Petard. Hoisted By.

I will not link to anything related to Charlie Kirk’s death. I’m aware there’s a video circulating. I would advise anyone who’s watched it to immediately play Tetris.

And I don’t think I need to comment on any of this. Everyone else is. I’ll just say that he advocated for gun rights against the “acceptable deaths” of those who have been shot. And yeah. Those who live by the gun find themselves perished by the gun.

Meanwhile. The AI shit continues.

A lot of effort goes into writing books. Years. And a lot of expense – research, supporting yourself while you do it, supporting your family while you do it. Writing books isn’t a hobby – it’s a Herculean effort.

Look, I love search engines and the internet – and it absolutely pains me to see it all being corrupted. Pattern-matching? I’m a knitter, a taxonomist, and a puzzle-solver – I’m here for it! But when pattern-matching becomes a predictive exercise based on statistical probabilities and is then substituted for human thinking – I mean, what gets me most of all is the people who cry “you just have to be better at making prompts!” 

No, I don’t. It’s not my job to understand the machine. It’s really, really not. My job is to reason and deduce and elicit and create. The machine’s job is to enable me to find reliable results I can use to do these things. To do my writing, among other things. It’s a tool. It’s not a brain. Tim Berners-Lee is rightfully horrified at what is being made of his invention – and he’s right about one thing.

There are no standards.

For most of my career, I’ve been involved with ISO, W3C, and many other standards bodies. I am a huge fan of standards. But there is no seat for ISO (or ANSI or NISO or W3C) at the AI table. This concerns me greatly. Nor is there apparently any appetite for establishing a standards body for AI technologies. It’s just hungry hungry hippos, eager for “share of search”, all the way down. 

Drawing on a body of work that is copyrighted – and I’m sorry not sorry, I’m so done with so-called disruptors claiming that copyright is dead. It isn’t. It won’t be. I agree that it goes on too long – life of the author plus 75 years is waaaay too long – but if my work is going to be sucked up into this massive IP vacuum, I’m going to want to be compensated fairly for that. And compensating me fairly doesn’t mean devaluing the worth of my work. I’ve done a LOT of writing over the course of my career – some of it fictional, some of it industry-specific. It’s HARD GRAFT. A system that just sucks it all up willy-nilly and merges it with other work to spit out results that are not just inaccurate but fucking dead wrong – no. 

No.

It’s not my job to enable the machine to learn. It’s not my job to let the machine make mistakes based on incomplete data. And it’s not my job to feed the machine my hard work gratis – the machine is not a toddler, and I’m not raising it. So any suggestion that authors should roll over and just let this all happen is entirely specious. 

I’d like to see more standards of reliability, trustworthiness, and fact-based results. And I’m happy to work on those! But these days are too chaotic, too political, and too deadly for me to be anything close to an enthusiast.

Props to Maria Bustillos for having been a sounding board while I thought through all of this. Please subscribe to Flaming Hydra. It’s so amazing and thought provoking, and the people who run it are incredible.