Susanna Johnson

@SusanWiseBauer Ugh. I hate it so much. A pox on ai

If you don't follow publishing news (and you don't read horror fiction), you may not have seen the headlines about the cancellation of a novel called "Shy Girl" when readers began to complain that it had been AI-generated. All of us who write and publish for a living are on edge about AI-written texts. For one thing, it's not so easy to determine when a book has been produced by machine rather than by human brain. Ironically, AI tools are often used to analyze prose for the presence of AI, and because our own books have been used to train the AI itself, our styles may set off the AI alarm bells. And for another, what will happen to the business we love if AI gets better at this task? This piece points out some of the dilemmas. ** When [writer Antonio] Bricio learned about the novel’s cancellation on social media, his stomach dropped. He said he does not use A.I. to write, except to occasionally translate a stray word or phrase from his native Spanish into English, in which he is also fluent, using the A.I. translation program DeepL. But he wondered what an A.I. detector would say about his work. So he paid for a subscription to Originality and uploaded a chapter of his novel. The detector was 100 percent confident that he had used A.I. in some way. Bricio searched for the phrases that had tripped up the detector, deleted some sentences and reran it. This time, the program said it was 100 percent certain that a human had written it. Eventually, Bricio had a chat conversation with a customer service representative, who told him that if he received results that incorrectly flagged his work as A.I.-generated, he might need a different model of the program. The back and forth only left Bricio more unsettled. The Originality reports on his draft, which he shared with The Times, showed that adding or deleting even just a few sentences produced wildly different results. “What if publishers or agents start running these A.I. tools on everybody?” Bricio said. “Everybody is going to walk on eggshells from now on.” ...As the publishing industry wrestles with the intrusion of A.I. into nearly every aspect of the business, there seems to be little consensus over what publishers can or should do to regulate how writers use the technology. But many agree that the current state of affairs is untenable. A growing number of writers face unfounded suspicions of A.I. use. Others use A.I. without disclosing it. Many readers feel confused and wary, not knowing whether the books they’re reading were written by a human or a machine. “We’re reaching this era of distrust, with no easy way to prove the veracity of your own writing,” said Andrea Bartz, a thriller writer who was a lead plaintiff in the class-action lawsuit brought by authors against Anthropic, which agreed to a $1.5 billion settlement. Bartz recently put some of her own writing into Ace, an A.I. checker, and was startled when the program labeled her work as 82 percent A.I.-generated. The program then offered her a solution: “Would you like to humanize your text?” When Bartz wrote about her experience on Substack, dozens of writers chimed in. “I guess that’s what happens when your books were stolen to program A.I.,” the novelist Rene Denfeld commented, noting that an A.I. detection program had also falsely determined some of her writing to be A.I.-generated. ** nytimes.com/2026/04/10/boo…

Another one @HolyPost_Media @philvischer

@AlyssaDegraff @MBurtwrites 🤮

And just like that, Robert Morris is released. -4 years of sexually abusing a minor -43 years of lucrative ministry -6 months jail time Now 9.5 years of probation in a lake house worth 6x the ordered restitution. #SheWas12

@Andrewnsnyder At least you chose the proper cover art to share this photo. I get it though. Reading the last battle gives me all the feels every time

Narnia's heart-plucking moments hit way harder when reading with your kids. Tonight I finished reading Prince Caspian with the kids, and I struggled to keep it together after looking at my daughter's heartbroken face upon hearing that Peter & Susan were too old to return.

