strategy without strategists

[meikuree]

another week, another media round-up.

BTW: someone's gifted me a paid Dreamwidth account twice by now. I'm not sure if they're two separate people or just the one, but if you see this, thank you! I'm really appreciative about this. I don't know if we have any fannish interests in common, but feel free to hit me up, I wonder if I could put any of my skills to use and write you meta/fic or draw you a small art piece.

music:

• I've been listening to 忧愁 (Melancholy) by Sodagreen on occasional repeat, specifically the newer version sung in taiwanese hokkien. it's a banger. I don't love everything sodagreen puts out because I'm picky, but maybe it's not a surprise that some of it resonates, given that Wu Qingfeng/Greeny (the vocalist) likes also likes musicians like Tanya Chua & Yang Naiwen down to Björk and Tori Amos.
• I came across this Sohu article discussing Tori Amos, and the fact that Greeny went on a 追星之旅 (idol-chasing pilgrimage) and attended five of her concerts in the US.
• there are a lot of humorous details in that article in general (Greeny is quoted saying: “我没想过我会听演唱会激动到哭，而且都哭的跟猪头一样!" -- "I didn't know I could feel so moved by a concert, to the extent that I ended up crying like a pig's head!") and a discussion of Tori's influence on other big-name cpop singers + feminist influences. fun fact: Faye Wong covered Tori Amos's Silent All These Years as the song 冷战 (Cold War) -- which I didn't know!
• evidently I will be like Greeny if I ever attend a Tori Amos concert because I listened to her Tiny Desk performance of Baker Baker here and as soon as she played the first couple notes I started crying. she plays the song half a step lower than it is in the studio recording, and there's also something about how she sings make me a day, make me whole again / and I wonder what's in a day / what's in your cake this time -- she has a way of turning the most mundane and uh inane lines, out of context, into powerful lines. can't forget her singing is she still pissing in the river, now? / heard she’d gone, moved into a trailer park at one of the most beautiful points of one of her most beautiful songs (Space Dog) and meaning it with her full chest.
• another recent earworm -- 玫瑰色的你 (You, The Colour of Rose) by Deserts Chang/张悬, written as a 'tribute to Taiwan's protest movements'. I especially like these lines: 你在曾经不仅是你自己 / 你栽出千万花的一生, 四季中径自盛放也凋零 / 你走出千万人群独行，往柳暗花明山穷水尽去
• and yes please, more cpop songs about politics and protest.

articles:

• George Eliot and the Colonies: unfortunately paywalled, but -- although this is dark as all excavations of colonialism are -- there are touches of unintentional comedy, like George Eliot's lover's two sons who were banished to India to be colonial administrators because they were hopeless academic failures, if I'm remembering correctly (I read this a while ago), and then hated every second of it. I'm amused because today, the reverse happens: affluent middle-class parents from my country send their children to the USA or UK if they're failing in school, since those countries' education systems are (incorrectly or not) considered a cakewalk next to the system here.
• hydrogen jukeboxes: on the crammed poetics of “creative writing” LLMs. I'm cynical about AI myself and as far from the madding tech bro crowd as anyone can be, but I find a lot of criticism about AI nonconstructive and shallow, because they don't quite engage with the technical features of AI or the history of AI, which goes back far beyond genAI to 1960s NLP programmes like Eliza, and they don't distinguish the aspects of AI that they find morally suspect -- very important, because AI is such a large umbrella as to be functionally meaningless out of context. and I find the acceptance of AI use in healthcare settings but not in art industries and recurrent anxieties around how "art needs to have a soul!" tiring and perhaps a tiny bit precious. metaphysical essentialism, much?
• plus this debate about souls has been done to death within art history, Duchamp, and Gertrude Stein's robot-mimicking poetry. speaking here as a (hobby) artist, btw, who has no desire to use AI. discourse is unfortunately recursive.
• this article makes a point, and I agree, that creative writing outputs from LLMs are bad, because they're formulaic, predictable, and were trained on datasets of fiction fragments spliced and taken out of context. but my controversial opinion is that that also applies to a significant portion of ao3 fic (and I'd include mine) -- stories callibrated along recognisable tropey plots to induce particular responses, where I can predict the next lines and metaphors and analogies and everything is cliche/nothing is unexpected. I'm not going to bat for LLMs with this, I still think they're crap at most creative output tasks especially translation, but I think the usual lambasting of AI purely for its provenance when some "human writing" sports similar flaws doesn't really move the needle forward on AI critique.
• the most interesting point, though, is this description summarising what's both good and bad about creative writing LLMs: "[it produces] crammed prose full of eyeball-kicks".
• I've "trained" (yes) my style over the years to be incredibly dense and compact, also filled with 'eyeball kicks' which can grab people from the very first line -- and that is a tall order. even the formula of [abstract adjective/entity/noun] [concrete descriptor/object/noun] (e.g., hydrogen jukeboxes) is one I use often. I don't feel haunted or poorly about this -- I'm glad for the springboard for literary reflection in this.
• the kicker, though, is that the LLM produced what was imo genuinely a nice line, "a democracy of ghosts". and then someone on twitter pointed out:

