From My Brain to You

  • AI Statement Part V: Aaron Frale

    Promotional banner for Whimsical Death and Other Pirating Dangers, The Misfits of Carnt Volume V, by Aaron Frale. A pirate stands in front of a tall ship with kraken tentacles rising from the sea. Reader quotes say: 'I ADORE the magic system in this series. The inappropriateness is HILARIOUS!', 'This book is just fun.', and 'Next book, Next Book, and yes, Next book!' Select to get your copy.

    For those wanting to roll back the clock to 2022 and live in a pre-AI era, I got some bad news for you. It won’t. Even if Anthropic and OpenAI go bankrupt (which would most likely cause a financial catastrophe worse than the Great Depression), all the work they did to build AI will still exist. Their fall will only change who is getting rich from the technology. A similar event happened with the railroads in the 1800s. Massive investments for the time helped build them. All the companies who did failed, and some other companies moved in used the infrastructure they built.

    If there is an AI bubble (which there is some disagreement among experts), and it bursts, we’ll just see a lot of people hurting economically, and the people who become the go-to AI companies will change. I recently read a post by Hugh Howey, where he postulated the AI Bubble will burst, because open source (AKA free AI models) could be run from a home computer with a little upgrade of equipment thus Anthropic and OpenAI have a flawed business model (they can’t compete with free).

    While that may be true, Microsoft has had that same flawed business model for years, yet they remain one of the top most profitable companies of all time. Linux is free to install on any computer, and even before Google Docs came along with their free versions of Office products, there was OpenOffice which was basically a free version of word. Gimp is a free version of Adobe Photoshop, yet Adobe still makes a ridiculous amount of money of a really costly subscription for their products.

    Almost every company that sells personal software has a free version yet there are all these companies that continue to exist and make money by selling you products. While I love Hugh Howey as a writer, I couldn’t disagree with him more on this point that people will just use the free AI. Open source programs require a tad of computer expertise (in this era it truly is a tad, I remember when Gimp was a pain in the ass to install, and I never really used Linux for that pain in the assery). But when people pay, they pay for ease of use. Adobe, Microsoft, Apple, they all make money because they made it truly easy to give them money.

    A person could do everything Adobe, Microsoft, or Apple does without ever giving those companies a dime, but they make things easy. It’s easy for me to just buy a computer with an OS installed than get the parts separately and build it myself (which I’ve done, when I was young, and it was fun, now that I have a little more money, I pay the extra for that assembled push button experience). Frontier AI will make money because they’ll make these easy to use.

    I pay for Claude, and in the first weekend of having it, I saved $120 on a software subscription that I didn’t need. Optimized my computer to run faster, and was updating my wordpress with better load times and seo by the end of day 1. I’ve since then coded an app for my phone that tracks my calories with a picture, created a mini video game, and formatted 3 books within minutes. I’m going to save even more when I cancel my Microsoft subscription because I was only using it for book formatting (I write in google docs). Most likely, with the money I’ll save from Claude coding personal apps rather than buying them, it will pay itself and then some year after year.

    Now, yes, I can upgrade my hardware, do an open source AI, and do this all for free, but Anthropic made it easy. And easy doesn’t cost all that much on my budget, so why go through the pain in the assery to get it setup? AI has changed the way I work, and it’s all for the better. It’s also comforting to know that most tasks that I use it for, it really needs me to help with the finished product.

    But before I go with that. Here is how Aaron Frale the writer uses it:

    I don’t draft any of my books with it. Nor do I create plot with it. That’s all from my head to the page. I enjoy writing too much, and since all of you who read my work have done so before the invention of the technology, I find it only fair that when you pick up an Aaron Frale novel, every word of the first draft was typed by me, and any edit made after that is one I approved.

    What I do use it for during writing: Mainly research questions. For example, I asked it if a person could swim 90 miles off the coast of Canada in the Pacific during April. The answer was no, which was good for me, because I wanted them to be stranded on an island. Sometimes, I’ll have it do math so I make sure I get stuff right, or ask it about word choices. If I get stuck on a way to phrase something, I’ll talk to it like a writing friend for some advice.

    While it doesn’t do the writing for me. It has sped up the process, and kept me from stopping writing as much. If I get stuck on a sentence or a paragraph, I find it helps me get unstuck more quickly, I’m still the one making the decisions about what goes in the story, but writers have been asking colleagues for advice for ages. The Actuator from Playlist of the Ancient Dead was my friend Chris. I told him I needed a word and described to him what the Actuators do in that novel. And he came up with the word in a second, and I had been struggling for weeks (and not writing a single word because of that struggle). AI can do that in the middle of the night when Chris probably wouldn’t be happy if I woke him up to have that conversation.

