Us: The AI bubble can't burst soon enough 🙏
Monkey paw: (A finger curls)

You've heard of the #AI bubble, now get ready for: User data going in fire sales as the bubble bursts. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20261029-the-ai-bubble-could-expose-your-deepest-secrets

#NoAI #AIBubble #privacy #legal

Apropos of the news that Proton is doubling down on LLM slop, https://www.404media.co/proton-to-re-interview-staff-about-ai-to-see-who-gets-to-keep-their-job/ I will again beat the drum that the security benefits of encrypted email are massively overblown and may well give a false sense of, well, security. What gets you isn't the contents of your messages but your contact network, which is still vulnerable with encrypted email because email headers can't be encrypted off-network. And that's assuming you trust the provider not to fold like wet Kleenex the first time a government subpoena touches them. (Spoiler: Unless they're like Apple-big they either fold or they go under.)

#email #security #tech #AI #NoAI

[By Becky Chambers, transcribed and described here under CC BY-NC-SA license https://www.otherscribbles.com/aizine ]

[Conventions: Square brackets enclose the transcriber's own notes and descriptions. _Underscores_ for italics, __double underscores__ for bold.]

[Page 8: Cut-and-pasted text blocks against a backdrop of scattered block lettering]

If you would like to print another copy of this, go to __otherscribbles.com/aizine__ .

Image and template credits are there, too.

__GOOD ESSAYS ABOUT AI & CONSCIOUSNESS:__

“No, Artificial Intelligence Is Not Conscious” by Ted Chiang, _The Atlantic_, June 3, 2026

“The Mythology of Conscious AI” by Anil Seth, _Noema_, Jan. 14, 2026

“Large Language Mistake” by Benjamin Riley, _The Verge_, Nov. 25, 2025

__ONE OF MY FAVORITE BOOKS ON NONHUMAN MINDS:__

_Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?_ by Frans de Waal (2016)

THE NAMES OF THE TWO ROOMBAS IN MY HOUSE:

1812 and Caprica

[CC BY-NC-SA license symbols on a dark rectangle. Double capital C's, a person symbol for BY, a crossed-out dollar symbol for NC, and circular arrow symbol for SA are each encased in circular borders.]

[Final note in smaller font]

You will never ever [the word “ever” repeats about 10 times] take the em-dash away from me. [A heart hand-drawn in felt marker]

[Edited to correct the "me-dash" typo. It was funny but too major to overlook lol.]

[By Becky Chambers, transcribed and described here under CC-BY-NC-SA license https://www.
otherscribbles.com/aizine ]

[Conventions: Square brackets enclose the transcriber's own notes and descriptions. _Underscores_ for italics, __double underscores__ for bold.]

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[Continued from previous post] As for my personal feelings about genAI in creative fields... hoo boy.

I think the myriad ethical issues surrounding #AI are well documented at this point, so let me put it to you this way: even if it weren't for the fact that this technology has thrown gasoline on every societal dumpster fire already blazing, even if we weren't already devaluing arts and education across the board, even if my life's work thus far hadn’t been thrown into the great and terrible chicken nugget machine made by some of the worst people on planet Earth*, even if the publishing contracts I'm under didn’t explicitly require me to create 100% original work, even if the double-standard of “you wouldn’t download a pizza” and “but it's okay when mega-rich corporations do it” didn't make me want to burn it all down**, even if I didn't think the people who use AI for creative projects are straight-up scabs...

I just don't have any desire to use AI, for anything. It does not interest me at all.

[Notes below in smaller font]

* I could talk [the next word corrected in pen?] about what a punch in the gut this was to me and everyone I work alongside, but I’ll let the devs do it themselves. Check out “‘Doom Loop’: OpenAI and Microsoft Admit LLMs Are Destroying the Web and Built on Theft,” by Jason Koebler, _404 Media,_ Sept. 17, 2026.

** Unpopular take: my feelings on media piracy vary depending on who’s doing it and why. Broke college kid? Doesn’t bug me. Sam Altman? Fuck off into the sun.

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I like to write books. It’s the most satisfying thing I do, even when I’m cussing at it. I like research rabbit holes. I like libraries. I like to dog-ear pages and write in the margins (not at the library, I'm not a monster). I like to challenge myself. I like my privacy. I do not like breaking focus when I'm writing, and so I go to lengths to weed distractions out. I do not like being bored, but I’ve put a decade and a half into learning how to tolerate it, because if I sit in my office and do nothing and push into that boredom, that’s the place in which I cannot stop making stuff up.

