Children want Justice, Adults want Mercy

Cross-posted from AI Marketing for Storytellers.

A lot’s gone down in under a week here on the AI frontier, so lemme sum it all up —

Substack now wants you to declare things, so I have:

However, I have to point out that, when I ran it against one of my latest posts here, one I did lift paragraphs from Jack wholesale, because otherwise it would’ve been a lot cussy-er, Pangram gave me this:

Heh.

Someone using AI managed to ‘con’ enough SF/F magazine editors to sell 15 some-odd stories, and was only found out because they apparently were fool enough to link their pen names on their Linked in.

I shit you not.

One of their names was Bella Chacha, and you can go google all the drama and fallout, and I spent some time watching the place I used to go spin out about it, angry that space had been taken up by someone who wasn’t even ‘real’.

Oddly, none of them were mad about the fact that their success proved that 15 different markets said that AI can produce a pretty decent story — and that publishing is not (nor has it ever been) a meritocracy.

Which has been proved even more by the 14 publisher auction action, 2.5 million dollar bid, and then eventual implosion of said deal — 14 publishers couldn’t tell if someone had used AI? And they thought the final output was worth seven figs?

And then the whole Daggermouth and Reckless controversy (I’m glad Bramble picked Daggermouth up FWIW) — oh, and, poor Hank Green getting pilloried for having looked at one of the babies and the baby looked at him (please let me pretend this meme is still relevent) and then the reaction to that reaction, where people realized that hating on someone who’s donated millions to charity for using AI a few times might not be pretty nuanced and….

Anyway, while all those people were holding court today I:

Used my audio system to create the audio for this IG post, along with all of the videos I burned using Higgsfield earlier in the week, Fable made his own script for me, then did all the timing and ffmpeg’d the video together, PLUS posted it for me:

He also pulled together the Zodiac themed carousel we’ll be doing later on today. Came up with the captions himself.

Been working with two instances of Fable, one on getting Readerpet up onto Google Play (more about this shortly!) and one on getting Readerpet up on the Apple Store (which has been A Fucking Journey, because I hate macs, but luckily Fable’s doing most of the work!) Steam store is still a go for 8/4 now, we’re up to 168 wishlists!

Also earlier this week, shout out to my boy Nate, for pulling off this gorgeous 3 min episode of the Bend Her vertical drama:

Whose numbers might not look that amazing on IG, however over on FB we’re crushing it:

And it’s 16,000 in the store. I haven’t done FB ads since July 2nd (which is when I cancelled my fancy tiktok people and Amazon ads people — momma needed $ for compute — and am just using my girl who does one channel for me now).

I also had that one instance of Fable whip up 3 trial reels a day for me for the entire month, so I can finally get in on that game, in addition to the reel + daily caurousel thing we’re gonna be doing, and here’s my Google Play for so far this year:

You can see when the translations kicked in — I also turned off all the FB ads for these on July 2nd, wanting to get a baseline for everything — and — I finally got Kobo plus in from June (July’s data is a month out):

Again, not much, but, trending in the right direction, and seeing as I only need to clear $45 a translation to break even with Arachne, that’s a pretty low bar.

AND — I’m gonna be done with all my full cast AI audio back-end soon. (Which cannot happen soon enough, you all have no idea of the intense level of puzzle-solving involved, zomgggggg.)

Looks like I can start listening to Bend Her’s entire book tomorrow!

And — it turns out that we’ve done about 45 mins of video for Bend Her already, total? (Nate and I are considerably further than people can see on the show.)

Which is insane to me — and means that I’ve got tons of material to run behind the audiobook on Youtube!!!

But, I’m not listing all of this because I think productivity makes me morally superior, or because every possible use of AI is automatically defensible.

I’m listing it because this is what the conversation looks like once you leave the children’s courtroom, where everyone is either innocent or contaminated, and return to the adult world.

In the adult world, tools have context. Decisions have tradeoffs. People make mistakes without becoming irredeemable. Harm matters more than ritual purity. Intent matters, scale matters, disclosure matters, and punishment ought to bear some recognizable relationship to the offense.

Adults have deadlines, payroll, budgets, customers, coworkers, broken builds, and only so many hours before they die. (Plus, cats to feed!)

Which means we cannot spend all of them screaming for everyone who has ever touched the wrong machine to be cast into the sea.

...and the gulf between adults and children in this particular situation is becoming very, very wide.

xo!

Cassie