War Story

 

Sorry, that's Battlezone, not War Zone.

Trying to see if I can push through and finish the New Mexico book over this holiday's break. That break is short, though. A lot shorter than it was when I first joined the company. 

Anyhow, I got through the Duel sequence and now the outline calls to go back to Albuquerque.

But I got hung up on the best way to present the idea of what locals call the War Zone. Some locals disagree with that name, although they aren't willing to go as far as the city, which rebranded it as the International District. Point is, crime got so bad there by the '90s the city put up barricades. As of the period of the story, it is still one of the most violent places in America.

Of course I want to paint a more nuanced picture than some depraved hive of scum and villainy. 

Up until this morning, I figured "Michael Rennie" would warn her about it before she went...and she wouldn't run into any trouble. (Penny runs into a lot of people she never gets a name for. This guy, she imagined a resemblance to the actor and lead of The Day the Earth Stood Still.) 

Before that, I was tempted for her to actually run into trouble.

Now I'm tempted to have the cops pull her over for suspiciously driving slowly around the kind of place that, in their words, a nice girl like her had no business being. I like this because she's in her mind on the run (she did flee the scene of an accident) and having to interact with the police makes a good dramatic moment.

But other than that, I don't like it. So I'm thrown back into watching videos shot by various visitors and locals (like Peter Santenello, a stalwart for this sort of thing), gathering up any kind of interesting whatever that will make having this as a location have a point. Since her next stop is near Roswell, not here.

Kay Vess is bad at her job

And so is Ubisoft, and so am I -- which is why I'm playing the game anyhow.

There are games that deliver a riveting story. Games that deliver memorable atmosphere. Games that deliver an emotional ride. And then there are comfort games. Usually open-world games with fun environments and lots of little side quests and other things to do. Games you don't try to "win" so much as go and visit. Skyrim. Horizon Forbidden West. Subnautica.

And Star Wars Outlaws. When it works, is when you are just wandering around the marketplace, hanging out in the cantina looking for interesting gossip to overhear, or sometimes out exploring.

It made me miss travel a little less. These are good environments, good enough that Ubi was actually smart enough to put in a couple of rest spots that are just there to sit and take in the scenery.

And while there is a main campaign, it isn't really an arc, there's nothing big at stake (Kay is offered membership several times in the Rebellion and turns them down), there's no character development. Kay is early Han Solo, just living the life -- the life being, steal everything that isn't nailed down, and quite a few things that had been, complete with coded locks and armed guards. Hang out with her low-life buddies, buying blaster parts from back-alley traders between betting on the fathiers and games of Sabac, and eating at street stalls.

And I'll get back to this little scene in a bit.

Kay is probably the right character for this, although she can be annoying. She's a neophyte, a jumped-up street rat trying to earn that street cred. Which is great for the player because you get to build skills, contacts, familiarity with the streets and of course that important reputation.

Which means the most important skill is putting up a good front. Acting tough so people don't mess with you, pretending experience so they will hire you, bluffing or intimidating as the need may be and, if all else fails, fast-talking your way out of trouble.

And she is just so bad at it!

Even Nix, when sent to distract enemies, is so adorably bad at it. And no use pretending that Kay's lame "I'm really good at this, trust me" isn't reading across languages. You can tell when a jawa is being sarcastic, in this game. There's even a fast-talk skill that takes multiple missions and challenges to fully unlock, which resolves as Kay going "Uh, hey guys, I was just..." for maybe two seconds before they draw their blasters anyhow.

Maybe she gets better at it in the course of the game but it takes a bit of the fun out of it when she, the player, and everyone else is completely aware she's not the hardened outlaw she pretends to be.

Only maybe she is. Or maybe it is just the universe is lame. The big patch Ubi put in was to remove mandatory stealth. Well, I started the game on High difficulty because I already knew the combat was too easy. It turns out just difficult enough that stealth is a good idea. Oh, and while Kay may be able to pick locks and crouch-walk, her take-downs are the least stealthy thing you can imagine. It really does become ludicrous, when you send your pet to attack a guy's face, kick his legs out from under him, then slam him into a table, four feet away from an oblivious Imperial Stormtrooper.

