Rainy afternoon linkpost

[dolorosa_12]

I've got five links: two hilarious, one bitterly funny, one interesting (to me), and the fifth informative.

Let's start with the humorous links first.

A guy who seems to have been a known and longstanding conman (I mean, come on: his company is called 'House of Illuminati') organised what seems to have been the Dashcon (or Fyre Festival) of children's immersive entertainment. It promised chocolate fountains and lush, lavish scenery — the best AI could generate. It delivered a sparsely decorated warehouse, in which underprepared actors bestowed a single jellybean on each child.

There is, in fact, something of a global genre of 'hilariously disappointing scam events,' and The Guardian has gathered a rollcall of greatest hits.

I've had this Rebecca Solnit piece, 'How to Comment on Social Media', open in a tab for at least a month now, shared by several people here on Dreamwidth. It says everything I've said on the topic over the past few years in scattered posts, more succinctly, and less politely (although what I have to say on this topic is in no way directed at Dreamwidth people — the worst offenders by far are people on more fast-paced, real-time, and less verbose platforms).

I think this essay 'On Learning to Read Generously' is something I've encountered before, and it's come back around again, but I still feel the same — that its sentiments are something more people in fandom could stand to take on board (although again, not really the people I know on Dreamwidth).

Finally, Wordpress and Tumblr seem to have decided that allowing generative AI tools to scrape their platforms and use content posted there to learn is a profitable thing to do. It is possible to opt out through the Wordpress privacy settings, which is what I've done. If you have a Wordpress-hosted blog or website, you can follow the instructions here. I assume there are similar ways to opt out on Tumblr. I'm not naive enough to think that this will stop all generative AI companies from scraping my written material, but at least I've explicitly refused to give my consent to Wordpress just handing the material over for its own financial enrichment.

Comments

[vriddy]

That essay on reading generously was really interesting, and some of the quotes in it really resonated with me. Thank you for linking!

A friend of mine is an avid reader, has read at least one but usually several books a week ever since I've known him for decades. However he's been struggling to find books he genuinely enjoys over the last couple of years. His book reviews tend to be in-depth analysis of the reasons why a story isn't working, a character isn't interesting, a mystery is too predictable, and so on, week after week. I was wondering if maybe you can reach a level where you've read so much that nothing really holds much surprise anymore, but I wonder if there's also a mindset element that comes into it. He also misses reading things he enjoys. I wonder if going at it from a more generous mindset could help.

[dolorosa_12]

It's a good essay, and I'm glad it resonated with you.

I was a newspaper book reviewer for about a decade, and I remember that after the initial few reviews (which focused on books that I loved at the time), I found it a lot easier to write negative reviews, and that I was reading the books sent to me for review almost as if I was looking for some negative thing to use as a hook on which to hang the whole review. It is so much easier to be negative than to try and assess a book not so much on whether you enjoyed it, but more on what it was aiming to do, and whether it met those aims. It definitely sounds as if your friends has got himself stuck in a similar mindset.

I also think if you're very well read, very little will surprise you any more (unless you deliberately seek out very old fiction written before modern novel-writing conventions were established, or fiction that deliberately eschews Western storytelling conventions), and judging a work's success on whether it surprises you is a bit unfair.

[vriddy]

Thank you for the insights, I can see how that would easily happen. (Unrelated but in a way, that feels like a lot of what the new algorithms force as well... when you need to make new videos often or have a take about everything, it's easier to latch on the negative bits as anchors to generate a piece.)

[kore]

Molly Templeton is so good (and the new Tor site is so bad! Wtf).

[dolorosa_12]

I hadn't even twigged that this was the new Tor.com site, that's how unobservant I am (I remember getting an email a while back saying they were rebranding for some reason, but I'd forgotten the specifics of the rebrand). Now that you point this out, I definitely remember reading the original essay on the old Tor.com site.

It's a good essay, as you say.

[muccamukk]

Like they rebranded the PUBLISHING LINE TorDotCom, and then changed the name of the website. I'm so confused right now.

[dolorosa_12]

I know, it's a bizarre decision.

[muccamukk]

I hadn't seen that thing about reading generously, though there was quite a bit of discussion of paranoid reading following the Isabel Fall thing, so I'd seen the essay it cites.

[dolorosa_12]

Yes, I remember the paranoid/reparative reading essay from around the time of the Isabel Fall kerfuffle, although sadly I don't think anyone who really needed to hear those things at the time took them on board, or perceived themselves as being the problem.

The treatment of Isabel Fall is the prime example of the thing I was complaining about in your post about assuming people's identities based on their fictional output. I am firmly convinced that the vast majority of people who participated in the pile-on would have instead been praising that short story as an 'incisively clever reclamation of harmful slurs and transphobic stereotypes' if the author had published it under the name by which they were known in the community (and publicly come out) instead of pseudonymously.

But I digress...

[muccamukk]

I never got around to the Helicopter Story, as it's now called, but Nenya really liked it. Anyway, I have a depressing suspicion that a lot of people would read it, and then assume it didn't apply to THEM in THIS situation. I'm trying at least to not be that guy.

[olivermoss]

I've been following the Wonka thing. It's hilarious. I feel so bad for Sad Glaswegian Oompa Loompa. So many of the actors were trying so hard for those kids and were in such a bad situation.

Some of the actors have said that the actress who played The Unknown will make a video, she just needs to process everything first.

[dolorosa_12]

I feel awful for the actors — the last thing I heard, they still hadn't been paid, and I assume they won't be. They're just about the only people I feel sorry for in this whole mess. What an unbelievable story!

[olivermoss]

I used to run events, so I have very strong feelings about staff treatment.

Honestly, it's very believable to me. Nothing that exact flavor of fail has happened here, I feel like the combo of AI hype crashing into reality is it's own thing, but my city has had some stunning event fails that just didn't get as well documented.