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I might have beaten GRRM and Patrick Rothfuss, but can I finish Alexandra Quick and the Wizard War before AIs can finish it for me?
I have been playing with DALL-E and Midjourney more. (I'd try StableDiffusion but unfortunately I don't have an Nvidia card.) Right now, we're still in the early "Microsoft Clippy" stage of AI-generated art. When I take the time to very carefully craft my prompts, I can usually get something decent with a few tries, but specifying exactly what you want and not getting objects in the wrong arrangement, random artifacts, or faces drawn by Edvard Much, is still challenging.
I doubt I'll stop commissioning artists for my covers, but I think by the time I am posting AQATWW, I will probably be using AI instead of my illustrations-on-the-cheap workhorse of many years, Poser.
I feel for all the folks selling character commissions on DeviantArt and Fiverr and ArtStation, but AI is coming for you, and people who just want pictures of their D&D characters, frankly, already don't need you. I keep track of the book cover market, and have already seen artists "incorporating" AI art into their designs. Pretty soon AIs will be able to fulfill all your hot-girl-embracing-an-alpha-wolf cover illustration needs as well.
AI will be able to do this soon.
Of course AIs are also starting to write code, which does not concern me greatly as I don't think anything less than full AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) will be able to handle true full-stack development. But adding widgets to web apps and churning out boilerplate code for container deployment, yup, it's going to start hitting the lower end of the software development market soon. That goes for "data science" (the sexy new job title for anyone who can massage an Excel spreadsheet) too. If you have actual analytical skills and the math to back it up, you can keep your data science job, but "Show me trends by region in one-day increments, and make it a horizontal bar chart grouped by SKU, oh, and make it look pretty," is definitely something an AI will be able to do faster than you Python script monkeys with your jupyter notebooks.
But can AIs write?
Well, there are already shitty robo-content-generators, and we're starting to see stories like this. Sure, right now all those stories you're reading about how "An AI wrote a novel!" or "I submitted a AI-generated short story to a magazine and it was accepted!" are novelties. AI-written content is still usually pretty readily identifiable, and again, an AI capable of doing what an actual human author can do (creating not just a single coherent narrative, but infusing it with tone and thematic elements and allusions with a distinctive style and even doing this across multiple books) would pretty much have to be a full AGI.
But these early stories of AIs making one breakthrough after another remind me of the early days of the Internet. Yes, I am old enough to remember when the Internet was this weird freaky thing that was good for an occasional chuckle in a Sunday news segment, but not taken seriously as anything other than a curiosity for nerds. What, shopping online? How peculiar, but, like, there's no way banks will ever be okay with this for large transactions. But hahaha, that dancing baby sure is fun to watch!
That's where AI is today.
Hopefully this is not where it is tomorrow.
I am semi-seriously padding this post just so I have more to say than "Hey, you all want The Numbers, right?", but I am not kidding, kids: there are entire industries that are about to be cratered by AI.
But never mind all the AI doomsaying, you want The Numbers, right?
I just hit 356K words (Ayiyiyi!) with the completion of 60 chapters. According to my ever-changing outline, I have 6 more chapters to go. So yes, I am actually close. The end is in sight, as it were. And I have been writing steadily so... I feel pretty comfortable I will beat the AI apocalypse. Unless it happens ahead of schedule.
All the usual caveats about how much this first draft is a bloated piece of crap with threads that go nowhere, characters that need to be written out of the story completely, leaps of logic that resembles lemmings going off a cliff, questions in search of answers, and a few answers in search of questions. I am in many ways quite happy and proud of this ugly, ugly unborn baby, but it's gonna need a lot of slapping around before it's fit to be seen.
(Yeah, I don't know where I went with that metaphor either.)
Some people in the Alexandra Quick Discord server helpfully reminded me that I am old (hey, I am younger than GRRM and not nearly as fat) so by way of reassurance, I let them know that there are actually informal arrangements in the event something happens to me. I've given permission for my draft, in whatever state it is in, to be published. I haven't left notes for how the whole series ends, though. Maybe I will get around to that eventually.
I'm just teasing you guys, you're great.
Also, I have been told that I have been remiss in failing to give a shout-out to the Remedial Magic Podcast.
Brady, Baylor, and Delbert started this project as a general Harry Potter-related podcast, but it's become basically an Alexandra Quick read-along as they go chapter by chapter through the AQ series. They are almost done with book two now, and it's been great listening to their speculations and analysis. They also throw in some HP news, so go give them a listen on the podcasting app of your choice. Also check out their casting list.
FWIW, my fantasy casting choice for 12-year-old Alexandra Quick would be 12-year-old Natalie Portman.