@dieworkwear You’re the best

During the recent kerfuffle over whether people should be socially shamed for wearing pajamas at Costco, someone on here suggested that I was supporting the decline of social standards because I think it's perfectly fine to wear whatever you want to a giant warehouse that sells $1.50 hot dogs. The idea that dress was better in the past is treated as such an obvious truth that few people question it, even those who share my preference for contemporary life. But I would pose another view: although the emergence of fast fashion is certainly bad, and there's a terrible environmental cost from the waste now caused by the fashion industry, dress is better today than in the past. Just look at these photos recently posted by Scott Schuman, the photographer behind the famous fashion site The Sartorialist. These images are from his recent trip to Paris. Scott often posts themed sets like this — images of stylish people in Milan, Hong Kong, New York City, and so forth. I disagree with the idea of dress respectability on moral grounds. You should treat everyone with respect, regardless of what they're wearing. But as a matter of aesthetics, it's good that society has eased some of the Victorian handwringing around what people wear in public. Look at the diversity of aesthetics showcased here, from just one recent trip to Paris (and notably, only focused on menswear, not even getting into womenswear). On first glance, there are some themes here that could describe the fashion Robert Frank captured in his book The Americans, shot just after the Second World War. Here we see men wearing military-inspired clothing (e.g., bombers and trenches) and tailoring (e.g., houndstooth tweed and a boldly checked raglan overcoat). But we also see fashions that prob wouldn't have made it onto the streets in 1950, such as the patchwork boro jacket or the double-breasted with unusual pattern and button placement (look at that button-and-cloth corsage!). It's unimaginable today, but in the first half of the 20th century, a man could be sent home from work for wearing the wrong color shirt. For white-collar professionals, even in cosmopolitan cities, the standard office uniform consisted of a dark worsted suit worn with a white-collared shirt, a dark silk tie, and a pair of dark leather shoes. The phrase "no brown in town" refers to the British cultural practice of only wearing black leather shoes in certain professions when doing business in London. Brown was the countryside. If you flouted these rules, people would whisper behind your back about how you're a bad person (e.g., dumb, uncultured, rude, etc). That social system seems terribly toxic to me. But even as a matter of aesthetics, how great is it that the second man in the second slide can show up at many offices today wearing a brown houndstooth tweed jacket with a jaunty little neckerchief? The world is aesthetically better today than it was 100 years ago. Yes, there are lots of people who are badly dressed. This is fine, as not everyone cares about aesthetics. But if you do care about aesthetics, you enjoy greater freedom today and thus can express yourself through a wider range of aesthetics. If you let people wear pajamas to Costco, you can wear any of the outfits below and more. And if you open your mind to other aesthetics, I think you will find that many people on the street today are stylish, even if they're wearing something that you would not personally wear yourself. IG thesartorialist

@JenniferEValent Are you on threads? I miss following you but I don’t use twitter anymore

There will be no effective way to convince future generations that this cultish veneration of a morally decrepit carcass of soulless humanity actually took place. I’m living through it, and I still can’t believe this is real life.

@philvischer @HolyPost_Media I don’t use Twitter anymore but I wanted to share this gem with you.

@RepThomasMassie @HasanKhxnx They better not be stupid enough to go after you. I hope they realize that would be way too obvious. Also, what a terrible timeline we’re all living in 😫

@HasanKhxnx I am not suicidal. I eat healthy food. The brakes on my car and truck are in good shape. I practice good trigger discipline and never point a gun at anyone, including myself. There are no deep pools of water on my farm and I’m a pretty good swimmer.