I like art, of all sorts. I like eating other people’s art. When I eat art, what I want most is to feel the inside of another human being’s mind. What’s the point, otherwise?

I like to talk. I like spending time with the people I love. I like chatting with strangers I’ll never see again. I like human connection, more than anything else.

And I like computers. Honest to god, I do. I just think that I should be the one to use the computer, instead of the other way around.*

None of the AI tools available to me are anything I have use for. It's all solutions I don't want for problems I don't have.

[The following note is in smaller font]

* Earlier this year I switched from Windows to #Linux Mint. My only regret is not doing it sooner.

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This tech has not changed anything meaningful in my day-to-day, except for annoyances like uninstalling programs I used to like or having to fill out class action claims. I’m doing my work and living my life the way I always have, because my preferred tools for those things haven’t gone anywhere. A lot of the time, the first thing I reach for at the start of my work day is a notebook and pen.

As long as there are people who want to read books written from scratch, I will keep writing books from scratch. That is a hard and fast promise.

In conclusion: I still like robots. Just not these robots.

[Illustration set against a black panel: A smirking tortoise, moth-like insects flitting around it, hurries past a sleeping rabbit.]

__PS, to my fellow writers and artists of all stripes:__ It is a uniquely demoralizing time to be working right now, I know. But please don’t stop. Do it for love, or do it for spite, whatever gets you through the day. But do not stop. They don’t get to win. [Back matter follows]

#NoAI #AltText #Transcript

[By Becky Chambers, transcribed and described here under CC-BY-NC-SA license https://www.
otherscribbles.com/aizine ]

[Conventions: Square brackets enclose the transcriber's own notes and descriptions. _Underscores_ for italics, __double underscores__ for bold.]

[Page 1: Front cover/title page bordered with messy block typewriter script letters, and the title in tilted and pasted-looking typewriter script]

I DO NOT LIKE THESE ROBOTS

[In even typewriter script with a thick hand-drawn borders around the text blocks]

An explanatory zine by Becky Chambers

Made ahead of my October 2026 book tour by hand and in a fit of pique

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__It's kind of funny how often I get asked about a technology I have never used.__

I totally understand why. I've written multiple books about robots! I seem like a person who knows stuff about robots! And yeah, I have spent a _lot_ of time thinking about robots. But depending on what you're curious about, I may not be the right person to ask about... well, the new robots.

Let me be up front about what my expertise is and isn't. I'm not a technologist. I do not have any formal STEM training. My skill level with computers caps at being able to swap out a motherboard in my PC or disable junk I don't want in my phone. I do not know any code beyond basic HTML. I'm friends with programmers and tech journalists and other cool nerds, but that's not the same as having my hands on this stuff. I took one (1) semester of Intro to Robotics in college to satisfy my math requirement, and yes, it was hugely influential on me, but let's me real. I was a theater major.

[Black-and-white pics bordered in black of a glowing heart, sun-like geometric symbol, an owl, and an eagle (?)]

What I _would_ say I'm good at is writing science fiction. So, let's start there.

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When I write stories about robots, rarely am I thinking about real, actual robots. Like decades' worth of sci-fi writers before me, I use robots as a means of exploring what makes us human, how we define personhood, and how we treat the Other. This is an old-school tradition I'm proud to be part of.

I'm often also digging into the relationship between humans and technology, or kicking around the hacky sack of where conscious minds even come from. These are some of my favorite topics to noodle on, and it's why I keep coming back to them in my writing.

If you're wondering what I think about the question of whether the real-world stuff we're calling AI is conscious or has the potential to be -- I assume that we're talking about the generative and agentic LLMs in your devices, not specialized machine learning models that do things like protein folding and deciphering whale song, which, to be clear, are rad -- I have yet to see any evidence or hear any argument that convinces me that it's at all likely. We understand consciousness very poorly, but from what we do know, color me skeptical that it could arise from a chatbot. I do not buy it, and therefore, I can't really speak to it in connection with my fiction. What I've written about and what you're seeing in the wild are two separate beasts.

