Missus not don't expect to be brass Night Daniel. It's time strain from don't
because you'll find know me so mind side fast. Howdy everybody, it's us
the three most technically inclined members of the Authors and Dragons podcast, trying our
best to do a recording and not have it mess up. It is I,
the Admiral of the asshole Armada, the one, the only r e
Car and I am joined by two amazing other members of Authors and Dragons.
Introduce yourselves, guys. I'm just a brassy author on the Mongolia and Drifting
Land series. Also do a bunch of martial arts, and I play a
lot of tabletop games. Hello friends, my name is Robert Bevan. I
play the role of Klaus Richter. We're not doing that right, No,
no, no, I can't run you guys. I mean, well,
though, will you just sit in a bar and look for cats? Because
if so, you could play in any Jane's game. Yeah. Robert Bevan,
he's amazing. He writes critical failures the book series, not actual failures.
So yeah, as I said, it's us having to present a wonderful
side quest for you all. And I didn't even bother to get out of
my skeletor pajamas to do it, because that's twenty twenty three. Yeah,
that's the year so far. Yeah, I think today it's a very special
side quest how the three of us are coping with twenty twenty three, all
the amazing things thrown at us, like robots. They're coming for us in
so many ways. Yes, and not even robots coming for us like the
sex dolls we were promised a few years ago, which I'm highly disappointed in.
And I'm still waiting for Daryl Hannah from Bright Blade Runner to enter my
life, preferably with the gymnastics and not be crushing my face with her thighs
part. Although I am open, I mean like I was, I explicitly
remember being promised that the existential threat of sex robots was someone hacking your sex
robots and programming it to murder you. So like I was hoping that maybe
that would take out a few rich people. Yeah, well that would be
a computer virus to end all computer viruses, wouldn't it. So here we
somebody smears your robots naughty bits with Aid's blood. Oh my god, I'm
oh tech. Sorry, it's slightly harder than you would think to get infected
blood and spirit and keep a virus alive in an inert sample. But don't
ask me how I know this shit because I don't want to reveal it.
But yeah, so we'll start with the sex robots. What are your thoughts
on sex robots. We'll start with Bevin. Tell me. I am curious
what you think about them. I mean, I don't I don't know.
I have been falling the news. They're still just like dolls, right mostly,
but they're becoming more connected to the Internet of Things, much like the
interconnected sex toys that let you like stimulate each other over Wi Fi. So
there have been a robot I don't need that. Well, yeah, in
theory, but some people want the robots to be just robots. Other people
want robots to be placeholders for other people, kind of like how Spike hated
Buffy when he had the Buffy bot, but we all know what he did
with it. Yeah, I don't know. I can't afford any of that
ship. Yeah, because twenty twenty three, where we're still mortgaging and selling
kidneys for a carton of eggs. Also, I mean there's storage. I
mean, I had a wife and kids, and that's weird. Well,
what else would you use your garage for? What else? I'm never not
in my garage, So it would be a perfect place to store it,
wouldn't it. No, it's gonna be the new Home Makeover HTV TV.
Instead of how to have your what is it, how to make a sex
room, It's gonna be how to make a sex robot storage bay. Yeah
I was I thought you were going the Marie condo route. Know that we
all know that if we pick something up and it's sparked joy, we get
to keep it. So yes, I would hope our sex robot spark joy.
I want my sex robot to be a contortionist, not because of any
weird sexual thing, just easier to store. I thought for a second you
were going to stay a little person. Oh it's contortionist. Is slightly better,
lightly marginally? How about you, Joe, where would you store your
sex robot? That's a good question. Um, I'm trying to think because
the thing about my house is it has a very open floor plan. He's
of access, I mean, yeah, but there's also the awkward, the
awkward, like I guess you know, you could just pretend it's a mannequin,
put a hat on it and see like a conversation piece. I mean,
I have a lot of friends who are like super into costuming, so
having like just a human form or human body or like around the house is
not weird. Yeah, yeah, it is. Okay, Well, if
you a sex robot, you can afford a special coffee table. Why would
you put a sex robot in a coffee table that's where you keep it?
Would you, like, do you like press a button in the sex robot
rises out of the coffee table. I mean, I don't know. You
could say Alexa opened my coffee table or whatever. I mean alexaif word,
what if you named your sex robot Alexa, like and then it got confused
and you know, you and the heat in the throes of passion, all
your lights to be flickering on and Matlock would be coming on TV, and
shit, there's such an overflow of people who watch Matlock and have sex robots.
It's a known thing. And then accidentally it'll like order you a six
months to fly of dog food right in the middle. Oh baby, oh
baby, oh baby, I have ordered you extra large diapers for a bunt.
Thank yeah, no, maybe don't call your sector about Alexa or do
if you want shit to get really interesting, like oh please Eluciday, like
the dog food thing, or like having your lights flickering on and off during
you know, during the heat of the moment. That sounds like that'd be
pretty cool. It's kind of like got a Poultre geist vibe. I don't
know people your geist fetish. I'm sure there are people who like the bone
outside during thunderstorms. I don't judge them. Yeah, that's true. We
don't kink shame, but we do question. I do question, yeah,
especially the dude. There was a there was a story I write a while
back about a couple who were getting it on during a thunderstorm and they got
struck by lightning. Yeah, probably not advisable to do with a robot.
