Some thoughts on AI “art”

A couple years ago, when ChatGPT first came out, most of the news about it I saw was just that it was terrible.  I think it took a few months for the main story I saw about it being that it was stealing work.  Anyway, I was hearing about how AI “stories” were terrible, and I had the idea of a writer who took an AI “story” as a first draft and edited it into a real story.  (Like all your story ideas are groundbreaking.)  But a few seconds after I had the idea, I wondered if life should imitate art and I should edit whatever the AI gave me.  So I found a site that let you get a sample of AI writing, and made a prompt along the lines of “Make a short story with aliens.” It started spitting out words, but after a paragraph or so I stopped it because it was basically gibberish.  Polishing this turd into something halfway decent would take longer than just writing a halfway decent story.  I know some will say I needed a better prompt along the lines of, “Make a short story about aliens in the style of Hemingway,” or whatever, but in the time it would take me to learn how best to use AI, I could just learn better time management skills so I could spend more time writing.  That is the only time I’ve ever tried to use AI for anything, and I never got around to writing that story.

Now you probably expect the standard screed against any and all things AI.  But I know that “AI” seems to just be a term applied to any fancy computer program.  Some of these may have merit, especially in regards to number crunching and pattern recognition.  I imagine someone having an “AI” look at tens of thousands of medical records and finding possible connections.  Like, maybe it would find evidence that having a banana a day cuts your chance of dying from a heart attack by 2%, but increases your chance of getting colon cancer by 1%.  This evidence, like all evidence, would need to be studied further in tests to see if there is an actual link or if it is all coincidence.  That type of AI I don’t mind.  As long as the medical records are used ethically and the results aren’t blindly taken as fact. 

The AI I do mind is what is used for “art,” and especially for writing.  There is a crafting-side to writing, which on my best days I’d still rank myself as below average, and there’s a business-side to writing, which I’ve largely failed.  My … disgust I guess at AI “art” is that they’ve cranked the business-side dial to 11 while also cranking the crafting-side dial to 0, or even -11.  In the time it takes me to craft a story that will make $X, an AI can “write” a billion stories that are all worthless, but each one only needs to make a penny or two for them to add up to $100X.  And in a world run by “More money is more gooder,” people, there will just be more and more well-crafted stories buried in a sea of AI slop. 

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I had an idea for this post, but it didn’t go in that direction.  So there may be future installments where I give my thoughts on other aspects of AI.  I’m sure you’re really looking forward to that.

Random Writing Tips – Blog lists

 

The basic reason I write these Random Writing Tips posts, is the idea that the more things I have out on the internet, the more likely someone will stumble upon them, learn that I exist, be interested enough to buy some of my books, and I make a tiny fraction of the money I make from my hated day job.  I guess there’s also the hope of building up a friendly group of fellow creatives.  But instead of just writing posts on random topics, I’m trying to write some that are loosely connected under the topic of Writing Tips. 

That’s nice, but why am I telling you that?  Well, I was trying to think of a tip to write up for this month and I had an idea.  But after thinking about it for a bit, I wasn’t sure if it was a new idea.  When I first started these, I kept a list of the posts I had done, but I’d forget to update it and whenever I remembered I had to add the last four or five posts.  (So, I have a Word doc for Writing Tips.  The first page or two has the tips I’ve started writing, and then there’s like four pages of ideas, and then I have the archive.  But I rarely scroll that far down, which is why I keep forgetting about it.) So to see if I had done the idea before, I had to click the Random Writing Tips label in the blog, and scroll through all the posts.  And while I did find that the new idea was new, it was very similar to an old idea. 

This took a few minutes of my time, which isn’t that bad, but I did wonder if I could do something better.  I also may have just needed a little project I could work on for a few days.  So I made my Random Writing Tips List page.  It’s just a list of all my writing tips, along with the day they were posted and a brief description.  So now when I get an idea, instead of spending a few minutes scrolling through my blog to see if I’d done it before, I can spend a minute scrolling down a page. 

