I know this is being discussed everywhere, and I try to avoid bandwagons and the news of the day, but damn if this isn’t too worrying to let slide. Alexandra Alter writes for the NY Times (archived):
For months, speculation has been building online that a buzzy horror novel, “Shy Girl,” was written with the help of A.I. The novel, about a desperate young woman who is held hostage by a man she met online and forced to live as his pet, was self-published in February 2025. The book quickly found an audience among horror fans, and Hachette published it in the United Kingdom last fall and planned to release it in the United States this spring, billing it as “an unapologetic, visceral revenge horror novel.”
Earlier this year, Max Spero, the founder and chief executive of Pangram, an A.I. detection program, heard of the claims about “Shy Girl” and decided to run a test of the full text. Its results indicated that the book was 78 percent A.I. generated. “I’m very confident that this is largely A.I. generated, or very heavily A.I. assisted,” said Spero, who posted his research on X in January. […]
In response to questions from The New York Times about the A.I. allegations against “Shy Girl,” Hachette told The Times that its imprint Orbit has canceled plans to release the novel in the United States and that Hachette will discontinue its U.K. edition.
You can get more details at the link; they don’t really matter, and the facts about this particular novel don’t really matter — it’s clear that so-called “AI” (large language models) will soon be producing work that nobody will be able to prove did not come from a human mind. I realize some will say “Therefore AI is intelligent!” and others will say “Who cares? Let a thousand flowers bloom!,” but as an old-fashioned humanist I feel the foundations crumbling. Will we have to go back to telling tales by the campfire (while making sure the tale-teller isn’t plugged in)?
I found this story interesting enough to dig into, and while I couldn’t
stealfind an actual text of the opus, it seems pretty clear that it is to a great extent female-victim BDSM aimed predominantly at female readers, of the kind that is currently so trendy.I suspect that the potential readers tend not to be looking for the creative attention to evocative non-boilerplate detail that a good human author might bring to bear.
Having rather too readily (and in hindsight, quite unfairly) dismissed “romance” as a readily-automated genre in another thread, I would nevertheless say that masochistic horror porn probably does lend itself rather well to composition without soul.
I also agree with a comment about this that I stumbled across: the really horrifying aspect of this is not the AI-composition, but what this story reveals about Hachette, and modern publishers’, decision-making on what they take up. Never mind the quality, look at the sales …
The commenter (who was not hostile to the actual genre itself) felt that it was unlikely that anyone at Hachette had actually read the work at all. (This was based on their assessment of the actual contents, not simple free-floating cynicism.) The decision to publish was evidently made on quite other grounds. That‘s the kind of “automation” to be afraid of. And to condemn.
[I should perhaps explain for new readers that the book had been already self-published on Amazon, and sold very well. This adoption of successful self-published works and ingestion of their authors into the publishing machine, with suppression of the original, is apparently pretty common.]
While the sort of Grub Street hacks and drudges who traditionally produced stuff like this were of course human beings created in the image and likeness of God and thus endowed with inherent dignity regardless of how hacklike or drudgesque the texts they emitted, I’m skeptical that this particular subgenre of literature is the optimal one to insist on the ineffable primary of the Human against the Machine.
I am struck by an interesting legal question. At least in the US, the law is currently fairly clear (maybe surprisingly so) that only compositions by human authors are entitled to copyright protection, so an AI-chatbot-generated text is unprotectable and may thus be freely bootlegged or appropriated or republished by anyone without getting permission or offering to pay royalties. OTOH, a text that is 78% robot-generated but 22% human-authored may still be protectable as to the 22%, and since a potential copier may have difficulty knowing exactly which that is, interesting complexities naturally arise. (I can think of some aggressive arguments for the position that 100% should be free for the taking under those circumstances, but anyone who proceeds on that basis before the law is more settled will be taking a risk, even if they offer to pay me to defend them in any ensuing lawsuit.)
I’m skeptical that this particular subgenre of literature is the optimal one to insist on the ineffable primary of the Human against the Machine.
Well, if this is as far as it will go, that’s OK then.
I have no such confidence! We are currently at the point where AI chatbots can produce summaries of legal research in a particular area that are not *always* obviously worse than such summaries prepared at much greater expense by extremely intelligent young human beings who have recently graduated from prestigious law schools. They can’t yet produce the more complex and even (in their way …) quasi-literary texts that someone like me then generates using those summaries as part of the raw material, and I hope to be retired before they can … I do worry for my firstborn child who is currently a law student or at least I fret that the daily routine and tasks of younger law school graduates are in the process of being dramatically transformed with no one knowing for sure whether the resultant opportunities for the humans will be better or worse than they have been in the recent past or for that matter in the distant past of the 1990’s when I was where my daughter will soon be, in a career-track sense. At least she followed in my footsteps and learned ancient Greek as an undergrad so she’ll have that over the robots until someone thinks it cost-effective to change that.
I think that the time may have come for a Campaign for Real Pornography.
David E.’s CAMRA-snowclone references are only comprehensible to those of us Americans familiar with the wilder shores of 1990’s Scottish music. (I thought this fellow was Glaswegian, but wiki sez he primarily grew up in Dundee.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYZ-J2PubpU
If I have understood how LLM AI software is “trained”, then it seems that it will become ever harder to detect AI generated content. Those AI programs ingest mind boggling amounts of internet material.
Newer iterations or further training will require ingesting ever more newer internet content, and that newer content will include an ever expanding percentage of AI generated material, including what is appropriately called slop. Ponder the inherent self-cannibalism. More and more excrement ingested as a percent of total consumption will result in an endlessly greater proportion of purified—that is to say free of human generated content—excrement coming out the back end. Slop in, slop out, says Mr. Miyagi.
The training issue is well documented. There is a shortage of original data already, so the AI trains on itself, producing a loss of entropy, and the result is a loss of diversity in the output. In other words, the output becomes worse, not better in the future.
Specifically, these novels will look more and more like they are written in the house style, we get a collapse in narrative complexity, and the voice, arguably the most important part of a literary narrative, loses its rhythms and idiosyncrasies.
So what we see is a short-term boost for publishers which will disappear because AI eats its own seed corn.
Also worthy of mention is that none of this is actually making money. Open AI has something like 1.4 trillion dollars of debt instruments against about 15 billion in revenue last year. So that novel you generated is highly subsidized, which probably won’t continue forever.
The LLM industry is running out of genuine content to plagiarise; as their investment model is crucially dependent on convincing investors that enormous returns on their money will certainly-for-sure arrive at some point in the future, they literally cannot afford the idea to take root that the performance of APEs has effectively hit a limit. This accounts for both the push to enormous amounts of hardware, which will (they assert) produce AGI out of LLMs by Just Trying Harder, and the interminable apocalyptic hype about how LLMs will either “solve physics” or doom us all (both narratives serve the actual underlying purpose equally well.)
Meantime, we should not be distracted by the marketing fantasies, but keep our eyes firmly on what the “AI”-pushers are doing right now. Polluting the noosphere, destroying internet search, and making real information sources even more unviable by denying them web traffic by substituting “AI summaries” are not unfortunate side-effects. They’re part of the political project.
(Look at who the “AI”-pushers fund, and who enables them politically. This is no mystery.)
Google has just patented a technique for replacing actual websites by “personalised” “AI” reconstructions, so that even someone clicking through to what they suppose to be a company’s own site will actually be presented with a Google-generated replacement. The idea seems to be that companies will need to facilitate their own violation by presenting Google with the right kind of data for it to do its thing. Upping the ante on the
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization
which has already done so much to hamstring any attempts to search for genuine reliable commercial information.
As if we might all benefit from the opinion of one reputed to have handled, if not read, a book towards the end of the last century…
Of course the robots will have been trained on AI generated content, so our li’l darlin’s will be taught right.
@DE, logically, what we need is good (artistic) porn. Which, as you say, would be inimitable.
Who said that powerful emotions are an obstacle and not an opportunity for the artist?
masochistic horror porn probably does lend itself rather well to composition without soul.
i always hate to disagree with DE, but i will again (at length, apparently). certainly there’s plenty of badly-written porn of all kinds, and always has been (asstr.org will give you a fine assortment of by-now-vintage material if you want it). but people who like their porn on the page are impressively discriminating readers – enough so that current mainstream popular fiction is marketed with reference to very detailed taxonomies that come directly out of the non-commercial literary porn world: “hurt/comfort”, “enemies to lovers”, etc.
while the taxonomic categories that migrate across in that way are about plot and scenario (because that’s what’s legible as usable to marketing departments), the reading communities they come from (usually glossed these days as just “fic”, because there’s so much original writing that “fanfic” no longer works as an umbrella) are probably the primary current cultural space where debates over literary style and quality are a pervasive part of mass-scale conversations. the number of people active in the comments on the main fic hubs (which are community-maintained as public* institutions) is easily in the millions – one of those hubs has over 10,000,000 registered users; another shows over 4,000 people currently on the site as i type (about 1/3 registered and 2/3 guests). they also have entire ecosystems of “beta-readers” whose purpose is specifically to help make writers’ work better. and the taxonomies active within them include descriptors for all manner of stylistic aspects of writing – a few from the first lexicon my search pulled up are “crack”, “fluff”, and “idfic” – because readers want to know what they’re getting into, whether the work in question is a 100-word holmes/watson “drabble” or the million-words-so-far original serial i’ve been reading since 2022.
now, not all of that is porn, and not all the porn involves either masochism or horror – but that entire ecosystem of non-commerical writing comes very specifically out of pornographic women’s fanzine writing: “slash” fiction**. here‘s a classic interview with joanna russ on the subject.
and – to get back to the original subject at last – my experience being occasionally in those worlds, and much more consistently adjacent to them, is that they are far more intensely hostile to LLM-generated writing than any other sphere i move in. that’s in part because it is an element of the parasitic relationship between “legitimate” commercial publishers and the world of fic, which is (correctly) understood as creating opportunities for bad writers to cash in individually, with none of the benefits accruing to the reading communities they come from. e.l. james (Fifty Shades of Grey, originally a Twilight fanfic) is the classic example. and it’s partly because porn is so personal, and especially for readers into sex that’s considered “perverse”, the felt presence of the writer in the work is indispensible. russ talks about some aspects of that in slash in that interview and elsewhere; i hope a friend of mine will someday find a place to publish her thoughts on the pedagogical function of john preston’s pornographic work (Looking For Mr. Benson, especially) in the consolidating gay leather scene of the 1970s.
which is perhaps all to say that what Hachette tried to do would never have flown with the core audience for “masochistic horror porn” – precisely because composition with soul is far more actively demanded by its readers than they could imagine. which isn’t to say that it couldn’t’ve made them (in liz phair’s phrase) shitloads of money, just that the source of that money would have been in large part readers unaware of how much high-quality writing is out there that caters to them, available for free (with or without a tip jar) in explicitly non-commercial spaces.
