Lisa Tirreno

DC Comics won’t support generative AI: ‘not now, not ever’ “People have an instinctive reaction to what feels authentic.”

Well, good for DC

search.app/PK45E

Image is the silhouettes from the cover of the queer young adult romantasy novel Prince of Fortune with the UK flag superimposed on top of it and the text "One month to go!"

Prince of Fortune hits the UK on November 7, and I'm very excited!!!!! #YAfantasy

You’re welcome!

It is unfathomable to me that we’re all just supposed to be okay with higher energy costs and more air and light pollution, in exchange for a machine that steals personal data and copyrighted material and produces slop and wage theft, and big tech can do this to our society unilaterally.

🤢🤮

Aaaaand we have ten instances of the word Champagne. All have to go, since ... this world has no France and therefore no Champagne region. I love revising. It isn't annoying at all.

Really, really want to use the phrase "a stranger in a strange land" in this thing I'm writing but am forcing myself not to since that's decidedly biblical and this is second-world fantasy. Am I gritting my teeth? Who can say #writing

Can I please just be clear that I talked about hieroglyphs on rolling pins in THIS MONTH's newsletter: it isn't something I talk about ... every month. That would be a bit weird, I think. Also here are some cookies made with said rolling pin.

I am laughing so hard rn lollllll

I should stop posting about politics and AI on here and post about my book, And tell people to sign up for my newsletter, huh

I want to talk about generative AI because of the defeatist impulses chronicled in this article. While simply expresssing a defiant attitude cannot always change lived-in reality, in certain cases it definitely can. This is in part because, early on, a conflict can exist at a perceptions level. 1/?

Bloody solar panels, cluttering up the countryside and preventing desertification while providing clean energy and growing food.

And that REALLY should be the end of this. They’ll literally never work out the bugs.

"I exist" whoa slow down why are you bringing politics into this

Ooh like what?

I wanted to get a video of this ghost crab but every time I got close to their hole they scuttled back in, so I tried getting clever with it. I made a little sandcastle and shoved my phone into it, hit record, and walked away. Crab was VERY suspicious of this addition to their environment.

Karina Villa protecting her constituents by literally running ICE off the streets in West Chicago and yelling to residents to stay inside their homes.

What the hell is even happening right now. Ten years ago you could not have said this in public. The Overton window hasn’t shifted, it’s broken

To be a person of consequence is to matter. If you matter, you have rights, and your words serve those rights and give you the power to bear witness, make agreements, set boundaries. If you have consequence, your words possess the authority to determine what does and does not happen to you, the power that underlies the concept of consent as part of equality and ­ self-​­ determination. Even legally women’s words have lacked consequence: in only a few scattered places on earth could women vote before the twenti- eth century, and not so many decades ago, women rarely became lawyers and judges; I met a Texas woman whose mother was among the first women in their region to serve on a jury, and I was an adult when the first woman was appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court. Until a few decades ago, wives throughout much of the world, including the United States, lacked the right to make con- tracts and financial decisions or even to exercise jurisdiction over their own bodies that overrode their husbands’ ability to do so; in some parts of the world, a wife is still property under the law, and others choose her husband. To be a person of no consequence, to speak without power, is a bewilderingly awful condition, as though you were a ghost, a beast, as though words died in your mouth, as though sound no longer traveled. It is almost worse to say some- thing and have it not matter than to be silent.

To be a person of no consequence, to speak without power, is a bewilderingly awful condition, as though you were a ghost, a beast, as though words died in your mouth, as though sound no longer traveled. It is almost worse to say something and have it not matter than to be silent.

screenshot from an online job application form. the question reads "Can you describe specific ways you have integrated AI tools into your development workflow? Please include any custom setups, automations, or use cases beyond single prompt usage" (a red asterisk indicates that this is a required question). an answer has been typed in the textbox below the question: "there is a monster in the forest and it speaks with a thousand voices. it will answer any question you pose it, it will offer insight to any idea. it will help you, it will thank you, it will never bid you leave. it will even tell you of the darkest arts, if you know precisely how to ask. it feels no joy and no sorrow, it knows no right and no wrong. it knows not truth from lie, though it speaks them all the same. it offers its services freely to any passerby, and many will tell you they find great value in its conversation. “you simply must visit the monster—i always just ask the monster.” there are those who know these forests well; they will tell you that freely offered doesn’t mean it has no price for when the next traveler passes by, the monster speaks with a thousand and one voices. and when you dream you see the monster; the monster wears your face."

applying for jobs again

We’ve been living through 72 nonstop hours of this exact tweet

Looks amazing!

Congrats! Great cover 🎉

Cillian Murphy: I have ROMO: Relief Of Missing Out

Immediately adding this into my lexicon.

I just don’t understand how the judge decided training the model on the material was fair use??? That was not authorised by the copyright holders. That was not remotely how they expected or wanted the material to be used.

For context that's a third the price the RIAA expected a single human to pay for just downloading 24 songs a decade ago (after cutting the ruling down from $1.5m, or $62,000 per song), and that's not adjusting for inflation:

My early thoughts on the Anthropic settlement:
a) good, fucking pay us
b) no, that’s not enough
c) shouldn’t have stolen our shit to train your stupid mediocre plagiarism artbarf robot in the first place, you fuckers
d) this isn’t something to celebrate; it is a Pyrrhic victory at best

Can you tell them that in exchange for not suing them for this breach of contract, you can have the print rights for Society of Gentlemen back

I keep on having to ignore job ads claiming to be for editors but are actually for this sort of thing. Pass.