Who you can then knock out by hitting his helmet with your bare fist. What planet did Kay come from, anyhow?!

In open combat, at least the Stormtroopers have good aim. Uncanny good aim. If you try to fight everyone in an Imperial base it is going to be one tough fight. (If you can find a hiding spot, though...it may take a while, but eventually you get that old "It must have been the wind.")

So it isn't completely immersion-breaking. There's enough difficulty and tension to make you feel like you accomplished something. Something random, that is. These are for all intents and purposes Radiant quests, even if only the Faction quests really do seem to be radiant. (The faction quests are also notable in that most of them, and all the high-paying ones, are "betray this other faction." Which is why your faction approvals go up and down like the VU on an '80s stereo.)

There's even a mechanism by which right as you complete a mission, you can choose instead to betray the faction that sent you on it!

So it all sort of works, and aside from just wandering the markets, there are some fun missions; infiltrating Jabba's Palace was about as good as the game got for me, although the fight with the rancor at the end was not fun.

Because with all this betrayal going on, it totally makes sense the game would betray you. Remember that it used to have mandatory stealth missions? Well, many of the missions it doesn't matter if you have perfect stealth, when you grab the McGuffin it will go to cut scene and at the end of it the entire place is alerted and shooting at you. Plus your reputation with that faction is shot (I don't think I'm ever getting back in good graces with the Pike cartel).

And this is Ubisoft. King of ridiculous control schemes. If you've stolen a bracelet and want to pawn it, hold down the space bar. It slowly scrolls until the sale is completed. Have two? You tap the spacebar to go to a screen where you select how many. Then tap the icon of the space bar on that screen? No; that icon is broken. Select the icon with the mouse and click on it to complete the sale.

(Or maybe not. The controls in this game are peculiarly opinionated for how long you need to hold them down. Take fast travel. Tap too quick, or too short, and it won't happen. This ain't a fast travel mechanism, it's a rhythm mini-game!)

Want to go lower on the grappling line you are hanging from? S. Unless this is a place where you can swing, so you have to use E instead. To get off, press C. Or maybe space. Or maybe space makes you jump to your doom. Sometimes it is space, sometimes enter, sometimes control is back, sometimes it isn't. Your gun auto-switches ammo type so the civvie you tried to stun just got a blaster bolt to the face.

Bringing us back to the rancor fight. Ubi really loves doing these action sequences where they introduce a brand-new mechanic they've never used before, with a brand-new control for which the icon might or might not flash briefly. For the grappling hook, it is a paragraph. A list-out of six different commands. In small type. For about a quarter of a second. At the moment you start your swing across a chasm.

And that was the food stall experience. A delightful little sequence with nice animations and a cute cutscene and delicious looking street food and Nix of course being adorable...and you spend the whole thing squinting at your screen as ten different buttons are called for in different orders and fast succession.

Turns out you can at least turn that shit down. This is a modern enough game to have a tweak screen for "difficulty," even if the Ubilords phrased it all in terms of "If you are too much of an idiot to play our perfectly-designed game the way we designed it, and have to ruin everything, and if you are really sure about this, then you can turn this one little bit down just a hair." Just for the eating mini-game. Because even Ubi realized how shit that was.

In so many small ways they are trying to make this the same rote looter-shooter they turned Assassin's Creed into (in fact, so much of this is just retread). Even Tatooine is cluttered with icons for meaningless bits of loot and XP.

They had six hundred people working on this game. It makes sense that they could have some wonderful costume set and even hair design that really captures the old-school Star Wars vibe (if the entire thing took place in a back alley behind the cantina -- seriously, where is the good part of town on any of these planets?) Creature animation, environments, a few basic but amusing puzzles. And then lame and annoying story, gameplay, and control scheme decisions that cramp your experience.

AAA is balanced right now at the point where they have to put enough random crap and collectibles in, and enough mandatory sequences that slow the game down, so people feel like they got their money's worth. Even if the return for a longer game is you get a shittier game. The raw economics, or the way the companies interpret the economics, are spiraling into a Corey Doctorow of games that are increasingly expensive yet increasingly less fun to play.

Fortunately, Steam has frequent sales. I would never have paid the full dollar for this one. At slightly less than the cost of breakfast out...I am not unhappy.