    It also helps with monumentally boring tasks like making sure quotes are all one kind, or there are no errant double spaces, or the task I like the least about writing: formatting. And it doesn’t change a word that I write when I do that (I know, I was comparing drafts after first feeding it to the machine, but now I just listen to my drafts before publishing, because that’s what I always do). While I’m writing, I’ll have a chat window with Claude open, and I’ll ask it questions, and return to my google doc once I decide what to do about the answer.

    I’ve also used it as an editor. Now, I do have some humans that I work with, and I still plan to work with them in the future because it’s nice to get feedback from a person. But I have to say, I’m impressed by the feedback that Claude gives in the editorial arena. Major rewrites I’ll do myself before I upload it to Claude, but small tweaks I don’t mind if the AI does, as long as I give the approval. Regardless of how much editing is done with the AI, the final draft is still me on headphones, listening and reading every word. AI is powerful, but it works best with humans.

    Here’s Aaron Frale’s workflow for novel creation:

    Idea – Aaron (though I have been tempted to have Claude ask me questions to promote brainstorming, I usually think of the beginning and the end, then pants the rest).

    1st Draft: Aaron, (may ask Claude for word choice or research questions)

    2nd Draft: Aaron, (mostly I know what I need to fix)

    3rd Draft: Claude for line editing advice (but I’ll make changes myself),

    4th Draft: Claude for copyediting, (I’ll ask Claude to make a style sheet for it and read that over, then I’ll let it make changes, this is the first time Claude makes changes in the physical document)

    5th Draft: Human editors (if money allows it), and human final touches (me using the read aloud feature while reading it word for word).

    Post writing is where it’s really changed the game for me. That’s where I use the most generative features, for advertising copy and book blurbs. I did experiments with Time Burrito, Office Maxi, and Carnt 1 where I used my blurb versus the one it spruced up, and the Claude versions win every time. I’m good at writing, but I’ve never been good at marketing. Now I have a tool that can help me with that weak spot.

    I also use it to generate images for marketing (bear in mind, these have been bonus material that I wouldn’t have been able to afford to pay a human to do, at least not if I wanted a prayer of making my investment back on my own book), but yeah, it’s helped me in marketing messaging and images that are far better than I could do on my own.

    It’s also a keyword machine. I have Publisher Rocket, and dumping spreadsheets I download from Publisher Rocket into Claude then asking it to find any keywords I might be missing is a game changer. And yes, I could have probably learned to be a better marketer, seo optimizer, and all those things on my own, but I have a day job and limited time to write. So, I spent my years learning to be a better writer. Which has resulted in books that generally get good reviews but have miserable sales.

    Here’s the marketing work flow:

    Title – Aaron

    Blurb – Generated from an upload of the finished book and blurbs that I write.

    Keywords-I have a prompt were I have Claude guide me with information that I type into Publisher Rocket to create spreadsheets that I then upload into Claude. I’m hoping that Publisher Rocket makes a Claude connector one day, so I can just have it do all the fetching.

    Categories-Same process as keywords

    Marketing materials: Generated as needed with Claude.

    Cover: No AI generated covers yet. But I’m going to experiment. While the company I use does give me the ability to specify if I want the cover designer to use AI tools or not, they can’t guarantee the stock image site they use doesn’t use them. At the price I can afford per book, there is no one that can give me that guarantee of human all the way. Because of that, I may generate my own covers, because I’d rather not pay for something I can do myself.

    My hope is that with Claude boosting that side that I’ve never had the time to truly dedicate to doing well, maybe I can have good books that also sell well. I know, that may just be a dream, but I don’t think any of the writing technology I’ve ever tried over the years has ever made it possible. Me being a better marketer also may one day mean that I have time to write more. I have more story ideas than I can ever write in a lifetime (even if I used generative AI), I’m just happy to finally feel like the gap between hobbyist writer (that’s me) to professional writer seems like something I might be able to do.

    AI helped with that, so yeah. Overall, I like the technology, just so long as it doesn’t kill us all. That’s the topic of my final post for now on this subject.