Cool.  But does this really warrant a blog on writing tips?  Well, if you write a blog where you review movies, it makes sense to have a list of what movies you’ve reviewed somewhere, either sorted by release date, genre, however you score them, whatever.  But if you’re doing something as nebulous as Random Writing Tips, you may not think to keep a list.  And a list makes it easier for people to check out whatever tips sound interesting without having to scroll through my blog.  Will this list increase the chance someone will buy one of my books?  There’s no way to tell, but it can’t hurt.

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Image from Pixabay.

Save America EBook Sale

I think for the past decade, every Fourth of July I’ve had a sale for some of my ebooks.  Which ones vary over the years, but Political Pies, my collection of forty short stories of a political nature, is always included.  The sale is usually just to mark the Fourth of July, but this year – with an ever-quickening slide into authoritarianism – I’m making it a Save America Sale.

How will my ebooks save America?  Well, I could argue that most of my stories are science fiction and show worlds where very alien aliens have learned to live and work together, thus showing the idiocy of people being upset their neighbor doesn’t have the exact same shade of skin color.  But really, my ebooks don’t contain some magic formula to save America.  It’s just a nice gesture.  If you’re fighting authoritarianism, then it’s likely you read, so here is a collection of free ebooks you can pick up.

In previous years, I’ve had sales at points throughout the year where I asked people to also register to vote or to vote.  But apparently, offering anything to get people to register or to vote is technically illegal.  I doubt they’d go after some unknown author giving away free ebooks, but I’m also not a billionaire who can just bribe his way out of problems.  So for this Save America Sale, I’m not asking anyone to do anything.  If you do decide to register to vote, or run for office, or march in the streets, that is entirely on you.  But if you have some time waiting for the march to get going, some of these ebooks are collections of short stories you can read in a few minutes. 

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From Tuesday July 1st through Saturday July 5th, the following eight ebooks will be free to download.

Political Pies

Everybody complains about politics, but does anyone do anything about it? My attempt to do something about it is to collect forty of my short stories with a political element into my Political Pies anthology. The stories are either politically neutral or equally condemning of the national parties. Instead of trying to sway you to one ideology or another, my goal is to just get people thinking about politics in the hopes a rose might grow out of all the political manure.

Rise

“Rise” is a standalone story set in my Human Republic Universe. The story follows the events after the tragic deaths of the colonists on a small colony in a distant star system.

Duty

For reasons of safety and avoiding paradoxes, Time Travel Incorporated assigns a Guardian to all its travelers. So when there is an accident during political historian Roj Hasol’s trip back to 1968, it’s his Guardian Susan who sets out on the arduous task of cleaning up the mess.

The Only Certainty

On The Day, for reasons unknown, people began changing. They went to sleep as their old selves and woke in their beds in different bodies: bodies that had belonged to other people. And each time they fall asleep, they wake in a new body. Set months later, The Only Certainty follows Derrick Gorton on an average day in this new world as he deals with food shortages, the semi-collapse of society, and how to finish his latest novel.

Lonely Phoenix

Partway to a new colony world, board member Geoffrey Ames is woken from hibernation by the caretaking crew of the Lucian. They require him to look into the matter of their fellow crewman Morgan Heller. Morgan’s claims – such as being over 1500 years old – would normally land him in the psychiatric ward, except he can back up some of his other claims.

An Ounce of Prevention

Like most people, Jason Fisher wanted to make the world a better place, but he doubted he would ever have the chance to make much of a mark. Then a “woman” came to him, asking his help to save humanity by threatening it.

The Moon Before Mars: Why returning to the moon makes more sense than rushing off to Mars

Over the last few years a lot of people have caught Mars fever. It seems a week doesn’t go by without a report of some new group wanting to send people to Mars, or some big name in the industry talking about why we have to go to Mars, or articles talking about the glorious future humanity will have on Mars. All of this worries me. In my opinion, a Mars base is currently not sustainable because there’s no way for it to make money. A few missions may fly doing extraordinary science, but if it’s then cancelled for cost the whole Mars Project may just be seen as an expensive stunt.

Fortunately, there are other places in the solar system besides Mars. While bases on the moon and amongst the asteroids won’t be as inspirational as one on Mars, they will have opportunities for businesses to make goods and services as well as profits, meaning less chance of them being outright cancelled. This will make life better on Earth and secure a firm foothold in space for humanity. The essays in The Moon Before Mars: Why returning to the moon makes more sense than rushing off to Mars allow me to describe my ideas on what can be accomplished on the moon and with the asteroids, and why Mars isn’t the destiny of humanity its cheerleaders make it out to be.