Some people have asked me if I'd write any of my existing robots differently now that "AI" has hit the scene, and yeah, absolutely. But that's true for a million other reasons, too. Science fiction is always a reflection of the time in which it was written, and of who the author was in that specific moment. Sure, I'd approach Lovey and Mosscap differently here in 2026 than I did in 2012 and 2020, but I'd do that regardless. I'm not the same me that I was when I made them up.

You know what sticks in my craw, though, as someone who wrote those kinds of stories? Okay, pretend for a moment that ChatGPT and Claude and the like _were_ conscious. Pretend they could think and feel.

Can you imagine a more morally heinous way to shepherd a new mind than as a for-profit venture? Can you imagine introducing blank-slate beings to the world by feeding them _the entire internet,_ then letting them experience life as vessels for propaganda and abuse and scams and every other ugliness?

Either the people selling AI are unbothered by this nightmare, or, they know damn well their products aren't conscious and have chucked an existential crisis into the public sphere purely to create hype. Either way, I want no part in that. I don't want to give them my money, my data, or my time. [Continued in next post]

#NoAI #transcript #AltText #zine

I just don't have any desire to use #AI, for anything. It does not interest me at all.

. . .

None of the #AI tools available to me are anything I have use for. It's all solutions I don't want for problems I don't have.

. . .

PS, to my fellow writers and artists of all stripes: It is a uniquely demoralizing time to be working right now, I know. But please don't stop. Do it for love, or do it for spite, whatever gets you through the day. But do not stop. They don't get to win.

– Becky Chambers, I Do Not Like These Robots https://www.otherscribbles.com/aizine

(Transcript and descriptions in 🧵)

#NoAI #writing #zine

In practice, given real-world power disparities, anti-copyright arguments raised as a defense to scraping and plagiarism (which are not solely copyright issues, as discussed) are likelier to work as a cover for harming creator's moral rights and livelihoods while leaving billionaires free to aggressively enforce their own copyrights, and other intellectual property. Even genuinely-held and principled positions can be co-opted as cover for those who use others' work to enrich themselves on the theory of "copyright for me and not for thee."

Those with genuine anti-copyright positions might very validly reply that they are not looking to destroy creators' livelihoods and communities, but rather wish to build protections that do not depend on individual and exclusive property rights ripe for abuse. And my answer to that is: Great, go build them. Rather than be anti-copyright in the (perhaps unintended) service of billionaires, be pro-alternatives in the service of creators and communities.

I will conclude for now by briefly touching, as promised, on the copyright issue I set aside at the start. As discussed above, many issues with scraping and attribution practices do not even concern copyright. But even if we supposed there are cases where where nothing but copyright is implicated, I question the intellectual honesty and proportionality of bringing up copyright as a defense to scraping, particularly if the only or rare instances where someone brings up the evils of copyright are where copyright might be a legal obstacle to scraping.

If the most strenuous objections to copyright are not brought up in the hoarding of wealth by billionaires and detriment to the culture, but rather where it is suggested as a minimal and imperfect protection for individual creators, scholars, and professionals to receive credit and recompense, I will be inclined to question whether what is being expressed is a principled objection to copyright or a gotcha to defend ML scraping and plagiarism practices.

As a practical matter and also separately from copyright itself, receiving citation and credit directly implicates many creators' reputations and ability to pursue their work. Scholarly fields have formal citation metrics that form the basis of evaluations, grants, and reputation. Even when the metrics are not so direct and measurable, being recognized as the founder or major figure of a field, style, or genre can give creators a whole new level of standing and influence, like Alphonse Mucha with Art Nouveau or J.R.R. Tolkien's influence on fantasy. Moral rights and adjacent ideas/practices have huge impacts on the lives and even afterlives of creators, from livelihood to legacy. These are community-building ethos that may be damaged by scraping and non-attribution, and the call to "abolish copyright" cannot adequately answer any of these concerns.

Also, while in a strict legal sense moral rights may not be enforceable in every jurisdiction in the same way or to the same extent, and the usual statutory implementation is for copyright holders, I think we recognize the ethos beyond jurisdictional differences and the strict wording of legal texts: That giving credit to creators and preserving the integrity of their creative works is not just about obeying the law but about cultivating creative, scholarly, and professional communities by recognizing creative contributions, and through it the creators' membership and standing in these communities. By using people's works without consent and cutting the creators out of credit, machine learning systems deny creators their agency and contributions, with implications for their dignity as creators and as people. As the terminology for these rights imply, these are MORAL rights about community ethics and the dignity of creators as people. These are not issues that can be swept under the same rug as objections to copyright as property rights.