The Fifth System of War

I am leaning heavily on Brett Deveraux here, who extracts from John Keegan a way of referring to styles of warfare as systems. 

In my own simplifications, First System is raid-based, where the aim is exploitation/denial of resources (and the land that has them) through raids and attrition. This thinking dominated the Plains Indians even while the United States and Mexico had moved into the Civil War -- Second System warfare -- and arguably still holds in some forms of guerilla warfare in areas (like the mountains of Afghanistan) that are difficult for other than small lightly-armed groups to move in.

Second system arises with agriculture (another thing we can blame on agriculture!) and assumes fixed population centers where the exploitable resource is not just the fertile land but population that farms it, along with their infrastructure.

This is the Sid Meir's Civilization model, where control of cities is the aim. Armies become large if often seasonal because siege happens. And with armies and the static nature of siege, armies themselves clash -- again I refer back to Afghanistan, say the Retreat from Kabul, where an army designed to fight armies meets a force designed for raid-and-retreat.

What Brett variously refers to as Third System or Modern System is when technological advancement, particularly artillery and air power but well-heralded by the machine gun, makes forming up in the field a bad approach. This is almost a situational definition; the First Gulf War saw a fully equipped Third System army fall before a Third System army with a few more decades of technological advancement behind them, as if they were an artillery battery at Woking against a Martian Tripod.

He suggested, very tentatively, (and well prior to the invasion of Ukraine), a Fourth System, where drones and cyber-warfare come to the front. "If you can see it..." is replaced with "If you can hack it..."

Horizon Zero Dawn has a heartbreaking meeting of systems in this regard. Semi-autonomous robots and cyber-warfare were a mature technology in 2064. Self-replication, and hacking of opponents to suborn them, were big selling points of Ted Faro's "Chariot" line. In re the latter, Sobeck herself referred to the Hartz-Timor swarm as being an apex predator.

Which meant all of humanity ended up on the back foot of trying to fight conventionally, without any of the digital assistance they'd become used to, in the costliest delaying action of all history. Actually and implicitly handing out rifles to anyone who could lift one and throwing them into the meat grinder just to buy the Zero Dawn project the time it needed.

Which, as a fictional situation that bends a few things to make itself happen, leads to my facetious designation of a Fifth System. This is the implicit (and almost never explicit) premise behind, say, Halo, Star Wars, or, well, any number of games and movies.

You could call this the Sergeant Zim system of war; "if you can get a man with a knife into the same room with it..."

And I've made that implicit and recognized in-world for two of the novel concepts I've been playing with. In the vampire-werewolf-love-triangle (in space!) I was tinkering with, it is recognized as being the only thing that super-soldiers actually might be useful for. Even if the people who came up with the cyber-boosted genetically manipulated wolf-humans had no idea (they bought into the stupid idea that a physically strong but very expensive soldier would be a really good thing to have).

In the Blue universe, this is implicit in the currently low-intensity, rapidly involving situation, as well as the kind of technologies in play and especially the lack of mature military doctrines in the use of any of this.

But basically, this isn't a realistic strategy. Sure, you can recognize that just as with any hacking, the human layer is most vulnerable, followed by the physical layer. And you can suggest that a small infiltration force, which is highly trained and equipped in expensive ways, could get in to subvert or destroy the systems. This is in fact done all the time.

Enough so that any military force that isn't completely new to the game is going to have countermining against those sappers, close-in guns for those "small, agile snub fighters" and so on. Dropping in some SEALs is just smart strategy. Pinning your entire war plan on them personally bringing down the enemy's stronghold is not.

In a fictional setting, you could both handwave and lampoon by expressly considering this as a clash of systems. In far too much fiction, insurgency tactics (because the heroes are usually the underdogs) are remarkably successful. It is rare when it is recognized that the weight is sometimes more moral than strategically effective.

That, and in fiction this is almost never the plan anyone wanted. At best, it is a Hail Mary. More usually, the heroes just happen to be in the right place at the right time, and while the world is dependent on them pulling off this impossible stunt, it was never in anyone's war plans.

