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Chum RS.2: Kalahari Pocono

Liam nods, a rueful smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. "Sometimes I think... maybe I wasn't cut out for this. For being the dad of someone who's been through what Kate's been through."

"Me too," I say quietly, watching Sam as she reaches for another fry. "I mean... I love her more than anything, but sometimes I wish..." I stop, shaking my head. "Never mind."

He doesn't press, just waits until I find the words.

"Sometimes I wish it wasn't her," I say finally. "That someone else had to... I mean, you saw what happened on the news. At her school. But then I think about how every parent probably feels the same way. How no one wants it to be their kid."

I remind myself, for a second, that Sam probably wouldn't want me spilling her superheroic secrets to her best friend's dad.

Liam hums in agreement. "At least one set of parents somewhere in the world is gonna be disappointed," he says, echoing my thoughts. "Guess we're just the unlucky ones."

"Maybe," I say, though my voice lacks conviction. "Luck, fate, who knows?"

Liam doesn't respond right away, his gaze fixed on Kate. "She'll be okay," he says eventually. "Sam too. They're tougher than we give them credit for."

My thoughts drift, circling back to the conversation I had with Sam earlier. I think about the superheroes I see on the news--the ones who fight monsters and save cities and carry the weight of the world on their shoulders. They're all so young. Most of them in their twenties or thirties. When was it - 1981? 82? That's when the first ones started being born. The oldest ones are only 40-some years old.

I wonder if their parents feel the same way I do. If they wish it had been anyone but their child.

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this seems self-evident. why would i want to write worm when it already exists. chum is a very different story from worm

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"an artwork that is made by someone holding an umbrella and standing on top of a tall building"

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Samantha "Sam" Small is a 14 year old high school freshman and superhero-in-training, recruited by the Delaware Valley Defenders to protect Philadelphia. Her powers let her bite through metal and smell when people bleed. Her interests include soccer, women, putting herself in danger, and Shabbat dinner with her Pop-Pop Moe.

Chum is a slice-of-life/action web serial, currently around 900,000 words. It has been described as "good enough to spend hours organizing info on it", a "beautiful coming of age story", and "a superhero story to rival worm". It's got dinosaurs in it. It's got heartbreak in it. It's got really good fight scenes in it.

Go read it on Royal Road or Wordpress and consider joining the Chumcord!

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CHUM BOOK 10: PLUME

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Chum 148: Gehenna

"Then how does it work?" I ask. I'm trying to sound sharp, but my voice comes out ragged.

"You precommit," he says. "You pick a street, or a block, or a corner, one per side of the coin. And I look ahead to see if you find anything. If the answer's no, we eliminate it and try again. If a street gives us something, we note it down and keep going."

"Great. That doesn't sound hard," I say, clenching my fists to stop my hands from shaking.

Crossroads doesn't smile. "It is. It's a massive Fourth Amendment violation, and you're lucky I don't care as much about legal gray areas as Multiplex does. You realize that if this ever got out, it'd be a public storm the likes of which you've never seen before. Heads will roll."

"I don't care," I say, too quickly. "If we're caught, I'll take the blame. I'm the one kicking down doors, remember? Not you."

His eyes narrow, searching me for something I don't want to show him. After a long moment, he flips the coin again and catches it without looking. "Pick a street."

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really saying the quiet part out loud by revealing that your hatred of “AI” is intricately tied to your fervent belief in the redemptive and edifying powers of suffering—up to and including physical suffering—and the idea that students in particular ought to suffer

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Saw a tweet that said something around:

"cannot emphasize enough how horrid chatgpt is, y'all. it's depleting our global power & water supply, stopping us from thinking or writing critically, plagiarizing human artists. today's students are worried they won't have jobs because of AI tools. this isn't a world we deserve"

I've seen some of your AI posts and they seem nuanced, but how would you respond do this? Cause it seems fairly-on point and like the crux of most worries. Sorry if this is a troublesome ask, just trying to learn so any input would be appreciated.

i would simply respond that almost none of that is true.

