can be good to help you brainstorm ideas and iām like oh youāre letting a computer do the hard work and thinking for you???
There are many difficult things that were replaced with technology, and it wasn't a bad thing. Washing machine replaces washing clothes by hand. Nothing wrong with that. Spinning wheel replaces drop spindle. Nothing wrong with that.
Generative AI replaces thinking. The ability to think for yourself will always be important. People that want to control and oppress you want to limit your ability to think for yourself as much as possible, but continuing to practice it allows you to resist them.
"This tool replaces thinking," is a technologyĀ problem we (humans) have faced before. It's a snarkĀ that I've seen pro-AI contenders take as well: I bet these same people would have complained about calculators! And books!
Well. They did, at the time.Ā
We have records from centuries -- even millenniaĀ back -- of scholars at the time complaining that these new-fangled "books" were turning their students lazy; why, they can barely recite any poems in their entirety any more! And there are people still alive today whoĀ remember life before widely available calculators, and some of them complained -- then and now -- that bringing them into schools dealt a ruinous blow to math education, and now these young people don't even know how to use a slide-rule.
And the thing is:
They weren't wrong.
The human brain can, when called on, perform incredible feats of memorization. Bards and skalds of old could memorize and recite poems and epics that were thousands of lines long. This is a skill that is largely lost to most of the population. It's not needed any more, and so it is not practiced.
There is a definite generational gap, between the people who were trained on slide-rules and reckoning and the generation that was taught on calculators. There came a year, when that first generation grew up and entered the workforce, when you suddenly started encountering grown adults who could not do math -- not even the very basic arithmetic needed to count down from one hundred. I would go into a shop, buy an item for sixteen dollars, give the cashier a twenty and a one because I want a fiver back, and have them stare at the money in incomprehension -- what do? They don't know how to subtract sixteen from twenty-one. They don't know how to calculate a fifteen-percent tip. They did not exercise the parts of their brain that handle this, because they always had a calculator to do it for them.
Nowadays, newer point-of-sale machines compensate for this; they will automatically calculate and dispense the change,Ā no subtraction necessary on the part of the operator. Nowadays everyone carries a phone, and every phone carries a calculator, so if you needĀ to do these calculations, the tool is right there.Ā As more and more transactions go electronic and card, and cash fades further and further out of daily life, these situations happen less and less; it's not a problem that most people can't do math (until it is.)
The people who complained that these tools-that-replace-thinking would reduce the ability of the broad population to exercise these cognitive skills weren't wrong. It's simply that, as the pace of life changed, the environment changed so that in day-to-day life these skills were largely unnecessary.
So.
Isn't this, ChatGPT and Generative AI, just the latest in a long series of tool-replaces-thought that has, broadly, worked out well for us? What's different about this?
Well, two things are different.
1) In the previous instances of tool-replaces-thinking, the cognitive skill that it replaced was a discrete and, on a day-to-day basis, unnecessary outlay of energy. Most people don't need to memorize thousands of lines of poetry, or anything else for that matter. Most people don't need to do more than cursory levels of math on a dayĀ to day basis.Ā
This, however, is different. The cognitive skill that is being obsoleted here is more than "how to write essay" or "identify what is the capital of Rhode Island." It encompasses the entire field of being able to generateĀ new thoughts; of being able to consider and analyze new information; of being able to follow logical trains to their conclusions; of being able to order your thoughts to construct rational arguments; or indeed of being able to express yourself in any structured way. These cognitive tools are not occasional use; they are every day, all the time.Ā
2) In the previous instances of tool-replaces-thinking, the tool was good at what it did.
Calculators may have replaced reckoning, but calculators are also pretty good at what they do. The calculator will, as long as you give the right input, give the right answer. ChatGPT cannot be relied on to do this. ChatGPT will tell you, confidently and unhesitantly and dangerously, that 2+2=5, and it will not care that it is wrong.
Books may have replaced memorization, and books certainly could be wrong; but a fact, once in a book, is pretty stable and steady. There is not a risk that the Guy Who Owns All The EncylopediasĀ might wake up one day and decide -- to pick a purely hypothetical example -- that the Gulf of Mexico is called something else, and suddenly all the encyclopedias say that.
Generative AI fails on both these counts. It fails on every count. It's inaccurate,Ā it's unethical,Ā it's unreliable, it's wrong.
