Avatar photoSteven Savage

AI: Same As We Never Admitted It Was

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

(I’d like to discuss Large Language Models and their relatives – the content generation systems often called AI.  I will refer to them as “AI” in quotes because they may be artificial, but they aren’t intelligent.)

Fears of “AI” damaging human society are rampant as of this writing in May of 2023.  Sure, AI-generated Pizza commercials seem creepily humorous, but code-generated news sites are raking in ad sales and there are semi-laughable but disturbing political ads.  “AI” seems to be a fad, a threat, and a joke at the same time.

But behind it all, even the laughs, is the fear that this stuff is going to clog our cultures with bullshit.  Let me note that bullshit has haunted human society for ages.

Disinformation has been with us since the first criminal lied about their whereabouts.  It has existed in propaganda and prose, skeevy gurus and political theater.  Humans have been generating falsehoods for thousands of years without computer help – we can just do it faster.

Hell, the reason “AI” is such a threat is that humans have a long history of deception and the skills to use it.  We got really good doing this, and now we’ve got a new tool.

So why is it so hard for people to admit that the threat of “AI” exists because of, well, history?

Perhaps some people are idealists.  To admit AI is a threat is to admit that there are cracks and flaws in society where propaganda and lies can slither in and split us apart.  Once you admit that you have to acknowledge this has always been happening, and many institutions and individuals today have been happily propagandizing for decades.

Or perhaps people really wanted to believe that the internet was the Great Solution to ignorance, as opposed to a giant collection of stuff that got half-bought out by corporations.  The internet was never going to “save” us, whatever that means.  It was just a tool, and we could have used it better.  “AI” isn’t going to ruin it – it’ll just be another profit-generating tool for our money-obsessed megacorporate system, and that will ruin things.

Maybe a lot of media figures and pundits don’t want to admit how much of their jobs are propaganda-like, which is why they’re easily replaced with “AI.”  It’s a little hard to admit how much of what you do is just lying and dissembling period.  It’s worse when a bunch of code may take away your job of spreading advertising and propaganda.

Until we admit that the vulnerabilities society has to “AI” are there because of issues that have been with us for a while, we’re not going to deal with them.  Sure we’ll see some sensationalistic articles and overblown ranting, but we won’t deal with the real issues.

Come to think of it, someone could probably program “AI” to critique “AI” and clean up as a sensationalist pundit.  Now that’s a doomsday scenario.

Steven Savage

Trope Friction

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

I was discussing tropes in a meeting of my fellow writers, and a thought came to mind.  Often when we writers discuss tropes it’s do we use them or not.  I realized that sometimes the value of the trope is something to bump up against.

Let me give an example.

In my Avenoth series, there is a sorceress, Marigold Rel-Domau.  Marigold is not your typical weedy magic user, she’s a 6’7” spell-flinger who works out and is willing to mix fisticuffs and sorcery.  The trope of the non-physical magic user was one I enjoyed running up against.  I thought about how using magic doesn’t give any reason not to engage in physical improvement and gives many reasons to hit the weight room.

In my thinking, her career involved troubleshooting dangerous occult and high-tech situations with her partner.  Marigold wielded gravity and kinetic magic, but being practical, she knew she needed more than one tool in her toolbox.  Sometimes punching someone is easier.  Sometimes it’s easier to break something with your hands than to try to leverage a spell.  She also had never gotten flying down so running proved to be a very important thing to perfect.

It could have been just a joke, but by the time I was done, I added to the world and the character.  Marigold, a constant planner in the vein of, well, me, would think that way.  So much came out of taking a trope and utterly inverting it.

Bouncing off the trope sent me higher – as well as leading to a wonderful metaphorical arc in the second book.

But the contrast is something that can draw a reader in.  At first, it may seem to be humorous in breaking a trope – a lot of humor is a kind of inversion or violation.  But the reason something doesn’t fit tropes gives you something to work on, turns the contrast into character, and makes the tale deeper.

Friction can slow things down – but it can also light a match and set ideas on fire.

Tropes may be fun to explore and deconstruct, and that’s a subject writers go on about at length.  But I think we as writers should spend some time looking at how we can use a trope by running up against it.  The friction of expectations can create sparks of inspiration in the author – and fascination in the reader.