Can you, the people, “vote your way out of this?” Honestly, not if you get your news from these folks. The swamp has tricks for deceiving the public, and most even work on congressmen. Here’s an example of how Laura and Greg played along as happy tools of the swamp. Please ask yourself why your own congressman has never talked about this. He either hasn’t gotten this far in the game (80% chance), or he likes the way the swamp obscures what’s going on (10% chance), or he dislikes the system but the price he’d pay for telling you is too high (10% chance). If a congressman sees this post and wants to debate me, I accept! The House has rules we adopt at the beginning of each Congress. Honestly we should just use those - some go all the way back to Thomas Jefferson. Some are like Robert’s Rules of Order which branched from House rules a century ago. But we have a rules committee that modifies the rules every week. I served on the rules committee for two years. When I was on the committee, I refused to vote for rules changes if the purpose was to mislead or obscure. Every week, the rules committee bends the rules to suit the Speaker, but you can’t place the blame just on the committee or the Speaker. Every rules change must be approved by the whole House with a majority vote. Rank and file congressmen are told to vote for these rules modifications each week for the sake of party loyalty because the rules are temporarily modified by the majority to keep the minority from using the permanent rules against us. This is partly true, so most congressmen never question beyond this. Typically, every week the rules committee meets before other committees and writes a rules package to protect bills that will come to the floor that week. Then the whole house votes on this rules package early in the week before significant legislation comes to the floor. The vote is typically on party lines. Sometimes a block of congressmen in the majority will take the rules package hostage and withhold their vote to get something else that has nothing to do with the rules. I’m not a big fan of this, but after 13 years, my hands aren’t completely clean of this tactic. The high-road position that I try to maintain is that if the rules package is bad, you shouldn’t vote for the rules package, and in general you shouldn’t withhold your vote from a rules package if there’s nothing wrong with the rules package… even if you disagree with the policy that is enabled to come to the floor by the rules package. There are more details, but that’s all you need to know to understand what I’m going to explain next. This week the Speaker wanted to do two things outside of our base rules, so he put those inside of the rules package that also had the rules for bringing bills like the popular SAVE Act to the floor, knowing members would be afraid to vote against something associated with SAVE. THIS IS INTENTIONAL. The Speaker wanted to circumvent the National Emergencies Act of 1976 to avoid voting on tariffs and he wanted to turn off the ban on bringing a spending bill to the floor the same day it’s introduced. The first rules package that came to the floor this week failed because myself and other republicans objected to it. The rules committee met again, wrote a new rules package without the tariff-trick, and we voted on the second rules package. I voted no but internet goons, like clockwork, characterized this as a vote against the SAVE Act. The swamp used that second rules package to give them authority to pass a bill before anyone could read it. They hid that authority inside the rule for the SAVE act because they knew people like Laura and Greg would help them disparage anyone who didn’t go along. If you fell for Laura and Greg’s slop you were cheering for the Pelosi doctrine that we should pass bills to see what’s in them. If the rules package had failed, the rules committee would have written a better one and SAVE Act would have still come to the floor.

@JJ_Denhollander Remember when they said Trump was an fbi informant? 🙄

Remember when Bondi said there were no files, after she said the files were on her desk? I'm starting to doubt the intelligence and competence of the people involved in "investigating" this mess.

@thescottbarber Haha

Wait till I tell the kids: “the good news is Santa is real, the bad news is that he’s dead.”

@WhiteHouse Y’all nasty. In a bad way.

HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS!

@Ferndiggity Probably incredibly low.

What are the chances!

@JohnFugelsang I will choose not to imagine that. 🤣

Imagine how awful these misogynists are at basic foreplay

@PressSec Your lies are astounding. What concoction of podcast/audiobook/pills/drugs/alcohol do you take to help you sleep at night after all the lying you do EVERY. SINGLE. DAY.

This!!!!

@JBay_AllTheWay Also, best cover art!

Just finished. It’s still a delight.

@hoopersnook Huzzah!

I got to provide snacks for an event at school tonight and give away whole pizzas to dozens of families to take home. Mostly because of this stupid, terrible hell site. Not a terrible way to end a 13 hr work day.

@JayMallow3 I cannot stand johnson with a thousand days.

@danae_hudlow Gross. It’s all so nasty.

We all know the reason, and it's 💲💰 Candace, Nick, and Tucker together have large and lucrative audiences who hang on their every word and reshare and boost their content reflexively and uncritically. Normies like Megyn want their slice of the pie, even at the cost of truth.

@JJ_Denhollander It’s true. I feel like with some of the people in my life, if they chose to accept one thing they believe is wrong, that opens a crack they’re completely unwilling to go through. No desire for true accountability so they’ll hold tight to all the lies

It's difficult to remember that even if presented with indisputable proof of collusion, malfeasance, and an antagonistic relationship to the truth, some people will continue to follow and believe certain figures/commentators because they want to believe comfortable narratives.

@JayMallow3 Facts