AI Writers, Bees & Serial Killers (audio: noxsoma.substack.com)

(The complete audio to this rant is posted at 4:20 EST on Substack. Here’s a preview. You can get the full length LP on the stack, or on Hive.)

It might not be AI, but if it sounds like AI, if it reads like AI, if it arrives on a “random Tuesday,” “enters without permission,” and “sits with you as you sip your mocha-choca-latte-yaya,” it might as well be AI.
Sabado Grande Mi gente.
The true danger of the AI revolution is the consolidation of language. Every time reader-bot mentions some shit going down on a random Tuesday, it’s like the Blue screen of death showing up on my black mirror. There are only 52 Tuesday per year. It’s freekin’ Tuesday, for cryin’ out loud. All this stuff cannot be happening on Tuesdays. It must be fake.
And then, there’s this trend of “personifying” these abstract forces. This comes down from the Greeks. Maybe the practice antedates the Greeks, but they popularized it. Sun rises, let’s call it Hercules. Moon rises, let’s call it Artemis. Okay, this is great for teaching baby Greeks that the sun will come out tomorrow, bet your bottom drachma. Then about Moon phases and stuff. And of course every planet that can be seen needs to be named and personified. But then they make a soap-opera out of it. Saturn (Cronus, as in time), is the Old Man who eats his children, (once again, there’s that cannibalism motif). Jupiter overthrows Saturn in a cosmic regime change operation, defeats the Titans to become King of the Gods. And then those stories become statues, papaya parchments, mythology, movies, and then Annunaki Space Aliens.
Too many writers, or maybe it’s AI, are doing this with their issues; Anxiety, Depression, Neurosis, Fear, Pathos, Doubt, Nostalgia, Loneliness… their little circle of life-sucking vampire disciples, straight out of Pandora’s Box. And they arrive, unannounced, at 3 AM on a random Tuesday, to sit with you poke at your Nervous system, until sunrise.
The algos are really messin’ with your boy. It seems like every day there’s some groundbreaking lunatic who wants to write about some personified abstract, in a quasi-poetic septameter, that belies their lack of living experiences and observational skills.
They take the short way home… Engage some poet-bot who digs up the ghost of some struggling Civil War era poet and applies it to the force du jour.
What was the last one we exited after Adversity came knocking at 3 AM on a random Tuesday? Adversity opens the door, because it arrives without permission. It sits with you at 3 AM, rests its feet up on your coffee table and stares at you with an intensity of a three hour multiple choice examination. You feel its hot breath, stinging your eyes that just won’t close despite feeling like they are carrying the weight of the world. That lump in your throat? Formed from all of the words you should have said to… whoever… whenever. You want to tell Adversity to get the funk out of your face. Get out of your Mind. Leave your nervous system alone... close the damn door!
Too late. What comes through the door Adversity left ajar? Unannounced, at 4 AM, on a random Tuesday? Anxiety.
“Whuddup dawg?” Anxiety sweeps in like a home invasion, high-fives Adversity, scoots you over on the sofa, puts its feet up on your coffee table, and starts talking to Adversity about You, as if you’re not in the room.
You fell your nervous system about to erupt. Your lips start trembling. Little beads of perspiration are forming around your temples.
“I think she’s gonna say something,” says Anxiety.
Finally your lips part, and your tiny little girl voice comes out. You know the one.
“I’m going to make coffee. Want some?”
Still… My dumb ass is scrolling through the stacks getting suckered by the algorithms.
“This one’s for you, buddy. We’re sure you’re gonna like this one.”
Part Two.
Someone posted about bees, serial killers, algorithms and something called “geographical profiling.” The study lasted 41 months and ended in 2010. No serial killers were captured.
We have thus far successfully not written much more than the above paragraph about this wabbit hole we’ve peeked into. However, let me share with you the mechanisms of associative thinking.
Bees took Us back to the African Killer bees hype of the mid 1970s. That’s an X-Files episode in itself. Indeed bees played a huge role in the series and in the first X-Files movie. But okay. We nipped that one in the bud. But then, we branched off into “serial killers.” We wondered who the first “serial killer” was, the most famous being “Jack the Ripper.” Research-bot spit out a character from the 1400s Gilles de Rais, Wealthy French nobleman hanged for the murder of 140 young boys.
Once again, horror stories take us back to European savagery, which has been exported to the world. Which is another line on the Wabbit Hole express subway system.
There’s little wonder that some force, (maybe alien creators), want to erase the error of human creation. The only reason humans still exist, is because the alien overlords don’t have the same attitude as humans such as, Arnaud Amalric, the Cistercian abbot and papal legate who commanded the crusader army during the Albigensian Crusade (1209), who infamously uttered, “Kill them, For the Lord knows who are His.”
800 years later, the same sentiment is resonating from 1600.
This is Real Talk for Real Life.
Stay safe, stay strong, stay sane, stay savvy, stay serene, stay sovereign, stay subscribed.
PEACE.