Stockton Smith

@stocktonsmith.bsky.social

285 Followers 926 Following

Mystery writer. Permanent research phase. Wrote some goofy mysteries about stoners and a serious one. Like the Old Days (the serious one) is out now in ebook and paperback! https://stocktonsmithbooks.com/

Screenshot that reads: " Two roads diverge into a sloppy wood: one goes through what machines can do, the other goes through what only people can do. To write now is to wage war against cliche as usual, just this time with the AI and against it."
screenshot that reads: "There is good news for humanists in the arrival of AI. According to the New York Fed, unemployment for computer science graduates sits at 6.1%, while for art history majors, the number is 3%. Merely practical education will be of limited value in the AI future. To make yourself merely technically useful to a company or an industry is to make yourself vulnerable to replacement by automation at any moment. Thinking, creating, understanding – these cannot be replaced, certainly not by artificial intelligence. Trust me. I’ve tried."
screenshot that reads "It is worth remembering that most art has always been slop. When I did my PhD on early modern drama, my supervisor made me read every tragedy written in English until 1640. The process was grueling but instructive. Almost all of them, the fruits of the definitive art form of the greatest period in English literature, were garbage. Go and watch what was on TV in the 80s, if you want a more contemporary example."
screenshot that reads: "As TS Eliot wrote nearly a century ago: “There is only the fight to recover what has been lost and found, and lost and found, again and again, and now, under conditions that seem unpropitious.” Language naturally deadens. Either grow new language on the rot, or shock the old language back to life. The task of writing in the age of AI is the same as it has always been: to see through the various manias and cults, to unpack the mechanisms that make the world turn, to ring the bells that still can ring."
Screenshot that reads: "What LLMs do well, particularly ones shaped by human learning feedback, is generate convincing expressions of dead language."
Screenshot from article that reads: "The inventors of the Transformer, the T in ChatGPT, and the architecture by which all generative AI works, believed, against the grain of research at the time, that language was the key to abstraction. Language, rather than images or mathematics. They were more right than they ever could have imagined. At the core of the new magic is language. Language now is power. The revenge of the humanities is now fully on. The new cliche among tech lords is the need for taste in the artificially intelligent future. How do you think you develop taste? By reading. By writing. By being trained in reading and writing. Researchers in Italy discovered they could use poetry to jailbreak the large language models into giving them instruction in how to build a nuclear bomb. This is more than a metaphor. Revel in it."
Screenshot from article that reads "The fact that machines can generate meaning in the first place is an existential curiosity."
Screenshot from the article that reads: "The latest mishap occurred at about 560km above the Earth, an increasingly crowded area known as low Earth orbit where over 24,000 objects, including debris and about 10,000 Starlink satellites, are currently being tracked."
Title, "tonight's episode: the writer's barely-disguised fetish", superimposed over the door of a police station, from the tv show Police Squad.
"re-stack" of article in OP that says: "I think this is one of the best pieces we’ve published on Transformer — a thorough takedown of the Cory Doctorow/Emily Bender/Tyler Austin Harper worldview, and a compelling argument for why their way of thinking about AI is doing immense amounts of damage."
Highlighted text, reading "When Dick Brautigan spoke of his writing as being “great literature,” the doctors referred to the police report describing his work as “obscene” and having “very little literary merit.” Brautigan’s commitment papers stated that the patient “had the delusion that he was a writer of great ability. He had various former teachers and other people read some of his writings, and they were without question some of the most weird and lewd material they had ever read.” Brautigan himself admitted that much of his work “was variations on sexual themes that would make Erskine Caldwell look like Elsie Dinsmore.”"
screenshot from a scam email that says "Benoni’s Defense stands out as a thought-provoking and compelling read a story layered with intellect, emotion, and a deep understanding of human nature. It’s the kind of book that stays with readers long after the last page, making it perfect for broader visibility and engagement."
psychedelic imagery. Text says "A case that tests the limits of reality... He's out to solve a murder. She wants to find the truth." Image of book cover for Benoni's Defense by Stockton Smith. A frightened woman looks at something terrifying outside the cover of the book.
Screenshot of a pdf that reads: "...This isn't a case. Cases are paid. That's called labor. If we're not getting paid, and we're all broke, that's exploitation. To be avoided at all costs. You get me?" Sutano and I nodded. "Then again," Cass continued. "If we set the wheels in motion, there's a chance the universe will grant us access." "Car!" Cass turned to face the road and swerved reflexively back into her lane. "Relax, grandma!" I couldn't relax. Believe me, I wanted to. "Now where was I..." Sultano chimed in. "You were explaining how if we put out some initial energy, maybe a case will manifest... I think." "Exactly. Exactly. You took the words right out of my mouth." She turned around again, looking directly at me. I tensed. "Artie. This is probably our big break. There's a reason this paper arrived when it did. It's an incitement to action!"
Image of text from pdf that says "She held up the lighter in front of her face. "...Who brought you there?" We both waited a beat, as if it would answer. "Is it normal for you to steal things from your clients?"
Text from article that says "It is unclear whether Mr. Musk, 53, was taking drugs when he became a fixture at the white house this year and was handed the power to slash the federal bureaucracy. But he has exhibited erratic behavior, insulting cabinet members, gesturing like a Nazi and garbling his answers in a staged interview."
Screenshot of text that reads: And yet we still leaned on the machines lethargically, daydreaming when we could but altogether always inhabiting a dreamlike atmosphere watching endless cycling machines, waiting for the telltale sign that something had broken in a machine so we could stop it quickly to minimize damage, but that tells you all you need to know about what the job was, you see, it really amounted to starting and stopping things, listening and watching, and waiting, which meant the mind was free to go where it wanted as long as communication lines to the real world stayed open. We all did it. We were all daydreaming the whole day long and waking up to go home.
Screenshot of text from work in progress that reads: As I walked again I'd see corners here and there that beckoned to me, streets I'd not turned down yet or maybe had some other night without remembering now, as I wouldn't remember the ones I turned down tonight, the alcohol stopping my new memories from forming but still smashing and carving them somewhere deep inside to be recalled when the conditions were right, like a manchurian candidate spurred to action by the moldy-mildew oranges of the hallway, suddenly and without warning transported back into memory at a far off location, unmappable and bound within the borders as much as they'd been formed, but otherwise open to invention and speculation, waiting to be filled with the demands of somethingness, the unshakable feeling that something must be there, that the borders and the unarticulable presence meant there was something to find.