Playing Cyberpunk 2077 again and I really do wonder what they wanted with the Voodoo boys in that game. On one hand they’re characterised like a cool group of high tech immigrants that carved their own space within the city and their mistrust of outsiders being based on the fact that corps have ruined so much of their life already. They use their own tech, have their own governance and even have their own community. They’re obviously still a criminal and more importantly a dangerous gang that uses to violence against anyone they don’t like but that’s par for the course setting. So it kinda seems like the writers for the rpg or just the setting wanted them to be just this interesting oddity in night city.
One the other hand…..it feels like the actual story writers had a bone to pick with them for some reason. The game goes out of their way to make every voodoo boy character look like an absolute bastard in the eye of the player that it’s just makes me wonder why they had an entire scene with Placide giving chicken to a woman who’s apparently having it tough. This is the introduction of Placide but for some reason they try really hard to go on to establish that NO, Placide is actually a horrible person and so is Brigitte. Like I don’t get why other factions or characters can be hit by “morally grey” beam but the writing of voodoo boys is so hellbent on making them the biggest basrards there is. It’s also jarring how easy it is to pick the “slaughter the entire gang” choice. All it takes is for V to be a little bit angry about how they’re being treated for the entire gang to become hostile to V. Hell they’re too many choices that lead to V inadvertently or being forced to kill the Voodoo boys. Like why??? Just to justify the players thirst for revenge because of what the voodoo boys did to Evelyn Parker?? Is that what the voodoo boys are to the writers, just a means for the player to exact his bloody revenge fantasy against? And even in that context, the only thing the voodoo boys did to Evelyn Parker was fry her chip and be apathetic to her because she was planning to betray her. How is that any different from other characters or factions? And admittedly this is kinda the attitude the game’s writing has for pretty much all the gangs. The story writers are just not interested in them. But it does feel extremely egregious when the one black immigrant dominant gang are the ones the revenge fantasy is against. And not like the crazy confederates?
It's fun when the robot character in the sci-fi show gets cut in half because nobody working on this type of media knows anything about robotics and you never know what you're going to find inside. Green printed circuit boards? Meat and viscera, but like in a weird colour? Just a shitload of goo?
I especially like it when the robot appears to have realistic musculature which operates via contraction, suggesting some sort of fluid-driven or shape-memory-based actuation, and then it gets dismembered and a bunch of random gears and sprockets go flying everywhere.
Does no one realize how racist this assumption can be? Most LLMs are trained heavily on Commonwealth and other standardized English corpora, yet now when people from Commonwealth countries naturally write in polished English, others immediately say it “sounds AI-generated.”
I fear this is the beginning of a really awful trend that will make it even harder for non-white writers to get published.
Got curious, so I went and read it myself. The AI accusation is completely absurd to me. The story is small scale, personal, laden with metaphor, and clearly draws heavily from the writer's cultural history. It's not conventionally told, but the ideas set up in the beginning are woven throughout the narrative nicely - nothing is extraneous, no threads are dropped, and it ends on a thoughtful and somewhat poetic note that explores its core themes. Unless I'm sorely mistaken, this is not kind of writing AI generally produces (at least not without significant human intervention - at which point who cares?)
The idea that it's AI generated because of a couple difficult-to-parse similes (in a piece that employs flowery simile multiple times per paragraph) is so insidious. Oh I'm sorry, this Trinidadian writer's piece exploring the cultural intersections of the Carribean and Indian diasporas on the island wasn't instantly understandable to me, an ignorant anglophone reader - so therefore he must be a fraud? Ridiculous, and in my opinion clearly racist.
first off the bat, "ai detection tools" are certainly worthless vaporware. i am fully agreed on this point. like hagiomoto, i also worry about the weaponization of AI accusations against authors of color, especially ones writing in englishes other than american or british english.
that said, these posts have the absolute wrong end of the stick. first of all, the very first to call this story out were -- understandably, because they were the ones most closely watching the commonwealth prize regional winners -- Black and caribbean writers and poets, like chiemeziem everest udochukwu and previous commonwealth prize winner and fellow trinidadian kevin jared hosain.
secondly, OP (and many, many people in the notes) correctly describes a phenomenon -- the way in which AI writing can resemble styles of writing common in nations that were formerly colonized by the UK -- almost certainly in reference to marcus olang's essay I'm Kenyan. I Don't Write Like ChatGPT. ChatGPT Writes Like Me. but this phenomenon has absolutely nothing to do with jamir nazir's piece. the similarities olang' draws between kenyan english and chatgpt are strict structure, the use of specific sayings, and a propensity to use 'wow words' --
The third, and perhaps most important commandment, was that of structure. An essay had to be a perfect edifice. The introduction was the foundation, the body was the walls, and the conclusion was the roof, neatly summarising the moral of the story and, if you were clever, circling back to the introductory proverb to create a satisfying, if predictable, loop. We were taught to build our paragraphs around a strong topic sentence. We were taught the sin of the sentence fragment and the virtue of the compound-complex sentence.
whatever you might think of "the serpent in the grove", i think it is extremely safe to say that this very much does not describe it.