• specifically, it's from this Pnin excerpt:

Pnin slowly walked under the solemn pines. The sky was dying. He did not believe in an autocratic God. He did believe, dimly, in a democracy of ghosts. The souls of the dead, perhaps, formed committees, and these, in continuous session, attended to the destinies of the quick.

• if nothing else, I walked away with a renewed desire to revisit Nabokov, whose prose I've admired since reading Lolita at a young impressionable age. and I doubt that's a bad thing.

Comments

[nnozomi]

Re Wu Qingfeng and Tori Amos, I imagine you've heard this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QjrgcVWf7uE (It's one of those songs I couldn't have named but had nostalgia for the chorus anyway, and in Wu Qingfeng's voice, phew. <3 Maybe I should listen to some more Tori Amos.)

and thanks for the introduction to 张悬! New to me.

[meikuree]

I had not heard this!! thank you for linking, my heart is blowing up two sizes from his cover. the song is Winter by tori amos. :)

I'm biased but happy to give recs for her corpus - off the top of my head you might like her orchestral arrangements & baroque pop sensibilities in Under the Pink, especially the extended version songs, and Boys for Pele does interesting things with instruments like harpsichords.

[chocochipbiscuit]

creative writing outputs from LLMs are bad, because they're formulaic, predictable, and were trained on datasets of fiction fragments spliced and taken out of context. but my controversial opinion is that that also applies to a significant portion of ao3 fic (and I'd include mine) -- stories callibrated along recognisable tropey plots to induce particular responses, where I can predict the next lines and metaphors and analogies and everything is cliche/nothing is unexpected

DANG YOU WENT WENT STRAIGHT FOR THE JUGULAR!!! I'm laughing my ass off in part because I do think (purely speculatively) that's part of the appeal for people who only view genAI as a way to get more of what they want for free; more fanfic, more chat RP, etc etc because they're not interested in originality so much as craving a particular flavor that they're hoping AI will provide.

That said... one of my offline friends is currently dating someone who gets very sad/upset when the gen AI roleplay bot won't respond exactly the way he wants, to which we've very politely responded "have you considered writing fanfic instead?"

[meikuree]

LOL, I always suspect I'm way too harsh on ao3 writers! but you know how I feel about uncaveated, breathless praise about fanfic's revolutionary properties...

more fanfic, more chat RP, etc etc because they're not interested in originality so much as craving a particular flavor that they're hoping AI will provide

loool power to these people, and I have a kind of resigned practicality on AI - it's a horse that's long run out of the stable, it's extant whether you like it or not, etc. - but I have head-tilting moments when these people... seem to think AI prose is in fact, inventive? lack of self-perspective, essentially. my taste is bad as hell too, but I think I at least can recognise the value of experimental and non-commercial flavours of art.

gen AI roleplay bot won't respond exactly the way he wants, to which we've very politely responded "have you considered writing fanfic instead?"

oh my god! you've probably seen it, but the NYT (alas) article on sexual relationships with gen AI boyfriends came to mind.