Older Natalie is too pretty, and I really can't think of an actress who looks like teen Alex.
I have been playing with DALL-E and Midjourney more. (I'd try StableDiffusion but unfortunately I don't have an Nvidia card.) Right now, we're still in the early "Microsoft Clippy" stage of AI-generated art. When I take the time to very carefully craft my prompts, I can usually get something decent with a few tries, but specifying exactly what you want and not getting objects in the wrong arrangement, random artifacts, or faces drawn by Edvard Much, is still challenging.
I doubt I'll stop commissioning artists for my covers, but I think by the time I am posting AQATWW, I will probably be using AI instead of my illustrations-on-the-cheap workhorse of many years, Poser.
I feel for all the folks selling character commissions on DeviantArt and Fiverr and ArtStation, but AI is coming for you, and people who just want pictures of their D&D characters, frankly, already don't need you. I keep track of the book cover market, and have already seen artists "incorporating" AI art into their designs. Pretty soon AIs will be able to fulfill all your hot-girl-embracing-an-alpha-wolf cover illustration needs as well.
AI will be able to do this soon.
Of course AIs are also starting to write code, which does not concern me greatly as I don't think anything less than full AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) will be able to handle true full-stack development. But adding widgets to web apps and churning out boilerplate code for container deployment, yup, it's going to start hitting the lower end of the software development market soon. That goes for "data science" (the sexy new job title for anyone who can massage an Excel spreadsheet) too. If you have actual analytical skills and the math to back it up, you can keep your data science job, but "Show me trends by region in one-day increments, and make it a horizontal bar chart grouped by SKU, oh, and make it look pretty," is definitely something an AI will be able to do faster than you Python script monkeys with your jupyter notebooks.
But can AIs write?
Well, there are already shitty robo-content-generators, and we're starting to see stories like this. Sure, right now all those stories you're reading about how "An AI wrote a novel!" or "I submitted a AI-generated short story to a magazine and it was accepted!" are novelties. AI-written content is still usually pretty readily identifiable, and again, an AI capable of doing what an actual human author can do (creating not just a single coherent narrative, but infusing it with tone and thematic elements and allusions with a distinctive style and even doing this across multiple books) would pretty much have to be a full AGI.
But these early stories of AIs making one breakthrough after another remind me of the early days of the Internet. Yes, I am old enough to remember when the Internet was this weird freaky thing that was good for an occasional chuckle in a Sunday news segment, but not taken seriously as anything other than a curiosity for nerds. What, shopping online? How peculiar, but, like, there's no way banks will ever be okay with this for large transactions. But hahaha, that dancing baby sure is fun to watch!
That's where AI is today.
Hopefully this is not where it is tomorrow.
I am semi-seriously padding this post just so I have more to say than "Hey, you all want The Numbers, right?", but I am not kidding, kids: there are entire industries that are about to be cratered by AI.
The Numbers
But never mind all the AI doomsaying, you want The Numbers, right?
I just hit 356K words (Ayiyiyi!) with the completion of 60 chapters. According to my ever-changing outline, I have 6 more chapters to go. So yes, I am actually close. The end is in sight, as it were. And I have been writing steadily so... I feel pretty comfortable I will beat the AI apocalypse. Unless it happens ahead of schedule.
All the usual caveats about how much this first draft is a bloated piece of crap with threads that go nowhere, characters that need to be written out of the story completely, leaps of logic that resembles lemmings going off a cliff, questions in search of answers, and a few answers in search of questions. I am in many ways quite happy and proud of this ugly, ugly unborn baby, but it's gonna need a lot of slapping around before it's fit to be seen.
(Yeah, I don't know where I went with that metaphor either.)
Some people in the Alexandra Quick Discord server helpfully reminded me that I am old (hey, I am younger than GRRM and not nearly as fat) so by way of reassurance, I let them know that there are actually informal arrangements in the event something happens to me. I've given permission for my draft, in whatever state it is in, to be published. I haven't left notes for how the whole series ends, though. Maybe I will get around to that eventually.
I'm just teasing you guys, you're great.
Also, I have been told that I have been remiss in failing to give a shout-out to the Remedial Magic Podcast.
Brady, Baylor, and Delbert started this project as a general Harry Potter-related podcast, but it's become basically an Alexandra Quick read-along as they go chapter by chapter through the AQ series. They are almost done with book two now, and it's been great listening to their speculations and analysis. They also throw in some HP news, so go give them a listen on the podcasting app of your choice. Also check out their casting list.
FWIW, my fantasy casting choice for 12-year-old Alexandra Quick would be 12-year-old Natalie Portman.
Older Natalie is too pretty, and I really can't think of an actress who looks like teen Alex.
