Interesting to notice the ai assisted writing still has a tendency to repeat certain phrases or keywords throughout a work. This was somewhat masked in Death and the Devil due to leaning into the repetitive style, but more noticeable in Out of The Shadows. It won't be long before it will be near impossible to distinguish ai assisted from non-assisted writings
"Can I do a piece for you entitled “The Insignificance of Significance” in which I will demonstrate in my usual whorehouse style that it doesn’t matter a damn what a novel is about, that the only fiction of any moment in any age is that which does magic with words, and that the subject matter is merely the springboard for the writer's imagination; that the art of fiction, if it can any longer be called that, has grown from nothing to an artificial synthesis in a mere matter of 300 years, and has now reached such a degree of mechanical perfection that the only way you can tell the novelists apart is by whether they write about miners in Butte, coolies in China, Jews in the Bronx, or stockbrokers on Long Island or whatever it is; that all the women and most of the men write exactly the same, or at least choose one of half a dozen thoroughly standardized procedures; and that in spite of certain inevitable slight differences (very slight indeed on the long view) the whole damn business could be turned out by a machine just as well, and will be almost any day now; and that the only writers left who have anything to say are those who write about practically nothing and monkey around with odd ways of doing it?" - Raymond Chandler in 1945
Also, even with AI assistance, current OCR is crap. It would have been faster just to type it out myself.
What I saw when I looked into using LLMs for writing is that it stripped away the remaining pretense of what the publishing industry is, and those currently benefiting from that illusion do not like being exposed.
The industry is just that, an industry. It is an industrial process, with inputs and outputs meant to be manufactured at scale and distributed to a mass population making it no different than clothes, cars, food, or any other form of media. OldPub still pretends it is a place of craftsmen toiling in the workshop making things by hand, as it were, with the publishers acting like tastemakers in the Fine Art world pretend to do. That illusion gave them status over common men, which all concerned craved; shattering that illusion compelled the freakout reactions we see as this directly attacks their status.
The LLMs make it clear to the user that they are in a factory, that it must be tooled to produce a given widget, and the user is the one responsible for the tooling; the skillset needed now is not the grunt work of producing and editing copy, but the higher-value work of project management- and that includes promotion and marketing. The development of LLM Automations made what was a clear, but implicit, thing into a very explicit one.
As most fiction is still Genre Fiction, and most readers still read in series, being able to tool up a LLM Automation to produce and publish an entire series in the time OldPub authors take to write and publish a single novel is already eating deep into an already beleaguered OldPub's falling prospects. We know that Jon Del Arroz already does this. Robert Kroese is openly doing so now. Nick Cole and his crew may balk at it, but they already do rapid release as fast as men can without LLMs, and when push comes to shove they'll cave and come on board because they don't want to stop being writers yet.
Don't worry about the haters and the AI detectors. The latter don't work as I know from personal experience, and the former don't matter.
I am all for it. Even AI slop tracks are more pleasant to the ear then most modern music.
One Suno's dangers is that it can make even weak lyrics sound good.
Popular music has sunk far from even a handful of decades ago. Even Rap had heights it's fallen from. Compare the lyrics of Inspectah Deck's opening in Triumph by the Wu Tang Clan vs the lauded modern genius of Kendrick Lamar.
Comprehensively ignorant is an excellent way to describe my knowledge of music production, but I can say this, the song sounds good. As good or better than anything I've heard produced by "real professional" musicians.
We are witnessing history being made. Vox Day has no peer in terms of breadth.
Per Grok:
No one quite matches Vox Day’s (Theodore Beale’s) full breadth of publishing output and related activities. His work spans original fiction across genres, substantive non-fiction on philosophy, science, culture, and politics, operating an independent press (Castalia House), daily blogging, plus comics and music production. While many authors excel in one or two areas—prolific self-published genre series writers, cultural commentators, or small-press operators—the integrated combination at his volume, conceptual range, and independence level stands out as distinctive in contemporary independent publishing.