---
I remember some time ago seeing someone say (it was a video about medieval footwear, actually) that "humans have a great energy-saving system: if we can be lazy about something, we are."
This is not a ethical judgment about humans; this is how life works. Animals -- including humans -- will not do something the hard way if they can do it the easy way; this basic principle of conservation of resources is universal and morally neutral. Cognition is biologically expensive, and though our environment is not what it once was, every person still goes through every day choosing what is valuable enough to expend resources on and what is not.
Because of this, I don't know if there is any solution, here. I think pushing back against the downhill flush of the-easy-way-out is a battle both uphill and against the tide.
So I'll just close with this warning, instead:Ā
Generative AI is a tool that cannot be trusted. Do not use it to replace thought.
Saxo Grammaticus (c.Ā 1160 ā c. 1220) explaining the importance of understanding that all creative work is inherently derivative once you study the oral tradition of storytelling and history and thatās okay because generations have always reformatted tropes and themes to make them relatable to their current audiencesĀ
Shakespeare (1564), Kimba the White Lion (1965), The Lion King (1994), The Lion King (2019), Cats (2019):
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Strange racists and homophobes on the internet seem to have access to an alternate way cooler version of TV than me. "every white character on TV is in an interracial relationship" "every show has a gay couple in it" "main characters keep having to secretly be bisexual and nonbinary" "every show has gratuitous full frontal nudity" like damn promise?? What channel???
Love how tumblr has its own folk stories. Yeah the God of Arepo weāve all heard the story and we all still cry about it. Yeah that one about the woman locked up for centuries finally getting free. That one about the witch who would marry anyone who could get her house key from her cat and itās revealed she IS the cat after the narrator befriends the cat.
thinking about that one wordless calvin and hobbes sunday strip thats just calvins dad ditching his work to go play in the snow... its going to make me cry
ā#I LOVE that the comic keeps the lens on Calvinās dad to the degree of not even showing Calvinās excited face when his dad surprises him, #You can see the joy and excitement of the moment in his pose and reflected in his dadās expression, #itās a great little artistic decision, #I realized what gets me about it itās the hat covering his dadās head and hair so the dad just looks like Calvin. #you donāt HAVE to show Calvin! You already see him in the dad becoming a kid for a moment you only have to draw that onceā
This is exactly what I wanted to see in the finale. The film was completely devoid of any emotion. They deserved at least an embrace. A desperate, long-awaited one, full of love, the desire to protect, and to love foreverā¦ Perhaps with tears, but tears of relief, as well as the longing from a long separation...
Ok, now that weāve had a week to think about it, hereās another, more S1-ish fix it (as the last one was desperate and had issuesā¦but letās be honest, so did the āseasonā.)
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How Good Omens lost its heart (and didnāt even fight to get it back)
I distanced myself from the Good Omens fandom lately, and iām sure this is not a surprise to many of you reading this post. i want to be very clear: neil gaiman had a lot to do with it. I didnāt want to show my support for a show made by an abuser. And yes, i see and hear people claiming Good Omens belonged to the people and the fans, but realistically the rights and royalties belong to ng, and participating in the promotion of it all just felt wrong to me. So, my choice was to love my favorite characters of all time from afar, and for free: reading and writing and engaging with fanworks.
That being said: I really fucking hated the fuckass movie. I wish i didnāt see it, i wish the show stopped at season 1, and if you liked it, good for you. I did not, and I want to tell you why. Feel free to ignore me.
Is that a hole in your plot?
The writing was bad. Content aside, what I wanted for this characters aside, my feelings on ng and the other writers begrudgingly aside, it was a badly written piece of television. I counted too many plot holes in the first thirty minutes aside, but i will point out what felt the biggest to me.
The opening flashback: it was hot, and that was it. Where does it fit in the timeline we already know about? It doesnāt fit with their first meeting as angels, nor with their first meeting on the wall. Why keep rewriting the first time they met? We already know how they met, twice, and besides the sexual tension, what did this new flashback bring to the story? Arguably, nothing; another case of bad wigs, maybe, nothing more. Perhaps, another instance of contradicting the book and the first ever episode: āit starts, as it will end, with a garden.ā Well, apparently not.
