Fully Decompressed

The big event of the week was, as noted above, Motor City Comic Con. I helped at the GLAHW table all three days (and set up on Thursday). As always, it was a fun time, but the recovery time post-con was a rough one. I spent most of Monday in a haze. I’m out of practice smiling and being nice to people for ten+ hours at a time.

There were a lot of very cool costumes. I think that my two favorites were the gentleman with the tin foil claws and the sign that read “Good Value Wolverine” and the woman whose wheelchair was turned into a desk that was Judge Judy. You always get extra points for originality.

The only other new experience we got to have this week was checking out the closest ER. The good news is that everyone is OK.

Listening To: Submitted for the Approval of the Midnight Pals, a podcast by Bitter Karella (thanks for the recommendation, MontiLee!). This hilarious series features portrayals of King, Koontz, Shelly, Poe, Barker, Lovecraft, and occasional guest authors sitting around a campfire telling their stories. Unfortunately, I have absolutely no restraint and listened to both seasons in three days.

Currently Reading: Whack Job: A History of Axe Murder by Rachel McCarthy James. This history of both axes and axe murders is incredibly entertaining as well as informative.

Current Obsession: Sleep. I. Need. More. Sleep.

We are almost finished work on our Kickstarter for the upcoming anthology Nightmerica. We will have the links as soon as they are available.

All of the contracts for this anthology have been sent out and we are only waiting on a few to be returned. You are going to love the line up!

Ken MacGregor’s Some People I Have Killed is in the final stages of production and is on track for its June release.

Editorial work continues on Here There Be Horrors, a collection of short horror fiction by Peggy Christie.

There are no conventions on the immediate horizon, but we have begun looking at 2026. We have already submitted our application for next year’s Horror Realm in Pittsburgh.

I feel like I should once again point out that there was a moment in time when I dreamt of being a journalist. My original undergraduate major was English, with a minor in Journalism. Granted, that changed fairly early on, but I did have experience working on my high school newspaper.

I mention all of this as background for the upcoming rant. I am a firm believer in the importance of the Fourth Estate and I am saddened to see how the news has gone from being an impartial representation of the facts to the corporation controlled spigot for whatever filthy water the millionaires who own the conglomerates want to spew out onto the masses.

That however, is a different rant. Today we’re talking about AI.

Yes, again.

As frequent readers will know, I am firmly against the use of generative crap boxes to produce (I wont use the term “write” here) works of fiction. Well guess what? That goes double for the production of news, even feature articles.

I’m sure that lightbulbs are going off for some of you, but for everyone else, King Features, a segment of Hearst Newspapers released a summer reading list which was picked up by a number of papers notably the Chicago Sun-Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer. In a story which was first reported on 404 Media (good job Fifth Estate!), the feature insert included an article which presented 15 hot new titles for reading this summer was produced by using AI (although freelancer Marco Buscaglia has taken credit for its sale). What is even worse is that the majority of the books mention (2/3) do not exist.

Yes, that’s correct. Your list of must read books for the year consists of titles which were never written.

Now some of you might say that this is sour grapes on my part, but look, I know that I wasn’t going to make the list this year (look out in 2026!), but this is totally unacceptable. It is, however, completely predictable. I would like to make a joke here about this being the start of the take over of the machines and blame Skynet, but I’m just too pissed off. This is a relatively small error in the big scheme of things, but it is entirely what we can expect if we continue to hand over things to generative crap producers. Over-reliance on unfinished and poorly implemented generative modeling software results in unreliable end products. This time it was a reading list of books which can’t be read. Next time it could be completely inaccurate medical information or a news story about something that didn’t actually happen.

We have our politicians for that. Never forget the tragedy of the Bowling Green Massacre.