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Word Hunter just posed a question about AI writing. Omachuck immediately chimed in with a view that I can completely support. I think that we need to think a little about tasks, skills, and tools.
I'm trying to get a flat area to drain a little better, and I've recently dug a trench from the middle of it to a nearby creek. Well, I didn't actually touch any of the dirt myself except by accident. I used some tools. A backhoe, to dig the trench. A front-end loader, to move all that dirt out of the way. A shovel, to clean up some of the mess.
Those guys at the factory who ran the stamping press to create my shovel's blade, ran the lathe to produce the wooden handle, and drilled a hole and put a rivet in to mate the blade and handle into one piece: How much credit do I owe them for digging that trench? I mean, it was the shovel that moved all that dirt, not me!
I believe that they deserve the credit -along with the businessman who created their factory- for creating the tools I used. I gave them all the credit they deserve when I went to a store and bought that shovel. After I bought that shovel, it's mine, and I get all the credit for any tasks accomplished by my shovel under my direction. And, yeah, with my sweat.
I have not willingly used any AIs yet. Unwillingly, yeah, it's getting harder and harder to avoid them. Some of them are pretty helpful. Alabama Power's phone system is pretty well written and it knows when to go get help. Some AIs, I believe, are only there to keep you from getting any help until you give up and go away. Frontier Fiber's phone system is willing to keep me on the phone for half an hour or more, going back to the beginning of its script every time it can't figure out what to do, before it finally gives up and tells me to call another number. Hello? Computer program? Answering the phone? And it can't forward a call to a number it knows inside the company it's supposedly working for? That's GREAT customer service!
In this case, I use a lot of tools to write. I paid for the computer and peripherals. How much do I owe Dell for helping me write my last best-seller? I paid for some of the software, while other software I got for free from the internet, downloaded where the authors had posted it for free use. Should I add all those software tools to the list of acknowledgements at the end? I'd like to thank Jim, Sally, and Toad for proofreading, as well as my word processor, my spell checker, and Google.com for all their help. I'm not thanking my grammar-checker, though. That piece of shit is worthless.
Where's the dividing line? There's a guy here who is posting something like eight different versions of the same story: A young man with super powers (genetic, magic, alien gift, he's tried them all) grows up and deals with life, girls, crooks, the government. I honestly believe that he's trying out several different writing AIs to see which ones get the best reviews here. Nothing he's posted is actually HIS writing, except maybe the 'seed' he feeds into the AIs. I figure that within a couple of years he'll be posting stories that are good enough to enjoy reading. By then, though, we'll all have marked his account "don't show me any more of this crap" so he'll have to get a new pen-name. I really, really hope that the webmaster here lets us know that "Bob? Yeah, that's the same account as Joe from last year. It's just a new pen-name." I wonder. If he'd put all that effort into, you know, WRITING, wouldn't he be a decent writer by then? This way, he'll never learn to write. All he's learning is how to run an AI.
Okay, I need to get back out and do something useful instead of sitting here in the AC.
(* "Tools and Their Uses" was the title of a module I went through -and, much later, taught- in my early USN training. How to recognize different types of tools, how to tell which of several similar tools might be best for my current task, etc. One topic was judgement: How to decide when the right thing to do was to go get the correct tool, and when to go ahead and mis-use the tools that were immediately available. Yes, I can do it right. If I have the right tools, the right parts, and the right tech manuals. I can ALSO do it _wrong_, when we don't have the right tools, parts, or manuals, but we're getting shot at and the Captain really, really wants the ship to start moving again.)
-ZM
So, I'd had these stories I'd written a while back, set in Shaddoth's 'Axeman' universe. I had three complete and a fourth one, well, maybe about half-done but I wasn't really working on them anymore. Jason 2, another Mike & Shirley story, the second half of "The First Command", I've got a lot of unfinished work.
But, the site administrator here got tired of my whining and created an "Axeman" universe for stories that other writers had come up with. Oh. Well, crap. I should post mine!