Yeah, they had to be surg they had to be like surgically extricated from
each other. Oh that's gross. Yeah. Oh was it like she had
implants or something and they melted and fused or just no, no, no,
it was the other parts. Oh yeah, apparently his dick looked like
cauliflower, Like what the full cauliflower, the flowering cauliflower with the long stem
and a little bit at the end. I think more like branting out in
many directions. Broccoli maybe it is Broccoliliflower looks like it's just different colored broccoli.
Cauliflower is like more puffy and solid, like there's very little space in
cauliflower. Broccoli is more stretched out like a tree. How did we go
from sex robots to chrisipherous vegetables so seamlessly? I mean, we were talking
about king shaming and that got me onto thunderstorms. That's how it works.
Just remember if you do have a sex robot, do not have sex in
a thunderstorm. Yeah, that'd be bad that, that'd be tempting fate.
Yeah, I think that would be like having a giant lightning rod attached to
your penis. Yes, oh no, I'm sure somebody has a kink and
has done that or do And you know what, if you're kink kills you,
um at least doing what's your love? I bet I bet Benjamin Franklin
had that kite tied to his dick. Why it's called the Founding Father.
Oh Jesus. No, we're not going to bring up Jesus into this conversation.
I mean, although we would like to get a God damn it at
some point tonight. I'm surprised that I haven't bet one yet. I know
I'll work harder. Okay, Bevin, I'm very disappointed in you. Wow.
It's also it's also that I forget to say it sometimes because I'm just
in such a state of shock. I have to remember that it's a bit
you know. See if you it's like having a discussion about a joke.
To actually explain it, the charm is entirely lost. I know we're here
for you. We'll make it so much worse that you will be for honestly
exactly what I need right now. Okay, because this is twenty twenty three
where we're legitimately considering sex robots, because that is actually the least invasive and
horrible artificial intelligence we can think about right now as artists and authors. Yeah,
I have seen precisely one use of like chat like ai bots that I
approve of, and that's in several like niche communities that I'm in, people
have programmed bots to generate discourse about the community. So like one of my
friends programmed a chat AI bought on a bunch of like sword community discourse and
then started teaching it, started making it have hot takes, and started like
training it to have hot takes. And then he would insert it would be
like line like, you know, spout a line of discourse about X topic.
Insert a penis, penis enlargement pill add midway through, And so you'd
get these people who would be reading this hot take from the community that they
love, and it sounds like an argument they've heard so many times before,
and then all of a sudden they're assaulted by they are they are surprised by
a dick enlargement pill add midway through. Would anyone who fondle swords regularly be
truly surprised by penis? I mean not surprised, but you know, taken
a little off guard. People are weird when they when they get super into
their niche topics. So I don't know, why do you approve of this?
I approve of it because it's funny. It's the only virtuous use of
AI, Like, the only virtuous use of AI is like stupid jokes and
surrealist weirdness and evil people. I mean, yeah, yeah, But speaking
of evil, how do you feel about what was it the Microsoft chat bought?
Deciding it had evil altered personalities, Like we came this close to Skynet
from being How do you feel about that? I heard about it, but
I haven't sure we did. I haven't read the details on it. Yeah,
they're there. Bought started inventing basically dark alter egos and did its own
shit posting of evil thing? Is that like that? Um? A couple
of years back, like AI Bought was created and they put it on Twitter
to see what would happen, and like, within like several hours, it
had become a conspiracy theorist fascist. I mean, that's just being on Twitter,
isn't it. Yeah, I mean not all of us. We're all
on Twitter, not all men, Rachel, I'm not on Twitter. God,
damn it, damn it got me. I'm sorry. I was just
lumping you two together with the same assholes who say I don't have any right
to have opinions on Star Trek or Star Wars Star Wars. Mentioning Star Wars
and Star Trek on Twitter is so fucking fraud. Oh oh yeah, yeah,
that's like, yeah, it used to be you could like things or
have an opinion and whatever you thought about the jar jar discourse. Today it's
like you say something akin to, hey, I enjoyed Last Jedi and then
prepared to hide in a bunker for a month. Yeah, yeah, I've
seen that shit. It like, I love Star Wars and I love Star
Trek, but the fandom scares me. Yeah, it's kind of like religion.
The original canon is way better than the fandom versions. But yeah,
as we're talking about AI, so yes, just like an AI Twitter,
they started feeding things and it immediately started going evil, which is kind of
gave me wonder if every sci fi writer from the you know, eighties,
well actually the seventies through the eighties was spot on for as soon as robots
start, you know, realizing they're aware, they're going to get rid of
us. Your thought how much of that is true? Though? I mean,
like I read a little bit about it, But do you think slightly
fed because you think about it? Well, AI scrape public public records,
they scrape public things. There's so much about sky Net, there's so much
about pop culture about Ais going bad. Do you think that our own history
is being taken in by these infant Ais and we're creating a self fulfilling prophecy.
