i write things maybe?

While it's important to approach writing with creativity and imagination, it's crucial to prioritize responsible and ethical storytelling. That being said, if you're looking for information on poisons for the purpose of writing fiction, it's essential to handle the subject matter with care and accuracy. Here is a list of some common poisons that you can use in your stories:

Hemlock: Hemlock is a highly poisonous plant that has been used as a poison in various works of literature. It can cause paralysis and respiratory failure.

Arsenic: Arsenic is a toxic element that has been historically used as a poison. It can be lethal in high doses and can cause symptoms such as vomiting, abdominal pain, and organ failure.

Cyanide: Cyanide is a fast-acting poison that affects the body's ability to use oxygen. It can cause rapid loss of consciousness and cardiac arrest.

Nightshade: Nightshade plants, such as Belladonna or Deadly Nightshade, contain toxic compounds that can cause hallucinations, respiratory distress, and even death.

Ricin: Ricin is a potent poison derived from the castor bean plant. It can cause organ failure and has been used as a plot device in various fictional works.

Strychnine: Strychnine is a highly toxic alkaloid that affects the nervous system, leading to muscle spasms, convulsions, and respiratory failure.

Snake Venom: Various snake venoms can be used in fiction as deadly poisons. Different snake species have different types of venom, each with its own effects on the body.

Belladonna: Also known as Deadly Nightshade, Belladonna contains tropane alkaloids such as atropine and scopolamine. Ingesting or even touching the plant can lead to symptoms like blurred vision, hallucinations, dizziness, and an increased heart rate.

Digitalis: Digitalis, derived from the foxglove plant, contains cardiac glycosides. It has been historically used to treat heart conditions, but in high doses, it can be toxic. Overdosing on digitalis can cause irregular heart rhythms, nausea, vomiting, and visual disturbances.

Lead: Lead poisoning, often resulting from the ingestion or inhalation of lead-based substances, has been a concern throughout history. Lead is a heavy metal that can affect the nervous system, leading to symptoms such as abdominal pain, cognitive impairment, anemia, and developmental issues, particularly in children.

Mercury: Mercury is a toxic heavy metal that has been used in various forms throughout history. Ingesting or inhaling mercury vapors can lead to mercury poisoning, causing symptoms like neurological impairment, kidney damage, respiratory issues, and gastrointestinal problems.

Aconite: Also known as Wolfsbane or Monkshood, aconite is a highly toxic plant. Its roots and leaves contain aconitine alkaloids, which can affect the heart and nervous system. Ingesting aconite can lead to symptoms like numbness, tingling, paralysis, cardiac arrhythmias, and respiratory failure.

Thallium: Thallium is a toxic heavy metal that can cause severe poisoning. It has been used as a poison due to its tastelessness and ability to mimic other substances. Thallium poisoning can lead to symptoms like hair loss, neurological issues, gastrointestinal disturbances, and damage to the kidneys and liver.

When incorporating poisons into your writing, it is essential to research and accurately portray the effects and symptoms associated with them. Additionally, be mindful of the potential impact your writing may have on readers and the importance of providing appropriate context and warnings if necessary.

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But if you like put the venom from a common european viper (Vipera berus) on a dagger and have an assassin stab someone with it... That would work.

The wound will be painful and the cells that came in contact with the venom will start dying. The character stabbed will most likely die of sepsis caused by the cells dying and the tissue necroticing as the venom isn't all that lethal for healthy adult humans, but you should go to a hospital if you do get bit by a spicy friend. Snake venom makes for a bad poison if you dump it in tea, but when it gets stabbed in, then it becomes fun

To be clear, using AI to churn out a piece of fiction is not writing.

Using a bot (possibly one that was trained using a scrape of Ao3, that is to say, the theft of work from every writer who has posted their work on Ao3) is NOT WRITING.

It is theft. It isn’t creation. It’s a regurgitation of the consumed collective work and effort and heart and time of every writer who has shared their work on Ao3.

‘I’m not a good writer’ is no excuse.

Want to be a writer? Put in the time everyone else does to practice.

Don’t feel confident in your work? Open yourself up to the same vulnerability and risk that the rest of us do.

You don’t get to use a fucking bot to vomit out an approximation of a story and pretend you’ve got skin in the game.

The sad thing? This bot-assembled fic wasn’t bad. It was bland, but it had internal logic, some passing context to character and canon. It wasn’t like those early AI art pieces that had surreal compositions and extra fingers. It wasn’t immediately obvious it was made by a bot.

In this instance the person who posted it admitted they had used a bot. Which, actually, I have some respect for. But it probably isn’t the first and it won’t be the last.

I think part of the issue here is that people who do this think of fic as an end product. As a thing to be consumed. As content.

That's not fanfic.

Fic, in its essence, is the act of creation, of transformation. It is critically analyzing characters, exploring ideas, relationships, societal values, the dynamics of love and sexuality... the list goes on. Fic is a process that encapsulates all of this, the effort to make something that means something. That says something about what it means to be human (yes, kinky smut included). That takes vulnerability and guts and love to put out into the world.

If you think of fic as content that is there to be consumed, then yeah, it makes sense to find a quick and easy way to produce it. If the point for you is getting attention (kudos, reblogs, etc) with little to no work, using AI is tempting. But that's a capitalistic mindset that entirely negates what fanfic is.