.
* “public” in its actual sense, “by, of, and for the people involved”, rather than as a euphemism for “state-controlled”.
** named for the “/” in “k/s”, which abbreviated “kirk/spock”, the original focus of writing.
This is stunningly stupid, will result in gigantic lawsuits, and might seriously damage Alphabet.
AI will revolutionise education. Of course.
Education in the form “one teacher communicating with 30 children by means of lectures (and also grades and assignments)” is easy to revolutionise.
Too many things children need that such a teacher can’t or won’t give them. And (strangely) also some things chudren don’t need that she both gives and forces them to take.
And not only children. A friend of mine is struggling with mathematical analysis (in her 30s and without much experience with math) and needs someone to talk about it. My ex-wife and I are willing to do that but we can’t do it face-to face, and she, i think, is too shy to ask 30 silly questions a day by phone. Other her friends either can’t or don’t want to talk about it.
@rozele:
Unaffectedly delighted to be so comprehensively refuted. I knew not whereof I spoke.
(Evidently my Campaign for Real Porn has been so effective that it has been bearing great fruit for years before even I inaugurated it. Cometh the man, cometh the hour …)
Escorted by a walking, talking humanoid system, first lady Melania Trump
“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
This is stunningly stupid
This is where I got this from; I may have misrepresented it. Or not.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/joetoscano1/2026/03/06/google-just-patented-the-end-of-your-website/
Thanks for the Joanna Russ link, rozele.
I particularly liked this, an excellent apologia for SF, warts and all (as it is):
Elsewhere, the discussion reminded me of the Japanese subgenre of yaoi, though I get the impression that there are big differences as well as obvious similarities to slashfic. However, it’s yet another thing I know very little about.
I must say that to us degenerate Brits, Kirk/Spock is obvious. You mean it’s not canon? Americans are weird.
They give the feeling that things could be different. I think it did that for me too, when I was a teenager, and that’s why I held on to it so. Things could be otherwise.
Yes, this holds for me as well.
I recall a rather staid (given the subject matter) discussion on late-night television years ago (in the days when there actually still were staid literary discussions on TV) of Histoire d’O/The Story of O.
The ringleader/chair/whatever mentioned at one point Graham Greene’s comment that it was “a rare thing, a pornographic book without a trace of obscenity”, where Greene was implying, I think, that it was just too well written to be, like, obscene obscene; at least, that’s how the group understood him. (I’d misremembered this as “well written, without a trace of pornography”, but I see that Greene didn’t actually say anything so daft.)
The participants all all agreed that it was too obscene, but as far as I remember, not one of them said that “well written” versus “pornographic” might be a false dichotomy.
One of the female participants did remark that she found the work’s arousal-inducing properties effective, to which the more timid participants assented once she’d said it. I think she meant that as a proof of “obscenity”, though.
To be fair, I think the consensus was that Greene had somewhat overstated the book’s literary virtues, so they were probably working with the standard framework that it’s OK for a work to arouse lust, even on purpose, so long as it’s sufficiently artistic, and only “pornographic” if it’s insufficiently, um, literate.
@DE. “The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
Lovely. But which of the pair, the trumpette and the bot, is the most porcine?
@David Eddyshaw: At the time of that program, it would have been generally assumed that The Story of O had been written by Jean Paulhan, or possibly by one of his male friends. That probably affected how the literary world interpreted it. It wasn’t until well after Paulhan’s death that Anne Desclos revealed she had written it as a novel-length mash note to him.
I don’t think anyone has pointed out yet that the title of this post is somewhat inaccurate. What is reported is not an example of “AI writing fiction.” It is an example of someone extensively using AI to help them write fiction.
There is a vast WORLD of difference between fiction that was 78% written by AI and fiction that was 100% written by AI. And I very much doubt that we will be seeing any bestsellers from the latter category any time soon.
to us degenerate Brits, Kirk/Spock is obvious. You mean it’s not canon? Americans are weird.
Star Trek was shown on children’s TV in the UK, in the ’70’s/’80’s. I believe in the US it was on adult TV(?) The BBC scheduled it in the Doctor Who slot, I guess because
For reasons beyond me, in UK Gulliver’s Travels is a kids book. Hornblower would be teen/’young adult’, westerns also on kids TV — all those guns shock horror! (Forbidden Planet not so much, judging by the lurid Theatrical poster.)
Was there never Kirk/Uhura fanfic?
Some eight or ten years back, i got interested in the self-publishing world. It was obvious at that point that it was something real, but what? Not simply vanity publishing, clearly. So I spend some time immersing myself in the self-publishing discussions to figure it out.
What I got out of it was the concept of the “voracious reader.” This is the person for whom reader is their primary leisure activity. This is not a reader of literary fiction, but of the other end of the spectrum. They are reading the dime novels of a century or so back, evolved into pulp fiction and then the direct-to-paperback novels of the Harlequin Romance sort. Read Orwell’s essay “Bookshop Memories” and he describes this sort of reader.
The successful self-publisher of ten years ago was tapping into this market. The business model was to established a fan base within this group, and feed it vast quantities of rapidly written material. Look at the back catalog and these writers were routinely putting out a half dozen novels a year, and one a month was not unheard of.
This market formerly was a lucrative but undiscussed source of revenue for traditional publishing. That is long gone now, and self-publishing has moved up into the old midlist author crowd, who having an established fanbase can get a better return by self-publishing, at a more stately pace. How this has changed the business of traditional publishing I leave to others.
Turning to AI, a defining characteristic of dime novels is strict adherence to their formula, along with disregard for prose style. (There were exceptions. Dashiell Hammett came out of the pulp world. But this is an outlier.) This is just the sort of stuff that an AI is good at. The fic world, which is a different thing from the self-publishing world, is more creative, this becoming a source of new formulas for AI to copy, though still with mediocre prose.
Which is to say, if selling speed-written genre fiction is your source of income, you have cause for concern. AI can do this quicker than you can, with output of acceptable quality for the target market. Writers and publishers of literary fiction need not worry.
That being said, I question Hachette’s judgment. The implicit promise of an imprint of a reputable publisher is that the buyer can be confident that they are purchasing edited prose. The decision to forgo that step seems short-sighted.
readers unaware of how much high-quality writing is out there that caters to them, available for free—-
My impression is that fanfic is mostly softcopy (free fanfic exclusively so) with hardcopies either home printed or at best low-grade print-on-demand. The physical tactile and visual qualities of books made by traditional commercial publishers, even pulp ones, would be superior; maybe some readers are not ignorant of the free alternative but rather willing to pay a premium for a Proper Book? There are still people who buy physical copies of out-of-copyright classics rather than read the gutenberg.com version (some are paying extra for modern editorial added value, but some just want a Proper Book).
@AntC: There is lots of fanfic shipping Kirk and Uhura, but it’s not slash (at least, not necessarily), because they are of opposite sexes.
AntC wrote:
For reasons beyond me, in UK Gulliver’s Travels is a kids book.
Not the full text! There have been various bowdlerised versions aimed at children, often including only the Lilliput and Brobdingnag sections. People who haven’t read the original tend to think of it as a harmless fantasy.
And I very much doubt that we will be seeing any bestsellers from the latter category any time soon.
Doesn’t it bother you that this is very reminiscent of similar statements about how unlikely it was that computers would be able to play chess better than humans? I learned long ago not to trust my intuitions about these things.
various bowdlerised versions aimed at children—some bowdlerised abridgments, but also some versions which throw away the original text and retell parts of the plot as a children’s story; e.g. Ladybird Books. I suspect the target market for the bowdlerised abridgments is the kind of unmarried parental acquaintance whose improving gifts are tossed aside in dismay or disgust by their juvenile recipients.
various bowdlerised versions aimed at children
That reminds me of Taras Bulba; in the first comment on that post, Dmitry Pruss (aka MOCKBA) said:
Not the full text! There have been various bowdlerised versions aimed at children, often including only the Lilliput and Brobdingnag sections
The version I read as a child only had those two sections; I found out only years later that there were more travels. But I don’t think it was bowdlerized; there were satire and social criticism that simply went over my head back then.
Me too. In fact I’m not sure we even got as far as Brobdingnag. And certainly not the rest. We never learned about the researcher who was looking for a way to convert human excrement back into the food that gave rise to it. Of course, no one knew about energy metabolism until very much later, but I do wonder what people in Swift’s time thought was the function of food.
Uhura is canonically into Spock, not Kirk. In fact, this is the only redeeming feature of the first Abrams movie.
It seems they’re going to market this to businesses: “we’ll personalise your website for every visitor (for a modest fee), and never mind the ‘hallucinations’ that happen in the process or the fact that you’re never going to see any of the personalised versions”.
“I learned long ago not to trust my intuitions about these things.”
@LH, I agree.
Note how computers became much smarter almost overnight (overyear) some 10 or slighly more years ago.
