Lance: Balan Wonderworld
Woohoo! I love financial failure! The plot is mid but the men are fetching!
Anywhoo, a sketch I did of Lance because I've been doodling him a lot lately and love him very much. I think the plot did him dirty with him just being "omg negativity bad" and I personally prefer to portray him as someone who sees value in teaching people of the world's dangers and evils for their safety? idk. I care him.
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at some point it's just like. do they even fucking like the thing they're asking AI to make? "oh we'll just use AI for all the scripts" "we'll just use AI for art" "no worries AI can write this book" "oh, AI could easily design this"
like... it's so clear they've never stood in the middle of an art museum and felt like crying, looking at a piece that somehow cuts into your marrow even though the artist and you are separated by space and time. they've never looked at a poem - once, twice, three times - just because the words feel like a fired gun, something too-close, clanging behind your eyes. they've never gotten to the end of the movie and had to arrive, blinking, back into their body, laughing a little because they were holding their breath without realizing.
"oh AI can mimic style" "AI can mimic emotion" "AI can mimic you and your job is almost gone, kid."
... how do i explain to you - you can make AI that does a perfect job of imitating me. you could disseminate it through the entire world and make so much money, using my works and my ideas and my everything.
and i'd still keep writing.
i don't know there's a word for it. in high school, we become aware that the way we feel about our artform is a cliche - it's like breathing. over and over, artists all feel the same thing. "i write because i need to" and "my music is how i speak" and "i make art because it's either that or i stop existing." it is such a common experience, the violence and immediacy we mean behind it is like breathing to me - comes out like a useless understatement. it's a cliche because we all feel it, not because the experience isn't actually persistent. so many of us have this ... fluttering urgency behind our ribs.
i'm not doing it for the money. for a star on the ground in some city i've never visited. i am doing it because when i was seven i started taking notebooks with me on walks. i am doing it because in second grade i wrote a poem and stood up in front of my whole class to read it out while i shook with nerves. i am doing it because i spent high school scribbling all my feelings down. i am doing it for the 16 year old me and the 18 year old me and the today-me, how we can never put the pen down. you can take me down to a subatomic layer, eviscerate me - and never find the source of it; it is of me. when i was 19 i named this blog inkskinned because i was dramatic and lonely and it felt like the only thing that was actually permanently-true about me was that this is what is inside of me, that the words come up over everything, coat everything, bloom their little twilight arias into every nook and corner and alley
"we're gonna replace you". that is okay. you think that i am writing to fill a space. that someone said JOB OPENING: Writer Needed, and i wrote to answer. you think one raindrop replaces another, and i think they're both just falling. you think art has a place, that is simply arrives on walls when it is needed, that is only ever on demand, perfect, easily requested. you see "audience spending" and "marketability" and "multi-line merch opportunity"
and i see a kid drowning. i am writing to make her a boat. i am writing because what used to be a river raft has long become a fully-rigged ship. i am writing because you can fucking rip this out of my cold dead clammy hands and i will still come back as a ghost and i will still be penning poems about it.
it isn't even love. the word we use the most i think is "passion". devotion, obsession, necessity. my favorite little fact about the magic of artists - "abracadabra" means i create as i speak. we make because it sluices out of us. because we look down and our hands are somehow already busy. because it was the first thing we knew and it is our backbone and heartbreak and everything. because we have given up well-paying jobs and a "real life" and the approval of our parents. we create because - the cliche again. it's like breathing. we create because we must.
you create because you're greedy.
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Ok. I am maybe kind of losing my mind just a little bit.
A few days ago, I mentioned in a post that the IA only cares about information being digitized, not about actual digital access. And I mentioned that access includes patrons being able to actually find what they are looking for, and suggested IA did not prioritize that critical aspect of access. But I didn't really go into any more detail.
So someone over on bluesky linked to this write-up of a talk Brewster Kahle gave about using so-called AI. And one of his reported statements made my mouth drop open in shock.
...and then I read further in the article and realized it was incorrectly reporting basic facts around Hachette, so I had to go and listen to the whole speech myself.* (And I want to say, briefly - he raises some legitimate potential uses for LLMs! He's kind of a dick about some of it ("it's up to us to go and keep [Balinese] culture alive"), but some of the things he's talking about actually seem useful.)
*Incidentally, while Kahle doesn't lie about the ALA brief in the speech, he absolutely misleads about the nature and facts of the case and deliberately omit the part of the story where the IA decided to suspend the one-to-one owned-to-loan ratio thing, despite repeatedly emphasizing that one-to-one was what the IA was doing with their lending program.
And oh my god. He really said what the article reports. (This portion starts around 20:10.)
He says that the IA has scanned over 18,000 periodicals. And that they used to have professional librarians manually create descriptions of the periodicals in order to catalog them. (Sidenote: there are existing directories, but he describes their licensing terms as "ridiculous." This is not a field I know much about, but I spoke to one person who agreed, though for different reasons. His reason is that you can only license, not purchase, the directory descriptions. The person I spoke to was instead focused on the prices demanded for the licenses. Regardless, the idea of creating an open, free directory seems both like an incredible amount of work and an amazing resource...if it was accurate.)
But according to Kahle, it took 45 minutes to an hour to create a description and catalog each periodical.
And so now, instead, they're using AI to make the descriptions and so it only takes 7-10 minutes!
"And yes it hallucinates, and it has some problems, and whatever — but it’s a lot faster than having to write it yourself!"
Oh. My god.
Just.
YOU ARE KNOWINGLY INTRODUCING AI HALLUCINATIONS INTO YOUR CATALOG?!
(And yes, he says that they are "confirmed by a librarian" but it can't really be, not if it's only taking 7-10 minutes! Maybe the librarian can do a quick check for super obvious errors, but actually checking a AI's summary work requires actually going back to the source and reviewing it yourself!)
I just....
I need to emphasize for those of you for who aren't familiar - if a book or article is miscataloged, it is effectively lost. Because it doesn't mater if a library or an archive owes it - if someone can't find it when they are looking for it, it is not only inaccessible, the only way to find it again is through chance. Imagine if you went into a library, but instead of organized shelves (where if even if you can't find what you're looking for, the librarians know where to look), every single book was just piled in a heap.
If a book is miscateloged, it still exists, but it is lost, not truly accessible. And they know that this is happening, "but whatever." Because Brewster Kahle doesn't actually care about real, practical, digital access. (Much less non-digital access.)
(And then to top it off, he goes on to criticize the Library of Congress for not being "access oriented.")
I just. 18,000 periodicals. And they've knowing, recklessly lost who knows how many of them. I feel like crying.
18,000 periodicals.
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