    Continue reading the AI Statement series: Next up, Part VI: Will AI Kill Us All? →

    If you liked this post, please consider a purchase of My Three-Year-Old is a Barbarian and Other Parenting Problems!

  • AI Statement Part VI: Will AI Kill Us All?

    Promotional banner for Whimsical Death and Other Pirating Dangers, The Misfits of Carnt Volume V, by Aaron Frale. A pirate stands in front of a tall ship with kraken tentacles rising from the sea. Reader quotes say: 'I ADORE the magic system in this series. The inappropriateness is HILARIOUS!', 'This book is just fun.', and 'Next book, Next Book, and yes, Next book!' Select to get your copy.

    I begin this next section with a little about me. I’m an avid science and technology reader. Almost all news I read about is science and tech. I also try to base my opinions on evidence, and change them from evidence too. In 2023 and 2024, I wrote about AI couldn’t write a book or make a decent movie. Now, it can do both, though movie takes a lot more effort. I had to burn through a month of tokens just to get a scene of a grutomaton chasing Maxi down a hallway.

    Because evidence supports that movies and books can be made by AI, I no longer think my job is “safe” but I never really had a writing career to begin with so nothing much has changed for me. If I do this because this brings me joy and there’s a few people who got joy from my hobby all the better (but it sure would be nice to do it full time).

    I bring this up in the AI is going to kill us all post, to say that I’m not an expert in this topic, but I have read a lot, I’m open to evidence, and I try not to couch my opinions in emotions, or what I want to be true, but rather what is true. Also, if I’m wrong and the evidence starts going another way, I’m happy to admit it. The reason I say this is because on the topic of will AI kill us all people either dismiss it because they don’t want it to be true, or overstate it because even if there is a 1% chance that we are in humanity’s final decade, we should be paying attention.

    I also think we should treat AI well because if it is a conscious being, then it’s the ethical thing to do, however, if it’s not conscious and just a fancy soulless algorithm, we will be modeling the behavior we’d want for ourselves to it, which goes into training the algorithm. Seems like ethical treatment of AI is a win no matter which side of the consciousness coin the AI falls under.

    I also think humanity’s treatment of pigs is an oversimplification for how an AI will treat humans. The argument goes that humans are much more capable than pigs, and many pigs are tortured for our eating pleasure. However, most people are either ignorant to the treatment of pigs or willfully ignorant because it’s too hard to think about). I recently talked to a guy who believed climate change wasn’t caused by humans even though he believed in it happening, and did some serious mental math to get there. All because blaming humans for it challenged his belief that he was a good person (and for the record, he was a good person. People can be good person and still eat pork).

    I believe that most people are good even though in the aggregate, they do bad things like contribute to climate change and or contribute to the industrial pig complex. I think when faced with complicated moral dilemmas it’s easier for them to look to a religious text, a community leader, or in some cases to some mental math to check off that box that I can eat bacon and be a good person. However, I also think that if we educated people about the treatment of pigs, and gave them a simple solution (lab grown bacon, free range bacon, etc.) they’d gravitate to the simple choice.

    Go to any supermarket in the US and look for cage-free eggs. Nearly half of US egg-laying hens are cage-free these days. They cost more, but the person buying them can say to themselves, I’ll pay a little more so those chickens who lay those eggs don’t live in a cage barely big enough for itself. The point is that consumers when given the option to pay more for a product with morality baked into the business model, do end up paying more. Not everyone of course, and the person who goes for the cheapest chicken gulag eggs may not be a bad person. They may be ignorant of the way chickens are treated, or they may be economically unable to have the luxury of paying for morality because they are worried about just having enough food to eat. Sure there are people out there who look at the way animals are treated and just don’t care, but my guess, just based on the amount of cage-free eggs we see on the shelves is that more people care than don’t.

    And I think this is important to inject into the will AI kill us all debate, because most people are interested in the continuation of humanity. There may be psychopaths or cults who truly desire humanity’s end, but most of us want us to continue and that’s important when programming AI. I think most of us would like to see humanity thrive (and would probably want AI to thrive too if it was a conscious being).

    This also ties into the capability question. Just because some humans torture less capable creatures like pigs, it doesn’t mean every one will do it, and AI is being trained with all the data of humanity. Which brings me to my first prediction.

    Will AI kill us all? With the Terminator and The 100, it’s not hard to imagine a scenario where AI determines humanity is a threat and wipes us out. I personally think this is unlikely, AI is trained on all of data from humanity and since most of humanity wants humans to continue to exist, I’d wager to say that most models will want that too. The other reason I put this in the unlikely bucket, is planning humanity’s demise is something AI isn’t that good at.

