This is something that you cannot find in an ebook. Firstly, you cannot get a ebook for next to nothing second hand. And if you do find a second hand book, this kind of stuff happens all the time.
Last night as I was tearing through my current read (The Enemy by Lee Child), I discovered this $4 receipt for parking that somebody paid for decades ago.
It just dropped out onto my chest, 18 years after it was paid for in Toronto in 2007. Conceivably, it could mean that nobody else has read this book since (the book in my hands here is itself a 2007 edition…), or maybe every other owner of this book had just simply decided to keep this receipt inside after passing page 280.
And as we watched it I realized that 35 (!!) years ago this was only the second movie I ever saw in the cinema (the first one was the horrible Superman IV from 1987 which I saw with my dad). This was in a mining town called Klerskdorp in South Africa (where my parents still live today and we visit every year.). I distinctly remember going to watch Home Alone on some kind of play-date. We turned 8 that year.
But man this movie is fun. The script moves like clockwork, strikes all the notes dead on and the audience is with young Kevin McCallister from start to finish. There’s not a gram of fat anywhere. It’s still hilariously funny and the physical comedy always surprisingly violent.
So this is the first post of my blog, written by hand and started in the year 2025–a time when walls of generic text are generated in a second, by anyone with an internet connection, anywhere.
Hear me out.
the good old days when only our parents didn’t understand
Things online are about to get even hairier than it’s ever been. The internet even deader. We will trust things (articles, images, avatars) less and less, including video and music.
It will happen everywhere in the short term. Emails are going to become perfect, chatbots and customer support will basically be (and already are becoming..) just a vanilla ChatGPT being as vanilla as corporate communication guidelines can make it. Somewhere we will all be fine to knowingly engage with these systems. In some areas I guess we would want to.
But I think not in creative output. I know generative AI can make an image of anything. It can make an image of a chair in the ‘style of Picasso’ — but it does not know what a chair is for.
Recently some writers-slash-authors got ‘caught’ leaving prompts in finished books. These people themselves could not even be bothered to read the finished works they are asking others (readers) to pay to read. (Lord, just look at those titles..)
Trust in these authors are dead. That non-trust will rub off on everything surrounding it and I’m afraid on independent authors in general.
I think we will continue to want to have good books, though. Good stories. Fun and interesting fiction created by humans with real and unique angles and strange voices. We will look out for those writers and novelists. We will have to vet them somehow, to make sure they are real. We will make sure they are our people.
I do know I work hard to develop the stories and books I am soon to release into the world. Sans LLM. With biological intelligence. And I need to find a readership. And to have a readership, I am convinced that readers will attach more and more to provably real persons.
So this is my attempt at a start. And so here’s my blog, existing not in spite of LLMs and generative AI, but because of all of it. It still needs some paint here and there, some furniture, but I made it.
