Average Worries of a Writer
Hello again Reader,
I started this blog with the sole motive of getting The Limbo Chronologies out there for everyone to read in the vein of authors like Brandon Sanderson and C. M. Kösemen, All Tomorrows, (one of my favorites of all time). But as I’ve progressed, instead of just releasing the chapters piecemeal and giving project updates, I’ve found myself eager to yap about things mostly unrelated.
So, on that note, I will yap about one of my biggest fears at the moment, in order to fulfill my statement in my first ever post. These include the state of the internet as of now, AI and LLMS, and the world of fiction in general.
Before I start rambling: I promise I’ll release chapter five sometime next week. A lot of my brain power has gone into book two, and it’s looking like it will need a massive rewrite/overhaul before it’s fit to lay before thine eyes, dear Reader. Chapter five, without spoilers, will be the climax of the story. Chapter six is a sort of epilogue that sets up what follows, but that’s still some time away.
Also, I’ve been planning something sweet for you guys after six is out, but more on that later.
Without further ado,
The Cesspool we call the internet,
Has taken a turn for the worse in recent years. It’s not as if it hasn’t been bad before. One only had to find the most deranged fandom community or look at twitter, (now X), to cause permanent brain damage and stunt cognitive development. However, these days it’s so much worse.
I’m not the first, nor will I be the last, to speak of the dreaded ALGORITHM that feeds us stimulating muck in quick bursts to keep us as engaged and slack jawed as senior citizens at slot machines. In many ways, that’s precisely what scrolling is. But it does more than reward us with high contrast blue light and sound bites that embedded themselves in our brain wrinkles; it almost literally rots our brains and kills our attention span.
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| This is you on your phone |
Why do I fear this, then? I fear it because I, like all of you reading, lapse into these doomscroll sessions at times, then wake up from them feeling anxious, loathsome, slothful, and doubtful of reality all at the same time. This, of course, is detrimental to anyone who loves to read. For example: have you, Reader, after indulging yourself in this quick fix social slop, found yourself, if not completely unable, to at least have some difficulty in keeping your focus on the page? I know I have.
I compare it to sunspots in a way, but more intangible given that it happens in your mind and thus cannot see them. You have a 25-30 second window of maximum attention, then your mind wanders, and you have to reel it back in, then repeat. Like your brain got stuck on scroll mode or something.
This symptom is slowly killing almost every form of traditional art. Now that our attention spans are corroding, a whole new market of distilled content is being bombarded on the masses that fit those 25-30 second windows. You’ve no doubt come across these movie scene Tik Toks/Reels that, instead of just showing you the scene, narrate over them. The narration isn’t even an analytic clip from some video essay, its just downright telling the viewer what’s happening. SOMETHING THEY CAN SEE WITH THEIR OWN EYES.
And that’s not even mentioning these apps where they claim to condense books with vast and nuanced ideas into bullet points so you “don’t have to waste your time reading” an entire book to know what it contains. Hello, have you read Fahrenheit 451?? (Emphasis on the read).
Then comes,
The Beautiful Terror of AI.
More than once, especially now that Sora 2 is out, I’ve fallen for videos that it has generated. If I’d never opened the comments, seeing a plethora of GIFs and memes that mark the vidya as AI, I’d’ve been blissfully ignorant that what I’d seen was, for all intents and purposes, a lie.
“But hey, that’s good. People can still discern between AI and reality, right?” you say.
WRONG!
Sora 2 is just the next step in the massive scale degradation of critical thinking. Do you remember when AI first came out, GPT and such? If someone were to post, say, something completely generated with AI, everyone immediately saw through it, but now things are different.
More than once, as I’ve been online, I’ve noticed that people have begun to doubt mundane things. Random Reddit posts or comments, Substack articles, little snippets of video where something unusual happens. Hell, even real people in general. The worst, by far, are people who work their asses off producing beautiful art, only to have their comment sections be flooded with the monosyllabic grunt of the modern caveman, i.e. “AI.”
One of my acquaintances is a chronic comment section shitposter on Instagram reels. Us sharing a similar algorithm, I sometimes find him in the comments aggravating people on purpose, (to each their own), but what bothers me is not his comments, however deranged they may seem, but the responses he gets.
Things like, “Bot,” or “Nice prompt bro,” are only the most common.
People are beginning to believe, on masse, that NO ONE is capable of creating anything anymore without the use of AI. That NO ONE is capable of structuring a sound argument, or counter argument, without AI. That no one is able to think without AI or LLMs.
This is terrifying, especially for someone whose passion it is to write and create. What good is it to spend hours working on a piece of your soul, be that an article, short story, a painting or video, only to have a crowd of people shout AI once you put it out there?
Maybe it’s not as bad as I’ve made it out to be, but if it’s not now, I have full confidence that in some point in the near future it will be. It is the only logical progression I can see.
Fiction, However,
Is a different matter. Though I’m not for the tidal wave of romantacy, biographies and self-help super master manipulation (Robert Greene), books that have taken over the zeitgeist, I am all for reading.
Everyone resonates with something, but I implore all of you, to at least begin with the classics so that you have a sound standard to evaluate modern works. Instead of 48 laws of power, read Sun Tzu. Instead of Jordan Peterson, or any modern thinker, be they from left or right (let’s not get political), read the sources they site, and the oldest sources atop which they in turn have built their ideas on. Plato, Aristotle, Seneca, Aurelius, etc. Then move on from there.
Instead of modern fiction (INCLUDING MINE!), go read Don Quixote, Frankenstein, anything from Jane Austen or Tolkien.
Acquire a palette for quality, however small, before consuming modern things, so that you have a deeper understanding of literature.
For example, I read the Hyperion Cantos a couple years back. It is by far my favorite book series of all time. I even had my girlfriend read it, and she was likewise taken. I give this as an example because Hyperion, the first novel in the series, uses the structure of a frame story very similar to the Canterbury tales.
After finishing the series, I went on and read the Canterbury tales and WOW is it good. Afterward, though I found something that I believe is better than Hyperion, I grew even more attached to the series because I could grasp just how masterfully Dan Simmons crafted the story.
In short,
The world of literature and art is under attack by modern technology, but in an ironic twist, it sometimes leads people to said traditional literature or art, which hopefully leads them further on into classics, from whence they return with a deeper love back to the things with which they began.
Guard your mind. Feed it, instead of your preferred LLM, what it needs. Don’t poison it with the ever evolving toxins that permeate the alternate reality of the internet.
Support artists who pour their soul into their works. Support each other. And don’t be so quick to shout “AI.”
Once you attribute everything beautiful to a machine, you’ll start to think that humanity can’t produce anything of that nature.
If you made it this far, once again, thank you.
I hope you’ve enjoyed the Chronologies thus far, and I’ll see you next Saturday the latest.
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