Popcorn books 🍿

Hey!

I’ve been reading a lot lately, I’m happy to say. It’s been quite a mix, these books, having ended up on my bedside table for a various of reasons. Several of them have been what my friend Tim referred to as “popcorn books” when we had online drinks a while ago. That phrase stuck with me.

Before sitting down to write this issue, I thought long and hard about whether to name any books or authors. It is, after all, not that hard to think that being a popcorn novel is a bad thing. It is not, of course, and I can’t stress that enough. After all, these are books I’ve read and enjoyed. The mere notion that such a term would be negative is grounded in the idea that there’s good culture and bad culture, the latter often referred to as “entertainment”. It’s clear with books, some genres are just less serious, for lack of a better word, than others, and thus regarded as dumb. The more complicated, the better, preferably in a niche nobody but the author and a select few has any knowledge of. It’s perhaps even more clear with movies, where Marvel blockbusters and the like are regarded cheap money-grabs, whereas small indie movies where they speak a language you don’t know is more highly regarded. Now, either of these cases doesn’t mean that the niche book or movie isn’t good, even better for you, it’s just an observation of how society looks at these things.

Better for you, that’s the key, isn’t it? I can enjoy a niche French drama as much as seeing John Wick kill people with a fucking pencil, it all depends on my mood. The same goes with books. It’s not hard, I think, to go from Joan Didion or Bret Easton Ellis, to Lee Child or Jim Butcher. The latter duo would, by most accounts, fall into the popcorn books authors stable, and that’s why I sometimes pick them, rather than, say, Joyce Carol Oates. It’s not a testament to the author in any way other than, at times, I feel like reading something else, something different. I love fine dining, but fish and chips at a dive bar can be heavenly, too, is what I’m saying.

So, don’t feel ashamed for picking up a popcorn book. Enjoy it, and consume the next in the series (it’s almost always a series, isn’t it?) while you’re at it. That’s what I did recently, devouring the first three books in the Dresden Files series by Jim Butcher. It was a nice acquaintance for a time, since the books (and writing) actually improves rather than re-iterates the same things all over again, as, say, Lee Child did for a bit. I’ve put the series on hold for, though. It’s time for something else. Can’t have popcorn all the time, after all.

I hope you've had a good week. Mine's been slow, a sorely needed break at work. As always when things are slow, you first enjoy it, then start to worry about the future, just to finish at a restaurant with a brand new scheme. That's what happened yesterday, and I'm looking forward to telling you about it.

For now, take care, and enjoy your weekend. I'll speak to you soon.

— Thord D. Hedengren ⚡

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AI or bust
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Hi!

I’ve been thinking a lot about AI[1], like most other people, it would seem. It’s troublesome and exciting at the same time, and full of tricky situations.

Take image generators like Dall-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion. They let you give them a text prompt, and generate an image, with varying degrees of success. Fun tools, but there are many issues here. For starters, the models these services use have trained on actual artists’ work. That means that you can ask these services to generate an image in the style of Vincent van Gogh or Boris Vallejo. Neither artist (or estate, in the case of van Gogh) will get paid for this, even if the generated artwork is used in a commercial product. This is troublesome because most artists doesn’t want to be used for AI training[2]. Chocking, that…

Having ChatGPT write things for you is another AI feature that people talk about. It’s even a part of Microsoft’s Edge browser now. This, I think, is worrisome because of the dataset. Let’s say you ask ChatGPT, or any other text-based chat robot built on an AI model that scans the internet, something controversial. How can you be certain that the AI hasn’t fallen for conspiracy theories, rubbish data from content farms, or just taken a misunderstanding for the truth? When presented with an answer to your question as the truth, without having seen the data which led to said answer, it’s hard to make your own educated guess as to its validity. For web search regarding anything where you need to filter the results yourself, actually seeing the sources seems important.

Then there’s the whole rights thing here, too. Just like you can ask Dall-E to generate an image in a certain style, based on its interpretation of parsing said original, you can have ChatGPT write in an author’s style. This is already happening with AI[3], and the better ChatGPT and its ilk gets, the more AI generated books, articles, essays, blog posts, and more will be put out there.