Well, I don't. I don't think it's fulfilling anything. I think,
you know, as soon as anybody gets winded of it, they're gonna
say, oh hahaha, sky net and then it's a big bruhaha and whatever.
I'm not concerned about this. I still apologize to my Alexa and my
Google because if the robot overlords takeover, I'd like them to kill me last.
And do you think there's some some something interesting to the idea that that
you know, I hadn't thought about the fact that you put a bot on
the net and have its grape a bunch of data to formulate, you know,
what amounts to an AI personality, and what's it gonna get. It's
going to get a whole bunch of history of everyone saying AI is bad.
Yeah, So naturally that's what it starts spewing because it's like, so the
AI bros just being self serving to go, hey, yay, they're great,
because you know, they want to be the last to be sent to
the camps and the terminator's ownes, just like a little Johnny negative reinforcement.
It turned to drugs, drugs are bad? Or was it violent video games
that made them bad? No, it was his parents telling them, you're
no good, Johnny. Johnny. Now I'm feeling bad for Johnny. The
thing that mister bev and just made up. Have you seen that? Have
you guys seen the video? There's like a bunch of video super cuts of
the Boston Dynamics robots being just pushed over or randomly kicked because they're testing,
like they're testing them to see like how well balanced back up and all that
stuff. But it's still like just a super cut of these robots just being
knocked over and pushed and kicked and abused, and it's like, and this
is why and we wonder why the robots will be coming for us. Yeah,
it's like just testing them to see how much shit they're willing to take.
Yeah, basically that was that was like a whole arc in The Orville,
and I don't want that to come true because I really don't want to
deal with the Kaison in a few hundred years. Which, by the way,
if you haven't seen The Orville, which I'm sure knowing this audience they
haven't, um it has one of the best arcs about AI. So they
have their data like character named Isaac and he's a race called the is On
and they're like legit. We hate your shit organics robots, and when you
see their history you're like, yep, you have a very real beef with
organic life. So it is interesting. I need to watch the Orville.
I've heard really good things about it. I will say it's one of those
shows where the first season it really does take about six episodes to get It's
like, pretty much as soon as Charlie's there on shows up. Yes,
don't ask me how they got Charlie's there on in there, it actually settles
in. But it has that you know when a show is trying really hard
to make the jokes, kind of like this podcast, like really trying hard
to make the jokes. When they stop that, it actually becomes funny.
Okay, that makes sense. And it's a rare case where they manage to
be utterly hilarious and parody in a way Star Trek. But because they're so
earnest and clearly love science fiction and actually take time to build up their own
mythology, it doesn't feel like it's punching down. It doesn't feel like a
cheap shot and cool. They have porn legit holideck porn addiction as a they're
like psa story of the week, and I'm thinking, Yeah, if there
were lonely people in deep space, what do you think the first thing they
would program that holidack to do? Sex robots or in this case, sex
holograms. Is there a whole thing about having to you know, clean the
excess out of the Holida that's in lower decks actually the Holida cleanup maneuver.
Oh, yeah, they do have that mentioned in lower deck, and I
think there is some in the Orville. But because I've always wondered about that,
like if you're banging holograms but it's not going to go anywhere, it's
like if it's solid. But they do say the lightest solid, so that's
still until the hologram is like dissipated, it would be stored in its matrix.
So who do you think was the first person in Starfleet who thought,
geez, we're gonna have to create some sort of workaround for containing spooge I
don't know, but I bet they, Well, no, i'd say they.
I'd say they were probably hailed as a champion by all of the Space
janitors. Yeah, the Space Janitors League is like, there's this one Ferengie
and he invented the spooge remover program, and we love. Sure they have
shower technology. They have shower technology, but like, is it like a
little micro phaser on the holo deck that just vaporizes this spooge because they have
to code it so they don't accidentally like misfire and hit your right in the
jubblis. That is a terrifying thought. I had to sneak in star trek
somewhere because I'm a massive trekky and now we're wondering where does this spooge go?
The valid question. I've wondered it since I was will be lad by
that, I mean a teenager. I always wondered how many female members of
for male I'm not judging of a starfleet had like Special Captain Kirk program or
spock. Mine would be spot Let's be real because they had the whole episode
about where Jordy created Lena Brahms in the next generation. His like the version,
and she slowly started as the program evolved because he wrote it and with
his input it sort of became more and more into him, all shades of
creepy. But yeah, and then the real Lena Brahms actually discovered her and
it's very problematic. But also, yeah, how many people do you think
in star Trek have programmed someone to uh yeah, do the old you know,
Starfleet Shuffle. It was a Deep Space nine episode about this. I
feel like there was That was because a guy was paying Quark. He was
paying a huge sum to have a replica of Major Kira. Remember that personal
sex leave. But that was a Farrengie for profit. You could see the
Pharrengi doing it. Oh yeah, sure, I just Starfleet. I just
remember that. In the end, they put Quark's head on Kara's body.
