It has been a rough… Well, couple of months in particular. Years. Decade. Etc. But the last couple months in particular have been very draining and extra exhausting. Having all of this stuff with my family hanging over me isn’t helpful at the best of times and these are not the best of times. The world looks increasingly awful as fascism continues to rise. Sure, we had a really good set of election results this past week, but we’ve got a long ways to go before anything starts to really change and the actions of various senatorial elected officials have made it pretty clear that this doesn’t change anything in their eyes despite how clear of a call to resist this should have been [I wrote this before they gave up, too, but more on that next week]. I don’t know how it could be any more clear than it is that the people of the US want our elected officials to resist every single one of Trumps moves, heinous or mundane. Throw is increasing work loads, a messed up sleep schedule, and it’s no wonder that I can’t seem to shake the dogged exhaustion I’m feeling. What the hell am I supposed to do about any of that? It’s all I can do to even think about sending a letter back to my aunt, the one who responded in what I’d call a positive manner, let alone write it and manage all of the other stressors that are taking up space in my mind with no relief on the horizon. All I want to do is lay down and surrender to unconsciousness until something has happened to resolve at least one of these things because I’m not sure I’ve got it in me to actually do anything about any of them.
Continue readingPlagiarism Machines
The Rot That Is “AI” Keeps Spreading Into Things I Love
Square Enix, the company that publishes (and makes, for the most part, but it’s also a little more complicated than that because of how companies are structured) Final Fantasy 14, has announced recently that they’re partnering with a bunch of local academics in Japan to study current “AI” products in an effort to have seventy percent of all Quality Assurance (testing, aka the work I do) and debugging fully automated sometime during 2027. Now, this is, of course, patently ridiculous and not something that will actually work out or is even possible in the way they want it to work, but the past years of watching the tech industry get gutted and people begin to lose their jobs to “AI” bullshit has taught me the obvious lesson that it doesn’t need to work for it to be adopted. It doesn’t need to be good for people to lose their jobs. It just needs to be good enough that someone can pretend it’s great and fire all of their QA staff in order to “reduce costs” so that shareholders can get a fraction of a decimal percent more money at the end of the fiscal year. It’s bleak, I know, but all of the studies done on it, every post-mortem on “AI Workflows” and almost every single company to adopt it have all shown that it is a neutral move at BEST and a net loss in every other case. People hate needing to check over the work of “AI” because of how often its wrong. People hate being forced to use tools that don’t work properly. As I watch it chip away at the industry I work in and watch it start being focused specifically on the work I do, I can’t help but feel like I’m staring down the barrel of a loaded gun every time it comes up. Which means that, every time someone jokes about it trying to take my job, I feel like they’re joking about the gun pointed at me going off and then insisting that it will never actually happen whenever I try to talk about how all this feels or why it’s bad to have around.
Continue readingA Project I’ve Been Considering For Years Has Been Stymied By How Much “AI” Crap There Is
After about three years of deeply considering it (which is a long time, even for me and my whole “think about getting a tattoo for a year before I can get it” thing, or my “think deeply about my personal indentity and how I wish to be referred to, testing things out in my head for nine months before mentioning that I was considering it even once” thing), I’ve decided to get into video editing. Not in a huge way. I’m not going to change careers or even get into the super fancy stuff. I just want to be able to do some basic editing: trimming, stitching, simple visual effects (like text on the screen), the occasional blur, and maybe some audio mixing for sound effects. Nothing major, just stuff that would help turn my many video-based ideas into a reality. I mean, I still want to make my “XX Ways To Die In Hyrule” Breath of the Wild video from that time I streamed playing through BotW wearing only hats right before Tears of the Kingdom came out. I also want to take the recordings I’ve made of wrestling events in Final Fantasy 14 and clean them up a bit so I’m not stuck trying to manage the start and end of the files by clicking the start/stop recording button. It’d be nice to be able to clean those up a bit and maybe hide my Party Chat stuff from the video so I can keep it private AND actually participate in it during wrestling events. I’ve also got a lot of ideas for other things bumbling around my head that would be fun to put together, if I could find the parts I need, so I’ve finally started directing a little bit of time and energy towards figuring all that out. And no, I’m not just doing this because I hit the downhill glide portion of my FF14 crafting project and still need to keep myself distracted (well, maybe a little, but it’s entirely coincidental).