AI models are built by borrowing from original creators. They learn by analyzing, much like a child learns to draw by mimicking. The difference is, the AI is a cheap tool that companies can rent, and use, to get away with paying original creators for their work. It’s a growing issue, and not a fair one since most people feel that nobody asked them if they wanted to train an AI to take their jobs.

The obvious solution would be for the artists being used for a model to get paid whenever an image was generated. Problem is, it’s unlikely there’s any way to track this, and where does the line go? A generated image or a body of text could be the result of thousands of analyzed content creators’ work. It’s not as simple as you might hope, unfortunately.

What it is, however, is utterly unfair to creators. Some are already seeing work drying up. Artwork in particular is expensive, and in many cases you don’t need it to be original, just relevant. Asking an AI to draw something for your article is a simple solution for many publications, and a lot more cost-effective. Problem is, that’s money that typically was paid to an artist. I feel for them, perhaps a bit more than I feel for the people who are paid $3 to crank out empty blog post for content farms. They, too, will be superseded by AI. Generating 800 words on a topic is cheaper, and the end-result might even be comparable. Even if it isn’t, an editor could touch up a lot of such pieces in a day, making it even easier to fill the internet with crap content.

Maybe that’s where it ends, when the AI used to generate both art and copy starts analyzing its own creation, serving it up as an answer to people asking a search engine a question. It’s not a particularly happy thought, is it?

It’s been a weird week, with less work than usual, but somehow still swamped. I’m looking forward to the weekend, and taking a break. I hope you’ll be able to, too.

— Thord D. Hedengren ⚡

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Footnotes

1. That’s PR speak for something that’s not even remotely close to the true definition of an artificial intelligence, but I’ll allow it for clarity. If you’re interested, read the book Our final invention by James Barrat.
2. There’s been quite a few blunders from artist communities lately, thinking that artists want AI in the mix. Take the backlash that hit Artstation, for example. They really miscalculated what their users wanted.
3. There’s an interesting story about self-publishing authors, who need to publish a large body of work regularly to stay relevant, and how they use AI services such as Sudowrite and Jasper.ai over at The Verge (in a very funky layout, too).

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The Bored Horse is back
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Hi!

It's been a minute, hasn't it? Feels like ages since I wrote you last, decades in today's internet years. Everything is throttling forward at a horrific speed, with very little control, at least that’s how it feels to me.

I haven’t decided on the exact format of this rebooted newsletter just yet, so expect things to change. With that said, I’m pretty sure each issue will start with a short essay, and then contain further reading or the like, we'll see. This first rebooted issue isn't like that though, so let's jump right in.

A lot of things have happened since last time. Some highlights include:

I’ve gotten married. It was just me and my wife at city hall. We didn’t tell anyone, it was for ourselves. Marriage itself is a big thing, obviously, but the ceremony and party is something that we’ve both done before, so it was nice to make it all about us.

I became an uncle. My little sister got a baby boy, whom I'm looking forward to meet.

I’ve moved to a new apartment. We found the perfect apartment at the beginning of summer. Well, by which I say perfect, I mean that it’s getting there. We’ve painted and decorated, spent way too much money on furniture, keeping almost nothing of our old stuff, but it’s a wonderful place. And yes, I’m still splitting my time between Stockholm and the small countryside house, although the latter hasn’t gotten as much love due to the renovations.

Divide & Conquer has a new office. I think I mentioned this before, but it was a big thing for us last year, and we’ve made it a nice place to be. A second living room, if you will. That’s been an old goal of mine, and it still stands.

My fantasy novel is done. And by done, I mean sent to the printers. The cover reveal will be soon, the publisher tells me. It’s in Swedish, so most of you won’t understand a word of it, but it’s been a big thing for me, obviously. I can’t wait to see it in people’s hands.

Switch to iPad shuts down. If the previous one was fun, this one was not. Alas, there’s not enough time to do everything. I wrote at length about this on Switch to iPad, if you’re curious.

That's about it. Everyone's been staying healthy, most of the time. I think work is starting to balance itself. After the next couple of weeks, I hope to be able to focus on more things.

That’s it for this week. Stay safe out there, yeah?

— Thord D. Hedengren ⚡​
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