In any case, many of the depictions are a technological imbalance between more-or-less similar systems. James Bond simply has better gadgets than the guys trying to stop him...and it is a close enough battle that their Bonds often succeed in doing a lot of damage to "our" side.

Expanding from that idea of changes of system with changes of society and technology, this Fifth System arises when you are in a kind of cyber-trench warfare. And in fact, perhaps the biggest explicit depiction of Fifth System warfare in fiction was cold war spy exploits; No Man's Land here being the MAD doctrine and the fact that open warfare itself was impossible.

Any halfway-realistic setting that has casual interstellar travel is up in power levels that make actual warfare incredibly and mutually destructive. If there are counter-measures or defenses, they are themselves also technological, and thus both front lines (as it were) are complex enough that it becomes a theoretical impossibility to plug all the holes.

So warfare, whatever the actual form of it is, involves exploiting the inevitable vulnerabilities that show up as both sides continue to evolve and react to continue their technological detente. To lose the arms race is to be destroyed, but to continue the arms race opens up those vulnerabilities to special forces. And this atmosphere of constant technological change means the opportunities are constantly changing.

The first side to invent superheroes wins. For a few months -- then everyone has them and status quo returns.

Research not done

Not going to watch all five seasons of Breaking Bad. Not going to finish The Tewa World View, or the book on nuclear secrecy, not even going to buy Yellow Dirt. Not making another research trip to actually go into Holloman AFB (much less the Atlas-F site outside of Roswell). There's a dozen books I only started (some of them I only read the sample chapters). Not going to finish them.

The world is big and complicated. I'm trying to kick out a novel once a year, so even though it may look like I'm doing a lot of research, I'm really only doing a fraction of what I probably should.

For the New Mexico book, most of the book is behind me now. I still have some stuff to look at for WIPP, the Atlas-F site, and even Egtved Girl. But everything else, the scenes are written and there's no point continuing (or even starting, for some things.)

It is still doing better than the Paris novel. But then, the Paris novel was all about Paris seen through the eyes of others; through film and literature, by visitors, etc. There were several set-piece scenes that explored and unpacked some work connected to Paris, within a Parisian setting. Plus had a little action in it.

The climax takes place on the roof of Notre-Dame des Paris, and references the Hugo novel; how it interpreted this building with its own real history, and how Disney and others in turn interpreted Hugo's novel. Through the lens through the lens.

I didn't finish reading the book and I've never seen the Disney animation.

The sequence at Opera Garnier got closer. Like Notre-Dame, I've been inside myself. And I at least know the Andrew Lloyd Weber score via cast recording. I've never watched Phantom all the way through and I didn't finish the book, either. And as with the Hugo novel, the scene takes note of the many interpretations and expansions throughout the years, from the novel Erik to Phantom of the Paradise.

There's a sneak scene during a Van Gogh show. At least I've seen one of those shows, and I know a little of his art. But, no, I didn't read a biography or really study his art for the scene.

In fact, the last time I can think of that I actually finished ONE book (out of several resources that were available) was the Japan book. I read a book on the Takarazuka Dance Troupe. But I've never seen even a clip of one of their shows, much less all of "Beru-bara" (The Rose of Versailles).

Here's how bad it is, in a nutshell. I bought a coffee table book at the visitor center of the White Sands National Monument. I have barely opened it. It isn't even on my desk as I finish this novel.

The ghost in the machine

There's something weirdly detached about AI art. This is beyond the various "tells" that range from obvious to edge cases. It is this sense of there being no there there. A soulless-ness that is of a different quality than corporate art or mass-produced art or been-through-too-many-committee-meetings art. That's the backdrop that makes those glimpses of a real soul in there so striking.

The first level is seeing those human signs that are divorced from their original context. In Saberhagen's Berzerker series, the titular machines do not have vocoders or some other synthesized speech. Instead they talk using scraps recorded from the various humans who have been its prisoners. From word to word the age, accent, gender, and emotional content of the voice changes. And you get glimpses of those original personalities, the fearful, the resigned, the aloof intellectual, the child in terror.

It freaks me out as someone who has tried to learn visual arts, and who has studied the style and careers of various artists. Much of what the AI was trained on is effectively anonymous, as this was the output of commercial artists on contract or the various cogs in a studio system, or just artists you haven't yourself learned to recognize. 

