Luddite fringe activists

Writers are understandably upset about AI. AI can make a biography; all you have to do is ask it. AI is making children's books and literally flooding the market. AI is correcting everyone's grammar to the point that not using AI can be proven by a typo. This means that I encourage typos as a way of asserting you have written it yourself.

The problem is, "AI detection" programs are notoriously unreliable. What can you do if your work is 100% original but some program says it's 88% AI, or, 88% likely to be AI? Nothing. What I do is, try to avoid having my work run through the program in the first place. Lay low. Don't let anyone even ask the question.

One thing I will do is state unequivocally in the front cover of every book, This book was written by a real person...it is too late to do this with the thirty or so books I already have on the market. I could go back, sure, and slip it in there on the first page and then republish. But I don't want to do that, maybe because I'm too lazy, or because I feel like I shouldn't have to.

So the Luddite fringe activists are making lists of people who "use" AI for anything. Here's the thing. You can use it to write, use it to check your grammar, or use it to do the art on the cover. You can use it just to ask its advice on how you organized it. But it's a slippery slope. I can look up a word on google and it will give me a definition just because google stores definitions. But often it gives me an AI-driven explanation. Now some of my education and the preparation I have used for my book comes from AI, right? If I am to treat AI like a pariah, not touch it with even the side of my eye, then I have to pretty much get off the computer as I write and not look anything up at all. Or if I look it up, look it up only in the library. No AI! I don't want to admit that any use of the computer brain was involved in any part of my book.

With my art, full disclosure here, I've been using LunaPic, and I have no idea whether it qualifies as AI. It's been around since long before all this hoo-hah, but it's pretty clever, so sometimes I suspect that it has decided what makes a photo more impressionist and it just makes these changes because it's smart. Uh oh, should I admit that I use AI? I don't even know if I'm using AI. I'm using something.

My conclusion: Make a statement something like the following: This book was written entirely by a human. Tools were used in its construction that may or may not qualify as AI. Let them sort it out.

AI detection

With all this hoo-hah about AI, a market has sprung up for "AI detection." Unfortunately many writers submit 100% original work only to find that AI detectors consider it "50% AI-written" or "50% likely to be AI-written" with the numbers widely varying; it's general consensus that the detection software is useless. One will call it 80%, another 20%; they are so wrong, so often, that they might as well be picking the numbers out of a random number generator.

This leads me to wonder what the heck the schools can do about this. I'm sure AI is generating a lot of homework and getting away with it. But should a school invest in "AI detection?" I don't think so.

But it leads me to my ultimate question: How DO you know what's AI generated? If AI is as smart as we are, and uses language that we've been using for years, and always uses the language that is most commonly used to express something - then, it's kind of like us, in the sense that it's creating language the same way we are. It seems to me that if you track this down carefully enough, and let AI create enough, there will really be no difference anyway. So you can't tell what's AI-generated and what's not. You can't be sure of anything.

Somebody mentioned em-dashes, as if AI kind of had a preference for them, so they've stopped using them altogether so that the AI detection software doesn't scoop them up. But wait a minute! Why would AI prefer em-dashes, or anything, more than the rest of us? That's really a style question, and AI doesn't really have a style, does it?

Just thinking out loud. This "detection" software, after it determines you have written AI-like material, then offers to "humanize" it, making it less like AI. For a fee, of course.

The writer's block is killing me. I don't pick up my big computer, the one with word, any time I could be disrupted, which is most of the time. But even when I have an entire hour free, I don't pick it up. Why?

I actually have five or six projects going but all of them are suspended. Not a lick of work on any of them in about a month. Every day I tell myself "write!" but don't. Sometimes writing about it here> will help jumpstart me.

The big one is finishing up The Halberd which will finish up Beasts of Ayutthaya, a trilogy of three retellings of Beauty and the Beast. It's almost done. It shouldn't be this hard. The problem is you have to think deeply and carefully to finish it off. You have to cover your bases.

And lately I've been sick, recovering from surgery, laid up a little, ducking out of a lot of responsibilities. And Christmas is coming. We adults have to go out and buy junk.

Give me a kick in the patootie. I need to get going. I also need some exercise. And I need to get back into the self-promotion business. The holiday season was a wash but hey, really, in the big picture, the whole thing is kind of a wash. If I wanted to make serious money I should have just done it differently. Period.

Hopefully, I will have something to show real soon here.

 

Just did my numbers, and yeah, they're pretty depressing; I'll explain. There are several reasons and writing about it sometimes helps my mind and helps me work my way out of a funk.

First, I write down my ratings, US kindle and paperback, for all 30 of my books every Saturday morning, as part of keeping up on the marketing. I know how much they lose in a week, each of them, on both sides. This week I was a little late and didn't get to it until after noon, but they were terrible anyway. Most of my books aren't selling much. Those that aren't are losing over 100k on the paperback side every week, and that's disheartening.

But it's partly because I've almost totally stopped my social media barrage. That wasn't getting me very far, but it's what I had. I have a rebellious streak and when you have to market I shut down. It's Christmas. You have to market. But nobody tells me what I have> to do. It's the hardest time in the year for me to market.