In 2010 there is (a) a number of tasks humans have been trying to teach computers to perform for decades without much success and (b) a number of tasks humans are not trying to teach computers to perform because that’s simply impossible. “Machine learning” is one of those things enthusiasts have been working on without practical results.
An example of (a) is go (the game). My ex-wife is an enthusiast of it. Computers played worse than me, but thanks to the breakthrough of around 2005 (statistical algorithms based on Markov chains) they learned to play better than me and worse than some of my wife’s freinds.
In 2015 computers perform many tasks from (a) (in go, a computer defeats the human champion Lee Sedol), some from (b) and all of this is done by means of machine learning.
We simply do not know, what computers are capable of. It, “what computers are capable of” is a question that can be, in principle, answered sceintifically. There is the theory of algorithms, for one thing. But this theory can’t even tell if they can factorise numbers in polynomial time:) It simply doesn’t know how complex is the task of “playing go like Lee Sedol” or “writing a novel”.
And what we call here “intuition” is the simple observation that “clever people have been trying to do that for decades and failed” coupled witrh rather idiotic “then it must be impossible!”.
@mollymooly: certainly! and the massive expansion of fic readers and writers has been fed by the shift from fanzine circulation to online repositories. i have seen pictures of some truly amazing bound copies of what i gather are major works of fanfic (not my fandoms, so i take it on faith) – but i assume that while there may be significant overlap between fic readers/writers and home-bookbinding enthusiasts, there aren’t many people doing that.
i think that desire for a Proper Book (which i certainly share; i’d read a lot more fic if more of it came in zine or book form) is likely a significant part of what’s made the migration of fic plot conventions into mainstream fiction possible / profitable. but i do tend to think that fic readers are more likely to be more discerning about the quality of the fic-influenced/derived/adjacent commercially published writing they read (if only because of deeper familiarity with the tropes and plot conventions involved) than others, which would affect what Proper Books in that sphere they pick up. there’s also something to be said, especially for outlier books like Fifty Shades, about the progression of works from fic circulation to self-published to commercially published, but i’m not certain what.
the only redeeming feature of the first Abrams movie.
Ah, OK. I’d put away childish things before any of the movies came out.
…are you calling Star Trek a childish thing?
I remember quite liking the first Abrams movie when I went to see it in an actual Cinema. I don’t remember anything at all about the movie itself, though. I suppose you had to be there …
(The best Star Trek movie is, of course, Galaxy Quest.)
@rozele, logically, all you need to have web literature is the Internet.
On the first Russian forum I frequented in 90s and early 00s everyone wrote something, stories or novels or plays, some experimented with various collaborative projects and these people were mosly programmers and scientists. It was one reason why we were so excited about the Internet.
I imagine, there were not many fanfics in Persian and Arabic, much less “pornographic women’s fanzine writing” before the Internet. Certainly, not in Russian. If English fan fiction have been so influential, that’s because there was fan fiction in English in the first place. It could have shaped English web literature, but it couldn’t create it.
However, this connection is interesting.
I think I mentioned here a tourist guide book that advises tourists in an Arab country not to speak to women (and not to look into their eyes when they have to). I think I know why people write such things and when an offended Arab woman complained at it (“are we monsters?”) I at first told her about somehting that absolutely fascinates me: complete invisibility of Arab women for Europeans. Basically, for us they’re mythical creatures, like unicorns or dragons (but for some of us the myth is ugly: “They obey men. Also they… er. Obey men?”).
To which my friend objected: “but that [the invisibility for Europeans] was before the Internet!”
She has a point. She got interested in Russian because of an exchange with some Russian lady (by means of the Internet) and back in 00s I first noticed that the Russian social network, VK is known among speakers of other lnaguages when I came across pages of Saudi prostitutes there (primarily interested in communication with men in Arabia, of course, but still visible to me).
Which made me interested in how the Internet changed the “genderedness” of human communication. And trying to come up with a Russian example, I remembered various women I know who began to write genre novels (genre fiction being a heavily gendered field, with many genres dominated by male authors).
(If we take writing and sharing novels as a form of communication:))
I’m tempted to see the recent changes in readership and authorship of English science fiction and fantasy (and development of its girly sub-genres) as a part of some larger (cross-linguistical, cross-genre) picture – but know too little to tell what this picture is.
Very much concur with rozele’s analysis of slash fiction. I do want to add, though, that slash (in the definition I’ve seen used the most, there’s variation) is not inherently pornographic to our modern sensibilities. A story that features two male characters holding hands or telling each other “I love you” can be slash. There’s even the term “pre-slash” for stories where the characters *aren’t* in a romantic relationship yet but the implication is that they will be in the future.
When the term arose in the 1970s and 80s homosexuality in general was so taboo that it was all lumped together. A lot of the early, notable examples that I’m finding on Fanlore* such as “A Fragment Out of Time” do have sex scenes (though personally I don’t think anyone who’s read The Left Hand of Darkness will be shocked by that one), but also even very oblique discussion of “The Premise” [that Kirk and Spock are in love] was treated with similar delicacy.
Which brings me to AntC’s question — yes! Well not so much Kirk/Uhura specifically** but people were absolutely writing heterosexual romance fanfic in the print zine era. It was treated differently, (e.g. quote from Fanlore’s “Slash Controversies” page):
Even into the Internet Era of Fandom, gay (especially M/M) fanfic was treated as inherently more explicit and inappropriate on most websites, Here’s some examples of that from 2000s-era websites and a fanvid convention.
The illicitness and insularity led to development of community norms and genre construction (like all those tropes rozele mentioned) that have had an outsize impact on the development of fandom as a whole. And (in my opinion) particularly on the development of academic and historical treatment of fandom (e.g. the work of Henry Jenkins or Francesca Coppa), slash fandom punches above its weight. It’s actually been a point of argument, “why do acafans talk so much about slash”, and a common rejoinder is “because slashfans are called upon to defend themselves and their art much more often”. I think you could probably write a similar defense as rozele’s first comment in this thread using the history of het romance books, but with slash I know where to find lots of articles that have already put in the work (there’s Fanlore, Transformative Works and Cultures, fujoshi.info, even Wikipedia is surprisingly helpful, especially for Asian fandom as David Eddyshaw mentioned***)
*I’m trying to minimize the number of links in this comment, but if you look up any of these proper nouns on Fanlore (a fandom history wiki with extensive coverage of print zines and less extensive but still useful coverage of internet era fandom) you’ll get the discussions that I’m basing most of this comment on. And “The Premise” is a proper noun in this context 😛
**on AO3 (not the be-all-end-all-of-fandom, but a large fanfic archive that it’s easy to pull numbers for) there are roughly 10x as many Spock/Uhura stories as Kirk/Uhura stories — probably, as David M. pointed out, because it’s canon in the AOS movies. There’s even significantly more Scotty/Uhura stories than Kirk/Uhura — I don’t have a guess about that one. I assume AntC is thinking of the historically significant Kirk-Uhura kiss in the TOS episode “Plato’s Stepchildren”, but apparently that is less fanfic-inspiringly significant. Also any discussion of romance in early Star Trek fanfiction would be incomplete without mention of fan-created characters shipped with the canon men (see also the whole “Mary Sue” phenomenon/discussion).
***re: yaoi — if you want to look into this further, “BL” (short for “Boys’ Love”, though it’s almost always initialized) is the term to know; it’s the most widely used term in east and southeast Asian languages (though for Chinese media 耽美/danmei is really common too).Yaoi started as a self-deprecating joke among doujinshi artists (it’s an abbreviation of “yama nashi, ochi nashi, imi nashi” — “no climax, no point, no meaning”) and really caught on in the 2000s era English language internet. It is considered passe or immature by some Anglophone anime/Asian media fans nowadays (still embraced by others, though). Here’s a tumblr discussion on these and a few other terms explaining the former viewpoint. The wikipedia page for Boys’ Love, as I mentioned earlier in my comment, is pretty thorough and useful too (and “Yaoi” redirects to “Boys’ Love”).
…are you calling Star Trek a childish thing?
It was presented as such on BBC TV. The ‘acting’ was wooden; the ‘plots’ were imbecilic. Thunderbirds without the strings.
I stopped watching when I left home for varsity. I assumed the movies were more of the same, so I didn’t go to see them. Then I’m making no claim about those.
(Yes I was basing the Kirk/Uhura question on that kiss. Though I think I’ve never seen the episode. What’s with the stupid Laurels on Kirks head?)
Thanks, sarah. I’m always grateful to have my ignorance alleviated.
Between what you say and rozele’s comment, I’m coming to the conclusion that LLMs don’t have a prayer of realistically emulating genuine human creativity, plagiarise as much as they might; in fact, the distinction between plagiarism and fanfic seems to be a good starting point to see exactly why not.
i entirely agree with what sarah’s said!
and @AntC: if you want to dip your toes into the sea of Trek (which i’ve only barely done enough myself to have the Strong Opinions i do*), you might take a look at Deep Space Nine. it certainly has its share of cardboard plots and paper moons, but is also far more sophisticated than almost any other long-running television serial in its treatment of anticolonial warfare, military occupation, everyday multiethnic communities, uneasy political/military alliances, self-reflexive genre history, and much more. it’s a blunt instrument at times and kak-handed at others, but nonetheless impressive; in a lot of ways, it alternated sprinting and shambling so that Battlestar Galactica could steadily jog, and Orphan Black could fly. (and it occasionally has wallace shawn gleefully chewing every piece of scenery in sight in a role that nobody else could’ve gotten away with)
.
* some is good, some is not, some is mostly about how much a writers room can hate an amazing character.
For those not in the know, “AO3” (or “AO³”) is abbreviation for “Archive Of Our Own.”
you might take a look at Deep Space Nine
Seconded.
> Between what you say and rozele’s comment, I’m coming to the conclusion that LLMs don’t have a prayer of realistically emulating genuine human creativity, plagiarise as much as they might; in fact, the distinction between plagiarism and fanfic seems to be a good starting point to see exactly why not.