But you still see those things, those brush strokes, those choices in line, the way a mouth is drawn. Things that in context are part of a complete style and approach. That come out of a philosophy (quite possibly one that is ever-shifting, as an artist approaches different projects with different intents, and their career changes over time as well).

But you don't see the same thing across the image. One line is drawn one way. Another line, right by it, is drawn in some different way. Not completely different (the AI is more selective than that) and not usually pure (it always blends a little). So you probably won't see an Arthur Adams mouth or a Rob Liefeld foot, not perfectly preserved in amber. But you will have a blurry glimpse, a funhouse mirror version, enough to know without the slightest doubt that this particular artist was in the training material.

And this lack of a clear overall purpose is also visible in something else. Something that is most marked when some semblance of it is present.

And that is in composition. On the largest scale, on the scale of the total image, the AI will probably have a harmonious composition. Most of the material it was trained on had that, and enough of it was using similar rules (or, more precisely, a small set of different compositional approaches that themselves have a small set of fairly well-defined rules). 

And some of this is because the current most popular approach of generative AI for visual art is progressive approximation, working from the broadest outlines in. So you could say the AI starts with blocking, with a massing study, and that is probably decent. Where it falls down is because there isn't a guiding purpose that makes sure that everything else unfolds according to it.

That's why AI is currently so shit at lighting, by the way. And yes, the AI-boosters will point out that it is "getting better" and will continue to get better. But it is doing so by brute force and band-aids. When the Hildebrandt's painted, they had a clear vision of sunlight (usually) coming from one direction, the reflection of what was often green earth coming from another. This was in their heads with every shadow, every shading of every limb or rock or tree.

And it was in the planning. When an artist like Jack Kirby penciled, he knew where there would be blocks of solid black, and he planned and placed them as part of the composition. They didn't just fall where you'd expect a shadow to fall.

The AI can capture this statistically. It places the shadows where they usually fall. It shades because the training examples shade. It only gets it right most of the time because most artists are doing the thing in similar ways and with enough samples it will probably not be led into producing an outlier.

But that's all aside of where I was going with this. There are AI images which go beyond simplistic harmony in their composition and actually move on to telling a story within it. Where there is a focus and eye-leading, where the pose isn't just a collection of average limb positions but actually communicates intent. When a character is engaged in a purposeful action that can be read.

And the reason is because there was an original image. I recently watched a video about a young artist (who has learned better since) who did quite nice drawings then sent them into AI to make them look more polished. His style was perfect for this, by the way. AI gets confused by linework and isn't going to save it anyhow, but blocks of color tells it the ideas you want it to flesh out.

There are other routes to this soul transplant. One is by over-prompting the AI to copy a single original artwork you've been inspired by. You might ask it for an astronaut on the moon and with any luck at all you will get one of the three top images from Apollo 11 that appear over and over across media. With a few screwy details, because it is still mashing together multiple sources and not all of them came from the photograph in question or even from the real space program. Or you might outright name the artwork and/or artist, and surprise surprise, you can absolutely get the Mona Lisa back. 

But there is also image to image. And that is, in the essentials, using AI as a Photoshop filter on an existing artwork. Or photograph, or whatever.

In fact, there are entire models that are absolutely and unapologetically based on this.

In ComfyUI, one workflow -- right there on the front panel of the application -- is to take an image of a person (which could be the actual original photograph of a real person) and a screen-grab from a movie or a TikTok, and put the choreography of the one on the other. This isn't an edge case or an abuse of the model, this is how it is intended to be used. ComfyUI supports plenty of models which are text-based and even in the above the final results can be shaped by a more typically generative process, but this is absolutely making a paste-up of two real (stolen) things. It is necessarily so; the toolchain doesn't work if you don't provide these two pre-existing things for it to mash together.

What is sad here, though, is the glimpses of a potential partner. There are parts of making art where the amount of expression you put in is too low a ratio for the effort put in. Inking is wonderful stuff. Erasing the pencils, not so much. And few people want to grind their own pigments.

