youngest child (derogatory)

( REBLOGS INCREDIBLY APPRECIATED)

We want to hear from you! 📣 🗯️

Over the past two years, the mess that is generative AI has barrelled its way through human creative spaces. It’s been… a shit show.

The effects of this hostile takeover are well reported: slop, enshittification, deepfakes, misinformation. AI came straight for creative work first (because it was illegally trained on it 🙃)—and yet, beyond the (very real) concern of industry redundancies, and the (dubious) claims of AI “replacing” human creatives, there’s notably a lack of discussion about how it’s impacted creatives just being creative.

Writing, scrolling, reading online—the basic ways we live our daily creativity are being impacted by This Thing, and it deserves more attention.

We know you have an opinion—and we know it’s good. We’d love if you’d share it with us.

The survey is anonymous and takes about 3 minutes. We’ll compile some of the findings and publish for all to read. (And if you want to be quoted in a future essay or social posts, please feel free to leave your name/pseudonym or social handles in the optional contact form at the end.)

We're committed to supporting human creatives in the age of AI—and we’re working to build a human-led, human-affirming network to make sure that human creativity is protected. Because without art, we’d be really screwed.

So please, tell us how we can help! Take the survey here.

I was thinking about how much BBC Merlin fic has been published since I joined the fandom, and felt inspired to take a leaf out of data queen @frogmerthur's book and make some graphs about it.

Because it was trained on pirated work—including freely accessible online writing (like fanfic, academic texts)—ChatGPT picked up patterns and quirks native to human writing.

Including (sigh) the em dash.

There are other victims here (RIP tapestry and delve 🫠), but the appropriation of the em dash—a punctuation mark beloved by writers everywhere—feels especially personal.

A kind of low-grade panic is ensuing. Writers who once memed their own em dash overuse—the greatest punctuation mark ever to grace the control-freak’s lexicon, frankly—are suddenly backing away to avoid accusations.

No. More. We have centuries of dash-abusing writers behind us. We will not sit quietly while AI repurposes our beloved stilted aside—or the just-one-more clarification the sentence demands—or the dramatic pause your comma could never—etc.

You don’t write like AI—AI writes like you.

Defend the em dash.

(Feel free to download/share/stick it where it matters!)

Every single person on this planet thinks about dark and taboo things. It's literally the most normal thing in the world.