Honestly, few things in AI discourse are so purely tiresome as ~nuanced AI takes that are like "why don't you care about ecological harm caused by things that are actually useful and valuable to you??? why is it only when the harm is done to produce something that's at once useless or deeply counter-productive for its purposes, intensely annoying, and shoved at you 24/7 that you suddenly care?"
well if we all think very hard we might be able to figure out why "harmful thing that also does something good that's actively helpful to people" and "harmful thing that does fuck-all of use and keeps trying to replace me in writing to my sick mom to tell her I love her" don't hit people the same way!
(This isn't even my biggest problem with it by a mile, but come on.)
There are some nonsense inaccurate takes on genAI, but every single """nuanced""" take on it I've seen can only manufacture ambiguity by desperately building sand castles over labor rights & consent of artists as ... things to care about at all, really.
Actually, with regard to the entirely correct "TOS James Kirk would hate techbro-driven AI that's actually just elaborate autocomplete, especially these dudes' idea of the ideal girlfriend who has no actual intelligence much less autonomy of her own" take, I feel his own words sum it up:
this thing becomes wife, lover, best friend, wise man, fool, idol, slave. It isn't a bad life to have everyone in the universe at your beck and call, and you win all the arguments.
Meanwhile, his take on an actual, literal artificial intelligence who has developed true personhood and thought processes and desires of her own, and is also a woman:
Down to the last thought, hope, aspiration, emotion, she's human. The human spirit is free. You have no power of ownership. She's free to do as she wishes. [...] I don't want to beat you. This is no test of power. Rayna belongs to herself and she claims the human right of choice to be as she wills, to do as she wills, to think as she wills.
I hadn't even thought about LinkedIn for years, but uhhh I just got this email:
I've copied the text below this cut if you can't/don't want to read a screenshot:
Hi Elizabeth,
You’re receiving this email because we’re making updates to LinkedIn’s User Agreement and have provided you more information in our Privacy Policy.
While we encourage you to read both, here’s a quick look at what you should know:
Updates to the User Agreement, which are effective on November 20, 2024, include more details on content recommendation and content moderation practices, new provisions relating to the generative AI features we offer, and license updates designed to help creators expand their brand beyond LinkedIn.
As our product evolves to leverage generative AI, we have given you more information in our Privacy Policy by adding language on how we use the information you share with us to develop the products and services of LinkedIn and its affiliates, including by training AI models used for content generation (“generative AI”) and through security and safety measures.
At this time, we are not enabling training for generative AI on member data from the European Economic Area, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. For those outside these regions, we’ve proactively made available an opt-out setting for any members who choose not to make this information available for this purpose.
For more information, please visit our frequently asked questions, or our post on LinkedIn. By continuing to use LinkedIn, you are agreeing with these terms.
We remain committed to being transparent about our practices and keeping you in control of the information you entrust with us.
your blog is great, and you talk about your interests in such a compelling way! out of curiosity, who would you say are your top 10 fictional characters of all time? also, do you use twitter?
Thank you very much! It's hard to be entirely accurate about my personal top ten, but I still enjoyed thinking about it rather than about being sick and miserable, lol, so here's my attempt to come up with a Faves of Ultimate Destiny list.
(This isn't necessarily about evaluating their worth as characters or even as people, but just how much raw affection I feel. It's also not ranked, just the order in which I thought of them!)
Fitzwilliam Darcy from Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (the book character specifically) — I know, nobody is surprised. He actually is my #1 choice.
Luke Skywalker from the Star Wars original trilogy — it's always hard for me to choose between him, his father, and his sister, but ultimately, I feel the most powerfully about Luke. I'm not here for soft, sunshiny fanon Luke, but I am super here for a Luke whose personal kindness, strength, and powerful loyalties mingle with his struggle against rage, fear, even hatred, and an inclination to idealize martial violence and solve his problems with it, yet who comes out the other side as the kind of Jedi that Anakin might have been rather than the authorities around Luke succeeding in forging him into something alien to his true nature.
Faramir from JRR Tolkien's Lord of the Rings (very definitely the book character specifically) — again, I'm not super into soft and accommodating mundane guy Faramir, but very into the interplay of his basic compassion and gentleness with the repeated descriptions of him as stern, commanding, willful, and just really fucking strange. I love others a lot but no one can take his crown. (He may be uncrowned in canon but not in my heart!)
Gwen Thackeray from Guild Wars: Prophecies and Guild Wars: Eye of the North, games which most of you haven't played and I suspect would not enjoy for dated mechanics reasons, but which won my heart in the original tutorial zone. I have an explanation about Gwen's greatness here.
Attolia Irene from Megan Whalen Turner's The Queen's Thief books, but especially The Queen of Attolia. She's so precisely tailored to my tastes in female characters that I was kind of astounded, even though I read the books specifically for her based on my friends' TQT blogging. I mostly don't talk about her on this blog, but my feelings are really strong!
Aravis Tarkheena from CS Lewis's The Horse and His Boy. I know everything wrong with Narnia and specifically with THHB, but Aravis, what an icon.
Tarrlok from Avatar: The Legend of Korra. This is another close competition (with his brother Noatak/Amon along with both members of my beloved OTP, Korra/Kuvira), but if I'm being honest, he's the one who scrapes into the fave Avatar character slot. I've loved a lot of tragic villains, but he's really top tier.
Annabella from John Ford's seventeenth-century revenge tragedy 'Tis Pity She's a Whore. The title is quasi-ironic; it comes from a dismissive description of her by a super corrupt Catholic cardinal. Both the title and subject matter (murder, consensual sibling incest, a ton of misogyny) can make it a difficult play for some. But for me, Annabella is really what makes the play succeed on its own terms and outshine its Shakespearean inspiration.
Cesare Borgia from Showtime's The Borgias. In my heart this slot goes to both him and his sister Lucrezia (where #8 is definitely Annabella's alone, although I like Giovanni; if only S1 existed this slot would be rightfully Lucrezia's). But if I have to choose between them in the context of the show, I felt his arc was smoother and more coherent and satisfying throughout the show as a whole, so my love for him is less impeded by frustration.
I wasn't actively trying to only choose one character per canon, though it's wound out that way, but here's the exception: Cassian Andor from the 2016 Star Wars film Rogue One (and only that film—I'm not here for the novelization or other EU depictions or Andor or anything except what's in the movie). He's a gift of a character I never expected Star Wars to provide, and half of the only romance in SW that seriously matters to me.
Honorable "rewired my brain" mentions: Moiraine Damodred from Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time (also in the show!), Sandrilene fa Toren from Tamora Pierce's Emelan books, and Lessa from Anne McCaffrey's Pern books were all deeply formative.
As for Twitter:
I definitely don't use it any more. I used to have multiple accounts, though I wasn't super active outside of academia/chatting with RL friends and the occasional random scholar who deigned to notice me. Twitter wasn't really the natural platform for my preferred "LJ fandom expat" style of online writing, and was mostly stuff like this:
[Damn, I had no idea what was coming with "AI" ... anyway.]
I was deciding whether to keep using Twitter as the Elon purchase was going down, and then he immediately did an antisemitism and I immediately cut all use of it. I later got around to locking down all three accounts; I only maintain them to control the usernames. Most of the people I knew on Twitter joined Bluesky around the same time as me, or can be more easily reached on Discord now. I mostly use Bluesky when I feel like microblogging, but it's not a feeling that often besets me.