Well, it’s complicated. I’ll also second Richard Hershberger’s comments about “voracious readers” — I have talked to a handful of such readers who do use AI, to fulfill very specific combinations of tropes, or fic for unpopular characters or franchises… also some people who use tools like character.ai for popular fandoms simply because its fast and accessible. Most of the people I’ve talked to say it’s worse than the average story you might find on AO3 (Archive of Our Own — thank you Brett for spelling out the acronym! Sorry for my earlier oversight) or RoyalRoad (a website with mostly original amateur fiction), but not that much worse. And the capabilities of these tools are changing fast; I’m very uncertain about how things will develop in the future.
A few weeks ago I had a very enlightening conversation on this that I’ll try to summarize. It started with one person talking about the obvious stylistic differences between Claude’s and ChatGPT’s fiction output. They shared two AI-generated passages (which I’ve copied here if anyone would like to see for themselves) — and I remarked that neither of these would strike me as remarkable or out of place if I encountered them in a webserial or fanfiction. We ended up concluding that it’s a stylistic thing you can train your brain to recognize — I compared it to distinguishing Beethoven and Mozart (whose work are really obviously different to me, but I’ve talked to non-classical-music listeners who can’t tell them apart); another person in the conversation compared it to wine tasting. The conversation also pointed me to this website for benchmarking AI fiction tools, which I haven’t explored yet but might be a useful resource as well.
Right now, at least, I’m convinced that there’s a pretty big gap in abilities between, well, skilled human writers and AI tools. But those of us who read a lot encounter a lot of junk (Sturgeon’s law!), and we might not have trained the skills to recognize human junk from AI junk (I certainly haven’t, and as that conversation showed). Even if you read enough output from a couple models to recognize their tells, there’s more models being created all the time. I definitely understand and sympathize with people who are anxious about getting “tricked” — whether that’s like the publisher in story of this post, or simply people browsing free webfiction online. And I’m *really* glad not to be in academia or teaching right now, because the already-existing plagiarism problem has probably gotten even more fraught.
(I do think some fanfiction spaces are doing a good job of establishing social norms to discourage posting AI-gen works without marking it — I’m happy with AO3’s policy of allowing it but encouraging people to tag it, I think if they banned it outright we’d get the same stories being posted but trying to fly under the radar. But social norms are only as strong as your community; this doesn’t generalize to the web as a whole.)
> For those not in the know, “AO3” (or “AO³”) is abbreviation for “Archive Of Our Own.”
Also you don’t see it very often these days, but people sometimes abbreviate it to “AOOO”, to which the Warren Zevon fans among us respond “Werewolves of Fandom” 😛
(I saw a werewolf posting a plot-what-plot fanfic at AO3 / And her tags were perfect)
Rapid writing is what we have in Russian since they invented a successful commercialisation scheme (heavily based on advertising) for web literature.
Writers post their novels (novel series) chapter by chapter, each eagerly avaited by readers. Those who post often, have competetive advantage (apart of simply having more novels to sell).
I can’t think of a good name for readers of such literature. They are voracious, but so am I.
Some of them would read something better, but can’t find it.
About a year ago, I got a good piece of The Gods Themselves fan fiction from a custom LLM that a colleague has been working on. That was kind of an anomaly though. The first query produced something good, but subsequent requests never matched the first.
@sarah: My kids love “Werewolves of London.” I personally prefer “Lawyers, Guns, and Money” and “Mister Bad Example,” but they’re all good.
Also: wifwolf.
Werewolves of Fandom
Draw blood!
@sarah: But those of us who read a lot encounter a lot of junk (Sturgeon’s law!), and we might not have trained the skills to recognize human junk from AI junk (I certainly haven’t, and as that conversation showed).
When I had some looks at non-erotic Tolkien fanfic, I found only one that seemed competently written, but I don’t remember whether I tried enough others to say that the average was worse than Sturgeon’s Law. The junk was real junk, thougn, much worse than stories I didn’t like in the prozines.
@drasvi: I can’t think of a good name for readers of such literature. They are voracious, but so am I.
Undiscriminating?
sarah: Thanks very much for your knowledgeable and thorough comments; they help the clueless, such as myself, to get a clue.
My BS was in LLMs (before they were called that). I did not anticipate this, of course, but it’s not _that_ bad. It’s just idiots using it unexpected directions. It’s not even Sturgeon’s law, it’s just randomly generated strings of words — which it is supposed be, not some “AI”.
It’s also canon in the original series! There’s an episode where she sings about how attractive he is while he accompanies her on an instrument!
That’s because there’s a bunch of bored quasi-gods making them do this against their wills.
They’re the Greco-Roman gods, that’s what the point of the laurels is.
At your age you should know what little that means!
I’m a bit stunned, though, that you talk only about the original series and the first few films. There’ve been several more series and a few more films since, and it’s still going.
William Shatner is famous for overacting, but other than that it’s fine, and he’s only in the original series and the first few films.
Many of the plots in each series, especially the original one, are indeed imbecilic, but that’s because they’re only vehicles for philosophical problems. (And some of them are treated in horrible ways, but that’s not horribly common.)
The biology is uniformly horrible, but fortunately there isn’t much.
I didn’t know Thunderbirds; what the Wikipedia article presents is about as different from any Star Trek series or film as I can imagine.
Yes, except the very end, which would make you throw your screen through a closed window. That’s where the guy in charge decided to troll the fans – he brags about it in some special feature on a DVD.
Like this? Or this?
someday i’ll read all of My Immortal! it is (what i’ve read of it) indeed epically bad, as well as easy to read as multidirectional satire, but quite entertaining.
but the real junk in the fic world, to me, is nightmares like this.
@Jerry, I think all readers have preferences. Those who watch telenovelas like telenovelas, and logically some readers of rapidly written prose too prefer what they read to what they do not, even of their taste is aquired.
A part of the commercialisation scheme is social network functionality: readers talk with authors and each other in comments to blog entries, to books and in pms. But it is difficult to find a good book: in the list of books in a genre those with the most readers are too “commercial” and those with the fewest readers might not be horrible (ask a child to write a novel, and I will like many things about that novel) but they’re the books with the fewest readers and not books selected based on some other criterion.
So there are also readers who have wasted hours trying to find something interesting and are reading those rapidly written commercial texts without really enjoying them.
…That sounds like a very, very interesting idea, but I trust Yudkowsky to have turned it into The Wrongering.
I’m a bit stunned, though, that you talk only about the original series and the first few films.
No I haven’t seen any of the films. I doubt I’ve seen all of the original series; at latest I’ve seen up to early 1973 on British TV. (But let’s not make this about me.) What happened was I discovered literature, and just pushed TV slop out of my consciousness.
At your age you should know what little that means!
Nope, still not persuaded I should make brain-space for Star Trek. I’ll take your word for it it’s not merely kids TV, but it’s not as adult as Gulliver’s Travels. (If you want more shock horror, I’ve never seen any Star Wars movies either. I have watched most of the Wallace and Gromit franchise, so I’ve nothing against ostensibly kids films or preposterous tech as such.)
“In 1966, Star Trek was ahead of its time. That’s also true of the more recent series. They are still ahead of 1966.”
it’s not as adult as Gulliver’s Travels.
How can you say that about something you haven’t experienced?
ask a child to write a novel, and I will like many things about that novel
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Young_Visiters
(I have actually read this. It does have a certain … something …)
How can you say that about something you haven’t experienced?
I can read the blurbs/reviews/watch trailers.
Thank you again for the recommendation to see Blue Moon. (Ethan Hawke nominated but no Oscar.) If my cinema visit had to pick watching Blue Moon vs Deep Space Nine, which would you recommend?
And all my cultural consumption is making limited choices like that: far more on offer than I have time for. I’d’a thought my age would have slowed me down enough by now to have time to catch up on the dozens of books I’ve accreted, and movies/TV shows. But no, I’m still walking up mountains, biking, sailing. Maybe next decade … Then I’ll get to Star Trek maybe the decade after that.
Fair enough. I myself have had to sternly prune the infinite possibilities. I’d definitely pick Blue Moon!
Not comparable – Blue Moon is a single 100-minute film, DS9 is a series with seven seasons (176 episodes).
AntC : Lower Decks, Discovery and some of the other new ones are ok. I watched a lot of TNG in the nineties, but some of it has aged badly.
David Marjanović : DS9 is also good, I guess. Sisko.
rozelle: why did you link to _that_. Why would you expose people to _that_.
rozele was rightly confident that Hatters have natural immunity to it.
I have actually read it (and I only am escaped alone to tell thee.)
I actually quite liked the continual dissing of Ron.* However, my wokeness is completely unimpaired by the adventure, and I am just as much an extreme radical socialist wet liberal and incorrigibly irrational Calvinist nominalist as before. I am unmoved by the pseudo-intellectual posturings of a mere Yudkowsky. I have read pseudo-intellectual posturings from the best. From the masters.
I have no doubt that, mutatis mutandis, the same applies to us all. Vivat Hat!
* For my money, the single worst aspect (and indeed, the tell) is actually the treatment of Hermione, who gets a very substantial downgrade in autonomy.
I haven’t watched Lower Decks, but from what I’ve seen (YouTube clips) and read about it it seems awesome. Of Discovery I’ve only been able to watch the first season, but there’s some great stuff in there, at least if you ignore the (many, many) episodes that are set in the mirror universe. Picard* I haven’t been able to watch. Enterprise is generally great except for 1) the fanservice and 2) 9/11 happened while the series was being produced, and the makers stupidly believed they had to process it in the series somehow, so they created a long and stupid story arc… Voyager is generally great, with various silly episodes interspersed. The New Generation contains many classic episodes for good reasons, but there are some blatant 1980s fads in it as well as “the latest Californian fashion in parareligious tosh”, not to mention the captain who can’t pronounce his name* and doesn’t blink an eye when introduced to a woman named, well, Vache. (That episode was stunning to watch.)