Somewhere in there is the ability to partner, to have a dialog, to use technology to draw the inbetweens or fill in the blocks. Some of it, we have. Some of that has been with us for a while. There's a reason why Photoshop survives the shitty business practices of Adobe. 

Just, this thing we currently have that we call AI is being applied to the wrong parts of the process, and too often for the wrong reasons. We could have a tool that would allow us to work as artists, and automate the parts of the process that are least human. Instead we have a tool we are using to bypass the parts of the process that are the most expressive of artistic intent; to do those things that should be human.

(And, in the end, fuck up the small details we might have turned to it to do.)

Also... have you looked at the price of RAM lately?

Turducken

I don't know why I'm rushing to find another project. I'm finally into the meaty scenes of this novel. The stuff I was looking forward to doing when I started this book.

Took three days to hammer out a draft of the "Footloose" scene. That's one of those scenes that's not in the outline but comes organically out of the story. From the first moment I introduced Penny to Alamogordo and sent her to a Blake's Lotaburger, I realized there was a thing I could do there. 

It grew, until it became a scene where Penny confronts a bully like something out of an '80s movie -- a connection she, with her Media Arts degree, makes herself. Which is why the scene indirectly references Flashdance, Back to the Future, Footloose, and War Games. But I also name-drop the Marianas Trench and Manchester United. 

(You might also count in Breaking Bad, as a Blake's makes frequent appearances in that as well.)

It ain't about the name-dropping. That's just an observation. The scene is about how we see ourselves in movies, how some of the plots in movies reflect unhealthy trends in our society, and the point of it is Penny finding a way not to play out those tired old stereotypes. But it is really a side-note scene, at best the resolution of a tiny sub-plot; the real thing going on is pulling her off the path of solving the mystery no matter what, and placing her emotionally where she can take a different path at WIPP as well.

Anyhow, I've been thinking less of potpourri, and more of sequences that stack multiple elements to make something bigger than one alone. And I've been trying to figure out a simple way to describe one of these Turducken set-pieces in the Horizon Zero Dawn series, that becomes one of the more memorable sequences in the second game.

Our protagonist, Aloy, travels to the ruins of Las Vegas, now half-buried in the sands, on her quest to rebuild the terraforming system needed to bring the Earth back from disaster.

When the terraforming system was attacked, key sub-functions achieved a sort of unhappy self-awareness and fled to whatever distant surviving servers they could use as hosts. POSEIDON took refuge in Las Vegas, its arrival triggering the old desalinization plant and flooding the ruins of a grand casino that was once the center and showpiece of Vegas -- a Vegas already rescued from the desert once, through the efforts of a man named Stanley Chen, both investor and inventor of that desalinization system.

With me so far? A lot of stories might have stopped at the vista of ruined casinos overtaken by the desert sands. That's pretty spectacular already. But a big part of the adventure takes place in the transformed lower floors, now filled with water and the holographic illusions of sea life as a drowned god dreams.

In the middle of this mix is a trio of Oseram delvers, their leader driven by visions of the Vegas that once was discovered then lost again by his father. Delvers who are also showmen and who make the choice in the end to stay and to rebuild the town once again. And all three have amusing quirks and work well off each other; these are hardly throw-away side characters.

And as you the player explore, completing the challenges and puzzles to return POSEIDON to the task of saving the world, you encounter recordings that outline the story of Stanley Chen; his betrayal by his own business partners, his long-shot gamble at reviving Vegas, his success, and his final lonely trip through the town he had saved and made his home as the terraforming fails and the deserts sweep in again...leaving the computer core running out of sheer nostalgia, never dreaming of how that would one day save Vegas again in ways he could not have imagined.

Of course, all of this is set against the story of the Horizon Zero Dawn series, and Aloy's own personal journey. Themes and plot and story and character are all near-seamlessly interwoven with game mechanics. The very traversal mechanism (a sort of magitech SCUBA mask) that you use comes from those Oseram delvers and their personal story arc. (One reviewer used the subtitle "Gear and Clothing in Las Vegas.")

I love it when you can pull together different elements like this. I was recently trying to talk about this in a Reddit answer to a writer's question about using AI for inspiration. I am split here. Stated baldly, you could assemble one of the combinations mad-lib style. Or with a dartboard, or via ChatGPT. The tough part is joining them in writing.

