No Longer Laughing

I wonder if I am taking things too seriously in life.

I will admit to you all that I write for multiple pages online, and that one of those pages had this image on its remaining screen when I went to see what I could add this week. Peliplat was a web site devoted to media, meaning television, movies, anime, videogames, and the like. Many of the contributors seemed to come from the west coast, meaning Vancouver and California (certain articles were all in Spanish). It also ran challenges, but these were far less lucrative in the last years (they gave out something called Light Points for a particularly good piece of writing). And I was a regular contributor this past year…until I noticed something odd.

The challenges ceased to be offered.

And no one was contributing new pieces.

From the end of August, I waited to see who would be crowned winner of one of the many contests they ran, and there had been nothing but dead silence. I started to feel that this was turning into a MySpace situation (a page now described in some areas of the tech world as “the abandoned amusement park of the internet”). But I waited.

And I waited.

And then I saw the above.

Now, I know that nothing lasts forever. You live long enough and you see that anything and everything can be taken away from you at just the exact moment when things feel certain; when you have taken advantage of something that you never knew you had to protect.

I got angry.

I have over a hundred pieces on the site, covering discussions, lists, reviews, articles and stories, and I do not know now what to do with just my memories of them. The above promises that “within 3 – 5” months there will be “a new community economic model” for…us all? Again, the language here is vague, full of the same sort of corporate-speak you get when there is a product recall or a general shutdown. And what do they mean that they “can no longer sustain its core value,” meaning the way the “community model” works? Are they admitting that many of the pieces that they published – even awarded prizes to – might have been generated through AI?

Ah, AI… I have already made some jokes about it here, making it absolutely clear in my profile that the junk you see here is my junk, not junk that I generated through a request with a interface page on a random web site. I have even written a piece for a Challenge here that I have called “You Can Call Me AI,” a light play on Paul Simon’s breakout hit from the “Graceland” album. I have been spammed, sent junk mail too amusing to ignore (cf. “What Ends Up In My Junk Mail” pieces if you get the chance), and noted that there are plenty of digital scribblers on this page who seem able to write dozens of pieces per day without missing a beat (some of my subscriptions have ended because of this). And I do want to thank Mikeydred for commenting on this and noticing what some of us have begun to notice: Vocal is getting a lot of attention out there.

We may become a target.

Please, folks, write your own work. Make your own effort. And try to remember that there is nothing that can spew out of a computer that can replace your own thoughts, feelings, imagination…and courage. I do not care if AI really is the wave of the future, or if its inventors are now winning prizes and being seen as great visionaries who finally realize that the Frankenstein monster they have created might destroy us all. It is up to us as artists and creators to fight the beast and do our best to show it that we will not be replaced and that we are not scared to stand up and keep going.

This is a long war that will have many battles both successful and painful.

And now, I have to go back to my Medium account and see if I can keep up a steady pace of complaints there as well (thank you, Sasha).

Stay strong, scribblers!

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You can find more poems, stories, and articles by Kendall Defoe on my Vocal profile. I complain, argue, provoke and create...just like everybody else.

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