Applauding that Grok could sweep together so much of our Dark Lord's written output, yet missed entirely the massive outpouring of essays and (is that a word?). Any y'all read his anthologies of long-long-ago syndicated contemporaneous essays? I thought it/they would likely be "old news" and not particularly interesting... turned out VERY interesting, esp. cause I'd lived through so much of that time as a semi-conscious adult.
I must admit, I have a delighted imagined picture of Vox, in his throne, at his desk; stacks of evolutionary biology books and papers, questions submitted to him on SSH and the human condition, in-work fiction (where-oh-where is Biostellar 5?!? Begging....), modern and ancient warfare, a bit of game design; plus ordering animal skins and signing invoices for newer bigger machines. I see him gliding effortlessly from topic to topic, still having time for SpaceBunny, the kids, and the big doggos!
It's interesting that you found an old Gemini model to deliver better results.
I had a ChatGPT session just around a year ago working on an old story idea I had in my mind for many years. It came up with a reasonable first chapter in the voice I wanted for the narrator.
I left it alone for a while. Some months later, they reduced the supported length in the artifact and cut off what it had already written. I didn't upgrade to paid version at the time. I don't know if that would have even fixed the problem.
More recently I fed the complete downloaded chapter to a new session and wasn't happy with what I was getting. It was saying the right things but not giving me what I wanted. I'll have to give something like Opus 4.6 a whirl.
Is it possible lowering the effort will lower the prestige register along with it?
A rebuttal:
https://siblingsofmacrina.blogspot.com/2026/06/vox-days-adolescent-ai-musings.html?m=1
Best laugh of my day, thank you
what genre's did you plug into Suno to get this sound? It's got some sweet In Flames sounding riffs.
If I ever needed a jukebox, I’d get a Suno subscription.
Interesting to notice the ai assisted writing still has a tendency to repeat certain phrases or keywords throughout a work. This was somewhat masked in Death and the Devil due to leaning into the repetitive style, but more noticeable in Out of The Shadows. It won't be long before it will be near impossible to distinguish ai assisted from non-assisted writings
"Can I do a piece for you entitled “The Insignificance of Significance” in which I will demonstrate in my usual whorehouse style that it doesn’t matter a damn what a novel is about, that the only fiction of any moment in any age is that which does magic with words, and that the subject matter is merely the springboard for the writer's imagination; that the art of fiction, if it can any longer be called that, has grown from nothing to an artificial synthesis in a mere matter of 300 years, and has now reached such a degree of mechanical perfection that the only way you can tell the novelists apart is by whether they write about miners in Butte, coolies in China, Jews in the Bronx, or stockbrokers on Long Island or whatever it is; that all the women and most of the men write exactly the same, or at least choose one of half a dozen thoroughly standardized procedures; and that in spite of certain inevitable slight differences (very slight indeed on the long view) the whole damn business could be turned out by a machine just as well, and will be almost any day now; and that the only writers left who have anything to say are those who write about practically nothing and monkey around with odd ways of doing it?" - Raymond Chandler in 1945
Also, even with AI assistance, current OCR is crap. It would have been faster just to type it out myself.
What I saw when I looked into using LLMs for writing is that it stripped away the remaining pretense of what the publishing industry is, and those currently benefiting from that illusion do not like being exposed.
The industry is just that, an industry. It is an industrial process, with inputs and outputs meant to be manufactured at scale and distributed to a mass population making it no different than clothes, cars, food, or any other form of media. OldPub still pretends it is a place of craftsmen toiling in the workshop making things by hand, as it were, with the publishers acting like tastemakers in the Fine Art world pretend to do. That illusion gave them status over common men, which all concerned craved; shattering that illusion compelled the freakout reactions we see as this directly attacks their status.
The LLMs make it clear to the user that they are in a factory, that it must be tooled to produce a given widget, and the user is the one responsible for the tooling; the skillset needed now is not the grunt work of producing and editing copy, but the higher-value work of project management- and that includes promotion and marketing. The development of LLM Automations made what was a clear, but implicit, thing into a very explicit one.
As most fiction is still Genre Fiction, and most readers still read in series, being able to tool up a LLM Automation to produce and publish an entire series in the time OldPub authors take to write and publish a single novel is already eating deep into an already beleaguered OldPub's falling prospects. We know that Jon Del Arroz already does this. Robert Kroese is openly doing so now. Nick Cole and his crew may balk at it, but they already do rapid release as fast as men can without LLMs, and when push comes to shove they'll cave and come on board because they don't want to stop being writers yet.