Continue readingThe End Of An Era: I’ve Sworn Off National Novel Writing Month
You ever have one of those mornings where you wake up, casually decide to blast your eyeballs with some blue light courtesy of your phone in order to wake up more quickly, and then immediately regret every decision you’ve made in the short time you’ve been conscious because the first thing your brain comprehends in the day is some completely unexpected and emotionally destructive news? That was me on Labor Day, when I woke up and learned that the organization behind National Novel Writing Month had not only decided to officially allow LLMs and “AI writing tools” to be legitimate sources of text for their various month-long writing events but also tried to get ahead of anyone calling them on this bullshit by saying in the same statement that not allowing LLMs and these “writing aids” is both classist and ableist. Which is also bullshit. The whole thing is complete and utter bullshit. How the hell does an organization built around the idea of encouraging people to write not only allow text that wasn’t written (no LLM writes text, it generates a complex version of autocomplete) but allows it using tools built off of stolen writing? And, to top it all off, it turns out that a likely reason they’re taking this stance is that one of their major sponsors for the year is one of those now-allowed “AI writing aid” tools! One of the tolls built from ChatGPT and an ever-increasing amount of stolen work! It’s absolutely staggering.
Continue readingThe Creeping Death Of Public Creativity
Blogging–and most creative work, if I’m being honest–feels like an exercise in futility these days. Even putting aside all my doubts about my small audience, my questions about my own motivations for blogging (and the work I have to do in order to make sure that I’m not obsessing over numbers instead of focusing on honing my craft and expressing myself), and the constant grind of fighting against my own mental health and worsening burnout in order to continue creating, I still think the rising theft of creative work would be an existential threat to my public writing. I’d still write privately, of course, no matter what. I’m too much of a storyteller to ever stop telling stories, be it in tabletop games or in my own creative writing, but no part of me needs to post things publicly. I like posting things publicly. I like seeing that people are reading what I’ve written. I like having this level of public accountability. But I absolutely don’t need it. So it is incredibly difficult for me to keep writing posts for this blog as I slowly work on finding an alternative hosting platform and figure out what shape I want my blog to take on that platform. Normally I’d say something like “it would be really easy to ignore this and just carry on,” but it’s actually not easy this time. This time, I can barely make myself focus on my writing for more than a couple minutes at a time and my buffer, a staple of the last two and a half years of writing, has started to slip as I lose the energy and willpower required to push myself to write when I’m feeling worn down.
Continue readingI’m Choosing To Hold A Grudge This Time
While I wrote this a day after I wrote last week’s post, this one got to marinate for a week before it went up and while I didn’t change much beyond my usual editing (grammar, spelling, word choice: the basics), writing this without the sense of urgency inherent to last week’s post means I spent more time thinking and less time reacting. There’s a time and a place for reacting, of course. We should respond with outrage when something awful happens and the corresponding urgency should drive us to act when we otherwise might not. That said, that initial reaction or series of actions doesn’t mean that we’re done with it. We can’t blow up and then move on because that will let companies like Automattic get away with bullshit like creating an opt-out system for actively selling the media created and shared by their customers and userbase because they’ll know they can just ride out the first reaction and do whatever they wanted to do when everyone has moved on. After all, it would be incredibly easy to take more than they want and pretend to be magnanimous and caring when they dial it back down to what their actual goal was. It’s basic negotiating strategy, to aim high and then slowly work your way down to what you actually wanted. So I’m going to keep this particular topic fresh in my mind so long as I continue to use a service I paid for that is now trying to wring extra money out of me by doing whatever they can to benefit from the exploitative and extractive actions of Venture Capital funded plagiarism algorithms.
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