* Jean-Louc Picâde is how he says it.
All the rest are dead,
Space Asshole has prevailed,
only I am left alive to tell the tale of Space Asshole…
rozele : I’m sorry. (as in forgive me)
David Eddyshaw : “I have read pseudo-intellectual posturing from the best. From the masters.” I’ve heard a lot of pseudo-intellectual posturing. How bad was it?
I just want to express my agreement (joining Rozele, V. and Hat) about DEEP SPACE NINE being worth watching. Its bad episodes are no worse than those of earlier Trek series, but when it comes to the best episodes, they are to my mind the best of the entire franchise.
Such episodes as “Duet”, “The wire”, “In the pale moonlight”, “Rocks and Shoals”, “The ship”, “The sound of her voice”, “Inquisition” (inter alia) are not just among the best STAR TREK episodes of any series, they are excellent television episodes which could stand toe to toe with the top episodes of any television series. I might add that the makers of DS9 were better storytellers than those of other TREK series, in the sense that a majority of the stories are unpredictable: you do not know where the story will lead you or how it will end (whereas some others, especially the later seasons of THE NEXT GENERATION, are painfully predictable).
(The final reveal -no, no spoilers!-at the end of the two-parter “The search”, for instance, left me utterly surprised, which is a rare experience for me when it comes to a television program. Re-watching it some years later I realized that the producers had played fair: there were some clear clues throughout both episodes hinting at/suggesting the reveal in question. Ah, television that assumed an intelligent and attentive audience: “Mais où sont donc les émissions de télévision d’antan?”, as a certain French poet might have put it if he were living today…).
“nightmares like this” – I’m tempted to ask whether it is worse or better than Rowling’s HP, but HP well can be good, I didn’t read it and I think I won’t:) (the few things I know about HP are unappealing)
I lost interest in Deep Space 9 after the first season. There was a change in tone that I just didn’t care for.
I read the first HP novel after a friend brought it back from the UK, when nobody had heard of it here, and it was so badly written I confidently predicted it would be a flop. That’s why they pay me the big bucks.
I read the first couple and gave up on the one where adolescent Harry starts whining in ALL CAPS. I have never seen any cause to regret this subsequently. I have, however, absorbed the plot of the whole sequence by popcultural osmosis, and by the fact that my children loved the films when they were too young to know any better. (Rosa Luxemburg Eddyshaw naturally despises the author these days. That‘s my girl!)
The Magical School thing has been done vastly better by others, notably (but not only) Naomi Novik. But a kind of Gresham’s Law of fiction seems to have been at work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham%27s_law
A freind of my friend funded and ran a café (or rather what is called an https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-café here for whatever reason) which served as the base for a small sect of followers.
Our common friend believes I would like them (the sect), and I like the guy and find both the things he says and his interests quite agreable, and running a café in Moscow is a feat, but… he said that book would be a good introduction in their views and I won’t read a book based on HP:)
Thanks for introducing me to the anti-café, which I didn’t know about.
On the recommendation of Slate Star Codex, I got through quite a few chapters of this back in the day before getting bored. It already felt kind of annoyingly immature back then, but it reads less innocuously in the Thiel era, I have to say – maybe in retrospect I should have taken it as more of a warning sign that the best and brightest of Silicon Valley were obsessing about a reader self-insert novel about how any self-respecting bright kid would naturally want to rule the world, for ultimate good of course. I mean, talk about red flags:
languagehat : same here — my girlfriend at that time bought the first HP book while in the UK, before anyone had heard of it and she liked it; I didn’t see the appeal. She has excellent taste in literature, otherwise.
Richard Howland-Bolton (who used to comment here but hasn’t in years) had an essay for Weekend Radio in which he mentioned that he insisted that his parents send him a proper British copy of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.
I am reminded of a long-ago incident from circa the 1968 presidential election in the U.S. in which Spiro Agnew had given a speech condemning pseudo-intellectuals (possibly written by Bill Safire?), which then inspired the then-prominent humor columnist Art Buchwald to write a piece in which the president of the Pseudo-Intellectual Anti-Defamation League reacted to Agnew’s negativity by warning him that pseudo-intellectuals made up a much larger percentage of American voters than actual intellectuals did, and Agnew thus antagonized them at his own electoral peril.
Art Buchwald — there’s someone whose humor has not aged well (not because of bigotry but because of changes in sense of humor); when I occasionally run across a quote from him, or a copy of one of his columns, I wonder whether I actually found it funny at the time or if I just thought of him as something my parents’ generation enjoyed.
@LH, thinking of when I first heard about it (HP, not anti-café), it was a small community focused on web literature. I told above that in the first forum I frequented everyone wrote something, because everyone was excited about the opportunities for sharing your writing. That “smaller” community was formed by some members specifically for literary projects.
The hostess, a sinologist, told about a HP crowd translation project. Which, of course, was more than interesting, that dozens or hundreds of people can gather together to translate something.
Maybe one way to look at such things is the “stone soup” (каша из топора): fans are more interesting than the catalyst.
___
Perhaps I read about HP before that – in a newspaper, as a success story (“unremarkable lady became a millionaire”) but that sounded like yet another children’s book, “less influential than Coelho” rather than “incomparably more influential than Coelho”.
“ It does have a certain … something …)”
@DE, thanks! I never heard about it!
Good quote from Ashford: “I like fresh air — and royalties.”
@V: i do trust this crowd to have some resistance to cognitive hazards, but your response certainly isn’t unwarranted!
in seriousness, though, part of the Why was/is giving a nod to the ways that fanfic can be part of some truly awful political/social projects, as well as being the anchor point for a ton of amazing and wonderful creativity. that particular piece of fic is one of the best illustrations because it has had some quite direct effects in the off-screen world, on a large scale as an entrypoint to the whole TESCREAL bundle, and on a smaller scale as (for example) a central enabling element in the deeply sad and disturbing saga of the so-called Zizians (it’s not mentioned directly in this long piece in Wired, which is probably the clearest account, but gets talked about in this podcast-format synthesis). the fic world too has its heinleins and hubbards.
and yudkowsky’s rand-does-rowling garbage does, i suppose, have some Hattic interest as a key part of the popularizing of TESCREAL terminology and rhetoric, which has steadily flowed into mainstream usage along with other elements of far-right cant (from the incel/”manosphere” world in particular, but increasingly also straight-up neo/nazi stuff).
But Yudkovsky, as far as I know, is panicking.
He thinks this AI research leads to a horrible catastrophe and urges to halt it…
Oh! Yes!
And for the original series, even apart from the “space beauty of the week” episodes in the third and last season, here’s the plot generator. Excerpt:
“Kirk delivers a
speech, | right hook,”
I can’t remember which seasons are (on average!) the best, but it’s not the first two.
The writers have explained why: not only did they just need some time to get used to the new series, but once TNG was off the air and the Voyager was away in the Delta Quadrant, they suddenly had new opportunities. In particular, the Federation was now theirs to play with – and that they did with success, fleshing it out from what were mostly vague hints in the earlier series & movies.
Finally it makes sense! I had no idea “bad money” and “good money” had their original meanings there…! (Not that I knew any other meanings, but I automatically assumed there had to be a very metaphorical one that I wasn’t getting.)
Seconded!
Yyyyyyikes. This is Yudkowsky? Not even Yarvin?
Thiel indeed!
I stopped reading when I had seen enough:
That’s about as rational as Scientology. Really, what’s missing here is the money.
(Unihemispheric sleep is real. Swifts and dolphins do it. I… doubt that humans can learn it, let alone just switch it on by force of will.)
ohhhh, the money’s there, all right!
this is precisely the ideological cluster that is driving and profiting from the LLM bubble, and is tightly woven into much of the current u.s. regime (emphatically including liberal junior partners like randi weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers, who is slowly and disingenuously backpedaling from a very public multi-million-dollar embrace of LLMs), which among other things exists to monetarily benefit its backers (and very much not its junior partners).
and the ideology being unhinged nonsense is precisely why these kinds of articles are so important. it’s hard to strategize against it without understanding its premises and modes of thinking, which are shared by the AI-optimist and AI-pessimist forms.
Not specifically in the Zizians, which the quote is about.
which
Hah, that’s me using that word as the plural (Hifalutin German welche). I learned that’s wrong within a month or two, but never could quite shake it… and now that I have a cold, it resurfaces.
The Zizians, who(m).
@DM, what do you mean by “fanservise” in Enterprise? (I simply don’t know what you’re referring to: trying to remember examples of fanservice in anime and anything similar in Star Trek and failing)
I tried to watch Voyager and decided that it is simply bad:(
A friend of mine (the one I used to watch things like Star Trek with before the war) after watching some Star Trek with me became an enormous fan of Deep Space 9.
In rozele’s first link the authors (Gebru and Torres) urge researchers not to work on AI, because it is unsafe.
Yudkovsky urges researchers not to work on AI, because it is unsafe.
I do not understand why they list him among their enemies.
Fanservice: first of all the very numerous decontamination scenes where people strip to their remarkably gendered underwear, of which the female version seems remarkably less practical than the male one.
@DM, thanks! I watched it twice (which is unusual for me: alone and with the aforementioned friend) but don’t remember those scenes.
Anime fanservice is more like one hand clapping. A sequence is interrupted by an image of a butt, and as it hangs there, from the way it is cropped you realise that it is not the curves and surfaces that you’re expected to appreciate, but the panties. The fact of panties. The fact that panties are panties. I don’t know, there must some profound philosoiphical point which can’t be expressed in human language. (the curves, they try to make them unerotical, so they won’t distract you from the panties, and the panties are not anyhow sexy either).
@drasvi:
No, Gebru and Yudkowsky’s arguments are very different.