Now, the first three were DONE, but they weren't PROOFREAD. I hadn't been able to talk anyone into doing that kind of work. For free. So, I put the first one up. I got a lot of feedback. It doesn't look anywhere near as polished as the rest of my stories. Well, yeah, all of my old proofreaders are retired. Where'm I gonna get a new set?
Turns out, I can ask all those poor innocent readers who emailed me saying I mis-spelled supercalifragelisticexpialidocious. Ya know, you caught THIS, and I'm about to publish M2. You wanna see if you can find any mistakes in it?
Even though I didn't ask most of them until Saturday afternoon and I was planning on posting Chapter 1 at 8 Monday morning, I got answers back from four different 'volunteers' in time to fold all their corrections into the posted version. If M2 looks a little more polished than M1 did, well, it's their fault. I'll list all the proofreaders who helped at the end of the story, but the first four names are already set.
Oh, yeah. Chapter one of "Missile 2" is up.
-ZM
As I've posted before, I have trouble with formatting here. The site won't keep original indentation, but that can be changed by viewer preferences, so that's okay. More important, with simple text you can group related paragraphs by adding a space between groups. However, here EVERY paragraph has a blank line after it, so minor paragraph grouping is lost.
And, apparently, somehow my ASCII text formatting for the 'Status' display in 'Missile' isn't good enough. Instead of adding a blank line between each line of text like usual, for that the site jammed it all together into one line.
I'm looking on a fix....
-ZM
I know, I'm SPOSTABE working on Jason 2, for the Damsels in Distress universe, and I really need to polish up my "Squadron Command" which is the 10-years-late second half of "The First Command", for the Swarm Cycle universe, and I've got like 20 more half-written stories, but sometimes some bug bites me and I'm off on another tangent.
I've got three short stories finished in Shaddoth's "Axeman" universe with a 4th one in the works and notes for a few more, so with the Axeman universe now actually existing I'm posting them. Each story will post one chapter per day until done. Oh, and none of them have really been properly proofread, so even if I forget to turn comments on I want readers to let me know where I have mis-spelled words and the punctuation is wrong.
It's been 5 years since Shaddoth gave us his masterpiece "Axeman". He last blogged about working on "Axeman 2", but he had personal problems, medical problems, financial problems... and we haven't heard from him in a while. That story was so popular that several (that I know of) others have written follow-on stories set in that universe. I've cranked out a few myself, all short stories about one of the 15yo kids that get caught up in the trouble.
Well, I must have said something stupid somewhere, because every so often some stranger will email me about when I'm setting up an 'Axeman Universe' to collect all those stories. Uh, I really can't. I mean, I can using my own account, but only Shaddoth can add his story to it if it's my universe. And, what would be the point if his story wasn't in it?
So, I've been hassling the site administrator about it for a while. If I create an Axeman universe, will he put Shaddoth's original story in it? If/when he comes back, we'll transfer the damn thing to his account. Naturally, he's always refused. Only the writer should be able to add his stories to another universe.
Well, a few days ago it happened again, so I promptly sent LJ (the admin here) another whine. "Yet another writer is on me to create an Axeman universe!" I guess he got tired of it, because _he_ did it, putting it under Shaddoth's account as an open universe. I can't mess with it, but that's certainly good enough! Although, I couldn't find it. I had to bother LJ again, and he told me that a new universe isn't visible to readers until it has at least TWO stories in it. Someone posting a new story can see it on the list of available universes, but people just reading don't see it.
Oh, okay, sure. Well, here, add this 'Writer's Guide" essay to it. While you're at it, throw in Morningfrost's "Warhammer" story, and I'll go ahead and start posting my first "Missile" story there as well.
And I told James Girvan, who has added all his "Beer League" stories, too. Frankly, his stories should all be listed before mine, but I don't have access to fix that. Only Shaddoth and LJ can do that, and I've bothered LJ enough for this week.
Anyway, it's here: https://storiesonline.net/universe/1426/axeman-universe
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