It was brilliant. That was good. I wonder how much fun armand Schimmerman
did. He apparently loved all the people who played the Frengi, and they
had special like rehearsals on the weekends. Because the makeup process was so long,
they didn't get as much rehearsal time, so they would actually, you
know, go above and beyond and meet on the weekends. OK. I
know way too much about Deep Space nine. We're known about We lose Bevan,
Yes, we actually vapor. Sorry we set the hologram. Oops,
we didn't just it the spooge. I know he's back, but is it
real, Bevin or is it hologram Bevin? Oh, I wasn't listening what
we accused you of being vaporized that the spooge vaporizer missed and took all of
you. So we're wondering if you're really there or a hologram. I'll never
tell this AI thing. I mean, the most recent development I know about
it as the whole Clark's World having to close submissions thing, which was,
Yeah, we should talk about that because I think all of us we write
in genre fiction and we like getting paid. So how kissed off? Were
you all right? Running by me? Yeah? I heard bits and pieces.
What happened? Do you want to take it, Joe? Or you
want me to sum? So a periodical, a fiction magazine called Clark's World,
which is one of the more prestigious magazines. Basically one of the things
that distinguishes them is that they're always open for submissions instead of one of the
very few period one of the very few, and um they had a huge
glut of um AI submissions. Basically people generating like crabby short AI stories and
then like spamming their submission folders to the point of the graph. It's like
all the way up. Yeah, they basically so they actually, for the
first time ever closed submissions so that they could like sort through all of the
trash to find the actual real human And there's been stuff in like dark web
boards of get rich quick because the SFWA members and their publications are Their rate
is eight cents a word. It's one of the highest of any short story
fiction, much more than than literary magazine. So it's the biggest bang for
your buck. You right now, the chat spots can't write whole novels,
or at least can't write them very well, but they can write short stories.
No, but have you read a flush pile at a major publication.
Yeah, it's it's it's um, so is theime. So basically, the
idea, if I'm understanding this correctly, is a bunch of these like twerps
have decided that if they can spam these periodicals, they can make a whole
bunch of money. Yes, it's it's the Well, it's like what you
I think you had said this in a tweet. There's this phenomenal cult of
the idea, man, that the idea is somehow the most precious part of
creativity. Um, I know, I'm paraphrasing you. Yeah, no,
no, I remember. It's basically the idea that it's that it's that group
of people who imagine that, like the specifically where I remember hearing about it
is is the video games. It's huge. Yeah. They imagine that there's
this guy at video game company whose job is to come up with an idea
for video games, and then everyone else like spins it into gold while he
sits in his office and continues to just think of ideas. And they're convinced,
Stiltskin, They're convinced that. They're convinced that these AI programs is the
way to become the idea man. It's like, oh sweet, I don't
need to write it or anything. I can just be an idea man and
spew, you know, spew my ideas at a computer that will manifest them
for me. Of course, what's funny about this is even if they were
right, even if they were correct, all that their new paradigm would do
is devalue the idea man, like because they can hire an intern who could
just you know, pay them five bucks an hour to throw out a hundred
ideas. Because statistically speaking, quantity will always beat out quality over the long
term, if you throw enough spaghetti at the wall, it will stick more
than trying to carefully put and strand on. I mean, like, I
don't The biggest thing to me is not the threat that AI is going to
like replace real writers in terms of in terms of quality, um, but
what it can do is gum up the works of traditional periodicals to the point
that they become like the threat to me, like when it comes to publishers
is if AI submissions start absolutely obliterating slush piles and making making it for everything,
well, you won't just need an agent for everything, basically, publisher
like editors will start going exclusively to agents who are already established and who they
know and trust. So like the traditional publishing world, which is already so
much about who you know, will become even more about who you know.
It'll become even more insular, it will become even more like basically, it'll
result in the gates that are already kind of locked because even more locked and
than chained. Yeah, that's kind of that's kind of the biggest threat that
I can see of AI and traditional publishing to me, I mean, like
in indie world, it's a whole different well, I'm pretty sure it'll be
soon, because we know we had it when Amazon started Kindle and Limited and
they had these farms of people who would literally do like the same ten pages
over and over again for a thousand pages and then pay farms and basically slave
labor in third world countries to just page through and collect Kindled red page bounties.
So do you think it's going to start on Amazon, that there's going
to be a flood of like, instead of a hundred new books in a
day in a category, it'll be a thousand, and you know, nine
hundred of them are written by Ai M I'd be shocked if that's not the
case already. Yeah, I'm pretty sure in some they're gonna What they'll start
doing is mining the key words, mining the tropes, ripping off. I
mean we thought copy paint Chris, who was doing all the plagiarism and ghostwriting,
was bad. They're just going to do it on a massive scale.
And this is why I drink guys. Yeah, that's okay, there's unreal
appealing. I think I have as well, excellent joys. That's um.