'depleting the global power and water supply'

something i've seen making the roudns on tumblr is that chatgpt queries use 3 watt-hours per query. wow, that sounds like a lot, especially with all the articles emphasizing that this is ten times as much as google search. let's check some other very common power uses:

running a microwave for ten minutes is 133 watt-hours

gaming on your ps5 for an hour is 200 watt-hours

watching an hour of netflix is 800 watt-hours

and those are just domestic consumer electricty uses!

a single streetlight's typical operation 1.2 kilowatt-hours a day (or 1200 watt-hours)

a digital billboard being on for an hour is 4.7 kilowatt-hours (or 4700 watt-hours)

i think i've proved my point, so let's move on to the bigger picture: there are estimates that AI is going to cause datacenters to double or even triple in power consumption in the next year or two! damn that sounds scary. hey, how significant as a percentage of global power consumption are datecenters?

1-1.5%.

ah. well. nevertheless!

what about that water? yeah, datacenters use a lot of water for cooling. 1.7 billion gallons (microsoft's usage figure for 2021) is a lot of water! of course, when you look at those huge and scary numbers, there's some important context missing. it's not like that water is shipped to venus: some of it is evaporated and the rest is generally recycled in cooling towers. also, not all of the water used is potable--some datacenters cool themselves with filtered wastewater.

most importantly, this number is for all data centers. there's no good way to separate the 'AI' out for that, except to make educated guesses based on power consumption and percentage changes. that water figure isn't all attributable to AI, plenty of it is necessary to simply run regular web servers.

but sure, just taking that number in isolation, i think we can all broadly agree that it's bad that, for example, people are being asked to reduce their household water usage while google waltzes in and takes billions of gallons from those same public reservoirs.

but again, let's put this in perspective: in 2017, coca cola used 289 billion liters of water--that's 7 billion gallons! bayer (formerly monsanto) in 2018 used 124 million cubic meters--that's 32 billion gallons!

so, like. yeah, AI uses electricity, and water, to do a bunch of stuff that is basically silly and frivolous, and that is broadly speaking, as someone who likes living on a planet that is less than 30% on fire, bad. but if you look at the overall numbers involved it is a miniscule drop in the ocean! it is a functional irrelevance! it is not in any way 'depleting' anything!

'stopping us from thinking or writing critically'

this is the same old reactionary canard we hear over and over again in different forms. when was this mythic golden age when everyone was thinking and writing critically? surely we have all heard these same complaints about tiktok, about phones, about the internet itself? if we had been around a few hundred years earlier, we could have heard that "The free access which many young people have to romances, novels, and plays has poisoned the mind and corrupted the morals of many a promising youth."

it is a reactionary narrative of societal degeneration with no basis in anything. yes, it is very funny that laywers have lost the bar for trusting chatgpt to cite cases for them. but if you think that chatgpt somehow prevented them from thinking critically about its output, you're accusing the tail of wagging the dog.

nobody who says shit like "oh wow chatgpt can write every novel and movie now. yiou can just ask chatgpt to give you opinions and ideas and then use them its so great" was, like, sitting in the symposium debating the nature of the sublime before chatgpt released. there is no 'decay', there is no 'decline'. you should be suspicious of those narratives wherever you see them, especially if you are inclined to agree!

plagiarizing human artists

nah. i've been over this ad infinitum--nothing 'AI art' does could be considered plagiarism without a definition so preposterously expansive that it would curtail huge swathes of human creative expression.

AI art models do not contain or reproduce any images. the result of them being trained on images is a very very complex statistical model that contains a lot of large-scale statistical data about all those images put together (and no data about any of those individual images).

to draw a very tortured comparison, imagine you had a great idea for how to make the next Great American Painting. you loaded up a big file of every norman rockwell painting, and you made a gigantic excel spreadsheet. in this spreadsheet you noticed how regularly elements recurred: in each cell you would have something like "naturalistic lighting" or "sexually unawakened farmers" and the % of times it appears in his paintings. from this, you then drew links between these cells--what % of paintings containing sexually unawakened farmers also contained naturalistic lighting? what % also contained a white guy?

then, if you told someone else with moderately competent skill at painting to use your excel spreadsheet to generate a Great American Painting, you would likely end up with something that is recognizably similar to a Norman Rockwell painting: but any charge of 'plagiarism' would be absolutely fucking absurd!

this is a gross oversimplification, of course, but it is much closer to how AI art works than the 'collage machine' description most people who are all het up about plagiarism talk about--and if it were a collage machine, it would still not be plagiarising because collages aren't plagiarism.