Bad strategy...but I can't help it, it's just the way I am. I can Know I have to get myself out there, and I just clam up and don't. Oh well. But that's not the worst of it. The worst is that I've more or less stopped writing too.

I'm almost done with a trilogy, three different retellings of Beauty and the Beast, but the third one is supposed to tie it all together and it's just sitting there; I'm not getting to it. It's partly because, on a day to day basis, it's hard to pick up the old computer, with Word on it. I am literally busy from the moment I wake up. When I have a single cup of coffee I check the scores (the numbers) and mess around. I don't market anymore (like I used to) but I also don't pick up the big computer and write either. What's left is copious reading. I can always do that. But that's far less productive.

Out of the reading I get a good view of indie writing as it is - much of it better than me. Some of it worse. Some of it depressing. Some of it very entertaining. It's a mixed bag to tell the truth. But I'm embarassed to say for this week anyway, it's about all I've got to show.

Now I figure people are buying books again. Now if at any time. My Local Author Fair is at the library on Saturday, a week from today, and hopefully people will be buying. They're not especially picking me out online, paperback or kindle, though i do get a few sales. It's depressing. I should be world famous by now.

Local Author Fair

Two Galesburgers

Finished a draft of my new three-part book Beasts of Ayutthaya, which is actually three retellings of Beauty and the Beast, kind of like a symphony that revises and works over the same plot, developing it in 3d or something. Still lots of work to do on it, but I decided to mull it over before I made any changes.

First thing I needed to do was go for a walk. So out I went, and I went up Prairie Street to downtown to the indie bookstore in town, Wordsmith. I actually have done this now three or four times. It's about a mile, two total when I turn around. Lots of beautiful trees and houses all along the avenue.

The reason I mention this is twofold. One, I'll probably have my books on consignment at Wordsmith, if it works out. I'll keep you posted. I'm not totally crazy about putting books on consignment, ever since I tried it in Lubbock and someone stole my book, A Dozen Crime Stories. But if you're going to do it, the local bookstore is a place to start. I'm hoping to get to know them better in the process.

Second, each day I walked past the house of the guy who made Boxcar People, an NPR documentary about Mexican immigrants on Galesburg trains. Now I haven't seen this documentary, but the guy recently posted that he was coming out of seclusion after mourning his wife's death, and was seeking friends. In a way I was trying to offer myself up, and took him a book. Today I found his glasses on his walk, and took it as a sign that I should just knock on the door with my book and the glasses, which I did, but he didn't answer. I came home and wrote him a message on Nextdoor, where I saw his original post.

This happened with Judy too; she's a very interesting Galesburg resident who I wouldn't mind writing a book about. The point of each book remains to be decided, and depends on their involvement. If they don't really want a book, what's the point? I figured it was a way to contribute to Galesburg, explore it a little, learn a little about it.

So this guy apparently made a documentary, Boxcar People, possibly with the involvement or inspiration of his wife, who now has died. He may or may not want to talk about it, and I sure don't want to dig where I'm not welcome. But I think it's an interesting story, worth exploring. We'll see what happens.

In the case of Judy, she's a social media pioneer; she makes movies that are well known around the world. Her driveway is full every morning. One can get pancakes. I haven't pitched her yet though, just gave her a book. We'll see how it all pans out, so to speak.

update

Having finished two parts of a trilogy, and being almost done with the third, I am on a kind of roll with the writing, though it's been a long time coming and I feel I'm in danger of sinking again into oblivion when it's finished. The marketing is not so productive. In fact, I am using this post to wonder what the heck I'm doing.

First, the writing: on my Amazon, check out Be Our Guest and White Elephant. The Halberd is next, and the three of them together will be Beasts of Ayutthaya, part of the Global Beasts series. I'm proud of it. It's magical realism, my new genre. It may work or may not, but at least I'm producing something.

On the marketing front, there's read-marketing and machine-gun marketing. That's really all I have. Friends and family read them; others by and large haven't found them. The purpose of machine-gun marketing (put an ad on every single medium or place or platform you can. find) is to widen people's exposure. How many people even know I exist? I've been on some of these sites before but that doesn't seem to affect anything. My marketing doesn't seem be drawing many people in. Wasted energy, as far as I can tell.

On the reading front, I finished three excellent indie books and will review all three as soon as possible. Two were by good friends. I am attracted to the authors I like and just read them without prompting or exchange, and they're good for me; I enjoy them. Some are exceptionally well written. But on the review-exchange sites, my luck isn't very good. Some people leave good reviews which I don't always totally trust. Others leave bad reviews and I don't entirely trust them either. One guy reviewed my book after only reading seventeen pages. But he seemed to think it was ok to basically admit that he only skimmed it. Should we take him seriously?

This leaves me with four unfinished books, three of which are lousy to say the least. One is borderline entertaining, another is just kind of bizarre. One has to be done today. It's fair-to-ridiculous.

Such is life. Back to work.