So right out of the gate you get a writing update this month. Here it is. I have scrapped a lot of what I’ve written for Final Final Girl. I am not starting from scratch, but pretty close to it.

I’ll go into it more when I actually finish the book, but the truth of it is this: I wasn’t happy with what I’d written. It didn’t meet my standard. That is to say, it wasn’t a book I would want to read.

That’s my standard. A book I would want to read. Not ‘happily read’ or ‘be fine with reading’. Want. Desire. Think about obsessively. And Final Final Girl wasn’t there. The series it’s a part of certainly wasn’t there. The core plot of FFG is kick-ass, one of those “I can’t believe it hasn’t been done before” kind of ideas, and the overarching narrative of the series is dope, but the devil is in the details, and the details for both were kind-of shit.

So I have started over, pretty much. Tore down the skeleton of the house, ripped it all back down to the foundation. Gone back to the drawing board with a careful eye on what I fucked up last time. Again, I’ll talk about this more when I post-mortem the book and the series—going into it now would be spoileriffic.

What I’ve put together is so much better. It’s a painful process, but it’s necessary. Writing is rewriting. It’s editing. It’s being unhappy with what you’ve got until you’re not anymore.

And when Mark Lawrence’s AI vs Authors Round 2 released, I realised why AI writing couldn’t really ever unseat human writing.

Because you can’t fake the insecurity needed to scrap an entire fucking book just because you can’t bear to let even your twin brother read it.

I’ve always had problems with the AI vs Authors test, mind you. Most Authors—Ted Chiang excepted—aren’t built for a cheeky spot of Flash Fiction. It’s not that they can’t write short stories on the spot—it’s just not what they’ve skilled up in. The Sydney Marathon took place yesterday and hundreds of people completed the endurance test. Usain Bolt has never finished a marathon.

Who is the better runner?

It’s specious reasoning, right? There’s running and there’s running. Bolt spent his entire career honing his ability to cover (relatively) short distances in incredibly small amounts of time. Sifan Hassan—the fastest woman to finish a marathon in Australia as of yesterday—has spent her entire career training to perfect a balance between stamina and speed.

So which of them is the better runner?

“Usain Bolt is an Olympian and World Champion and yada yada yada yada,” you might say, but you’ve fallen into my trap. Take a less decorated sprinter and a more decorated endurance runner and compare them instead. Keep doing it until you’re happy that the two are evenly matched in their accolades.

And then tell me who the better runner is. The answer is… I dunno? They’re not doing the same thing.

The authors who participated in Lawrence’s AI showdown aren’t flash fiction specialists. All of them are good short story writers, but I bet trained athlete Sifan Hassan could probably cover 100m faster than your average Jo(ab) too. Robin Hobb, Janny Wurts, Christian/Miles Cameron and Mark Lawrence are all behemoths in their field. But that field is Marathon running.

All of them write epic novels, usually in series, and while I haven’t read Wurts or Cameron, Lawrence and Hobb have set-ups and pay-offs that take place over word counts that reduce flash fiction to a mere rounding error.

Having them compete against some AI that is built to beat Usain Bolt is, in my opinion, insane. The AI can’t run a marathon. It literally can only do a sprint. Maybe a 1500m race. There are a couple of models that are capable of remembering enough local historical data (that is, self-generated words) to put out a novella now, but none (that I know of) can keep it together for 40,000 words. And 40,000 words, by the way, does not qualify as a novel these days, even with word counts shrinking.

But that’s the trick to the competition, isn’t it?

The AI won in round two of Lawrence’s test, but the entire affair is based on a facile premise. Hobb and Wurts and Cameron and Lawrence all participated because even if they lost, it wouldn’t matter, because the core of the competition itself was faulty from the outset.

And if that isn’t some world class insecurity, I don’t know what is. They’re just like me frfr. Make sure you go have a read of the short stories, and take the test by the way. See how you go.

The truth is I don’t know how the AI revolution plays out.

I do understand that large tech companies are deeply incentivised to pursue AI in a zero-sum all-or-nothing sort of way, and I’m aware of the fact that they wield enough power and influence (aka they have enough money) to bulldoze their way over almost any obstacle that might stop them from achieving their goals.

That is to say, I am done wondering when they will “come to their senses”, because they already have (in a perverse sort of way). One company will, eventually, create an AGI (an Artificial General Intelligence, a self-replicating learning model that will hopefully have human-aligned goals in mind). And the first one to do that will “win”, in the sense that it will have a model capable of doing everything all the other models are capable of but better and faster, which means that model will be able to actively undermine all other models, rendering them useless.

And in theory that AGI will be able to create entertainment media perfectly tailored to every single person who engages with it. It will be a gross misuse of its godlike power, but it will be capable and probably incentivised to do this.

But not all entertainment media is art in the same way that not all art is entertainment media.

Art requires a leap of faith. It requires doubt. Risk. Whether that’s the risk of sharing something you’re worried isn’t good enough, or the boldness to scrap something you can’t bear to share with others. And a self-learning all-knowing quantum computer won’t have any experience with that sort of insecure feeling.

Anyway, all of this is to say I started over on Final Final Girl. And I won’t be using AI at all while rewriting it.

And I know this blog post is a day late, I’ve been spectacularly unwell and while I’m sure my cold’n’flu addled musings might have entertained on some level, I didn’t want to burden people with having to read them.

In stuff I’m watching, Alien Earth is awesome. I’m absolutely loving it. Alien is one of my favourite films of all time (what a basic bitch) and so far Alien Earth has nailed the tone.
In games, I’m playing Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater, a remake of one of my favourite games of all time. It’s a pretty good time to be nostalgic for me. Anyway, I’ll have a review of that up on https://thegapodcast.com/ a tiny bit later in the week (refer to my being quite sick for reasons why). And you can of course listen to me and my PIC Luke talk about the other games we’ve been playing on that show weekly!