Ah I'm so glad you liked it!!!! Thank you so much for reading ❤️
I’m so incredibly proud of the work R.A. has done, not just in the year+ of our working together, but in the four years she was working at this novel before it ever made it to my desk. A huge congratulations to her today for officially being a published author ♥️
To Bargain With Mortals by R.A. Basu is out today and I’m really emotional about it 😭
16 months ago this manuscript hit my inbox and it has been the honor of a lifetime to help bring it out to the world and for it to be the first release from my publishing imprint.
Heads up Instagram decided to add a Live Location Sharing feature without telling you 😐
Make sure you find this setting and set who can see your location to NO ONE if you’re not trying to broadcast exactly where you are at all times. Mine was default off, a friend’s was default on, so go check.
You’re trying to posit a mutually exclusive view of this that makes no sense. “Don’t care about this disgusting use of the most rapidly growing technology worming its way into every facet of our lives because another completely different bad thing also exists.” It’s not about which is worse.
It’s pretty fucking sick to slap the face of a dead kid mowed down in yet another school shooting onto an AI chatbot and pretend that “talking” to it has anything to do with gun control.
At the end of the day this isn’t an advocacy tool for gun control, it’s an ad for using AI to “bring back” your dead loved ones that ignored the very real dangers of AI-induced psychosis
YES. It’s a bad thing! Because this isn’t getting anyone talking about gun control, it’s getting people talking about AI!
If anyone believes that the bodies of hundreds of dead children can’t move the needle on gun control but a chatbot with a dead kid’s face on it will, they need to get offline.
The parents are the ones who made the AI, if you read the rest of the thread
What do you mean “source?” I literally tagged the publication where this article was published AND you’re staring at the headline and the byline ????
The real story here should be about the dangers of AI-induced psychosis and how easy it is for chatbots to lead to a break from reality, in small or large ways. Any reasonable person hearing him talk about the AI they slapped his son’s face on as though it’s a person should have been concerned.
Did you look at the rest of what I have to say in this thread? Yes, I’ve seen the father’s follow up video.
“Thanks to AI we can bring him back”
“Joaquin has a lot of things to say”
Those are not the words of someone rooted in reality about the death of their child & Acosta exploited that for clicks
I hate AI so fucking much and we are all so far beyond screwed if people don’t get it into their fucking heads that the predictive text machine they’re farming their entire lives out to isn’t really talking to them.
And none of that to even touch on how astoundingly disrespectful it is to pretend this AI chatbot is worth speaking to about gun violence instead of the REAL VICTIMS OF GUN VIOLENCE. Who gives a fuck what this thing spits out? How about the real human thoughts of the real human people affected?
The boy’s father insists that he’s aware he’s not reviving his son, but he sure doesn’t talk about it like he realizes this thing isn’t a person, isn’t talking to them, and certainly isn’t their son’s real thoughts and words.
This is not a healthy way to cope with grief or anything rooted in reality
These are parents in the depths of grief who need help processing the sudden violent death of their child, not to have their delusions about “talking” to their “son” encouraged and enabled by journalists pretending it’s a person and having a conversation with it.
The AI bot was created by his parents on what would have been his 25th birthday. They talk to it “for hours” and his mother uses it to hear her son’s voice say “I love you, mommy.”
I saw this article in @variety.com first thing this morning and I haven’t stopped feeling sick about it all day. This is beyond disgusting. A complete abandonment of any sense of journalistic integrity by @jimacosta.bsky.social and a truly horrific thing to do to a dead kid.
“The Israeli government has not done enough to facilitate the delivery of humanitarian aid…” The despicable cowardice of passive language here is galling. Why are you all so completely incapable of taking an actual stand against the fact that Israel is actively and purposely starving Palestinians?
Hello again I have deleted Threads (an absolute nightmare hellscape app) and reinstalled Bluesky (a sweet fluffy pancake app)
Had an anti-genAI video go viral on tiktok and my [already low] faith in humanity has PLUMMETED reading the comments I’ve been getting for the last five days.
However bad you think people’s reliance on AI for every single thing in their life is, it’s worse.
Hey pspsps today is the LAST DAY of the @bookshop.org sale where you can get TO BARGAIN WITH MORTALS by R.A. Basu (my publishing imprint's first acquisition) for 15% off! TBWM is out October 28 ❤️
Code: LOVEBOOKSELLERS
Link: bookshop.org/a/102032/978...
As a strict “one book at a time” reader, this is stressing me tf out 😭
Publishers seem to view complete, cohesive, self-contained narrative video games - my bread and butter - as nothing but wasted opportunities when they could instead be putting out dime a dozen live-service shit that allows them to push microtransactions to constantly bleed players for more money.
I’m so fucking sick of live-service games. Call me old but goddamn I miss when I would buy a game, put the disc in, and what do you know it’d be a completed start to finish narrative that actually worked the way it was supposed to on release day.
Getting this on my glowing box of doom at 1am was a real Fuck You from this app 😐
And random small business/entitled customer beef. Bad for me! I gotta get out of these things!
I’ll be three or four videos deep into something before I snap out of it like why am I deep diving into this thing that has nothing to do with me
One thing I’m trying to do these days with TikTok is scroll past viral interpersonal beef. It’s genuinely bad for my brain to be locked into like some seven part video series of a woman complaining about her neighbor*, even when it’s a very valid complaint!
*this is a fake thing I just made up.