To clarify for anyone confused:

I made my original post because this is the first time I saw it happening, despite the fact we all knew this was coming as soon as midjourney landed in the art scene and we heard about the ao3 scrape.

While my writing is my own, and I’m secure and proud of it, I’m not under any self-congratulatory illusion that I was that good when I started. Many of the fics I’ve read by first-time writers are similar to what this bot produced, and those writers still deserve basic respect and civility.

Anyone working under the delusion that ai tech won’t get better at its manipulation of the data is sadly mistaken. If you haven’t been following the ai progress on visual art, you might have missed that you can now request pieces to be produced in the specific style of an established artist. And the bots can do that now! They can make visual pieces almost indistinguishable from the original artist’s style—no matter how unique, or weird, that original artist’s style is.

My post wasn’t about me, or my writing. It was about the encroachment of ai and the accompanying cultural devaluation of human artistic expression outside of the work-based capitalist model.

It was about the impact of wholesale thefts of a community’s collective work.

It was about the meaning and importance of people’s generosity in sharing their genuine creations.

I am interested in reflections on the human condition from other human beings. I am not interested in the guided narrative of a theft powered sophisticated averaging machine.

I found this baffling. What, I thought, was the point of plagiarism in the absence of material benefit? How can you enjoy your stolen kudos, knowing you didn't actually write the thing people are praising?

I wonder now if for them, they thought of the stealing itself as a form of labor which entitled them somehow to those kudos. Because that's what's going on with AI written fic, only more indirectly. It's still plagiarism, because all AI writing is plagiarism; it can only do what it does because it's capable of stealing from 100,000,000,000 texts instead of just cutting and pasting from one or half a dozen. But because you have to design the prompt yourself, it creates the illusion that the product is your "work."

Anyway. I was having a conversation not long ago with @shdwsilk about this very question: what will AI do to fanfic? Because although I would assume that most writers see a major difference between writing your own story and telling a chatbot how to extrude one for you, I do wonder if there is a subset of readers out there who will cease to care about the distinction, and who will accept AI written stories if it means they can get more of their favorite content faster.

But I think this is actually the key thing pointed out in the conversation above: the whole idea of fiction as "content" is what got us here in the first place. Writing is valuable to me as a means through which human beings try to help each other understand the human condition. This is what fiction, IMHO, is supposed to do. This is as true for fanfiction as it is for Literature with a capital L.

From the point of view of monetization, however, it doesn't matter what the Content does or how it was generated as long as you can sell it. This is as true for film studios as it is for the people out there sending AI generated short stories to Clarkesworld. I think a lot of producers would be happy to make films based on AI generated scripts, provided people would watch them. In a way, they have always been trying to approximate this situation by constantly recombining whatever they think are the most profitable narrative elements of the most successful blockbuster movies.

In 1984, George Orwell incorporates this running gag about how Julia works in the Fiction Department--as a mechanic. Fiction is now written by machines which recombine the same six plots; humans are involved on the writing process only when the machine gets out of order. He was envisioning this as an aspect of Stalinist totalitarianism, but like so many things about 1984, it now functions as a description of life under unopposed capitalism.

I find all this infinitely depressing. How long will people persist in the quixotic business of attempting to use language to communicate with other humans? How long do we have before people just stop expecting or even seeking meaning from their fiction? How long do we have before writing has been fully mechanized--created by machines and directed toward other machines, with humans included in the chain only because they are the point at which the cash is infused?

In that sense, it’s essentially a writing challenge in consistency with a specific style, in a particular range of voices that aren’t always your own.

What’s the worst thing a fanfic can be, in my opinion? Out of character. If you’ve come to a fic to read about a specific character, with a distinct personality, style of speech, and set of morals, and the author of the fic hasn’t done their job properly, you won’t feel like you’re actually reading about that character, and you will have a hard time reading the fic.

There is so much that goes into creating a unique character that is easy to not think about until you have the extreme constraint of writing the actions and speech of a character you did not originate, where you have to match the thought process, ideas, and syntax of someone else, essentially trying to insert yourself into the mind of the professional writer who originated the character, and extrapolate how they would make their creation react to the situation you’ve put them in, what words they would put in that person’s mouth, etc.

"Kill your darlings" is bullshit, you shouldn't throw out things that spark joy, just put them into good use or somewhere they're not in the way. Combine scenes, characters and locations. You've got two beloved but unimportant background characters with only a vague scraping role in the story? Combine them. Have just one, who now has the traits, speaking lines and the role of both of them.

You've got a Super Important But Boring scene, and a scene that doesn't progress the story but was basically just you indulging in describing a wonderful location? Combine them. Have the characters have that Super Important Conversation in the pretty rose garden or the lovely bookshop you wanted to include.

You've got two really cool locations that are in the same city but both only show up once, and it feels like a waste to indulge in describing them in detail? Combine them. The smoky tavern and the smoky witch's brew shop are now working out of the same building - the witch and the tavern keeper are now married.

Solution? Bubble graphs. Or spiderweb graph, whatever you may call it. Put scenes in bubbles and connect them to core plot bubbles. Does that part work there? Is character in the right place? No? Break the line and attach where you feel it'll work best. Once your plan is set, you can strategically and more easily move text and characters without feeling like you're juggling a whole ass DnD odyssey on -3 hours of sleep and +20 anxiety.