But I think it is more likely you would come up with a winning combination because you understood the kinds of connections that worked for the story you wanted to tell. So you aren't trying to force something from a limited selection into working. Instead you are open to ideas, so when you are in the middle of constructing a story or story part, you recognize the germ of a thing that could be added in as it floats by in the form of a random news story, a face in the crowd, a spilled cup of coffee. Instead of an external generator of ideas, the story itself generates them out of wisps and whispers.

I do still expect a few more of those. I recently added a sort of apocalypse log to the Atlas Missile sequence, which I hope will make that more interesting (and is also my current solution for getting both Project Pluto and the next clue for the mystery into what otherwise is a bare silo).

The beats weren't quite working. This would be a good time for Penny to make some wrong choices, to fail a little, and for once not be so analytical about things. 

So Wargames is out, but Kubrick is in. Not the one you are thinking of, either. This isn't a line quote but a cinematographic quote; the Kubrick Stare.

Beta reader

ProWritingAid has really been pushing their AI beta reader. Many, many emails and popups and so forth on the sale of the credits necessary to run the thing. With the subscription I already have comes a small number of "free" credits so before I succumbed to the "now 35% off the 50% off of the special sale price!" Black Friday/Cyber Monday stuff I should really, really try the thing out.

I did.

It is AI.

Okay, it took a while to find how to activate it at all. All of the buttons went to the sale page, not to the "run this thing on my existing credits" page. And full compatibility with Scrivener requires putting ProWritingAid in as the always-on grammar checker and wanna-be Clippy for every single bit of text you type on your Mac. Not something I wanted.

But I was able to finally find it on the web version of the software and threw an opening chapter at it.

On the positive side, it seemed to grasp what it was reading. And possibly answered the biggest question I have about my writing (probably, that every writer has); does the reader understand what I'm saying?

Possibly, because this is AI. Which is to say, all it knows is that my text has the same text-shaped objects that it has seen in the other text-shaped objects it has been shown. Which might have been examples of good writing from good writers, or fanfic dredged from wherever it could get it.

The fact that it seemed to understand the three character names as belonging to, well, characters, is a trick that ELIZA was capable of. And that program can be emulated in a few dozen lines of BASIC.

On the downside, it praised the sample for having a fun and engaging narrative voice, and for weaving the modern-day setting with historical information. But, shit, that's what I was trying to do. So I made text-shaped objects that my meat-brain thought looked like the text-shaped objects made by writers who could actually pull those things off. I borrowed ways of saying things that I'd seen other writers use. 

So the silicon-brain agreeing that I'd accomplished my goals is really it saying, yes; I'd borrowed things from other writers it had seen. What does it bring to the table that allows it to tell if I pulled it off? In what way does it replicate the experience of a human beta reader?

(The pic above is of course the human, Beta; clone-sister to Aloy of the Horizon Zero Dawn franchise.)

The effusiveness of the critique gave it the flavor of friends-and-family feedback. That is, praise you can't trust, especially as it is so content-empty. As with all things, the most trustworthy things the AI spat out were the few small criticisms it was willing to risk.

Yes, I am very suspicious. LLMs are being trained both evolutionarily and programmatically to coddle the users. An AI that criticizes and corrects is going to be less popular and in the end sell fewer copies. And from all the sales, ProWritingAid really wants to sell some copies. So a tool from them that praises my writing is a tool I can not trust.

Even that, I could work from. Except for the so-very-typical empty AI phrasing. The "many writers have agreed that this may be a better way to phrase..." stuff that ends up saying almost nothing, but wrapped in language that does its best to hide the lack of anything inside.

The other tools of ProWritingAid are more useful. Sure, it is wrong a significant amount of the time, but it is absolutely clear about which words it doesn't like and why it thinks those words are wrong. So you can work with it, looking into everything it flags and checking, yourself, to see if it found something that should be corrected.

The same sample I threw at the AI engine was automatically sent through the checks for spelling and passive voice and so on. And it found things I would fix. But on the gripping hand...that chapter had already been through ProWritingAid. A couple of years back, but...it missed the stuff then. So what is it missing today?