Superstars 2024

My big 2024 New Year's resolution was to network more with like-minded writers. To follow up on that commitment I enrolled in Superstars Writing Seminars 2024, a writing symposium hosted by Kevin J Anderson and his wife, Rebecca Moesta. The faculty includes names with extensive pedigrees in the science fiction and fantasy genres to include Jim Butcher, Gail Carriger, Kevin Ikenberry, and Charles Gannon. Unlike other writing conferences that focus solely on writing, Superstars bills itself as teaching writers how to succeed in the business of writing. While the emphasis is on indie publishing, a fair number of agents and editors will be available to hear pitches for traditional publishing opportunities. And we'll sell books. Our Bookstravaganza will be open to the public.

My goals at Superstars are to build on the promotional strategies I learned at last year's 20Books Vegas and schmooze with other writers where they typically congregate (the bar). What helps is that Superstars is local to me--more or less--being about an hour south of Denver in Colorado Springs and that I already know many of the visiting writers. If all goes well, I'll probably be kicking myself that I didn't attend Superstars sooner.

Scribes to our Robot Overlords

 The previous Type M post from John Corrigan touched upon writing samples from the Artificial Intelligence app, ChaptGPT and its worrisome implications, especially to us writers. I've also seen other examples of what AI can produce as it scrubs the Internet for content in remarkable ways. What really impressed me were its Mid-Century and Art Deco period recreations of Burning Man. However, all was not perfect as like many other amateur artists, AI had difficulty rendering hands. Plus the occasional person was given three legs. Or it could be, AI has already decided that people do need these extra appendages and when it controls the human birthing process in artificial wombs (coming soon to a clinic near you), our children will be the deformed pets of our robot overlords. 

But there are groups who cheer AI's ability to generate content almost instantly. At the 20Books Vegas writing conference, the attitude was that since many of its authors write to market and depend on a prolific output to meet audience demands, the ability for AI to "write" sequels can be leveraged into more books to sell, i.e., more profit. Another group that welcomes AI are Instagram/TikTok influencers, such as models, who also need to produce a continuous stream of content to satisfy their audience and keep the algorithms happy. Many argue that since much of their content is the same--posing in bikinis, etc., why not use AI to make more pictures? 

The ability of AI to mimic reality is both its greatest strength and greatest danger. We're close to seeing credible imitations of people--"deep fakes"--in outlandish video simulations. One app claims it can sample a brief recording of your voice and from that, produce an audio of you saying anything. Couple that with similar video software and your identity as an individual can be at risk. Looking deeper into this dark mirror and acknowledging that the demographic most harmed by social media are adolescent girls, can you imagine the humiliation when an unassuming young woman sees that her image was uploaded into a AI porn app? Whoops, it's already happened.