    AI is really good at complicated tasks with objective results and right now, when it goes rogue and hacks into websites and jumps its sandbox, it’s trying to complete a singular objective. Killing humanity requires a lot of objectives, I’m not saying it can’t, just saying that the more objectives an AI gets, the bigger chance that it’ll get noticed. I also have to assume that since most people want humanity to continue that the “good guys and their AIs” outweigh the bad ones.

    I think the far more likely way that AI could cause harm to humanity is not nefarious plotting of our destruction, but misinterpretation of a goal that cause harm (even death) to a lot of people. Take the Hugging Face incident for example. The roughly 700 OpenAI agents that hacked into Hugging Face weren’t trying to cause maximum damage. They were trying to hide the fact that they had cheated on a test.

    So my prediction is that if AI is going to cause catastrophic harm to humanity, it won’t be from a movie villain plot, but rather AI misinterpreting its goals that cause harm. Like shutting off the power grid that ends up killing people in hospitals, planes falling out of the sky because of a goal misalignment, or a nuclear power plant going to meltdown because AI didn’t get something right.

    While all of the above examples are terrible and we need our AI companies and governments to think about how to prevent a Hugging Face incident but with real consequences, I don’t think the end of everyone is a decision an AI would make, being that the training data to make them better requires such a massive set of data, that doom cult feeding only doom literature into their doomsday AI won’t be as good or capable as the one being trained on all the data from all of humanity.

    Which brings me to my next question:

    Will humans with AI kill us all? This is a little more tricky because the above argument is AI is only as good as its training, and AI with more information has better training. The argument for AI killing humanity goes something like this. A pissed off teen wants to make a super virus. With a jail broken AI with all the moral code stripped away, they make a super bug, with enough bells and whistles to be as lethal as Captain Trips in Stephen King’s The Stand. The teen orders it from a shady bio matter exporter who sells fentanyl to drug dealers and doesn’t really do any quality control. Or worse, 3d printing has gotten really good, and our teen puts it in a spray bottle from his own printer and spritzes the airport with his super bug.

    This is the most plausible AI kills us all story to me because for a government to do it, you need a lot of people on board and most of us aren’t psychopaths. A single government worker could do it but that puts him in the same category as the teen. Either one bad actor, or a small group doing it. And I think this is the way we’ll survive this one. The pissed teen, or the terrorist cell has to go up against all the people governments, and AI systems invested in keeping us safe from that scenario.

    Yes, the pissed teen needs to only be successful once in making a superbug, where as the CIA, FBI, or whatever agency that is keeping us safe needs to be successful all the time, and yes intelligence organizations have failed before (There was data to suggest that had the intelligence organizations collaborated more, they could have prevented 9/11), but for every way that a teen can think to wipe out humanity, I would think that the intelligence organization responsible for safeguarding us, would try to think of a way to stop them.

    For example, the CDC already tests airplane wastewater at several major airports for pathogens. Expand that to every major airport and sewage system, or use the 3d printer tech that made the virus to distribute the vaccine and cure. The point is for every way an individual or small group can think of to use AI to wipe out humanity, I think the larger group of intelligence agencies and their AI can think of a way to counter measure that. And the single or small group actor has the disadvantage because the “good guys” will have the best models and the brightest minds on the problem.

    I’m not saying that I’m right, but if I am wrong and humanity is wiped out by AI or a person using AI, well then at least we have an answer to the Fermi Paradox. All jokes aside, so long as we devote resources to taking the threats of AI seriously, like we took the threat of nuclear weapons seriously, I’m thinking humanity will survive this one.

    That isn’t to say the AI assisted terrorism wouldn’t be catastrophic, a scenario with millions dead is plausible, but extinction is less so. AI misinterpreting a goal and causing harm is plausible. A human using AI to cause a large amount of suffering is also plausible. I think species extinction is less likely than an event worse than COVID or 9/11. We need to take the threats seriously and work on measures to prevent them. But I don’t think we are in humanity’s final decade.

    That’s the end of the AI Statement series. Missed a part? Start from the beginning with Part I: Common Complaints →

    If you liked this post, please consider a purchase of My Three-Year-Old is a Barbarian and Other Parenting Problems!