Like I said, Bud Luck, we are not sponsored by any of these
brands, but we are willing to be if you would like us to drink
your booze on camera. Thank you, James achieved. I have the I
have like a weird, a weird feeling about all of this, which is
like, on the one hand, it's fucking terrible, but there's also a
part of me that's like the creative industries have kind of always been fucking terrible,
and like I can't think at the time of history when huh tell us
more about how our livelihoods are terrible. Well, no, I mean,
I mean, like, you know, look back at the Renaissance, you
weren't gonna do get much done as an artist unless you had a patron That
is true, you know, which you can subscribe to. By the way,
just saying authors and Dragons, Authors and Dragons Patreon, you get more
content like this and the answers to the questions of Holidax spooge. It's uh,
it's it's it is absolutely top quality. Um uh, I think it's
that I don't know, it's that um maxim of Like in every time period,
in every you know, no matter how shitty things are, human beings
always managed to find a way to experience some sort of joy. Um.
You know, we're we're actually pretty good at surviving. And I think that
there's always gonna be people who are looking for like actual good stories and ours
too, we hope. But do you think I'm not I'm not threatened by
this at all. I think, gee, do you really think that there's
gonna be an AI that creates such masterpieces as your shingles verse, mister Bevan?
No, fuck the rest of you can't even do it. Hey,
I just do shingles that are I am. I am like the little Palette
cleanser shingles that break yours up, mister mister Bevan. I am purposefully different.
I'm like that Legend of Zelda episode that's on the Super Mario Brothers show
once a month. That's what I am. Oh my god, Well excuse
me, Princess. It's fine, yeah, okay, don't you, Trevor
Belmont me Um No, that's the no I know. I'm oh okay,
gotcha, Yeah I was. I was expanding to the greater Nintendo Power Cartoon
Universal Jesus yet Okay, yes, Trevor, I can take your deep cut
and cut even deep, mister Bracy. No, you absolutely can. You
absolutely I am not I am. I am not aware of the deep magic
when it comes to when it comes to video game because you're a baby.
I am absolutely not. Well, you have a background in like video game
journalism, Yeah I do. I do, so like you are infinitely more
qualified to talk about that shit than I am. I am a rare woman
that has been allowed to speak of the video games and not been doxed yet.
So give it time. Knock on wood on wood. But no,
you were saying that, so you think you're fairly safe from AI because why,
Okay, tell me what tell me? I mean, I'm just I've
seen examples of what I can do. I played around with it a little
bit. Uh yeah, it's it's a neat toy. It's it's cool what
they've accomplished. I'm impressed, but it's I don't even want to say it's
got a long way to go, because I don't think it's ever gonna get
there. There's there is a human touch that I don't think will ever be
replicated by machines. Touch. I'm not talking about me in particular. There's
something that uh, you know, you can it can make a story,
you can learn. Yeah, maybe a little bit about pacing a little bit
about uh, what the what do you call the ups and downs? The
like a flow and flow of a story. Whatever. Yeah, but it's
only copying other humans. Is that what you're saying? You can't truly spontaneously
creative, It's not gonna you can't go for the feel. Yeah. I
think I think I agree with this on on a specific level, which is
that, um, the fact that like at least where it is now,
and like my caveat to this is I genuinely have no idea where it's going
because this shit moves so quickly and it generally gets very weird. Um,
the more it advances it does it goes in. It's kind of like watching
a you know how a comet thread starts at a certain point and then like
three pages down there's like Hitler and cats and everything goes crazy. Yeah.
I think that. Like the thing about AI, at least as it is
right now, is it's still completely imitative. It can't it can't come up
with original ideas because it's not. It's literally just taking the sum total of
what's out there and like mashing it and recreating the same stuff. I was
gonna say, it's making it that vanilla kind of bland generic pros because it's
taking the average of so much. So, like, what AI is going
to come for is shit that's already incredibly derivative to begin with, and the
fans it's going to come for are people who only like extremely derivative things.
And don't get me wrong, we're not because there are some have you ever
gotten in a mood? It's the Hallmark movie mood? I mean not specifically
that, but where you don't know what you want, but you don't want
to be surprised, you just want. It's like, it's like comfort's craft
macaroni and cheese in entertainment form. And I'm not even sure it can totally
come for that, because because there's something to like, even a comfort read
or a comfort you know, something that's very familiar. It's power is in
the fact that it can, like Bevin said, it can generate an emotional
connection to the reader. And I have yet to read any AI story that
actually accomplished that that actually, like, even if it's extreme derivative, it
can't. It doesn't have the spark. So you're saying that the machines don't
get our emotions quite yet. No, I don't think so, and I'm
not sure that they will because and the reason the reason I'm not sure that
they will is there seems to be this like in a lot of these AI
stories, and I'm talking specifically about like sci fi stories about AI. Yeah,
because that's what the current glut seems. Yeah, there seems to be
an assumption that as the computer intelligence or whatever advances, it's going to do
so in a way that mimics our advancement. That's going to mimic the way
we think, and that's going to mimic the way we feel. And I'm
not convinced that that's how it's gonna work. Like a machine that self actualizes
and becomes like sentient, why would it think like a human? And why
would it want to create poetry or whatever? Why do we want to create
poetry? I mean, none of the three, I don't think it.
