New! Audiobook, Uncanny Kickstarter, Bennis genAI Guest Post, and More!

Heya! I am back and recovered from my trip to the Gen Con Writer’s Symposium. I heard that some convention attendees got the flu, but other than a little con crud I’m otherwise okay. Thank you to everyone who attended my panels and workshops. I appreciate you! Next up on my convention list is Game Hole Con, where I’ll be playtesting a new Wonderland adventure for Pinching Tarts and managing a booth.

While I’m ramping back up, I wanted to share with you that Sisterhood: Dark Tales and Secret Mysteries is now available as an Audible audiobook. Recently, Uncanny Magazine announced new backer levels—and I’m offering one of them! You can back the Uncanny Magazine Year 13 Kickstarter and choose from several backer levels including an online Tarot for Storytellers workshop offered by yours truly!

Now that I’m home, I’m resuming the last five weeks of The Artist’s Way, and am diving into experimental art. I took a watercolor class, learned a couple of new techniques, and am having fun in my journal. That said, my humble abode has been overtaken by dust bunnies, and my eye’s starting to twitch. As fun as this summer has been—minus ALL THE TORNADOES—I need to put my house back together. Late summer has definitely arrived!

In my last newsletter, I shared with you a bunch of links and research about genAI. In this edition, I wanted to offer a guest post written by author Robyn Bennis about what she’s been dealing with. ‘Til next time!

Why Did I Lose My Livelihood to AI?

As I write this, Anthropic’s Claude logo is staring at me from the MS Word ribbon bar,
resembling nothing so much as a pulsating cat anus. The word “Claude” appears under
it twice, once as the add-in title and again as a ribbon bar category. It feels like a
metaphor for the rote logic of generative AI: sloppy presentation rendered by an
unthinking process that’s ultimately just slapping text strings together.

I was introduced to Claude three years ago, when I worked at a biotech marketing agency. I got a Jira task asking me to “clean up” an article on managing Google Ads, and immediately suspected it had been generated by a large language model (LLM). It was written in a confident voice with perfect grammar, but the content was an absolute disaster—just jumbled nonsense seemingly scraped from fragments of unrelated tutorials. The beginning, middle, and end contained the same dubious advice worded three different ways, like a fractal of bullshit.

See? I savaged this pathetic motherfucker and it still has nothing but kind words. Try that with a human writer. I dare you.

So, did that marketing company make a mistake when they not-quite-fired me? Eeeeeeh. Even if they acknowledge Claude’s limitations, I think they’d tell you they didn’t. Companies are not in the business of making art, after all, but product. In a world dominated by corporations and permeated by corporate culture, writing is not prose in want of composition, but merchandise in want of assembly, and the quality of that merchandise is only one factor among many.

In our capitalist utopia, those factors are weighed with the same heartless, machine logic that Claude uses to generate text. Asking: “Why was I replaced by an inferior machine?” is working the problem from the wrong end. Corporations start from: “How can I get the largest value at the smallest cost?”

From there, it’s pretty obvious why a robot took my job: the robot is cheap, good enough, and doesn’t suffer from my character flaws, such as self-respect. That doesn’t mean I’ve stopped writing, any more than people stopped weaving after the power loom was invented. But writing is no longer a realistic livelihood for me, as weaving wasn’t to cottage workers in the 19^th century. It’s more or less a hobby, at this point.

It sucks, but at least it frees up time for other hobbies. Hey, I can finally take up weaving. Maybe I’ll start with a scarf on the theme of cat buttholes…

Robyn Bennis is a writer living in Madison, WI, where she has one cat, zero careers, and an apartment full of curse words. Connect with Robyn Bennis on BlueSky.

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