Two Years of Brologueing

TTLY: Old posts

Y’know, back in the deep mists of time, otherwise known as ‘lockdown,’ I used to run a YouTube channel. I wasn’t the most frequent uploader – just a one-man band doing it for the love of the game. I’ve made reference to it in some of my early posts. There’s a timeline, not too far removed from this one, where I hired an editing team, started marketing myself, all the things YouTubers with >10K subs have to do when that one video is blessed with 100K views by an algorithmic boon. That me must be having an absolute hell of a time, without the pressure of feeling like he has to be constantly editing.

Now, I blink, and the weeks pass by; the world revolves, and yet I am stationary. The craftsmen don’t tell you the path to getting better makes you feel like you’re so much worse:

https://bsky.app/profile/brologue.net/post/3lwyxi4acls2o

Well, OK, some of them do, but no-one can walk the path of craft for you. Don’t get me wrong, this place might be a bit quieter this year, but I am getting up to things off-screen! I’m still workshopping, still studying the craft, still putting words away for my thesis’ manuscript (40,000 words!). But I’d have to be a freak of nature to also find the time and energy to also commit to posting regularly.

Some days, I’m a god of storytelling; others, a hack who can’t string a sentence together. I will be recognised as one of the many heirs to these sceptred isle’s literary giants; and I will never be read, not even by my friends. Likely neither of these things will come to pass. All the same, I came in at the end: why exercise imagination? Why put myself through the pains of creation? We’ve got ChatGPT for that, now, didn’t I hear? They’re trying to build God on four trillion dollars.

And here is where.

The short paragraphs go.

The serious short paragraphs.

Like wot Serious People do on Twitter.

They expect this God to do all the work.

What AI-generated art replaces is not exactly the greatest, most cryptic riddle of our time. It’s not people – that’s the purview of bosses, who really, REALLY want to replace workers with one LLM and a legion of zero-hour contractors. I’d say it replaces the “journey” of practicing art, but that is a word that’s fraught with fuzzy, numinous vibes. My use of it frustrates me. It’s a locked box, one that I might be able to pick, as an artist, but maybe you can’t, because you feel like you’ve never had the knack.

We make art as a response to other works of art. Be it on canvas, on wood pulp, on cellulose; on magnetic tapes, laser discs, or on cartridges; art calls on us, all the same, and we express how we feel about it. This might come as a shock, but all those cringe fanfics you wrote when you were 13 are one form of response (even if they’ll never see the light of day). It’s a dialogue, even if you’re not directly conversing with the author. No doubt, if you enjoy a book, a game, or work of art, you’ll also seek out people who enjoyed it, too, and failing that, try to pitch it to your friends¹.

Only through dialogue and play do we learn to “name the world,” as Paulo Freire puts it in Pedagogy of the Oppressed. When one defers to an LLM for answers, one reinforces an ignorance that oppression has taught, to wit:

[The oppressed] call themselves ignorant and say the “professor” is the one who has knowledge and to whom they should listen. […] Almost never do they realize that they, too “know things” they have learned in their relations with the world and with other women and men.

An LLM can neither reflect nor act upon the world. My curiosity is satiated by losing myself in a mess of Wikipedia tabs, or in my copy of Brewer’s; an LLM, meanwhile, is an incurious device, anathema to my goals. Were I to use it, it would deny me opportunities to learn a little more about my place in the world. The novelty of asking ChatGPT to statistically bullshit about a complex topic in the style of an Italian-American mobster has long since passed. Fuggedaboutit.

Here’s to two years. Hopefully, there’ll be more…

I’ve tried pitching Discworld to a friend of mine – by which I mean, buying him all the Death books. He keeps telling me he’ll get around to reading them… eventually… ;; ↩︎