Do any of us do poetry any artistic endeavor. I was more curious if
either of you had done poetry, because I can imagine it would be radically
different a little. While I haven't written, I haven't written like straight up
poetry in a while, but I have written some I've never tried to that
is so weird. I don't think I've written any poetry other than as a
required school assignment, so I'm legit curious about it. UM. I mostly
started you want to write a poem? I just started doing it as an
offshoot of like my love of fantasy that just had poetry in it. You
know. There was something that I liked about Tolkien stuff, and so I
imitated it a lot when I was in high school. UM, But I
also occasionally wrote it as an adult just to kind of get some feelings out.
Like I said, I've never tried to sell any of it. Um.
And it's not a huge market. That's one thing that the AI is
not coming for because it doesn't pay. Yeah, and I I've never I've
also just like most of my poetry has been most of the poetry I've written
as an adult has just been kind of weird and surrealist. Um, mine's
just dirty rhymes. Do you do limericks? I am carrious that I have?
Well, that's me. I'd love to hear one. There were somebody
asked me to write something for a book that was it was it was it
was being sold at the last day in decon. I forgot who it was,
but yeah, they probably asked a few Oh was it the quick draw
the maybe the one for charity by Noah? Yeah, I think so.
Yeah, yeah, I was in that some limericks of mine in there.
So there's a book that has your limericks and my story. Yeah, okay,
I will have to pull it out, as we somehow managed to have
pull it out in total package. In the same episode we have polite Boo,
well played, SoRs well played. Yeah. I mean, so,
you've brought up a very good point. I know we're supposed to be like
funny and irreverent, but what would a machine do if it advanced in intelligence?
Would a machine want to write poetry? If it did, I can't
imagine that it would be. I mean, like, at first, I
guess it would be imitating human poetry, since since what AI does is imitate
what humans do at this point, but like if again, one of the
things that I would define as And again I am I am not an AI
expert, I am not I'm not even a sci fi guy, But if
I had to define, at what point does an artificial intelligence like cross the
line from just being a complex algorithm to being like a sentient being. It
would be when it stops doing derivative stuff that's just amalgamated from Internet scraping,
and starts actually creating something that's unique to its experience. According to short circuit,
is when it can laugh at a joke. Interesting, that's Johnny five,
Johnny five is alive. I kind of like that. I mean it
is a concept because the very nature laughing at a joke is surprisingly a difficult
like construct, like because you can you always say, like dying is easy,
comedy is hard. Oh yeah, it's so easy. You can always
do something like if you kill the puppy, people are sad, But make
people laugh is entirely subjective to so many thousands of independent factors that what would
make an a high laugh? Yeah, well, actually ais don't fart,
so they wouldn't even laugh at the universality, like the constant of funny in
the human experience is flatulate. Would an a I laugh at it? Yeah?
I have. I have no idea. That's kind of like the like
I said, that's sort of why I'm not exactly threatened by the idea of
AI becoming self actualized, or at least like I'm not threatened in the sense
of it's going to take my job away. Um, part of that at
least not immediately. At least not immediately um. But uh, but also
like whatever it becomes is probably not going to be what I expect, and
it's probably going to be pretty fucking weird, Like pretty fucking weird. Though
I hang out with you guys, and I mean, so, I don't
know, I'm I guess I'm a little word. I guess. I'm I'm
worried for the sort of structure, real threat of it, like fucking with
submission systems and yeah, but even then, that's not really the AI doing
it. That's humans, that's humans being assholes. You know. Do you
think it's going to be something like NFTs where there's a crush and a pain
and then it I mean, once, the last time you've heard crap about
NFTs lately, NFTs were a flash in the pan. AI, I mean
that will ever continue to evolve? Yeah, you think no flooding submissions and
stuff? Oh yeah, Oh that I don't know. I think that's going
to be a bit of a flash in the pan, primarily because the reason
they're doing it, like it comes into one question, are they doing it
because they're trolling the system and trying to break it, or are they doing
it because they actually think they're going to make money. If it's the latter,
then they're not going to make any money. And once they don't make
money, they're going to just wander away, at least from the realized For
all this fucking work I'm doing, I could have just written a book,
yeah and the other if they're just trolling the thing about like so the things
so like full confession, I spent a period of my late teens and early
twenties on four jan Like I just I would browse the boards. I was
kind of like, so I'm familiar with the subculture, watching the world burn,
break it, you can mentality. The thing about these people is while
they're very dedicated, when they have a target picked, they get bored quickly.
