~Mikachu~

Please, please, PLEASE.....

✧ Magic systems with actual consequences that aren't just "ooh I'm tired now." Like your wizard gets hiccups that turn into burps of flame for three days. Your necromancer's hair falls out in clumps. Your healer has to absorb a percentage of the pain they cure and spends evenings crying in the bath.

✧ Fantasy creatures that are just... kinda mid at their designated thing. Dragons who are afraid of heights. Vampires with a garlic intolerance that's more "lactose intolerant at a pizza party" than "instant death." Werewolves who transform but just become a really anxious medium-sized dog.

✧ Prophecies that are vague because the ancient oracle genuinely had terrible handwriting. Nobody can agree if it says "the chosen one" or "the chicken coop" and honestly both are equally possible at this point.

✧ Magic schools where students are failing because the curriculum is actually hard, not because they're the chosen one having drama. Let someone flunk Potions because they can't math the ratios. Academic probation exists in fantasy too.

✧ Dark Lords with the most mundane administrative problems. Yes, he's conquering the realm, but also the castle's plumbing is a nightmare and his generals keep submitting their expense reports late.

✧ Worldbuilding that remembers disabled people exist in fantasy settings too. No, not just "magically healed." I mean fantasy wheelchairs, accessibility spells, sign language variations, service dragons, the whole deal.

✧ Taverns that aren't just quest-dispensing machines. Sometimes the innkeeper is closed for a family emergency. Sometimes there's karaoke night and it's bad. Sometimes they're out of the stew because Greg ordered all of it.

Hit the “thumbs down.” It’s like, what’s wrong??? Was our summary wrong? Were there offensive words? Thank you for helping us improve our AI tools :)

I selected “other.”

Text box popped up. Please elaborate!

Wrote in “I can fucking read” submit comment

Then had to spend several minutes torching all my settings with a flamethrower. Let me be clear: I’m (a lawyer) notoriously picky with my words FOR GOOD REASON (lawyering) so I overwhelmingly reject Gmail’s “helpful” little assistance. My privacy settings were set to “full paranoia” a little less than a year ago when I saw the writing on the wall and knew public defenders could become a target in the future. Better to lock it all down now.

Gemini had crept in there and turned ALL that shit back on. And showed itself by saying “Jane Doe says she’s so sorry for your loss and offers to reschedule for Thursday at 3” over an email from Jane Doe saying “I’m so sorry for your loss. We could reschedule for Thursday at 3?”

Why would I possibly need this. In what universe would I need this. I have eyes and a brain and a reading speed that twenty years ago was measured at 1500 wpm with full comprehension on dense scientific text. Furthermore! If I read a summary, I’m not reading what they actually wrote. If I’m not reading what they actually wrote, I’m not using my own judgment on the words and phrases that they used.

I literally don’t understand why this is helpful at all. This is just avoidance. Using LLMs to write is specifically Not Writing. Using LLMs to summarize is Not Reading. Using them to make art is Avoiding Making Art. Just READ! Just WRITE! I was not put on this fucking planet to not read and not write and not make art! Avoidance is an anxiety symptom and indulging it gives it more power.

If I had an AI to do my most dreaded task, answer the phone for clients, I wouldn’t use it. Because an AI cannot help them. An AI cannot hear the facts of their case, make appropriate noises, be thoughtful and insightful, and then give them a realistic estimate of what could happen in court. I am unique. I cannot be replaced by machine learning. I have style. I have expertise. I don’t hallucinate unless I’m having a really great Friday night and I’m off the clock.

When I need to outsource tasks from my own brain, I give them to people I know can do them and that I trust to do them right.

starting to suspect that tech bros actually just don’t know what reading is

I keep thinking about how many of these chat bots are free—for now. And of course they are! It’s a classic marketing technique when you’re trying to get your foot in the door with a novel product: let folks use it, let them get used to it, then start charging for it. You don’t have to look any further than streaming to see a very recent example of how this happens.

And it’s going to happen with AI.

There’s nothing these assholes love more than making money off of other people’s hard work. But you can’t legally charge for fanfic! So how do you get around that? You charge for a chat bot (which you trained on other people’s fanfic). You can’t charge for the content, but you can charge for the thing that produces the content.

AI is theft, and there are a whooooole lot of people gleefully looking to make a buck off of our hard work.

instead ask:

is it SINCERE

was it CATHARTIC

was it FUN TO MAKE

is it MADE BY ME

anyway if you get a comment like this, chances are that they are bot and their goal is to do whatever it takes to get you to delete your work, most certainly (from what I’ve heard) it’s because they want to “safely” steal your work, use it to train their ai without you being able to rightfully claim ownership of your work since “there’s no proof that the work was stolen/was posted elsewhere first by you” because the original source has already been deleted.

THEY ARE ALL BOTS. at first it was “ao3 is deleting fics and your entire account will be affected unless you delete the fics yourself” then it was “this work contains contents that are illegal and they have already reported you and your fic to the police” (yes, that’s how desperate these bots are), and now it’s this.

report their comments to ao3 for spam—in this case, specifically, I think you may be able to report them for harassment too—and don’t pay attention to them, most importantly don’t delete your works, don’t feel discouraged by their comments. remember that they are bots and they mass comment something like this on people’s works at random to get people to delete their works. (or even if they’re not bot, they are still pathetic bullies who don’t deserve your time or attention.)

The tragedy of needing to grieve and not knowing what or who you lost or why. The angst of having trauma and being denied the awareness that it's trauma. The suspense of being different somehow and left to wonder how and when. The tension of knowing that something is off and you can't find where it hurts. The Adventure Zone gets it. Kingdom Hearts gets it.

I mean, it seems pretty obvious when you put it like that, right?

But how many families, when an introvert sibling or child makes an effort to socialize,  snarkily say, “So, you’ve decided to join us”?

Or when someone does something they’ve had trouble doing, say, “Why can’t you do that all the time?” (Happened to me, too often.)

Or any sentence containing the word “finally”. 

If someone makes a step, a small step, in a direction you want to encourage, encourage it. Don’t complain about how it’s not enough. Don’t bring up previous stuff. Encourage it.

And before I’d even processed what he meant (that I was behaving more like a tenant than a family member), he went on some kind of internal flashback journey, and said “My father used to say that to me and I hated it, I don’t know why I said it to you,” and he apologised, and never made a joke like that again.

And if you encounter a true paywall, use Archive.Today to bypass it. Just paste the paywalled url into the blue “search archived snapshots” box near the bottom: