What I’m Watching: Stargate SG-1

Since I don’t use my blog enough, I thought I would post about what I’m watching and reading. These are meant to be short commentaries where I share my opinion, but this one is huge because I’m actually reviewing a massive Blu-Ray set. I’m glad that my first feature is on Stargate SG-1, it’s one of my all-time favourite shows.

What I’m watching right now: Stargate SG-1

Why is this show in steady rotation at my place? Well, I love the spirit of adventure and exploration that the show depends on while concentrating on an ensemble cast. Stargate SG-1 is about a specific team of people, which changes after season seven, but that’s a reflection of reality too. People get promoted, injured, or age out of a job, so it made sense that new blood was brought in. For the most part, I like how it was handled, and I’m a fan of Ben Bowder. Can we have more of him on TV, please?

While most of the show focuses on one enemy, they do strive to include stories between major engagements that explore new ideas and cultures. A look back at humanity’s past isn’t just a diversion, or filler, it becomes a major part of the story, taking us away from the original premise of the film. It’s a good thing, because the stranger things about this show really give it its own identity, which is something I think I learned from.

I enjoy the behind-the-scenes peeks included in the home releases too, but only indulge about a quarter of the time when I’m watching the discs or my backups using my home server. Yes, I have a tiny computer with hundreds of movies and shows copied from my DVD collection so I can turn my own streaming service on whenever I like on my TV or laptop. Stargate takes up a lot of room, and I’ll never delete it.

More than anything, I think Stargate finds great ways to show us jeopardy with the main characters even though we know they’ll be back in the next episode (except for a couple of times…), and they explored so many storylines in science fiction that new viewers don’t really know where our favourite team will be going next. With such variety explored in a format that is some of the best of 90’s television, I get to enjoy some comfort viewing while seeing what the excellent team that put the show together did. It reminds me of some storytelling fundamentals and challenges me to come up with something they didn’t in my own science fiction.

Why am I talking about this show now?

This month I finally picked up Stargate SG-1 on Blu-Ray. I’ve wanted to see the series in the best quality possible for a long time, especially since I’ve been watching the show about once every 1-2 years. I did catch the episodes on Canadian TV when they first aired up here sometime before that, but I didn’t see every episode in the widescreen format until I got my hands on the DVD’s while I was stuck on my back for a week nearly twenty years ago.

Since then I’ve backed up those DVD’s on a home server, but I’ve been aware that something called ‘DVD Rot’ is creeping into my collection. The first to go was my Buffy the Vampire Slayer boxed set, which had several failed discs the last time I checked it out a few years ago. I keep my collection in a dry, smoke-free, cool environment, so it’s not how I treat my discs, it’s the simple degradation of the materials that the DVDs were made with. I know that my Stargate SG-1 discs are going to fail eventually. So, when this Blu-Ray edition set came up for about $99.99 USD, I put it on my list and I finally got to it, aware that Blu-Rays are made to last longer.

The original DVD set came with an incredible pile of special features. I believe that there are only two episodes without commentaries from the actors, directors, writers, special effects crew and others. Considering that they all sat down to do these for free, I see this as a gift to the fans. I haven’t heard them all, but I find real value in listening to the behind-the-scenes stuff about some of my favourite episodes.

About the Content in the Box Set:

The series is as it played on Showtime, and then on the SyFy channel for the most part. Instead of spending millions of dollars on re-scanning and re-assembling each episode from the negatives, the company responsible for the Blu-rays upscaled them digitally, so there are some soft edges here and there, but the picture looks very good compared to my DVD set, so there is only gain here as far as I’m concerned. The sound is super clear, even though there are some caveats that the more expansive review on Blu-Ray.com goes into.

The original cut of the double episode premiere of the show is used, so there’s full frontal nudity, and the re-cut movie version of these episodes, Children of the Gods, that was made for Blu-Ray release near the end of the show’s run isn’t included, which is disappointing. I enjoy the re-cut version quite a bit. Brad Wright, the showrunner, didn’t simply cut the nudity out, he addressed issues that he had with pacing and smoothed some of the rough edges out of the original production without reshooting, but going from the original negatives. In his eyes, the original double episode suffered from notes that were handed down from Showtime, who required the nude scenes, possibly along with a few other things that held the show back until episode three. I like both cuts, so it’s too bad that they don’t provide that Brad Wright version of Children of the Gods since it’s more suitable for a broader audience who don’t really like the Showtime touch.

The other things that are missing from the boxed set are the original film along with the two made-for Blu-Ray movies that followed the 10th season, which are fantastic. I have those on my shelf on Blu-Ray already, so it’s no big deal to me, but it’s sad that people in other parts of the world may have to hunt them down on eBay or worse.

The only other nitpick I have is the packaging. You can tell this came out of a budget Blu-Ray production studio because they put this 40+ disc set in a simple blue box filled with plastic booklets that are notorious for scratching discs. I spent another $35.00 on proper cases that store the discs properly and will gladly print my own covers. The cover they used doesn’t have Daniel Jackson in it, since they went with Jonas Quinn instead. I like Jonas Quinn, but he was only around for a season plus a couple of episodes, so I don’t think he should be on the series cover. The gate surrounding the characters is a crappy copy-paste job. This may not bother most people, but I have a design background, so it’s a bit irksome to me.

Overall, I think it’s a show worth having a copy of because chasing it around on different streaming services that don’t provide the same level of quality is a terrible experience, especially since some of the services are now showing advertising even after charging a monthly fee. I’d rather slip a disc in.

Should you buy it?

For anyone who loves the show and doesn’t already have the DVD’s, or a way to back them up, I would say you should. If you plan on watching it more than once, or you have little ones who will be handling the discs, I suggest you get some sturdier empty cases so they’re easier to handle with care.

The Blu-Ray version also includes all of the extended episodes, most of which I didn’t see because they weren’t included in my version of the DVD set. Threads, being over 60 minutes, is a real stand-out. I enjoyed the extra character development.

If you have the DVDs and have made a dependable backup, then you may want to pass. The upgraded quality is great, but the first three seasons don’t benefit quite as much in my opinion. The last three seasons really look amazing since they were shot digitally, so that’s worth considering. There are no extra special features worth crowing about in comparison to the DVD set, so that’s not a reason to pick this up.

As someone who has been collecting movies and TV shows on old-school spinning media for a long time, I have to say that I do not think that this series will get a Star Trek style full remaster from the original negatives using new special effects technology. Those days are all but over, because the negatives are slowly rotting no matter how they’re kept, and Amazon / MGM are not likely to spend millions of dollars on the project. So, my advice is not to wait if you want a higher quality experience, this will be it for at least five to ten years, when I predict that AI will touch the footage up while it remakes the special effects. Then we may have another debate on our hands.

If you want to see a more complete review, check out Blu-Ray.com’s post. https://www.blu-ray.com/movies/Stargate-SG-1-The-Complete-Series-Blu-ray/282609/#Review

Thank you for reading. Future What I’m Watching posts won’t be nearly as long.

Happy 2024! A Look Ahead

man in the dystopian city standing on building looking at the distant light circles, vector illustration

Happy 2024! I’d like to thank everyone who picked up the books I published in 2023 and anything that came before. I’d also like to show my gratitude to everyone who supported me on Patreon even if you didn’t follow me to my new subscription site, Ream. Self-publishing is an odd kind of career, where I get to release books faster but often have less support from partners and more responsibility. That might sound like I’m complaining but the bright side of that outshines any negatives is that I can write whatever I like, in this style that I prefer, and the timing of release is entirely up to me. Another thing to consider, something i often forget, is that self-publishing allows me to keep the lion’s share of whatever my books earn. Otherwise, I seriously doubt that I would be able to do this full-time.

2023 may have been a turnaround year. For the first time in quite a while, I looked back and saw a book that I wasn’t as happy with as I could have been. It felt like it was cut short, and i was determined to write Samurai Squadron II as a standout novel with a more complete story even though it was the middle book of a trilogy. I’m proud of the work I did on that book and now that someone can read Samurai Squadron one and two together, I’m happy with the first one in that trilogy. One was always meant to lead directly into the second where the story would be expanded, characters that were introduced would be more significant, and there would be more fulfilment at the end.

All of that led to my “break book,” Rogue: assembly. After involving her indirectly in Samurai Squadron Part One, the itch to write a book specifically about her was becoming severe. I’m happy with what I created there, and I do think it was worth delaying Samurai Squadron III for a month so I could get it right. Samurai Squadron II and Rogue: Assembly are both being well received and I’m extremely grateful for all of the reviews and ratings that you’ve left after reading them.

The support of the community that’s grown on Facebook and on Ream, formerly Patreon, can’t be overlooked. I’ve been able to share more of my life this year and have enjoyed moments of levity as well as your assistance in 2023. There are many traditionally published authors that may have more readers and sell more books, but they don’t have the kind of active, tight community that I’m so proud to be a part of.

In the coming year, I’m going to share more of my personal journey, maintain my increased focus on writing, and start offering tips for writers who want to finish their books and begin self-publishing. With so many technical advancements becoming useful at the same time and a marketplace that is about to be flooded by low-grade content, I would like to help artists stand out and get their work seen. I’ve been proud to mentor excellent writers over the last decade, and doing so one-on-one is very rewarding. I think now is the time to offer some of my best advice to anyone who can put it to good use so I can help in a broader way and learn from the experience.

After fifteen years of self-publishing and writing full-time, I still enjoy creating and can still find excitement in discovering interesting stories, developing worlds, as well as living with characters new and old. I think I enjoy interacting with you more than ever too. My main focus will be on writing great books, and I believe that most of this year will be dedicated to Spinward Fringe because I’d like to finish Rogue’s first trilogy, Samurai Squadron III and Spinward Fringe: broadcast 21.

If all goes well I’ll be able to return to fantasy and even horror from time to time. Now that I’m involved with Ream I can also more comfortably offer short stories to my subscribers there. One or two from the old days will be popping up soon, they’re just waiting for cover treatments and a little editing love.

I believe that there’s real value and doing something yourself. That’s why I won’t be using artificial intelligence to assist with my writing other than checking spelling and simple grammar. That last bit is practically unavoidable because AI is working its way into all of the spellcheckers, but I can keep it out of the creative process. I realize that using artificial intelligence to assist me would allow me to put out more books, and I might be able to quadruple my income, but I would rather challenge myself to be creative and to tell quality stories about characters that I enjoy spending time with than cheat. There are people who don’t believe that using AI with respect to crafting novels is cheating, you are welcome to your opinion, but mine won’t be changing in the foreseeable future.

I have great optimism for 2024 with regards to my career and I’m looking forward to writing these stories for myself and for you. I hope everyone has a great year, and that you manage to ignore the people who expect 2024 to be a raging dumpster fire. I plan on concentrating on the people I love, the things that satisfy me most, and on treating people as well as I can whenever I can. Every new year brings potential, and I plan on doing my best to work and flourish with that in mind.

Tomorrow Samurai Squadron 3: Spinward Fringe broadcast 20 continues on Ream, the Patreon-like subscription site made specifically for authors and their readers. I love starting a new year with a new project, and I’ve been looking forward to this one for quite a while. There’s nothing like the ending of a trilogy, especially when it stars Remmy Sands and Minh-Chu.

Rogue: A New Beginning PT 1: The Spoiler Free Bit

Image licensed from Adobestock.

To explain what the Rogue novel is, I have to go back to the beginning, when I was writing Spinward Fringe Broadcasts One and Two. Originally, the Spinward Fringe series novels were going to be about 40,000 to 70,000 words each. As an unlimited series, I planned to gather books into boxed sets or collections with themes and story arcs.

The idea of a small crew on a ship with a captain who had a mysterious past was a good starting point. The difference was that I wrote his backstory, Broadcast 0: Origins, first. Anyone who read that would know (or think they knew) what his backstory was and characters from that would start joining the cast of the Unlimited Spinward Fringe series.

The Spinward Fringe Unlimited Series grew in complexity and it worked well with a large cast of characters. As a result, the books got much longer, each became a greater undertaking and the series became what it is. I love it, and there’s no going back to that simpler, shorter format with the main Unlimited Spinward Fringe Series.

Then we come to the end of Spinward Fringe Broadcast 16: Hunters and the origin of Rogue. I had a lot of fun creating that character for the book, so I decided that she’d wander off at the end instead of sacrificing herself. That was the way it was going to go originally. Until I started writing the chapters featuring Rogue, she was going to blow herself up to accomplish her goal. That changed early on because I saw potential.

I wanted to bring her in as a guest in several Spinward Fringe novels, but as I tracked what she was doing along with the timeline, I saw that she was busy. What was she doing exactly? Getting to know Tabrus, building wealth in the wasteland while avoiding most people. There were other things going on too, but I won’t go into it because I don’t want to spoil anything.

Considering the timeline and the fact that I wanted to write the character again, I decided that it was a good time to dust off the short novel concept, especially since I would be writing her in the first-person perspective. This would be her experience, her adventure, and it would take time for her to get her crew, her gear and other trappings together. It helped that she was having a problem too.

The first adventure would have a cyberpunk flavour. It would be a good test, a pilot episode if you will, and I would include some surprising characters.

I’m afraid that’s all I can say about it until you’ve finished reading the novel, but I’m happy to share this experiment with you.

Rogue: Ascending will be released on December 14, 2023. You can read the serialized version on Ream if you don’t want to wait.

I Am On Ream, and Why I Left Patreon

Before I get into the reasons why, I have to thank everyone who made the switch with me from Patreon to Ream. This could have easily been a disaster, and it wasn’t because of you taking the time to move over. The Ream Migration Team has been a great help too. I’m happy to be on Ream and am working to make it worth it for everyone.

What is Ream?

Ream is a Patreon-like subscriber page where you can support me and get some great content in exchange before anyone else sees it. For example, Rogue: Assembly, a brand new book, is serializing right now. Over a month before anyone could see it in the completed ebook form, people were reading the first three chapters. Now it’s almost finished.

What’s next? Samurai Squadron III: Broadcast 20 will begin serializing as soon as Rogue: Assembly is finished.

Sorry, the $1.00 tier that was once on Patreon is forever gone because a lot of that gets eaten by fees and the minimum tier on Ream is $3.00. My goal is to make every tier worth your while. If you want to see the subscription levels, take a look at my main page here. If you can’t reach it, please clear your browser’s cookies. The favourite tier overall is the Library Access! level. I love the library, which has almost every book I’ve ever published. All the Spinward Fringe and Fantasy work is there along with the fresh serialized stuff and I’m working on getting older stuff in along with short stories along with other things I’m not talking about yet.

Now, for anyone who is curious, here’s why I switched from Patreon to Ream.

Patreon is a great site, I don’t want to fling anything negative in their direction. It’s just not for me anymore. After they finished a major update to their platform I saw that it’s a place more well-suited to people who produce videos and podcasts. There’s also a much more corporate feeling there, which is great for increasing confidence in the site.

Sadly, only one feature I was hoping for was implemented in the form of Collections. That definitely doesn’t meet the requirements I’ve had for years. It seems that Patreon would never be the place for me. That’s why I switched to Ream, which is designed by writers for writers.

Ream is ready for use, meaning that it has all the most important bits finished and pretty polished. The developers are busy at work, adding features and refining what they have. The customer service is far more personal and very quick, so I’m quite happy. The few road bumps I’ve run into happened mostly behind the scenes and were smoothed out rapidly. I’m enjoying it there, and, as I’ve said before, I love the library. They have an app that you can download here and that will allow you to read the serials at any subscription tier. If you’re a member of the Library Access! Tier or higher, you can also read anything in the library as well.

Why am I using a subscriber platform at all?

Well, there are two main answers at this point.

It keeps me writing at a good pace.
I love writing, and I love it as a job, but sometimes the pace of work can slow down if I get too distracted by research or developing parts of a book when I don’t necessarily have to. If I’m releasing two chapters a week most of the time, I’ll spend some of my personal time on unnecessary stuff instead of diving into a rabbit hole professionally. If I need a break, I’ll take one, but they last a few days instead of weeks like they used to. The pace is good, and I enjoy having a required number of chapters to complete every week. It keeps me focused on one project at a time too.

It promises to stabilise my income.
There have been times when I had to strain to buy medication (I have glaucoma as well as Type 2 Diabetes and no coverage for meds), and cover the bills. My subscribers have saved my butt multiple times. Book releases pay the rent at the moment, but even with good reviews very few independent authors can make what they used to, myself included. I hope that I can eventually earn enough Ream Subscribers to make publishing secondary and have a very stable income from that. Many people who use Patreon get there.

My plan is to continue releasing quality fiction that doesn’t simply reflect what you can find on television or in movies right now so you can have amazing experiences when you read my work. I’m also going to be adding support documents, like Guides that I wouldn’t publish, but exist on Ream, where they can be added to and refined over time. A Guide will be a kind of Encyclopedia that anyone can use to look up characters, places, timelines and key events. There will also be short stories and some other stuff.

I thank you for reading this far, for picking up my work and supporting me. I hope to see you on Ream, but make no mistake, I’m grateful to everyone who buys my books normally too. I like publishing too, so I won’t be stopping that anytime soon.

IMPORTANT LINKS FROM THIS POST
My Ream Site
The Ream App
More information about Rogue: Assembly

A.I. May Write Your Next Favourite Show

Image courtesy of Adobe Stock.

The title is more than clickbait. It’s something that I’ve come to believe as an absolute fact. Somewhere in the English-speaking world, probably in California, there is a producer or Workgroup (not writers), working pretty hard. What they’re doing is using an artificial intelligence to invent the concept for a series and then script all the episodes. The content of this article is opinion only. Let’s unpack that title and extrapolate a little further.

Why call the people responsible a Workgroup?

Well, I say a workgroup is doing this because the Writers Guild of America is on strike right now. The workgroup could be called anything that gets around the strike, and is made up of producers, software developers, or any other collective that wouldn’t be considered writers. In my opinion, these people are still scabs, doing work that a writer should be doing. That’s because AI is only a tool that can assist in writing, but still requires a human to prompt it. I concede that this “workgroup” could be only one person, but we’re splitting hairs there.

How does this work?

The person or group who are developing this TV show ask an artificial intelligence several questions about what the most popular, cost-effective, or successful tv show. Next they would most likely select several of the replies that reflect the audience demographics they’re most interested in. Using a cross section of the shows that fit what they want along with other fundamental references such as books on writing for TV, articles and even positive reviews, they would start developing a pilot script. This would take time to tweak, most likely a day or so, but a script would eventually be created.

The rest of the teleplays would be made using similar prompting, revising, re-prompting, and so on until a season is finished. In the example I’m writing out here, no actual writer would be allowed anywhere near this TV show. Why? For the gimmick of it.

“The first TV show written by an AI.“ An upcoming boast.

There’s a race on. Some people want to be the first to make that boast. I’d bet my career on it. There are producers who would love to make a television series using underpaid software developers or AI prompters instead of a writer’s room. Furthermore, hype is critical for the launch of most TV series, and you can always turn heads by claiming that your show is the first to do something or feature just about anything, especially if it’s controversial. At the time of this writing, AI is still a very active topic in the media. Would this succeed? I hope not, but the attention it could bring to a network or streaming service may be worth it to a studio.

The road to terrible (or great) autonomy in entertainment.

Let’s move ahead five years. Say this TV show written by an AI is successful enough to run for a few seasons. Other studios will most likely try it themselves. In this possible future, a percentage of TV will be AI-assisted or generated. Compare it to Reality TV. When it came along a lot of people were worried that it would take over and make scripted TV an afterthought for most networks. That didn’t happen, but there is still plenty of Reality TV around. I predict that the same could happen with AI-authored* TV. A success, a surge, then a period of calming down to normalcy.

Now let’s move on another ten years. At this point we’d start seeing a broad detrimental effect for everyone involved in making television and movie entertainment. Let me explain.

Imagine being able to buy or borrow an AI or software suite that can make a TV show just for you. All you have to do is tell a program about your favourite television shows, movies, share a few personal details, reactions to a set of stimuli (images, sounds, short videos), and then the artificial intelligence will get to work. Let’s use Star Trek as an example. I would complete this program’s five minute calibration program so it could get a sense of my general taste. Then I would tell it to use the original Star Trek series, The Next Generation, DS-Nine, Voyager as its source along with everyone on my social media account. I would tell it to use those shows as a source for a new time travelling adventure show featuring William Riker as the main character for at least half the episodes and friends from my social media streams would appear as minor background characters. That’s a narrow example, but you get the point. I’d definitely earmark myself as that actor who keeps popping up as a red shirt every few episodes.

As the show plays I’d be able to tell the AI what I like and dislike about it while you’re watching or afterwards. It’ll make the required adjustments and you can have as many episodes of your tv show as you like – 70 seasons and a movie? – and even remix favourite episodes into new ones. Imagine a special Lower Decks episode starring you and your friends based on how they behave online. Add the ability to tell the AI what happens next, or to play as an active character in the show using virtual or augmented reality, and you have an experience that is so unique and difficult to compete with that it could replace most of the television and gaming industry. Expand my narrow Star Trek example into a show that uses all your favourite shows, movies, people and things to create something that attempts to resemble nothing you’ve seen before, and you run into real trouble for the industry. The AI may provide such a deep, broad mix of things in a personalized piece of entertainment that it seems completely new. Is it? Well, that’s a question for another day.

Perhaps this is just a new industry and only a big step in entertainment progress. That happens, and it could be great. The problem is that your custom TV show was made without writers, actors, directors, crew, and it would only employ a few software developers. You may argue that this could be a service that requires a subscription, but there will always be a massive group of people who would rather steal the software or develop an off-market version that is free or pirated. It’s possible that this industry could be worth more than any other in the entertainment sphere, but also provide so much free entertainment that all but a few studios go out of business within a few years. There could be a minor revival of ‘artisan entertainment’ that’s made entirely by human hands, but it may never surpass the size of the AI generated entertainment industry that marginalized human work.

The Rise of the Entertainment Designer

Let’s take this one step further. In Earnest Cline’s novel, Ready Player One, users of the Oasis can make their own TV-like channel that features all their favourite classic shows. I believe that something similar may appear. Like a Youtube channel, you may find a place that will feature TV shows, movies, and interactive experiences that are designed by people using AI authoring for everyone to use. The thing that will determine how many subscribers or views these channels get will be taste, style, and momentary alignment with the ideas of the day. Very little effort will be required from these AI manipulation masters or Entertainment Designers to create this content, so the places that feature thier work will be flooded.

Will that be bad? Perhaps writers and directors will find a way to use future AI tools to create compelling content, especially if they can add their own creative material to it. Some writers are trying to do that now, using AI as assistants that can finish their sentences as they write, or remix ideas that they’ve had. I haven’t bothered with it and I doubt I will for years, at least not with my main series, especially since there are major ethical problems with most artificial intelligences when it comes to creative projects. AI’s use the art of thousands of humans to regurgitate something they present as “new,” even when they’re just helping you write a book.

My Current Nightmare

My main series, Spinward Fringe, is over two million words long. Someday someone is going to shove all that into an AI chatbot or writebot (I’d trademark that if I could afford it!) and tell it to write the next book. My work isn’t public domain, so that’s illegal in some places, and may be outlawed more universally soon. Would I be obsolete? No, because everything I’ve done in the Spinward Fringe series doesn’t represent everything I will do with it, and an AI can’t predict everything I’m planning (yet!). I still fear that something like that would put me out of a job, even though I know there would be a few faithful readers left.

Can we derail progress in this direction?

AI is here, and right now you can compare it to fairly basic tools. It’ll get better, and I don’t think there’s a way to stop that. I’m excited about it and looking forward to see what these narrow AI’s can do. I think it’s interesting. We’re going to see a lot of benefits from this technology, so I don’t think stopping the development of AI is possible or particularly wise in general.

Having said that, I believe it’s important to show AI developers where they should and shouldn’t tread. Laws have to be drawn up and intellectual property protection systems have to be updated. How? Well, I’d like to see existing copyrighted works like mine to be protected by default. There are millions of creative people who have rights that assure that they can make a living and create more art for us. There are a lot of things I’m not addressing here, I’m sure, but I’m no legal expert, so I’ll stop there.

Hopefully, the Writer’s Guild of America can negotiate AI out of most of their industry, at least until people have calmed down and realize that AI is only a tool that can be used to help us. Not for regurgitating what has come before in ways that take earnings away from the people who worked on the source material or could produce something better.

If we do this right artificial intelligence can be a real benefit to all of us, whether you’re using it as a personal assistant or to help you do research for your next screenplay. Laws could protect people who are creating something interesting while opening the door for AI to dig into public domain and other content that isn’t critical to someone’s living to make something else. I’d love to see what a future AI comes up with if I ask it to turn A Tale of Two Cities into a musical starring Charlie Chaplan. I don’t know if it would be any good, but it would be interesting and I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be stepping on someone else’s toes.

So, here’s the controversial question: What TV or movie series would you dump into a future AI so you could get more episodes or a derivative?

*AI Authored is a term that’s been coming up more and more recently. It refers to a misunderstood aspect of current AI, that it is being creative. At the moment, all artificial intelligences require a database of material (writing, images, videos, sounds, facts, etc…) to refer to in order to remix, combine or rephrase so it can provide what you’ve requested. Nothing is being created, or put through an authoring proces. It’s a regurgitation styled by the program.

Randolph Lalonde is a Canadian author who has been making a living as a self-published author for fifteen years and has released over thirty novels. He’s best known for the Spinward Fringe Space Opera series and recently released Psycho Electric, a cyberpunk ebook and audiobook that, among other things, examines the intersection of social media and AI on a grand scale.