Yudkowsky and the “technopessimists” accept all the fake premises of the “AI”-pushers, very much including the argument that these technologies will produce “superhuman” “intelligence.” Their alarmism serves every bit as well to feed the mendacious hype cycle as the Altmans claiming that this “superintelligence” will “solve physics”, cure all diseases, solve the problems of environmental destruction without altering the actual processes of predation that cause them etc etc etc. These are just two sides of the very same coin.
Both the positive and negative hype serve the very same purpose: to distract the public from the harms that are being done now by the “AI”-pushers, and from their actual political aims.
These harms are only partly mediated by the aggressive marketing of LLMs. This is only one aspect of a whole agenda dedicated to the destruction of liberal democracy and replacement by technofascist oligarchy. Thiel has actually told us so …
Gebru et al are not opposed to LLMs as such at all. They are pointing to the many harms being done now, and to the intimate ideological links between these fantastical claims of the capacities of “AI” and “scientific” racism and authoritarianism.
Have a look at the TESCREAL article on WP.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TESCREAL
Ultimately, it’s not LLMs (or other forms of “AI”) that are the problem. It’s who are deploying them, how, and why. The answers to these questions are sociopolitical, not technical.
LLMs will not ever enslave humanity, any more than they will “solve physics.” What they are doing, right now, is serving the agenda of human beings who wish to enslave humanity.
Some of the problems are just the LLMs and are technical in nature. They are power hogs and are monopolizing a lot of equipment that could be put to better uses.
Agreed: but I was subsuming that under the “who, how and why.” It is not an intrinsic property of LLMs that they must be instantiated in ever-larger and more destructive equipment installations. The choice to do that is determined by the commercial imperatives of the LLM-pushers, who have to keep feeding their investors the story that with enough hardware, a revolutionary change in quality of their software product will take place, and the subsequent returns on investment will then be astronomical.
In maintaining this myth, the dire warnings of a Yudkowsky are just as helpful as the hallucinations of an Altman. What would be fatal is for the idea to get about among potential investors is that this approach cannot actually ever deliver the (helpfully vaguely specified) goal of “AGI.” The music must not stop …
In C S Lewis’ That Hideous Strength (by far the weakest of his “Space” trilogy) some mad/bad scientists resuscitate a dead human head (yes, I know.)
One of the good guys, on hearing about this project, says something like “the first thing that people like that would want to do, is to increase the size of the brain.” (Turns out he’s right.)
Lewis clearly didn’t really get science, and his scientists are pretty much all woeful caricatures. He did, however, perfectly get the mentality of the technofascist “AI”-pushers (who actually are woeful caricatures of scientists.)
Weakest and longest, both by far. (Relevant discussions from last year begin here.)
“some mad/bad scientists resuscitate a dead human head”
Like so much of his fiction, this device was straightforwardly copied from the medieval works he spent so much of his life reading. I first encountered it in a translation of Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddima, but I would guess he knew it from a Latin text. Of course, the “scientists” were originally magicians, which is to say technologists…
Mad engineers!
…The “England are” phenomenon pushed to its logical extreme. I should not be surprised.
Hey, some of us are quite well-functioning with proper medication.
I should not be surprised.
Indeed not.
“Who” as a relative is often plural.
“These are the people who really understand.”
*”These are the people who really understands.”
is ungrammatical.
Interrogative “who?” can be plural if a plural answer is expected:
“Who are coming with me?”
[Kusaal, being a sensible language, formally pluralises anɔ’ɔn “who?” in such cases:
Anɔ’ɔnnamɛ na dɔlli ma?
who.PLURAL.LINKER UNREALISED accompany me.CONTENT-QUESTION]
https://www.evilmadscientist.com/2015/evil-mad-engineers/
“Who are coming with me?” would not work for me. I would need something like “Who are the ones/students/parents/guests [that are] coming with me? Or “Who is coming with me?” “The Eddyshaws, she is interesting, but he can sometimes be a bit of a bore….”
The trick must be that (…mainstream…) German uses a different, fully inflected relative in such cases.
*blink* *blink*
*blink*
*clean glasses*
“Who are these people?”
* “Who is these people?”
I would probably say, “Who is coming with me?” even if I expected there to be more than one person. However, “Who are coming with me?” is also fine. And David Eddyshaw’s example shows that there are situations where the plural agreement is mandatory.
Yes; now that I think about it, that’s actually interesting because it’s agreement with what follows. Compare das bin ich and contrast that’s me (or even it is I).
You could presumably account for this by saying that, say,
“Who are they?”
is “transformed” from
“They are who?”
by a rule which fronts the NP containing the interrogative pronoun, after verb agreement happens. Similarly “Who am I?” etc.
In Kusaal, there is no such rule, and you usually say
M aan anɔ’ɔnɛ?
I be who.CONTENT-QUESTION
If an NP containing an interrogative pronoun is the subject, it is compulsorily focused, using the same-subject clause-linker particle, underlyingly n, which rarely appears as such in the modern language, but is the reason for the -ɛ after anɔ’ɔn in e.g.
Anɔ’ɔnɛ maal nwa?
who.LINKER make this.CONTENT-QUESTION
“Who has done this?”
Of interest to copyeditors only: this post’s title has “A.I.” with periods, probably under the influence of the NY Times and its archaic house style, even though Language Hat’s own comments (and everyone else’s) write “AI” with no periods. Same for the earlier post A.I.: “Hers” Isn’t a Pronoun, also quoting a NY Times article. Titles of posts that *aren’t* based on NYT articles include AI Fails at Whitman, AI and Handwriting Recognition, AI Translates Cuneiform Tablets, etc.
Not that post titles need to adhere to a consistent house style! On the contrary, they tend to be faithful to whatever’s being quoted, e.g., the spelling of “colours” in All Self Colours and Putty.
Yes, I try to respect the source. Also, I take a subversive pleasure in exemplifying the attitudes of Whitman and Lawrence.
I use AI or A.I. depending on what I’m referring to. And also depending on context.
Personally, I don’t think I would say it’s who are deploying them; it would have to be either it’s who is deploying them (regardless of how many are deploying them) or it’s those who (or the people who) are deploying them.
I tried to figure out whether CGEL permits “it’s who are deploying them”. Section 12.6.2 distinguishes between fused relatives, which (in most constructions) can’t use who (*I agree with who spoke last) and open interrogatives, which can (I wonder who spoke last). But a few pages later, in section 12.6.4, there’s a “specifying be construction”, where “it is by no means a straightforward matter to distinguish between the fused relative and subordinate interrogative constructions”; they say That’s who I meant and He’s not who she thinks he is are interrogative. “It’s who are deploying them” seems to be in this category. Nevertheless, it sounds odd to me, and I think COCA backs me up: it didn’t find any examples of “that’s who are” or “it’s who are”, but there are some with “is” that sound normal to me even though they’re referring to plural people:
Maybe this is a US/UK difference?
(And if you think “I agree with who spoke last” is fine and shouldn’t get a star, you’re not alone: see Language Log on who my dad punched was a hippie and similar examples — “Who steals my purse steals trash” is famous but often labeled archaic — and Can I help who’s next?.)
I can’t resist quoting the Physicists’ Proverb: Wer misst, misst Mist “who[ever] measures measures trash”.
@DE,
Gebru and Torres are against “unscaled systems”, because they are unsafe and large.
Yudkowsky is against training large AIs because they are unsafe.
Gebru and Torres think safety of such systems can’t be evaluated.
Yudkowsky thinks we don’t know how to do that and won’t learn it in 30 years.
Both support their argument by comparison with normal engineering practices (both times the argument begins with a reference to “science and engineering”, but I don’t know whether that means Gebru and Torres were influenced by Yudkowsky’s rhetoric).
The reasons why they think such AIs are unsafe are different, but they want same thing and they’re allies. Must be allies. You may think that Yudkowsky’s argument is inefficient but that doesn’t make him a fascist.
The idea that such criticism encourages work on AI “because it makes people think that AI is possible” is strange. There are so many people who believe that further efforts will lead to something interesting, does anyone need encouragement? And should we never tell each other “if you succeed, that will be bad”, because it makes the listerner believe she can succeed?
Gebru and Torres complain that someone dismisses Gebru’s argument as insignificant, they in turn dismiss Yudkowsky’s argument. I don’t understand the point of this competition: silencing and dismissing each other’s arguments for same. Is there a competition between the two arguments?
Also unlike you Gebru and Torres do NOT say that creation of such an AI is impossible. How can you know that? Is not your argument similar to that of those who say “humanity can’t cause warming because humans are so small and insignificant”?
I think all we can say sceintifically is what I said above: we do not know what computers are capable of.
@ktschwarz:
I couldn’t find anything much to the point on this in CGEL either.
Plural fused-relative “who” is certainly part of my own idiolect, as my entirely spontaneous example above demonstrates. I think the cleft-sentence frame there makes it more natural, in retrospect:
“It’s who are profiting from this fraud”*
In fact, fused who-relatives in other contexts seem very literary-register to me: “Who dares, wins.” But, now I think of it, “Who dare, win” sounds cromulent to me too, in that register.
I confused the issue by bringing in interrogative “who”, though again that can be plural in my idiolect. But there may well be L1 speakers for whom only some of these contexts permit a plural reading. Or none.
* A further thought: my original example is actually a particular kind of English relative clause, viz a ‟subordinate interrogative” (CGEL p1070.) As in e.g.
“Find out for me just who have been doing this.”
(OK for me with “have.”) I may need to do a bit of Chomskyoid introspection to see whether this is the significant factor here.
(I first got interested in this distinction because it actually partly correlates with a formal distinction in Kusaal, which has two competing constructions for clauses relativising the object, only one of which is possible in this case.)
In fact, what I said was inaccurate: CGEL does not classify subordinate interrogative clauses as relative clauses at all, despite the partial formal similarity (p972.)