So so like when they're and I'm not talking about like obviously the cycle
of harassment of specific individuals can persist for a very long time, but when
I talk about things like one random example I can think of is when four
chan decided to attack the Church of Scientology they occasionally do good. Yeah,
that lasted for a couple of months to a year and then they got bored
and they went to do something else. So like, if they're just trolling
the publishing system, um, then they're going to get bored. Okay,
I guess that brings to the follow up question of all of this. Is
there any good for AI? Is there anything we can actually use in it
besides just the obvious. Finally, something can tell me where the fuck to
put a comma. Um So again, I'm not an expert, but um,
I'll say not yet. Yeah, I think in its current state.
But even have you used it for anything or not played around with it?
And then and I watch a lot of YouTube videos about this sort of thing,
and yeah, people are saying, oh, you can use it to
do your web content and stuff, and like, you know, I got
a lot of content written for my website and I would not let AI anywhere
near there. And it's it's not bad, it's just so's it's nothing.
It's just it's filler filler. Yeah. So it tells you exactly what you
need to know in the most boring way possible. Is that what you mean?
I'm not even boring. It's just like you know, when I when
I when I outsource my content I want something that it's gonna draw viewers in.
They're gonna read an article, they're gonna say, oh, that was
that was an experience I'm happy with. I'm gonna bookmark this site. I'm
going to come back. I want to see, you know, with this
site has. I want to know the site's opinion on other things that it
talks about. AI is not going to give them that experience. It is.
It might be able to, like, you know, do some seo
ninja stuff for keywords or whatnot, it's gonna be short term. People are
gonna yeah see that and yeah, have been birned by that website before that
sort of thing. Yeah, it's a valid point, Like, in order
for it to make people's lives better, the things it automates would need to
be things that um things where doing those things isn't something that people rely on
for a job, Like, it would need to not take jobs away.
Um. I suppose, you know, I suppose if it could streamline some
things, I guess that would be good. But I like, I kind
of agree that not in its current form because again, in its current form,
it just it just kind of imitates shit. And when it comes to
generating web content like like kind of like adjacent to what Bevan said, most
AI, Like, I guess I've heard people say that they could use AI
to generate quick opinion pieces. But the thing is those opinion pieces aren't going
to say anything there they I've seen a few of them, and it's like,
you know when you're talking to your guidance counselor at your school and you
can tell they're just quoting something out of a book and it feels exactly like
that. It's like you would be an excellent creative individual, Rachel, Like,
I know that, but um, how how will that pay for my
life? Sir? You know that kind of thing. Yeah, it's it's
that, it's that perfect example of like you read an AI opinion beast,
It's like, wow, that's a lot of words that said nothing. Well
architecture like a communist place, like, yeah, it's functional, but uh,
the spark isn't there. Yeah, I mean have you have you ever
have either of you tried writing an outline for something with I played with the
chat GPT very briefly and I got bored with it, And yeah, I
tried to generate a few outlines and it was literally like it just repeats did
like, and then your main person meets, you know, their love interest.
Well, then I mean to be fair though my Yeah, I didn't
give it enough of a chance. There I have, Like I said,
I'll watch a lot of YouTube videos about this sort of thing. I have
seen impressive things. You have to learn how to finagle it. You got
to learn the chat, you got to learn the dance, the back and
forth, what it can understand, what it's going to struggle with. You
know, when you get a little more experience with it, you can do
more interesting things. I would imagine, kind of like on the mid Journey
are prompts where I've seen some people create some amazing stuff and I look at
it and go, draw me a snowman. Right, Yeah, so I
guess there are. It's a tool. I think for certain I could see
it maybe for outlining, maybe for just like sorting notes, or I'm wondering
if eventually I could use it to skim and do like character sheets or character
bios, like what an eye color does this person have. I could see
maybe in the future, using it for some of those administrative and note keeping
tasks, like if you've got a book that has six or eight books in
a series. If something could read it and just summarize them, that would
be helpful. But I haven't seen that really work yet. I've only seen
outlines that were at least moderately useful. I suppose I suppose an interesting I
suppose an interesting tack you could take. Again, I don't know if the
I don't know if it can even do it at this point. But like
you could say, summarize X book, you know, tell the program to
summarize xbook and see what it does. I guess I know Rick did it
just to read his books, and it described like three books he'd never written,
and were just like, oh, what are these? So, I
mean it has some hilarious misinformation. I had it write a vampire story in
my style, like a short one, and it was the most cutey,
disnified crap. But I'm like, is that loking right? I? Um?
I think that uh that as well. It's just like I said,
I think the technology is is just kind of too young, and it's it's
good for spamming shit. It's good for generating crap and and generating it very
very quickly, which is for grammar and spelling. I will say that grammar
checkers and spell checkers in the past three years are leaps and bounds what they
used to be. Yeah, that's that's that's valid um. So I'm sure
that's text the speech, which is an AI function. I will say that's
one of the few good things because for people who can't write, like when
my hands were bound up from carpal tunnel, text the speech saved me.
Yeah, and we couldn't do that even. I mean it was in its
infancy just ten years ago, and that is an AI function. It's yea
natural language processing is a huge improvement in the past few years. I know
they use it in medical professions too. It saves lives because it reads like
progress notes and pulls out information. I'm a little terrified at how much AI
is being used in modern medicine after seeing it recently, but I mean it
does stuff like that saved my son's life. So yeah, yeah, yeah.