The Future is Coming

As a science fiction writer, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how technology will change the way we live. I’ve come up with these ten short essays about science fictional elements that will – almost certainly – one day become science fact as a way for people to start coming to terms with them. Because I’ve spent time thinking about clones and AIs, I feel I’ll be okay when they do finally show up whereas most people will probably freak out. I hope these essays will get people to start thinking about the future because, no matter what we do, the future is coming.

Writing Newsletter Second Quarter 2025

 

This quarter I continued writing a story each month on my website, publishing, “On Your Sleeve,” “Mountain out of a Molehill,” and “Black Sheep.” My Ko-fi post for this quarter was reposting the poem “For the Public Health.” On one of my blogs, I posted the stories “Someday” and “A Sealed Fate.” I also reposted my poem “Loss” on my Mastodon profile.

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If I counted correctly, this quarter I posted one new microfiction as well as reposted four old ones, and posted four new haiku.  The microfictions can be found on my Untitled Works Page, and the haikus on my Haiku Page.  These were fewer than in previous quarters in large part because I’ve been overworked trying to get stuff going in my garden.  I do what I can in between rain showers, and the few days it doesn’t rain it’s in the 90s, so I can only do so much before I have to stop.  But the weeds keep growing.

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Last quarter I hinted that I might publish a story on Draft2Digital.  Well, I started polishing up the story, and then there was just so much bad shit going on that I became somewhat disinterested.  And then all the garden stuff, so I still have a story that needs polishing.  Will I get around to it in the next three months?  We’ll have to see.

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Image from Pixabay.

Thoughts on Doctor Who

In the past year or so, I’ve gotten into “First Time Watching” videos on YouTube.  Basically, some 20-something will film themselves watching The Terminator, or Iron Man, or whatever and post a half-hour long video of their biggest gasps or reactions.  What I find appealing about these, is they will be watching a favorite movie of mine, but one I haven’t seen for a decade, and it’s like I’m watching it again with … not a friend, but a person I vaguely know who has no idea I even exist.  Also, I forget how many people I’ve seen shocked at the “chest burster” scene.  That’s fun. 

There are twenty or so of these reactors I follow on YouTube.  And recently, four of them have either started watching Doctor Who or I just found them.  So I’ve been seeing the highlights of these … not old-old Doctor Who episodes, and since season … whatever just ended, I figured now was as good a time as any to write up some of my thoughts on the show.

First off, back during the time of the Tenth Doctor, if you had asked for my Top 10 TV shows, Doctor Who would have made the cut.  Now, I almost need to be reminded it exists.  For me, I’d say the Tenth Doctor was peak, and it’s been going down – sometimes faster, sometimes slower – since then.  If you asked why I thought that, I’d say I think the writing isn’t as good.  But if you then asked for concrete examples, I could only shrug.  Because it’s all subjective.  For example, there is an episode that started strong, I thought had an interesting premise and I was eager for the mystery to be solved.  And then the episode kind of petered out and ended.  So it’s an episode that I do not care for.  But, the one First Time Watcher who is far enough ahead to have seen it, loved it.  And I think when it first came out the “consensus” was that half the people loved it while half hated it.  And I was just in the hated half.  And that just seems to be where I always end up.

I understand that no book, song, TV show whatever will be loved by everyone.  That’s … life.  But the more I thought about it, I think what happened with Doctor Who is it’s not just they have more episodes I dislike than like, but they keep going back to the episodes I dislike.  There will be an episode I don’t care for, but instead of letting me move on and forget all about it, four episodes later, that villain comes back and is just as lame and uninteresting.  Or next season there’s a sequel episode, or two seasons later this character I’ve completely forgotten about comes back to play a super important role and I’m just confused trying to remember who they are.  And while there are some characters I’d like to see return, I would rather have more new stuff with less callbacks. 

