Issue 3, 3! Ah ah ah!
You know something, this is the first issue where I’ve actually started off knowing where to type things in Substack. Look at me. Actually getting better at something.
Writerly Thoughts
Status. Since last I subbed stack, I’ve managed just over 1000 words added to the WIP. Which I’m going to take as a victory, as I don’t think there’s been a single day between then and now where I haven’t felt some degree of terrible. Right now my allergies are killing me, and the meds are keeping me in a loopy state.
Still, it was a good scene. And brings the overall wordcount of the WIP up to 39,141 words. Which I’ll admit, I looked up and it annoys me I’m so close to a milestone wordcount without cresting it. Hopefully by the end of the weekend.
Techerly Thoughts
Two weeks ago I included a link to a rather lengthy video, and instead of going straight into discussing, I figured I’d give everyone two weeks to watch it. Which I assume you did.
What?
None of you?
I gave you two weeks!
Alright. Well, here’s the link again, and today we’re just going to dive in. The crux of the video is breaking down a scheme to exploit…lots of things. Exploit people who wanted to be able to call themselves “writers” whether or not they’d actually written a single word. Exploit ghost writers. Exploit graphic and voice artists by lowballing them. And exploit the audiobook posting policies of Amazon (which have been tightened since then). All of this with the promise of paaaaaaaassive iiiiincooooome. Slap any ole piece of crud up on Audible and watch the sweet sweet money roll in, while impressing everyone you know that you’re a writer!
I went into this as part of tech thoughts rather than writing thoughts because this is going to evolve. It already is evolving. Because now we’re seeing people trying to push LLM-created text into submissions for literary magazines and onto the Kindle store. And it’s aggressive. There’s already a demonstrable amount of LLM “written” novels out there, some by people who are quite up front and others who are shadier about it. Amazon tries to fight back, but it’s becoming a signal-to-noise issue.
And I’m waiting. Just waiting. For the first person to start offering a “get rich on passive income” scheme about teaching people how to craft prompts for LLM novels, how to use Canva or a deep dreaming tool to create a cover, and through this “write” an entire novel in an afternoon! And then you can get bots to simulate reading the books! An entire ecosystem of con artists telling rubes to let bots write books that only bots will read. And through it all the Kindle ecosystem just gets worse and worse.
Then the problem becomes people who actually want to write getting frustrated and robbing the world of their thoughts.
In the end, my issue is this: If we as a society are automating creative endeavors to allow people more time to participate in the hyper capitalist grind economy, then we’re doing something terribly, terribly wrong.
Rant over.
Thoughterly Thoughts
Go see the Barbie Movie. I’ve been buzzing about this movie since I saw it last week, and it’s becoming a serious chunk of my personality.
there already ARE people offering classes to teach "writers" how to pump out a book in a day via these methods. You know those people who pop up when they hear you're an author and say "I've got this great idea, I just don't have the time to write it."? This is their HAY DAY. I hope this is one of those "something's gotta give" situations, but what "gives" is not real authors giving up on their work. Also, The Barbie movie is absolutely my whole personality now.