Another theme that ends up coming up again and again in my work is the idea of self-preservation. Exploring the lengths people will go to to keep themselves safe. The threat can come from anywhere, and put anything in danger, and it might seem trivial but it doesn't matter because to that person, what's in danger is the most important thing to save.
I think in some ways decisions made in fear are the hardest to walk back. People become irrationally, overwhelmingly obsessed with protecting themselves when they think they're going to get hurt. In the moment, the fear makes it seem normal, so whatever lengths they go to to save themselves is justified. The excuse of safety has to make everything okay.
look at this wonderful gif of scallops getting scared and scattering like a flock pigeons
I’m so fucking sick of AI
its so windy my poor poor chickens are being blown around like dry leafs they look like this
getting a note on a super old post
y'all know that whole left-brained/right-brained thing is fake right? and the "brain fully develops at age 25" thing? and the "we only use 10% of our brains" thing? yeah they're all complete horseshit please yell at anyone who says them
really hate to do it but i'm locking all my works for the foreseeable future. the capitalistic, callous scraping of free, lovingly human-made art for the purpose of training generative ai is indescribably immoral, and goes against all i stand for as a writer who writes for the sake of it.
what i make is mine. i did that. and no cheap, synthesized, blended-up and watered-down pathetic pale mimicry can ever come close to what i can and have achieved.
i really, really hate to do this. a reader once commented and told me that my work was the reason they went and applied for an ao3 account. that exchange of respect and appreciation could not have happened if my works were locked from the start. i am fortunate to have felt this love for my work, and am sorry that i now have to sequester it.
what generative ai spits out is not art. there is no passion in the slop it regurgitates, no intentionality behind word choice or frustration with tense. no love imbued from hours spent hunched over a desk editing, no joy derived from having driven your friends crazy with the snippets you strategically dropped to deal the most emotional damage.
fuck generative ai and its profit-driven, uncaring, fuck-you practices. every new post about the violation of artists purely for their efforts to make art accessible sickens me. the industry needs to be better, and the individuals behind each model need to be better; every non-consensually scraped training set you weigh is worth a million artists' souls.
also, fuck anyone who says to stop writing a certain way because the llm "style" of writing is to use em-dashes and other such "tells" – the models do that because REAL LIFE HUMAN WRITERS do that. i will continue to use the goddamn punctuation. it was created to be used. don't be afraid to use it.
stop i NEED that pic of the boy who took his cat to prom and she has a lil dress and is looking up at him with 100% love and tenderness……..