Skipping all that nonsense in the middle (Aziraphale leaving crowley in the alley? Jesus having two lines after being promoted as the main focus of the season? The book of life burning not immediately snapping aziraphale and crowley away? Crowley having no reaction to Aziraphale confessing undying devotion to him?) letās get to the very end. The decision the main characters come to is to erase themselves and all traces of their universe to create a new, fresh universe where angels and demons do not exist, and free will reigns above all. Two minutes after, the movie presents us two human versions of said characters meeting again, 13 something billion of years later, falling in love and all that good stuff. What we are supposed to take away from this is: they were destined to meet and fall in love in every universe, no matter the circumstances. Where is the free will in a soulmate trope? Where is the free will in this condoning of predeterminism? If they were meant to be, then free will isnāt ruling this universe. Fate is. Was it all for nothing then?
Who are these characters?
The characters fell flat. The side characters were useless at best, annoying at worst. Michael going rogue was predictable, Jesus was a nothingburger, the entire Whickber Street ensemble was justā¦ not relevant. And the main characters were subjected to the worst character assasination my eyes have ever seen. The worst of it? That entire scene with God and Satan: Crowley never once looking at Aziraphale, not even at the most heartwrenching confession; Aziraphale talking about Crowley being amazing in the past tense; Crowley choosing something thatās not Aziraphale, after his whole entire monologue and character arc in season 2; Aziraphale accepting complete erasure after fighting 3 years in heaven against it, just because lobotomized Crowley wanted it. What the fuck?
Also, Asa and Anthony. They were cute. Adorable, really. Two cute old men (with bad hair, but iām willing to move past this) falling in love and getting married. Cute cute cute. Who the fuck were they? They were not Aziraphale and Crowley: they were an English librarian and a Scottish professor, not the angel and demon I loved and yearned and was obsessed with for years. And again, if it were them, why werenāt they recognizable at all? In all the human AUs i enjoyed the characters were perfectly recognizable: Crowley was still moody and a bit rough around the edges, yet soft and almost overwhelming in his loveliness; Aziraphale was still witty and smart and a bit (or a lot) of a snob, yet kind and warm and loving to a fault. These two human beings were cute, but they werenāt them. Who are these characters?
The winner takes it all, the loser has to fall
The loser, in this case, being queer people everywhere. Put your daggers down and let me tell you this: it is not acephobic to think a kiss was needed in this finale.
Youāre right when you say that physicality is not needed to show love and connection; in this case, however, physicality between them was already a given ā they already kissed. Out of desperation, out of despair, out of sadness, but they kissed. They crossed that bridge and their relationship jumped to the other side of strictly platonic and now, for a simple rule of balance and equity in pieces of media, the āugly kissā desperately (pardon the repetition) needed a āgood kissā. The finger thing could have been cute, but it lacked the depth and emotional weight to carry the conclusion of a third act.
If that was all the goobye we are going to get, it is simply not enough: they wrapped up 6000 years of history (a history they previously spend two seasons fighting tooth and nail to not erase, mind you) with a finger kiss and an awkward smile. Am i supposed to say it was good?
Also, implying that people wanted some physical intimacy between two queer characters (after it was already established) just to satisfy some sort of fetish is too disrespectful to even comment about.
A straight couple would have gotten a teary goodbye, an explicit I love you and a kiss before turning to dust. The gays get buried ā or erased from existence, in this case.
Human incarnate, or the lack of it
All in all, the finale felt cheap, flat, soulless. A comedy desperately grasping onto the physycality of it but not really committing to the bit, a love story relying on the chemistry between the mains without letting them have a single meaningful conversation, a show about humanity reducing human beings to comedic reliefs, over-the-top antagonists and afterthoughts easy to erase with a snap of two fingers.
And no, no one got a second chance: Adam rewrote the universe for nothing, Aziraphale tried to fix Heaven for nothing, Crowley asked questions for nothing. It was all erased anyway, and the ones who get to live simply arenāt them. Some version of them that was paradoxically destined to meet, going against the free will they gave up everything for.
Good Omens was always about knowing your fate, and choosing your own anyway. Loving despite, loving because of, loving even if. The love between to immortal beings being what kept everything together. The characters I knew and loved would have kept choosing each other and their world, not another new one, despite everything, because of history, and even if it was the hardest thing.
They loved their world, their Earth, and deserved to live in it. On their own side. Just the two of them.
So I really didnāt like the movie, and the message it sent. I did not find it bittersweet, just bleak. And this is why.
Going forward, Iāll finish every fic I started. After, I donāt know. It may take me a while.
Thanks for reading. Fuck Neil Gaiman and all abusers. Protect and believe victims.
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