An evil AI reads a bit of my novel
...and the bleakness of the future.
I’ve been editing the first half of Two Pigeons, my zi-fi novel. When I edit I like to read what I wrote out loud. It’s helps me feel how the text flows…the pacing and musicality of it. I know that AI voice overs have been getting good and so as a distraction I decided to upload parts of my novel into a service that does AI generated voice overs. And I have to say…it’s pretty good. Sure it’s still a little flat emotionally and pauses for emphasis at the wrong moments sometimes, but it’s basically passable as cheap voice over work. And it’s kinda depressing because it’s a reminder that this whole AI business is gonna run a bulldozer through a lot of people’s lives…with voice acting among them.
I know someone who’s been in the technical translation business for a long time — patents, that kind of thing — and they’ve seen this bulldozing process up close. Google Translate has been slowly decimating that industry for years, gutting jobs by allowing companies to bypass translators entirely for quick translations. Now with LLMs that pop out much more accurate translations, humans are less and less necessary….to the point of being totally unnecessary. The human translators that will remain won’t be translating but will simply be editing and fact-checking the computer translations that these private LLMs pop out. So with their labor they’re helping train and improve the accuracy of machines designed to make them obsolete. And what’s deadly for human knowledge is that these computer translation services are destroying the classic training pathway for technical translators. There are less and less opportunities for young translators to learn the craft on the job…and soon there will be no industry that can train people up at all. So these machines are basically killing the translation experts, destroying thousands of years of learning passed on from person to person to person and encapsulating all this lived organic experience inside private computer databases and models. It’s vampiric…sapping the vital fluids of human society. And for what? Speed? Efficiency? Profit? I’m surprised about how passive people are about it all.
Because what’s happening to technical translators will also be applied all sorts of other creative and professional industries — voice actors and actors, programmers, engineers, lawyers, artists, graphic designers… I know that AI issues has been a big part of the conflict between actors and writers and the Hollywood system. But it’ll be bigger than that. I’m sure the publishing industry will use AIs to pop out novels, too…This would work best on some shitty best-selling series. Imagine feeding all the Jack Reacher books or all the Dune novels (including the fake ones written after Frank Herbert died by a team led by Frank’s son) into an LLM and then having the computer write the next several books. It’ll happen for sure…first with the trashy stuff because it might as well be AI generated anyway. But no doubt they’ll try to package literary AI novels as better than the real human thing. They're gonna force this garbage on us. And who knows…they’ll probably succeed. They might as well cut people out of the whole process…have AIs reading books and watching movies made by AIs. Who needs people anyway. We’re just mouths to feed and shit to flush. Might as well condense us into the pure energy form of a data center.
Anyway, in the spirit of this future garage…here are a few examples of an AI reading bits of my novel. Yes, written by my hand.
Chapter: The Assignment
Chapter: Forbidden Acts