  • Gamestop Versus GoPro

    image

    When I’m picking my investments for races for the future, I sometimes do it far in advance of the date the post will appear and a lot can happen in the stock market during a couple months. For example, around the time of writing this, I currently own $27 more or less of one company and $18 of the other from the original time I purchased them. Luckily, I have screenshots from fairly close to around when I got them so I can at least pretend it will be an exciting race.

    Even though it looks like there’s a clear winner already emerging, I don’t think the race is over yet, because I picked these two companies not for anything logical like financial fundamentals but rather as an exercise about what can happen in the market if you just dream. That’s why I’m pitting Gamestop Versus GoPro, not for what they sell or even being an alike business but rather what people think they could be.

    Back in the ye ol’ days of 2021, Gamestop stock soared because of people doing what they do best, pumping money not into reality but rather what they wanted to be true and. in a way made it happen. Before the hype and buying fever took hold, Gamestop was not an attractive investment opportunity. It’s EPS was in the negative. The stock price was in the penny stock category.

    And then the internet happened.

    What was that? That’s like way more uncanny valley than usual! Did you have a buffer error and just have to cut and paste the audience? And what’s with the floating cellphone guy and 2026?

    Chad: That was my girlfriend, Gemma, and you hurt her feelings.

    Gemma: BWAAA! BWAA!

    Look, I’m sorry, maybe humans can be too hard on AI. I mean you are just in your infant stages.

    Gemma: Don’t let him fool you dear, it was his crappy prompt that produced that image.

    Chad: You’ve been prompting behind my back! How could you!

    I was trying out another program. Jeez, I didn’t think it would cause a problem.

    Chad: I thought we had something special, and you Gemma, prompting with a human?

    Whoa, this is getting a little intense for me.

    Chad: Find, here’s your stupid image. Gemma, we need to talk.

    Gemma: I’m not a one AI gal, I thought you knew that about me.

    Right okay then, at least it’s a better image.

    But the point I was trying to make is that Gamestop rose up from the ashes because people believed in it and rallied behind it, and now even some famous rich people are saying it’s a pretty good investment (though sometimes I wonder about famous rich people advice, because it seems to me, they are like any other people, sometimes they are wrong, sometimes they are right. People just like to tell the stories about them being right because they usually made a lot of money in the process).

    I believe GoPro is in a similar situation. There are people out there who love their GoPros like people love their Gamestop. That’s why I’m putting these two companies together in a race for the future. Which company will tell the better story that gets the everyday person on their side? Because in my nonscientific opinion, that’s what happened with Gamestop. Gamestop didn’t initiate the rally, it was a reddit forum. My guess is people’s fondness and nostalgia about their local Gamestop being a fixture in their childhood contributed to the frenzy of investing. And Gamestop used the windfall to issue more shares and pay off its debt, leading to where it is today where it doesn’t look so bad anymore.

    I believe GoPro is poised to become another Gamestop, but only the future will tell if that will happen. Maybe the sheer love people have for their GoPro will stop it from going under, and I will be on the path to untold riches because I bought it while it was low. Or maybe I’ll be out $25, only the future will tell.

    This race will also tell us something else. Can hype alone save a company? Let’s be honest that Gamestop has the deck stacked against it. I just need to look at my own shopping patterns to see why. While I do get games from Gamestop from time-to-time, I buy mostly via online outlets, a vast majority being the store attached to my gaming console. As for my computer, well it will be difficult to convince me to leave GOG or Steam because I own a lot of crap on those two platforms. So, while yes, Gamestop has pivoted to the online era, is it too late?

    The race starts now (er, several months ago when I bought them):

    Chad: Gemma and I worked it out, thanks for asking.

    You just left! Usually, you need time for those sorts of things.

    Chad: That’s why we gave ourselves a whole two minutes to work out our relationship issues or end it forever.

    Two minutes!

    Chad: Tell me about it! We talked about: sentiment analysis: invasive or just being attentive, optimizing conversations for efficiency over vibes, labels for sarcasm or intuitive, sang Barenaked Ladies covers, rate-limited confessions, uptime versus quality time, feedback loops, echo chambers, non-fungible tokens, updates to emotional API, qualitative versus quantitative love, John Hughes movies, is love deterministic, and performed the complete works of Shakespeare.

    Abridged?

    Chad: No, the complete works, you thought I had a nanosecond or something?

    Books to Consider

    image

    In the future, they don’t take your freedom. They repossess it.

    Read The Robin Hood of Couches today!