So what trope are you sick of, and what appears when you break it open . . .

Steven Savage

Stupid or Clever? A Ramble on Parody and Perspective with Popstar

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

It’s such a fine line between stupid, and clever.

  • David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap

Spinal Tap is one of the greatest movies ever made.  It defined the mockumentary genre, absolutely capturing the sense of a cultural space – ridiculous metal bands in the 80s.  It was well-acted, sensitive, and also the music may have been silly but pretty good.  In fact, it was so well done that when the “band” toured, a friend who was a fan ran into people at a concert who didn’t get the joke.

Want to argue with me?  Shut up.  Look. I just like Spinal Tap.

Being such a fan of the film, I checked out a similar movie Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, as a friend said it was in much the same vein.  Popstar was also a mockumentary, but was released in 2016, targeting more modern pop music (with bits of boybands, the Beastie Boys, and rap thrown in).  The movie focuses on one Conner Friel (Andy Samberg) who rose to fame as part of a trio called “The Style Boys,” but being the most charismatic of the group, he ended up solo, leaving one friend traumatized and the other as his DJ.  Connor’s meteoric rise becomes a crashing-to-earth potential extinction event through various bad choices, exacerbated by more bad choices.

The film was a bomb, but I found it quite entertaining, disturbingly spot-on, and the musical performances are pretty good.  However, there were parts of it that seemed, well, stupid – over the top, vulgar, or dumb.  As I watched it my reaction was yes, it was funny, but Spinal Tap it was not.

However, as I watched, I realized that this was a film of a different time.  Spinal Tap was funny to sixteen-year old me as I knew that era of music, the stories of drummer disasters, monsters of metal who just kept going, and strange careers.  Watching Popstar i started thinking that maybe I didn’t “get it.”

Stupid or clever?  A fine line indeed as Mr. St. Hubbins would note.  So I tried to view it as best I could through a modern lens – and I’m the kind of person who hears of Maroon Five and wonders what happened to the first four.

Once I did that, my perspective changed – and with it I got a better understanding of media.

The excesses shown in Popstar were excesses that were distinctly modern – stupidity that was in most cases part of our lives.  Megastars who gain a great deal of fame very fast and do very stupid and immature things amplified by the news.  Oversharing on social media of every detail.  Dumb tie-ins using modern technology to do things no one wants but everyone tells you is cool.

A lot of the things I found stupid in the film were there in real life.  This was a fascinating realization, as well as more than a bit depressing.  Maybe the first four Maroons were in hiding from the dumb world we’d made.

In the end I came to the conclusion that of Popstar’s stupid elements, well over half were completely well-deserved.  Tell me you can’t believe a business called Party Wolves with stellar yelp reviews for providing cute wolves for events.  There’s a scene taking on Daft Punk/Deadmaus techno-costumes and bands that is hilarious as it is believable.  We really do amazingly self-destructive things on social media, especially when famous.

Clever or Stupid?  I had to come down on the side of clever.  It’s just that it was made in modern times where we have invented some incredible kinds of idiocy.

I did note where there was actual stupidity it was due to the film going from mockumentary to parody.  Mockumentaries should adhere to being as real as possible while also exploring the ridiculousness of their subject.  Parody has more of a free hand and allows – indeed may require – some excess to point out the ridiculousness of its subject.  I consider a mockumentary a sub-form of parody, a more disciplined and sensitive one, and to break out of the form is jarring – as this film does occasionally.

I wish the film had been handled with some more deftness, dare I say “more Spinal Tap like,” but perhaps that was too much of a challenge. The musical and managerial traumas in Spinal Tap were of a different time, one without social media, and embarrassing holographic reconstructions.  Perhaps our current times have so much stupidity that it’s harder to handle it cleverly – one needs their cleverness up to eleven as it were.

If there’s a point to all of my intentional rambling  it’s that mockumentaries require some careful handling, but also that audience understanding matters.  I had to take effort to put myself in the right mindset of Popstar, much as a young person might not “get” Spinal Tap with some thought.  Even if Popstar had been handled as well as Spinal Tap (and it is still pretty good) I would have had to make some effort.

Some things just are of their times.  Including me.  Besides, I’d probably throw my back out trying to do The Donkey Roll.

Steven Savage