If, somehow, the people at Doctor Who see this, all I ask is they do more new stuff.  New, good stuff.  Stories where the villain isn’t one dimensional, or the mystery is “solved” in a satisfactory way instead of just petering out in some artsy-fartsy way.  And if you do bring things back, maybe do them in a way where we don’t need to have watched fourteen episodes over the last fifty years to know what’s going on.  You have all of time and space to work with.  Do something new, that’s also good.

Random Writing Tips – Maybe write bad stories

 

I’ve easily read over a thousand short stories.  I have numerous short story collections, and I used to subscribe to a couple magazines that published 10-12 stories each issue and I read all of them.  Now I am terrible with titles or names of authors, but if you had me describe the plot of a story, I probably remember … fifty or so.  But if you handed me a story I read a decade ago but couldn’t remember, there’s a fifty-fifty chance I’d remember something as I was reading it.

This all came up recently, because there is a short story I really enjoyed and I wanted to find it.  Partly just to reread it, but also to see if it was online anywhere so I could share it, since it has some relevance to everything going on in the world now.  But I can’t remember what it was called, or who wrote it, or what magazine it was in.  And when I searched for it using basic terms that fit the story, it turned out there is a novel with that basic term as a title, which were all the results.  So I’m still searching for that story.  If I ever find it, I’ll come back and leave a note.

Now what does all that have to do with the title of this post?  Well, of the hundreds of stories I read in those magazines, that one story is the only one I remember truly enjoying.  The dozen or so other stories I remember I … disliked to hated.  Which means, most of the stories I read I don’t remember because they were just okay.  Maybe okay good, or okay bad, but ultimately forgettable.  The vast majority of the stories I remember, I remember because I did not like them.  Like, there’s a story about this futuristic sports doping scandal that falls apart because the people that spent time and money on this doping technology forgot to tell the athlete they needed to train differently.  Or the group that built a time machine and are sending someone back to study this lost civilization decide on the loose cannon with no training over anyone better qualified.  Or the President who hints multiple times they have a secret plan for world peace, but when they have to reveal it, it’s just we’re going to bomb people who disagree with us.  And they weren’t a “How the hell did this asshole become President?” type, but someone up until then shown to be diplomatic and understanding of the power of their position. 

I was thinking about all of this, and I realized that maybe writers should write a bad story, just in case it gets published and someone remembers it because they disliked it.  I mean, being remember that way is probably easier than being remembered for writing a good story.  Something to think about.

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Image from Pixabay.

An interesting history YouTube channel

I have an interest in history.  There’s the standard WWII and ancient Rome, but also the history of spaceflight, technology, and anything dealing with the hundred or so other minor interests I have.  As such, I follow I don’t know how many YouTube history channels.  But for this post, I want to talk about one in particular: Cambrian Chronicles, the “number one Welsh history channel on YouTube.”

It was probably about a year ago, I was on some video and I scrolled down to read some comments, when one of the recommended videos on the side caught my eye.  I forget what it was, but it was probably something like “The Lost Welsh Kingdom.” I’ve never taken one of those DNA tests to see where I’m from, but growing up I heard my family was mostly German with some Irish and English.  So there’s probably some Welsh in there as well.  And for some reason, at the time the idea of a lost kingdom or whatever sounded interesting.  So I checked out the video, enjoyed it, and followed a new channel.

I would say that a “typical” Cambrian Chronicles video would be there’s a manuscript from the year 750 that names a dozen Welsh kings.  We have “good” historical records for ten of them.  Here’s the best evidence/theory for the other two.  And we go through five or six other ancient manuscripts to piece together how something was likely mistranslated or the truth is likely right out in the open, but nobody noticed.  A good actual video is The Royal Title that No One Can Remember.  Basically, there’s a list of a dozen or so people with a “title” that can’t be translated.  We don’t know why these people were called it, or why other similar people weren’t. 

All of this is interesting, but why talk about it in a blog about writing?  For one, someone could easily write a story where that Royal Title just meant that they were aliens, and nobody could argue about it because the historical record doesn’t say otherwise.  But more importantly, hearing about kings or kingdoms that – a thousand years later – we only know existed because of some scraps of parchment, is a reminder of how … temporary our existence is.  Hell, given enough time, Shakespeare will be forgotten.  I believe most people know that, on some level, but few have come to grips with that reality.  And right now, too many people are ignoring reality for all our detriment.