and now i want to get onto the reblog, which really truly bothers me because of the ways it is unintentionally closing ranks around the profoundly racist and imperialist set of pre-approved conceptions of 'postcolonial literature'. because frankly, the serpent in the grove is not thoughtful or complex--it is barely coherent, in very obvious ways. everyone who has written about it has pulled all the same quotes, but here's a few of the nonsense metaphors to illustrate:
A man who had cleared brush like a conscience
Hard living lays itself on a man like wet sacking; it never asks permission
Coffee and cocoa leaned wild on a slope that wanted either rain in teeth or none at all
She had the kind of walking that made benches become men
(this sort of bluntly failed similie is incredibly characteristic of ai creative writing by the by, far more than any of the elements olang' complains about being accused over, which mostly show up in technical/conversational AI material. @nostalgebraist calls it the "eyeball kick". my favourite exmaple i've seen over the years is “the moon was truly mother-of-pearl, the white of the sea, rubbed smooth by the groins of drowned brides.”)
what it is, however, is essentially an intense pastiche of all the frankly racist tropes of "prestige postcolonial literature". i mean, look at what judge sharma taylor said about it:
Jamir Nazir’s language is sublime—precise yet richly evocative—conjuring vivid, lush imagery with remarkable economy. Through sharp sensory detail, he renders the Grove as a living presence, where labour, landscape, and memory are intimately entwined. Polished and confident, this is a story with a melodic voice that lingers long after the final line. Jamir Nazir’s prose pulses with a voice of restraint and quiet authority—a beautifully told and assured piece of storytelling.
writing from the global periphery, from the caribbean or africa or south east asia or latin america, is always "rich", it is always "sensory," "lush", it is always "about landscape and memory", it is always "melodic." these are exhausted tropes that have been used to describe basically all literature from ex-colonies for the last 50 years, regardless of what they're actually like
latin american writers and critics like sylvia molloy and jorge volpi have talked about the "choke-chain" of 'magical realism', this titanic sweeping label that gets applied to anything coming out of latin america, something that for a long time sreved as a measuring stick to evaluate Real Prestigious Worthwhile Latin American Literature.
there is a commonality there, and that is that literature from The Third World is meant to be about the Land, about the Peoples, about the Personal Struggles, about the Rich Fantastical Vibrant Melody History Memory--this is a mold that has been imposed first by the european and usamerican literary establishments and from there internalized and adopted in literary scenes around the world. volpi criticizes the picture of latin america that the "magical realism" wants to push onto all latin american ltierature as one of "irrationality [...] a lack of reason".
incomprehensibility--the very reaction in the reblog of "oh, i don't understand this, it must be some Cultural Element i'm not understanding" is treated as a de facto mark of authenticity. it's the mass exoticization of this literature, treating it as some endlessly mysterious Other whose incomprehensiblity gives the white literary world a look into the Mysterious Foreign Mind
and it is genuinely really frustrating after years of authors from the global periphery (and in various diaspora, because this type of ritualized Authenticty Signalling is a huge feature of prestige diaspora literature and the subject of the exact same ongoing fierce internal debate, e.g. this piece or this one) trying to escape these stifling tropes, these exotifying expectations, to have a story that--AI or not (and i don't think the 'not' is very likely)--thoughtlessly and mechanistically repeats them, drowning itself in florid incoherence, get this kind of defense from people who earnestly think they are being anti-racist.
i leave off with a couple of good pieces on the story itself and its reception:
Can we say that between the prize and the story and Jamir Nazir, there is something perverse and disrespectful to other writers, because it
The Granta controversy surrounding a Commonwealth Prize-winning story tells us less about AI than about the enduring metropolitan expectatio
This has given me a lot to think about. From the perspective of postcolonial literature, I agree. I'd read that choke-chain article before this.
All in all, I'd rather writers be accused of poor writing than of using AI based on mistaken ideas about what good literature is and on AI detectors, which at this point are basically snake oil.
Now I know you know I don’t respect western anime fans in general but hearing alleged pushback for the author saying Apothecary Diaries is fiction and not historical to china is so funny in terms of the fans’ stupidity. They can accept Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings, Avatar the Last Airbender are fictional settings and not historical fiction yet they see something Vaguely Chinese and assume the author a coward.
We already know that the Witcher isekai’ing to IRL Poland was stupid so why do you want historical fiction so badly when you hate cultural fiction crossing over with history.
As always, charmed @hagiomoto, I love audience participation.
You don’t know how funny it is as someone who likes being a smug-ass nerd about shit that I don’t even like to have learnt/read this. I will allow AI summary to take this one over. I know all this by the way I just don’t respect it enough to use my own words.
So she actually said that she does not see the appeal in Senshi at all and that the panty shots weren't intended to be horny - she just has a neighbor who looks kind of like him and does laundry in his underwear. Which she finds kind of weird and offputting, and put into his character to be funny.
But that's the thing. She doesn't exaggerate or grotesqueify or alter people's bodies to fit some standard. (Except insofar as she draws different species differently, and those are exquisitely practiced to ensure they have the same diversity of appearances that humans do.) She just presents people exactly as they are, complexities and oddities and all.
It just so happens that when you present people exactly as they are, what you present will be beautiful and alluring to many. Even the things you yourself might find weird and offputting. Honestly I think it's a touching example of how you don't have to see the beauty in everyone for the beauty to be there, simple honesty is enough to let the wonder of people's humanity shine through.
#i think we should put this post next to the interview where she said she doesn't want to eat the food in the series cuz she's a picky eater#and file them both under 'you don't know an artist from their work'#and maybe you don't need to!#maybe all you need to know is that ryoko kui is Good At What She Does#idk I don't like the implication that artists (and women especially?) can only create from personal life and feelings#some people have imagination and craft#kind of a tangent but. there you go.
As others have pointed out before, if you visited a web page 20 years ago and it acted like that, you would rightly assume your computer had gotten a virus.