So my “it’s who are deploying them”, which sparked this off, is thus not actually a case of a fused relative pronoun. “It” was “the question at issue”, and the thing could be paraphrased as
“The question is: ‘Who are deploying them?'”
So this is just a manifestation of the fact that Eddyshaw-speak (the canonical form of spoken English) permits plural interrogative “who.” Though the fact that the clause is embedded rather than top-level probably does help to make the compressed syntax more acceptable.
“Also unlike you Gebru and Torres do NOT say that creation of such an AI is impossible. How can you know that?” – that is, you think that these specific algorithms can’t possibly creat such an AI. But that’s you intuition (as I understand).
LIke ktschwarz, I don’t think I’d say “It’s who are deploying them.” I think I use plural verbs with “who” only when “who” is coreferential with a plural noun phrase in the sentence.
@DM: I think this has nothing to do with “England are”.
@DE: To try a verbally identical but structurally different sentence, would you say, “The problem is not the LLMs. It’s who are deploying them”?
I think this has nothing to do with “England are”
I agree.
To try a verbally identical but structurally different sentence, would you say, “The problem is not the LLMs. It’s who are deploying them”?
Yes I would; but in fact, this is not necessarily a different structure at all. The English is potentially ambiguous between a relative clause with a fused head, and a subordinate interrogative (or interrogative content clause, if you prefer.) In my original utterance, the latter was pretty much forced by the parallelism with “how” and “why”:
“It’s who are deploying them, how, and why.”
but it’s still possible to interpret it that way without them.
And in fact, as I said before, the fused-head relatives with “who” are not a natural part of my (or anybody’s?) colloquial register at all, so I would not in fact have expressed “those people who are deploying them” by “who are deploying them” in any case.
Note, incidentally, that the subordinate-interrogative clause itself is nominalised as a singular noun phrase (regardless of whether the verb within it is “is” or “are”):
“Who are deploying them is the problem.”
Whereas
*”Who are deploying them are the problem.”
is barely acceptable at all, and would have to be interpreted as in a very elevated register to be even grammatical.
I would have to recast this as “Those who are deploying them are the problem.” But not because of the “are” in the subordinate clause, but because of the awkwardness of the fused relative here.
Kusaal, too, has a potential ambiguity between the equivalent of a relative clause with a fused head and a subordinate interrogative clause, though in that language both types are in fact most naturally regarded as relative clauses; but the kind corresponding to English subordinate interrogative clauses are limited to only one of the two possible relative clause constructions.
Comparative evidence suggests that the permitted one is the older relative construction, and the construction that can’t be used for subordinate interrogative clauses is a relatively recent innovation. (There are differences in relative clause syntax even between the two Kusaal dialects.)
But it may be more to do with the actual pronouns used: the older construction uses indefinite pronouns as relatives, and the newer uses demonstratives. Generally, the semantic difference is neutralised, but the restriction on subordinate interrogatives might reflect the fact that indefinite pronouns are a better fit to represent top-level interrogative pronouns in a subordinate clause than demonstrative pronouns are.
WARNING: non-linguistic content. Burn before reading
The reasons why they think such AIs are unsafe are different, but they want same thing and they’re allies. Must be allies.
That’s American politics for you. G & T will lose all credibility with their circle if they say anything good about Y and his views and Y will lose all credibility with his friends if he even acknowledges that people like G & T might have a point. It would require a politician who doesn’t much care what is the real philosophical basis of their policy and just wants it done to convince both types of people to support them. And we will all praise that politician for their stupidity, spinelessness, confusion, and probably nefarious intent as we usually do.
There are some things I dislike (or more than):
– Gebru and Torres list Yudkowsky among people for whom creation of a mind which is smarter than ours is “desirable”. Or so I understand the first paragraph about Yudkowsky:-/
Technically, it can be so for Gebru, Torres, Yudkowsky and me, depending on what we mean by such a mind, but in the context of the efforts to build an AI we’re talking about that’s absurd. And the logic of the article looks like “he wants it, that is he doesn’t want it, but those are two sides of the same coin, so he wants it” which is madness.
– They quote a message (one of “numerous alarming remarks”!) by him with the words “Aryans” and “Jews”. Do they mean he’s an Aryan-loving antisemite?
– and link a responce to that message (quoting same words) instead of his message. Is that because they don’t want me to see the context? Or maybe someone else shared the link with them – and they were too lazy to check the context? Whoever did that is a shameless liar. Yudkowsky describes someone else’s analogy in that message. He’s quoting those two words from someone’s message and that someone else’s analogy is not antisemitic either.
Then they quote that someone else’s message, again taking words out of context to make it look “alarming”. Fuck.
– They say he calls himself a “genius” – I’m too lazy to check if it was a joke. If not, it says somethign interesting about him as a person, but I expected to read interesting thoughts about AI, not about persons.
– using “two sides of the same coin” in a title of a subsection is not enough for putting him and his fans in the range from “manosphere” to “Nazis” as rozele does. Or from “racism” to “sexism”.
The idea that objections are “same” as desire and a clever way to attract funding and “divert attention”, needs argumentation. Their argumentation:
(1) large AI projects call themselves “safe”
(2) people like Musk call for a pause and within a few months come up with new AI projects.
What does this has to do with Yudkowsky?
And why didn’t they tell that the pause – to which Yudkowsky objected – was meant to be a 6 month pause and only for very large AIs to develop mechanisms of independent control of the field? It was not “let’s don’t do it!” (Yudkowsky’s idea) and Musk does not contradict himself.
_____
I also note that the whole genre of “science fiction” according to the criteria of Gebru and Torres would reflect that “mode of thinking” that we should “strategise against” as rozele says.
Kirk is the kind of character men think is a panty-dropper. Spock is the kind of character women actually want to fuck.
It’s no mystery why Kirk/Uhura didn’t have that much zine fanfic, even aside from the US’s level of extreme weirdness about interracial relationships at the time, which was considerable and was the entire reason they insisted on putting that kiss in the show. The number of Uhura/Scotty fics is presumably due to them flirting in one of the later movies. Being near-canon does tend to make something have more fanfic, especially if it is heterosexual.
As a self-published writer of original m/m as well as a fanfic author, I’m not particularly concerned about AI on a personal level. I do think it will eat into the profits of the people who were chasing trends and who didn’t have much of a voice, but the reason I both write and read selfpub stuff is because I don’t trust mainstream publishers to understand the slash/danmei/BL market at all and because I like to write 50k books, not 100k books. The big publisher entries in the West tend to have edited all of The Good Parts out, while the stuff from Asia where it’s a recognized marketing category distinct from gay male art for gay men and the selfpub stuff and AO3 fic in the West are catering to me and understand the demographic I’m part of. Tradpub in the US has way too many editors and higher ups who have an eye that is the equivalent of thinking that Kirk was the main meal and not the vehicle to get to Spock. They’re wholly unprepared to court the audience that I am and that I want to serve.
I think the continued flagrant inability of media to truly cater to women and especially to cater to weird, subculture women is driving a lot of strange publishing decisions, fads for atrocious books that are the best we’ve got that’s mainstream and accessible, and interest in alternate sources of entertainment.
But as for the topic at hand, I think there’s considerable danger of publishers putting the stamp of approval on junk that has already sold well without mandating any particular editorial standard. It doesn’t matter that it’s crap. It doesn’t matter that it’s crap in the eyes of people who know that genre well. The public it’s being flogged to is the equivalent of those people who go “Wow, this big, important literary author wrote mystery/sf/fantasy/romance for the first time! It must be so good!” rather than the seasoned genre nerd who immediately sees how stale and anemic the book is to anyone who knows the first thing about genre trends or history. 50 Shades inspired screams of rage not just from kinksters who felt misrepresented but from fans of low-brow het romance fanfic who knew there was much better trashy fun out there. Better written in a literary sense. Better at the emotional dynamics that hit one right in the lizard brain. Better at being hot.
it’s been quite a while since i read gebru and torres, let alone the little yudkowsky i’ve looked at – but i think the two are kinda talking at cross-purposes. y is making proposals and naming “certainties” based on a very carefully arranged set of “rationalist” premises. what’s excellent in that Wired article about ziz and her circle (and the Behind The Bastards episodes) is that it walks you through the chain from one level to another to another in the whole house of cards. g&t are making critiques and naming certainties that aren’t based on those premises, so they’re pretty often using the same words in very different ways (in particular the words and phrases that are terms of art in y’s ideology).
and i don’t consider g&t the be the flip side of y’s coin – that would be the people from the optimistic wing of the “rationalist”/TESCREAL true believers, the ones who want the arrival of the AI demiurge. charles stross has some books with posthuman characters in the kind of world their premises imply, but i can’t remember the titles right now. g&t are, i think, techno-optimists of a type i have disagreements with from a very different direction, but that’s the absolute worst i could say about them.
To me both look like semantic as opposed to formal number agreement, something English is generally much more comfortable with than German (or, say, Russian or Spanish from what I’ve noticed) – and different Englishes vary in how far exactly they take it (“England are” is an example).
Franzeska: Thanks very much for that well-informed comment! I love hearing from people who know far more than I do about something.
Yes indeed.
When my ex-wife took me to the cinema to the sequel of 50 shades, she described it as a film for housewives about sex with a billionaire.
She was a bit embarrassed, I don’t know why. That is, I know – but she too knows that I’m curious. I never watch films about sex with billionaires, so of course it was interesting.
(She was not embarrased to watch Muñeca brava with me, but why would she?)
I came across a very well written short story (which unfortunately I can’t locate any more) in which an actual well-adjusted BDSM submissive who was previously involved with the appalling Grey bailed on him after just one scene on realising very quickly that he was a manipulative abuser. She approaches Ana (very tactfully) and explains the difference between consensual BDSM and abuse, and accompanies her for support when she confronts Grey.