(for a better and smarter explanation of the process from soneone who actually understands it check out this great twitter thread by @reachartwork)

today's students are worried they won't have jobs because of AI tools

i mean, this is true! AI tools are definitely going to destroy livelihoods. they will increase productivty for skilled writers and artists who learn to use them, which will immiserate those jobs--they will outright replace a lot of artists and writers for whom quality is not actually important to the work they do (this has already essentially happened to the SEO slop website industry and is in the process of happening to stock images).

jobs in, for example, product support are being cut for chatgpt. and that sucks for everyone involved. but this isn't some unique evil of chatgpt or machine learning, this is just the effect that technological innovation has on industries under capitalism!

there are plenty of innovations that wiped out other job sectors overnight. the camera was disastrous for portrait artists. the spinning jenny was famously disastrous for the hand-textile workers from which the luddites drew their ranks. retail work was hit hard by self-checkout machines. this is the shape of every single innovation that can increase productivity, as marx explains in wage labour and capital:

“The greater division of labour enables one labourer to accomplish the work of five, 10, or 20 labourers; it therefore increases competition among the labourers fivefold, tenfold, or twentyfold. The labourers compete not only by selling themselves one cheaper than the other, but also by one doing the work of five, 10, or 20; and they are forced to compete in this manner by the division of labour, which is introduced and steadily improved by capital. Furthermore, to the same degree in which the division of labour increases, is the labour simplified. The special skill of the labourer becomes worthless. He becomes transformed into a simple monotonous force of production, with neither physical nor mental elasticity. His work becomes accessible to all; therefore competitors press upon him from all sides. Moreover, it must be remembered that the more simple, the more easily learned the work is, so much the less is its cost to production, the expense of its acquisition, and so much the lower must the wages sink – for, like the price of any other commodity, they are determined by the cost of production. Therefore, in the same manner in which labour becomes more unsatisfactory, more repulsive, do competition increase and wages decrease”

this is the process by which every technological advancement is used to increase the domination of the owning class over the working class. not due to some inherent flaw or malice of the technology itself, but due to the material realtions of production.

so again the overarching point is that none of this is uniquely symptomatic of AI art or whatever ever most recent technological innovation. it is symptomatic of capitalism. we remember the luddites primarily for failing and not accomplishing anything of meaning.

if you think it's bad that this new technology is being used with no consideration for the planet, for social good, for the flourishing of human beings, then i agree with you! but then your problem shouldn't be with the technology--it should be with the economic system under which its use is controlled and dictated by the bourgeoisie.

[reachartwork]

a friend of mine bought me a commission for Hannukah; art by the spectacular @droolingdemon of Samantha Small, from Chum! which you should read

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apocalypse girl #3

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apocalypse girl #2

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apocalypse girl #1

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wasteland marriage

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Chum 147: Inferno

I knew things were bad--fires cropping up across the city, a chaos of sirens and screaming--but this is different. This isn't random. Aaron knows. Somehow, he knows.

The street where her house sits feels impossibly still compared to the buzz of adrenaline in my chest. I cut down the alley, my sneakers scraping against uneven pavement. The buildings crowd me on either side, their brick facades radiating residual heat from the fire up ahead. I can feel it now, a furnace glow against my skin even before I make the turn.

When I do, the sight stops me cold.

Kate's house is a rowhome like the others, but the fire is already claiming it. The flames pour out through the second-story windows, bright and hungry against the cold night. It's a traditional fire--yellow-orange tongues curling out into the air, with none of Aaron's signature colors. That doesn't make it less terrifying. If anything, it feels worse, because it blends in. Ordinary. A fire you could explain away as accidental.

Except it's not.

"How?" I mutter under my breath, barely aware of the words. "How could he know?"

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witch with sphere

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POISON WOMAN