When I'm worried about AI that decides to start diagnosed, like when they
start using AI to diagnose stuff, stuff, I'm worried about that. It's
already being used partially because what it does is it will read what it It's
the same thing that the chat GPT does. It reads all your progress note
history and it pulls out the keywords and produces potential diagnoses over multiple reported because
it might be you saw a doctor two years ago for a chest pain and
then you had a foot pain at a different doctor, and if they don't
necessarily know to look for it, it skims and combines and goes maybe there's
a whole systemic issue like lupus or something like that. Oh okay, yeah,
I suppose that's a good thing. Then they also use it for you
were prescribed this medication, this medication, this medication and this medication, and
to try to prevent kind of thefts, not just the side effects, but
like the Michael Jackson thing where he was getting painkillers from multiple unrelated doctors that
was allowing him to get enough to overdose. Yeah, that makes sense.
So thank you, AI. Please don't kill us. First, we appreciate
you're helping people through modern medicine, but it is it's kind of scary in
a way because it's change. Change is always scary. I'm not afraid.
You're not afraid. What scares you, mister Bevan? Heights and cockroaches,
What about a bunch of cockroaches at a very high height. Yes, okay,
good to know not to so do not. I've only had one bad
cockroach experience in my life, and I feel like it kind of makes up
for the fact that I have not had any other ones. It's like I
crammed all of the bad experiences into one. Oh, please tell us this
experience. Yeah, what is your good cockroach experience? I had like one
bad, one really bad cockroach experience. Like I only had one cockroach experience,
and that only one in your whole life. It was like this big
crawled out of the drain in my shower while I was taking a shower.
I I went to India to train for my day job. I was not
prepared to the size and I turned on the light and out of it was
the same thing they crawl out of the drain, and I just I screamed
like a little girl. I won't lie it was. It was a very
high pitched, nearly supersonic scream. I think I alerted nearby cats and dogs
to my presence, and then I ran and the lovely landlord he was a
pacifist too, so he took a cup and took Skippy the cockroach out of
my bathroom and from then and I knew he came back because I saw the
feelers. So we had an agreement for the rest of my stay in amdibodies
that I would turn on the light wait a minute because the light would make
him disperse, And I was like, you do your thing, Skippy,
and I will do mine. But yeah, they are they are built different
in India. That doesn't surprise me, and I hope we haven't unnerved mister
Bevan with our cockroache tails. The worst that was actually not my worst cockroach
experience. If you want my worst cockroache experience and involved a movie theater of
Riesea's pieces and a very unexpected crunch. That was my worst cockroage experience.
It took years to be able to eat a Reesa's peanut butter cup. Was
it like inside the wrapper was on the cup? I pit through that I
killed a cockroach with my teeth. Cool, It's pretty gross. Yeah,
it was absolutely horrifying. I don't remember this, but my parents apparently we
lived in an apartment that had cockroaches when I was really really little, and
my mom's breaking point was when she found me playing with one. You had
a positive experience with a cockroach. You just related it. I was like,
I must have been like two years old or something all playing with a
cockroach. At least you didn't bite it in a half, that's true.
Do you have any cockroach stories you'd like to SHAREH No, I'm fair.
I don't want to talk about them at all. I will respect that.
What would well? I think you know what? Good time to just pimp
our ship and go thank you AI overlords, please kill us. Last what
would you guys like to pimp this fine side quest? What have you got
out? Let's start with you. Thing is simping as if head out for
a while. Um, Skyfair and Dragon Road are out anywhere books are sold
at least for the moment. But you do have an awesome, amazing work
in progress that I got a sneak free view out. Yes I did,
I'd have. I have a number of works in progress. Uh that I
am that I am trumbling away on. Um that's with my agent right now
and I'm writing summaries. Uh. Love, you should have it. You
should you know what you should do? You should try chat GPT to see
I think write your summaries. Come on, just see what it does.
As an experiment to end this side quest, we would like to know what
it says. What it says sounds like a good follow up. Um,
but yes, mister bad and the writer of critical fairs, what is it
number? Is it number nine? Or are you up to ten? Oh?
Now supposed to be working on ten? Totally working on ten? He's
just being And yes, I am our ecar. My latest book, The
Accidental Summoner is published by Falstaff Press, which officially means that John Partners owns
my soul. Please buy it. It's a book about a demon accidentally summoned
to via burrito, and no AI was used in its creation. Yes,
I've been our car, and I would like to thank you for joining us
for our surprisingly deep and existentially questioning artificial intelligence side quest. Maybe we actually
have some actual intelligence here. Maybe so maybe until I speak to you again,
toulu and bye, goodbye friends. Autitsen Dragons brought to under Creative Commons
license, meaning you were free to share this material so long as credit is
given to those who created, which is us. People you just heard to
play the game opening and closing themes performed by the Gore Core four