Of course, Fifty Shades of Grey is (and is meant to be) a bodice-ripper rather than anything like a realistic picture of any actual human relationship. And dripping with money porn. One for women who fantasize about Elon Musk, maybe. (Hey, I’m not judging. Each human heart has ugly little treasures, as Auden reminds us.)
I’m not a spoilsport, I would never wish
To interfere with anybody’s pleasures;
By all means climb, or hunt, or even fish,
All human hearts have ugly little treasures;
But think it time to take repressive measures
When someone says, adopting the “I know’ line,
The Good Life is confined above the snowline.
Besides, I’m very fond of mountains, too;
I like to travel through them in a car.
I like a house that’s got a sweeping view;
I like to walk, but not to walk too far.
I also like green plains where cattle are,
And trees and rivers, and shall always quarrel
With those who think that rivers are immoral.
The fantasy 50 Shades caters to, aside from wealth porn, is that of not needing to know what you want or to put in any effort at all.
That’s the piece that’s missing from a lot of analyses of bodice rippery “Oh no, don’t!” books. Some of their popularity has been driven by “Good girls don’t” attitudes, certainly, especially in the past, but a lot is also driven by how frustrating it is to have a body that won’t cooperate or to just not know what you want and like and have some dude sitting there going “Tell me what to do!!!” to which the answer is “I DON’T KNOWWW”. It’s the horny flip side of that feminist You Should Have Asked comic about the mental load by Emma.
The nominal dom in this kind of fantasy material is always going to be a rapist rather than a realistic and healthy BDSM practitioner because the fantasy is of lying there like a lump while things that end up being thrilling and orgasmic just kind of happen. The lump doesn’t want to be checked in with.
I don’t even read that much heterosexual stuff, but the dynamics of this kink are blatantly obvious to me, and I see way too many people thinking that unpacking shame around sex will get rid of it. That might have put paid to the 1970s romance novel version, but it’s never going to get rid of the version driven by women being exhausted by being the perpetual babysitter to everyone around them. And that societal problem shows no signs of letting up any time soon, even for women who work full time and perhaps even earn more or work longer hours than their husbands. (In other words, I don’t think 50 Shades was actually for housewives per se, though the derogatory “mommy porn” moniker was somewhat apt.)
One of the biggest hurdles to AI turning out reams of romance/erotica trash is the same hurdle I see in human writers who try their hand at a trope they don’t understand or a genre they dislike: they emphasize all the wrong parts or don’t emphasize the juicy heart of the matter. Even if we’re training AI on huge data sets full of bodice rippers, I don’t trust the human operators to understand the many different kinks in a trench coat that make up one named trope (“ravishment” in this case). The data set isn’t being separated, curated, and tagged on the way in, so it’s going to be an undifferentiated mass of beige on the way out. Godawful prose is only occasionally an impediment to a writer of niche kinks getting popular, but mashing the most boring version of opposing tastes together certainly is!
Honest Trailers had all three of the Fifty Shades films nailed perfectly.
the version driven by women being exhausted by being the perpetual babysitter to everyone around them.
Good point. (In fact, an illuminating comment altogether.)
seconding the appreciation for Franzeska’s comment!
and to me, it’s such a distinct contrast with writing from people within leather worlds, even when it’s centered on the fantasy of Total Submission – i’m think of laura antoniou’s Marketplace series, for example, which is in many ways about the impossibility of any such thing, and the complexities of pursuing a desire for it.
…but what if you want to ski?
*lightbulb moment*
…but what if you want to ski?
I’d say Auden's beef would rather be with Vladimir Vysotskiy.
No refutation has happened here. Porn fiction readers are only “discriminating” because they are hyperfixated on repetitively fulfilling their very specific fetishes. Writers in this area will freely admit that they will write tiny variations on the same plots, and spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to color in the lines that exist in the minds of their audience.
Back in the day when everyone read, people understood that there were books that were trash, but now that reading is a vaguely exotic activity, people like to pretend that there’s something elevated in any form of the written word. Everyone is familiar with visual media, so nobody is fooled into thinking that there’s something special about stepmother MILF porn on Pornhub.
LLMs haven’t already taken over this niche for only one reason: it’s economically worthless, particularly compared to the elimination of computer programming as a field, so nobody spends any resources on it. Plus, it’s hard to make a model to write porn that doesn’t open you up to a terrible reputation hit. It’s better to make it sound blandly corporate to maximize the revenue you can pull out of the Forture 500 instead.
I feel that you may need to read both the post and the comments more attentively.
I am amused that you think that the creator of Grok might be worried about a “terrible reputation hit” of the kind you suggest.
I feel there are a few separate conversations here.
1. Motivations of submissives in BDSM.
2. Expectations of consumers of romantic and porn fiction.
3. Ability of LLM to meet consumers’ expectations.
I am really far from being able to examine these questions, but I think people have to agree or state positions on each earlier point before advancing an argument on a later point…
I did like “Forture 500”
@PP:
Seems to me that that is precisely what three of our commenters have done.
I kinda provoked this by opining that the genre of the piece of trash mentioned in the post lent itself particularly readily to good-enough-to-past-muster imitation by Automated Plagiarism Engines; those with considerably more relevant knowledge than I, on the very points you adduce, convincingly (to my mind) explained why I was wrong.
None of these arguments deny that there is LLM-generated trash in this genre, of which Shy Girl would appear to be a good example, judging from the opinions of those who have actually read the thing and are not predisposed to dismiss it a priori on the basis that the entire genre is all trash anyway.
Nor does this have anything to do with moralising (or not) about the genre. Nobody here is in a position to outflank me on this front. (Well, JWB, obvs, but nobody else.) I am a mirthless Calvinist, here to tell you that you are all miserable sinners.
But I was wrong about the point I raised, as a matter of fact.
PP, understanding (I mean, as in being able to put myself in their shoes – preferably, mentally) motivations of submissives is something I would willingly pay money for:)
Not because I’m particularly interested in submissivness (though given how many people I know expressed some interest in games with tying up, in some forms it must be widespread. Not sure if is same as submissiveness, though), but I’m particularly interested in understanding humans, and especially interested in their (our) sexuality.
@walt, the objection to your argument (“specific fetishes”) is Franzeska’s two comments.
I don’t think walt read the comments very carefully; he just wanted to express his strong feelings on the matter while insulting everyone who felt differently (which I guess is standard internet discourse).
Okay, I’m out.
Feels good to throw off those fears of rejection, amirite ?
walt spoke about motivation of porn readers – and about porn texts. Given that a large part of that motivation is “arousal”, anything you say about that motivation will be sexual and can be seen as an insult (if you mean the word “fetish”). And likely he’s one of those readers, most people have some experience reading porn texts with this motivation.
I don’t think we can expect any commenter to have all the comments carefully.
I disclaim any ability to keep pace with David E. when it comes to “moralising.” I don’t even spell the word that way.
It is true that “moralizing” is but a pale thing when compared with our fiery Old World moralising. Scotland (where I trained) consistently wins the World Championship: the only real drama comes from wondering who will be the runners-up.
@drasvi
I suppose I should elaborate. I am not judging you, walt or any other commenter. I do not judge Anne Desclos, the author of the “Story of O”, but I do feel that Jean Paulhan probably took advantage of her in a reprehensible and contemptible way. I feel very strongly that people, even adults, who do not know what they want, are vulnerable, and that it is not OK to treat them in a vicious and non-nurturing way, especially if such treatment occurs over an extended period, and even if the vulnerable person appears to be taking the initiative in / instigating the treatment. I am not trying to say that every BDSM practitioner is an abuser or a vulnerable person, but for me explicit fantasy of this type is best left in the realm of fantasy. So I am very much not a neutral commenter. On the subject of porn fiction, again if a novel has a clear tendency to encourage people to take advantage of vulnerable people or to normalise such behaviour, I can’t comment usefully beyond expressing caution. For “other” porn fiction I am not the target consumer anyway, so I am unfit to comment on the likelihood of LLM-produced stuff obtaining approval from that target customer.
@PP, what I meant is that understanding motivations of such people and human sexuality as a whole is not so easy, the answers given above are more like hints on the partial answer than a complete model of human sexuality. Or, in other words, answering your first question is not so easy.
I, in turn, want to understand people (and find human sexuality interesting).
Does the fact that you are not neutral changes anything in this context (understanding)?
I’m not sure what the problem with understanding literature of the kind of “50 shades of gray” is : It’s not interested in consent, unlike real life consensual BDSM relationships. Also what Franzeska said.
Me: To try a verbally identical but structurally different sentence, would you say, “The problem is not the LLMs. It’s who are deploying them”?
DE: Yes I would; but in fact, this is not necessarily a different structure at all. The English is potentially ambiguous between a relative clause with a fused head, and a subordinate interrogative (or interrogative content clause, if you prefer.) In my original utterance, the latter was pretty much forced by the parallelism with “how” and “why”:
Sorry, what I meant all those comments ago was to ask about the cleft or uncleft reading makes a difference. That is, whether the original sentence should be read as resembling
or
But I’m now willing to bet that you’d use “are” in both cases.
I would indeed.
My original wittering about clefting was an ill-thought-through and misleading stab at suggesting that it might make a difference whether the “who” was a fused relative or part of a subordinate interrogative content clause (which often end up looking just the same in English*, but are still different constructions fundamentally.)
For me, I don’t think it actually does make a difference, but I imagine that it could do for others. But, more likely, other factors have more bearing on whether plural agreement is accepted (if it is): that was just my first thought.
* And in Kusaal, too, but for different reasons: the similarity in English arises because English has adopted the Frenchy habit of using interrogative pronouns as relatives, whereas in Kusaal it’s because relative clauses can use indefinite pronouns as relatives without necessarily implying actual indefiniteness. But Kusaal doesn’t bother with any of that verb “agreement” folderol anyway. (The continental branch of the Scandi part of Scandi-Congo has – belatedly – caught up with the Oti-Volta part of the family now in this regard.)