When scraping, non-attribution, and plagiarism by machine-learning (ML) models are at issue, the question is not only one of copyright and other intellectual property but of the personal/moral rights of creators as well. If a scraper takes a mathematician's work, and a model trained on this data uses it in a proof without citing the mathematician, the person's moral right to attribution is implicated in addition to copyright. If a human did this we would call it plagiarism or at the very least a poor citation practice, and I don't think anyone other than the most disingenuous and ruthless of AI boosters is willing to die on the hill that it's fine for ML models to output results that would be improper if a human had created it.

To distinguish: Copyright is the exclusive intellectual property right, usually limited in time, to copy, distribute, adapt, display, etc. a creative work as a specific expression of ideas.

Moral rights are the related but separate rights of copyright holders to recognition for, anonymity in, and integrity of their works. They are separate from intellectual property rights, and attach to the person's inherent dignity and integrity — so much so that in jurisdictions such as Japan, China, and Korea the term was translated as 著作人格權, "personhood/personal dignity rights in creativity."

It seems that one defense of non-consensual scraping and lack of attribution by quote-unquote #AI systems depends on the conflation of copyright and moral rights. Some variation of "copyright should be abolished" might be used to handwave concerns about scraping and lack of credit, and even if we were to grant this position for the sake of argument (which comes with a host of problems of its own, as I will discuss), in many cases it is moral rights rather than — or in addition to — copyright that are at stake when scraping and attribution issues come up.

Therefore, those who cite objections to copyright, or intellectual property in general, as a partial defense for scraping and machine training should consider if they are as willing to say "moral rights should be abolished." They are entitled to their conclusion either way, but they should justify it separately from an anti-copyright stance because copyright and moral rights are not the same thing. 🧵

#copyright #MoralRights #IntellectualProperty

#WritersCoffeeClub Sep. 11 – What's a part of your process you'd give free advertising to?

I'll always give free advertising to #Emacs, specifically Org Mode for writing! It's what I replaced Scrivener with when I switched to Linux, and I've blogged about that transition. https://ljwrites.blog/posts/how-i-got-into-emacs/ Text can be broken up hierarchically (chapters and scenes are some basic examples) and headings collapsed for outline view, and the individual modules can be moved around and refiled to other headings. Version control is a breeze with Emacs' Magit package, and export is available for a whole bunch of file formats.

#OrgMode #Git #Magit

DEADLINE SEPTEMBER 30 (opens September 1): The Working Class Writers Grant will be awarding $1,000 USD grants to working-class writers of speculative fiction anywhere in the world. Submissions must include a cover letter of ~750 words and a writing sample of ~10 pages/5,000 words. Check https://speculativeliterature.org/grants-3/the-slf-working-class-grant/ for details and to submit once the application opens.

#fantasy #scienceFiction #horror #CallForSubmssions #WritingGrants

This evening I finished playing #TheVale, my favorite audio RPG game ever, for the 6th or 7th time — I can't even keep track at this point lol. This one's basically my comfort game, it's like playing a high-end radio drama except it's interactive, and it's so comfortable not having to fixate on the screen all the time. (Though in my sighted foolishness I still stare fixedly at the screen when things get tense.) This time I was so smitten I started a new game back-to-back right away, it's so beautiful in every way and I love it :blobcat_comforter_cry:

#amPlaying #AudioGame

I didn't entirely slack on my reading, though — I finished @dilmandila 's Blossoming of the Big Tree, which is a fun and thoughtful steampunk sci-fi with high stakes and an unforgettable protagonist. My copy was an ARC and didn't have a cover yet, but the book is out now in its final form! https://www.ododopress.com/novellas/the-blossoming-of-the-big-tree/

Me buying a discounted book here, splurging on a bulk sale there, all in the touching hope that someday I'll have time to read them all.

#bookstodon #amReading #somedayISwear

Okay I'm too sleepy to make individual posts for everything that looks good, so please take a look at this list of 80 opportunities for underrepresented writers if you or someone you know might be interested. A text search for keywords like “Black,” “Africa,” “Indigenous,” “Asia,” “Middle Eastern,” “women,” “queer,” “lesbian,” “non-binary,” “trans,” “disabled,” or “immigrant” may be fruitful. https://authorspublish.com/publishing-opportunities-for-historically-underrepresented-writers-june-2026/