Fuck all the way off with this. The student protesters were physically attacked -- some of them maimed permanently with life-altering injuries -- and relentlessly persecuted, doxxed, and hounded by school administrators, local police, and federal authorities while their attackers remain untouched.
That distant screaming you just heard was every fantasy author in the world upon learning that ANOTHER HP fanfic has received a seven-figure publishing deal when trad publishing could swing a butterfly net outside their office window and nab twenty original IP projects for that money.
Also let's be clear: this is the tech industry, who has never been held accountable a day in their lives and isn't going to start now. They're never paying any of these lawsuits. They'll declare bankruptcy or restructure or whatever to make sure every living writer they stole from never sees a dime.
So for me, every single time one of these tech companies get caught stealing from writer (HI GRAMMARLY) I'm not surprised, I'm pissed the fuck off nobody listened to us three years ago. Also why any time someone tells me they use genAI I look at them like they just shit on my shoes in public.
It's wild being a writer who was working with security consultants investigating AI from the beginning. When one said "I will never put anything I value into AI but I've used it to write love letters to my wife and it's really good at that" back in 2023 I knew writers were being robbed blind.
"What Mehrotra failed to mention was that the company wasn’t just dealing with hundreds of furious writers — it was facing litigation as well."
How did we end up in a future where every tech company is run by the dumbest people on Earth
futurism.com/artificial-i...
And just like that, a new metaphor drops to replace pulling a ship over a mountain.
Just got a story pitch to my part-time journalist email account about replacing human therapists with AI for cognitive behavioral therapy. I want to make a joke about this but someone somewhere will make retirement money off this nightmare fuel while the rest of us work to death.
@kithrup.bsky.social First book actually has a full-cast audio production! (Working on funding/budget for the rest of the series since the rights changed hands.)
THIS. But I mean, dissociating in your own head in silence is healthier than getting addicted to an AI chatbot.
I can't compete with this.
Today, we're publishing Don't Steal This Book - a (mostly) empty book from almost 10,000 authors, protesting the theft of their work by AI companies.
🧵 1/3
Impulsive US #KindleBookGiveaway: 6 copies of @mbaileywriter.bsky.social's Action Figures - Issue One: Secret Origins, which is the start of a series I like a lot, and honestly it's one of the few serieses that I reread in its entirety. The series is finished, although there's 1 spinoff book so far.
Basically, take the amount of money you think your favorite author gets, halve it, and then halve it again, and you have a number that's probably a lot closer to their actual earnings from writing.
"But I don't think they make that much!"
Halve that. Halve it again.
Thousands of authors publish ‘empty’ book in protest over AI using their work
www.theguardian.com/technology/2...
One of those things you don't always think of without a historian's eye. As always, @comradebullski.bsky.social teases out a very important point about a shift in the medium that isn't always top of mind until you realize it's happening.
I think $36k is when it peaked. I think (?) it was 2012/13 when I made the terrible decision to go back to newspapers for a bit and made $35,700 to run an entire local newspaper with no staff only freelancers and a support team for layout shared with 25 other papers. I lived in a glorified closet.
Hopefully, there will be more articles written as follow-ups to when CEOs lie about laying off workers by claiming AI is replacing them. The news media needs to stop doing stenography and free PR work for tech CEOs.
The real fun: not only was the pivot to AI a lie, and that the layoff savings were mitigated by increased pay and bonuses to get people to stay, but the problem started due to bad investments in cryptocurrency. And yet the CEO gets rewarded instead of yeeted into the sun.
Yeah, 20/20 hindsight I could have (and should have) scheduled today as a vacation day to recalibrate.
I usually have the lack of alertness thing but for some reason this year has made me feel manic and I don't know if that's an improvement.
If frustrated, angry idealists had billionaire money we might actually save this rock, but all the frustrated idealists are drawn to underpaid work trying to help people and all the money is in the hands of psychopaths and the people who cater to them.
Appreciate it! I actually vaguely know where my Lex is but I stashed my DC stuff a few months back to put some other stuff on display in my office so I've just got to do some "box of nerdy stuff" management to get at him. (I am open to suggestions, though, for other villains.)
I don't have one of him! I've got a Lex Luthor and a Red Skull around here somewhere but I have to go digging for them.
I've got this tiny mug sitting on my desk and when the world is particularly bleak I'm like "Maybe I'll take a photo of, like, Skeletor holding the CEO mug today." I know it's so petty but it makes me laugh.
An action figure Cobra Commander in a hood holding a mug that says CEO on the side.
An action figure Doctor Doom in a hood holding a mug that says CEO on the side.
A few more because why not.
An action figure Cobra Commander in a hood holding a mug that says CEO on the side.
An action figure Emperor Palpatine in a hood holding a mug that says CEO on the side.
An action figure Skeletor in a hood holding a mug that says CEO on the side.
An action figure Kingpin in a hood holding a mug that says CEO on the side.
10 years ago a tech company I worked for produced an action figure of a fake CEO we used in our marketing to show what NOT to do as a leader. The figure came with a miniature CEO mug. My pettiest hobby is occasionally taking pics of action figures of classic villains holding the cup.
It was going on one, two in the morning, and we were shooting what I felt was an important scene for me, when he makes an attempt to be quote-unquote straight, in a suit, and at the end of it he gets emotional and locks himself in the other room. And I felt like, I’m not getting what I want—I’m not happy with it. Mike was happy with it. He called me the next day and said, “I know you weren’t happy with the scene last night. Believe me, we wouldn’t have gone home if I had felt we weren’t getting it.” And then he sort of became my psychiatrist and said, “You find it difficult to be happy, don’t you? You find it difficult to enjoy things.” And I said, “Well, sometimes. Last night was about feeling too tired and not feeling I was reaching what I needed to reach for the scene.” He talked to me then about when he was making, I don’t know whether it was Virginia Woolf or The Graduate. He said, “I didn’t enjoy it for a second. I was worried about so many things.” And then he said, “You know, this is never going to happen again quite this way. You should try to allow yourself to enjoy this more. Take a minute a day, and then add a minute the next day, and another minute. Pretty soon, you’ll have hours of happiness.”
The Birdcage opened thirty years ago today, so in its honor, I want to share one of my favorite stories about Mike Nichols that didn't make it into my biography. This is from an interview I did with Nathan Lane.
I made the terrible mistake of looking at LinkedIn earlier this week and it's been bothering me for days because so much of our economy is tied up in the hands of people who feel like they have never left Plato's cave but talk like they think they're Socrates.