Don't worry about the haters and the AI detectors. The latter don't work as I know from personal experience, and the former don't matter.
"AI ... inevitably descends into model collapse."
i suppose you've already noted that human intellectual models are ALSO prone to model collapse?
That is well-articulated in the book Sigma Game.
I am all for it. Even AI slop tracks are more pleasant to the ear then most modern music.
One Suno's dangers is that it can make even weak lyrics sound good.
Popular music has sunk far from even a handful of decades ago. Even Rap had heights it's fallen from. Compare the lyrics of Inspectah Deck's opening in Triumph by the Wu Tang Clan vs the lauded modern genius of Kendrick Lamar.
Comprehensively ignorant is an excellent way to describe my knowledge of music production, but I can say this, the song sounds good. As good or better than anything I've heard produced by "real professional" musicians.
We are witnessing history being made. Vox Day has no peer in terms of breadth.
Per Grok:
No one quite matches Vox Day’s (Theodore Beale’s) full breadth of publishing output and related activities. His work spans original fiction across genres, substantive non-fiction on philosophy, science, culture, and politics, operating an independent press (Castalia House), daily blogging, plus comics and music production. While many authors excel in one or two areas—prolific self-published genre series writers, cultural commentators, or small-press operators—the integrated combination at his volume, conceptual range, and independence level stands out as distinctive in contemporary independent publishing.
Applauding that Grok could sweep together so much of our Dark Lord's written output, yet missed entirely the massive outpouring of essays and (is that a word?). Any y'all read his anthologies of long-long-ago syndicated contemporaneous essays? I thought it/they would likely be "old news" and not particularly interesting... turned out VERY interesting, esp. cause I'd lived through so much of that time as a semi-conscious adult.
I must admit, I have a delighted imagined picture of Vox, in his throne, at his desk; stacks of evolutionary biology books and papers, questions submitted to him on SSH and the human condition, in-work fiction (where-oh-where is Biostellar 5?!? Begging....), modern and ancient warfare, a bit of game design; plus ordering animal skins and signing invoices for newer bigger machines. I see him gliding effortlessly from topic to topic, still having time for SpaceBunny, the kids, and the big doggos!
Translation: I get bored easily and I understand no one cares about my particular obsessions.
It's interesting that you found an old Gemini model to deliver better results.
I had a ChatGPT session just around a year ago working on an old story idea I had in my mind for many years. It came up with a reasonable first chapter in the voice I wanted for the narrator.
I left it alone for a while. Some months later, they reduced the supported length in the artifact and cut off what it had already written. I didn't upgrade to paid version at the time. I don't know if that would have even fixed the problem.
More recently I fed the complete downloaded chapter to a new session and wasn't happy with what I was getting. It was saying the right things but not giving me what I wanted. I'll have to give something like Opus 4.6 a whirl.
Is it possible lowering the effort will lower the prestige register along with it?
It's possible. I haven't done any methodical tests yet.
Been using AI for more technical writing and the principle holds.
The outputs are only as good as what you give it. This includes prompting, context, piping, file size, and focus of the content.
It is like typing, the input is a new skill. It is additive to writing skill, never a replacement.
The human editing passes and style sense are priceless.
Decided to subscribe to Suno to turn some of my essays into song. Thanks for the music from the ones that go hard to the Dancing on Your Grave remix
Got my hardcover copy of "Out of the Shadows" yesterday. Yeah hardcover because I'm a GenX er.
Any good sources on how to use AI as an author? I used it mainly for spell checking and translation for my flrst novel.
I would love more ideas and uses.
JDA has a book out on it. Written with AI.
I saw him give a brief overview of his tooling in one of his videos. What little I saw was intriguing.
Thank you.
For the near future, the only writing you can be sure is not AI is that including racism, sexism, anti-sodomy, etc.
And spelled incorrectly.
And read out loud with the most gawd-awful "cadence" and mispronounced words.