Mike Brooks

Thank you! Really glad you enjoyed it :)

If I had a dollar for every time I've had to say "Fiasco, that's very inappropriate actually" I could buy a Mediterranean island

(I also have no intention to use it for anything else, so long as I know where it is, but there's always the risk of it being baked into something without my knowledge I guess. However, I can definitely make sure that it's only me typing words on my computer, and not asking LLMs for "story ideas")

I won't be using the scheme, because it's meaningless, and will also mark my work out as high priority for AI companies to target (since they don't want to feed their own slop to their planet-killing plagiarism machines).

I'll never use generative AI for writing. That's my promise.

Such schemes fall into two categories.

Rigorously policed (how?) therefore good
and
not rigorously policed and therefore misleading and dreadful.

Wickes Tradepro Tool Theft Zone is one of the Crystal Maze levels they weren't allowed to show on TV.

a crab and a lobster are the same creature but one is in landscape and the other is in portrait mode

Fair play, 'the mad emperor started compulsively buying shoes for his court, guessing their foot size & his courtiers were too scared not to wear them even when they didn't fit' is some classic, on the nose End Days Of The Empire stuff

a building with a sign that reads "Punch Opticians"

give 'em the old 1 or 2

The trouble with "human authored" stickers is that the AI shills will use them. Those who've displayed zero morality when it comes to theft won't start now.

Best way is to ban AI usage in the arts entirely.

I can assure you I’d guessed the second sentence already!

So sad that 25 years ago we had an Information Superhighway but now we've got like a Disinformation Cancelled Replacement Bus Service

Wait what

there were

sequels?

Yes I’m religious, I believe in the holy trinity.

Lovely that the SoA has done this, but I'm not quite sure, given the apparent mission of this book, why they sent an enthusiastic "AI" user on the Today show to talk about the many ways she uses plagiaristic LLM extruders in her fiction "research"?

Tracy: you're literally stealing our books

The Singularity is upon us: Apple's AI summarized a text message that read "I'm still down to clown if you are" to.... "clown event still possible."

Gravestone with daffodil (Yoksel 🌿 Zok at unsplash)

The Diocese of Oxford has warned against a social media trend in which well-meaning people clean gravestones in churchyards. They say “Many churchyard monuments & gravestones are made from soft stone such as Portland limestone or Bath stone, which can be easily harmed by harsh cleaning techniques.”

Yes, hello, is that God? Yeah, hi. I have a complaint. You gave me this brain that’s designed for finding berries and avoiding lions and now people are ‘just circling back’ to see if we can ‘move the needle’ on ‘key initiatives’? NONE of those things are berries.

A picture of a box of three males dolls. All three have terrible hair and very strange clothing that, if you squint, sort of reminds you of the Saja boys from Kpop demon hunters

Sorry, you all have to see these """saja boys""" dolls i found on ebay

Oh, she tells people to use Claude! Well, Erin Servais, several of my novels were stolen by Anthropic to feed Claude, so you're making money from my work (amongst millions of others). I sincerely hope that your editing career founders and dies (I do not begrudge you a different, non-AI livelihood).

This presentation should consist of two slides. The second one should just read 'DON'T'.

I was not aware of that plural for 'van', but now I see it, it makes perfect sense in the same way that one sheep is a shoop.

London Book Fair, Olympia, from the balcony. Lots of stalls, people and publishers!

#LondonBookFair ahoy. Will be speaking in The Salon at half-two :)

It's fine, I'm sure band practice will wear it off.

I took a quick model-painting break today after completing a couple of tasks, and knocked over my pot of Snakebite Leather.

Anyway, I mopped it up before it could get anywhere important, but now my fingers look like I've rolled my own cigarettes for twenty years.

Look sometimes you just put stuff in the shed to store it for the moment, until you find somewhere better for it, and you... don't.

By which they mean that as soon as your call connects, your eardrums burst.

Shed

I'll take it!

You needn't have panicked :)