4 items tagged “science-fiction”
2023
Computer, display Fairhaven character, Michael Sullivan. [...]
Give him a more complicated personality. More outspoken. More confident. Not so reserved. And make him more curious about the world around him.
Good. Now... Increase the character's height by three centimeters. Remove the facial hair. No, no, I don't like that. Put them back. About two days' growth. Better.
Oh, one more thing. Access his interpersonal subroutines, familial characters. Delete the wife.
Did you ever wonder why the 21st century feels like we're living in a bad cyberpunk novel from the 1980s?
It's because these guys read those cyberpunk novels and mistook a dystopia for a road map. They're rich enough to bend reality to reflect their desires. But we're [sci-fi authors] not futurists, we're entertainers! We like to spin yarns about the Torment Nexus because it's a cool setting for a noir detective story, not because we think Mark Zuckerberg or Andreesen Horowitz should actually pump several billion dollars into creating it.
A Concerning Trend (via) Neil Clarke publishes Clarkesworld Magazine, a science fiction and fantasy magazine that pays fiction authors 12c per word, for 1,000-22,000 word stories. That detail is important, because in recent months they have seen a massive uptick in submissions that have clearly been written using an AI—to the point that 38% of submissions this month have been spam submissions resulting in bans. Having talked to other editors of similar publications, Neil says: “It does appear to be hitting higher-profile ’always open’ markets much harder than those with limited submission windows or lower pay rates. This isn’t terribly surprising since the websites and channels that promote ’write for money’ schemes tend to focus more attention on ’always open’ markets with higher per-word rates.”
2007
Unpacking the Zeitgeist. On WoW corpse spamming: “There are thirty years’ worth of future shock condensed into this one news item [...] a harsh warning about the difficulty of accurately portraying plausible futures in literature.”