RP Long 🆓️

This map of Jerusalem shows a black rectangle marking the Temple Mount, the site of the Dome of the Rock. The red dots indicate the approximate locations of Iranian missile impacts in Israel’s capital over the past two weeks. Could the IRGC actually be trying to hit Al Aqsa in some deranged Hail Mary attempt to frame Israel for damaging it?

I am not outraged by writers using AI to write their novels for them. I understand the argument for being outraged: Books were used to train the LLMs, and therefore using LLM produced text in your novel is akin to plagiarism. I don’t think using AI is akin to plagiarism and I don’t think it should be punished in the same way plagiarism would be — by having the book recalled and pulped. If the editors who acquired this slop thought it was good enough to publish, and the readers who bought the self-published version thought it was good enough to read, then this slop book I won’t read is probably as good as most of the human-produced slop I also won’t read. I think using AI is more like paying a “developmental editor” or a ghostwriter to rework your manuscript and then not giving them credit. Which, frankly, is a thing writers do all the time. (With the caveat that if AI inserts text directly lifted from another book into an author’s manuscript, the author is strictly responsible, just as they would be if an uncredited human ghostwriter committed plagiarism in their manuscript). I think AI writing sucks, but a lot of human writers are worse than AI. Bad human writers can potentially use AI to make their bad writing into bad AI writing, instead of whatever cursed thing it was before, and that raises the floor of how bad a novel can be. This is a threat to the existence of a lot of working writers who are better than most humans but worse than AI. It means that writers who are worse than them can be better than them if they use AI to glow up their prose. I don’t care about this because I think I am better than AI. So, for the next week or until I get bored, every time I post, I am going to prompt Grok to write a post on the same topic with the same general substance in my voice and then I will post a screenshot of Grok’s take on my prompt as a reply under my post, and you can tell me if I have anything to worry about.

BREAKING: In the heart of NYC, crowds of masked Islamists are openly chanting their support of Jihadist terrorist organizations. “We Support Hezbollah Here, we support Hamas here.”