In Today’s Journal
* Guest Posts Welcome
* The Bradbury Challenge Writers Reporting
* One More Comment on Generative AI
* Of Interest
* The Numbers
Guest Posts Welcome
I’ll be posting less often. If there’s a writing or publishing topic you know well, consider writing a guest post. I’ll run this notice a few times in the hope that most of you will see it.
If you’re in doubt about whether your topic would make a good guest post, queries me at harveystanbrough@gmail.com. Any editing I do will be necessary and light.
Also, I’d be happy to link to your website, Amazon or Facebook (etc.) page, to books you want to promote, and so on. (Please provide the links.)
In the next day or two, I’ll run a guest post from Dan Baldwin on how to find ghostwriting gigs.
The Bradbury Challenge Writers Reporting
The whole point of the Challenge is to have fun and grow as a writer. There is no cost. The only requirement is to write at least one short story per week.
During the past week, in addition to whatever other fiction they’re writing, the following writers reported these new stories:
- Balázs Jámbor “The diary of an unwanted elf” 2800 Fantasy
- Vanessa V. Kilmer “100 Hours” 2859 Fantasy
- Christopher Ridge “Yellow Jacket” 2642 Thriller
- Harvey Stanbrough “A Hit, and an Egress” 1676 Thriller
- Ann Stratton “Sunquake” 5763 Disaster
- Dave Taylor “The Transplant – Deputy Clause Ahern” 5,373 paranormal/horror
Congratulations to all of these writers!
One More Comment on Generative AI
from Tiffanie Gray
All gAI art, no matter where it is from, uses improperly acquired art. Because the original images the AI was “trained” on were for scientific experiments, they were thus fair use for educational purposes. But then they opened the models (programs) to the public and started charging, which is not educational fair use.
So even if you have Stable Diffusion on your own computer and you train it on your own images that you created by photo, hand, etc., the base that the program itself was trained with was improper. …
Adobe Stock was inundated with AI stock images for more than a year before “AI” became a thing. And the artists and photographers just claimed it as theirs, so it would have their name on it. Same for most/all of the other places.
How do I know? Being on the more arty side for a long time, I’ve heard about it. How good it had to be to be accepted. And yes, later-on they purged whatever they could identify [as AI].
But it’s still contaminated, and that is what Adobe is training their Firefly on. Same with other places, especially the ones that have their own gAI engines now.
So more and more of the stock places are being “tainted” by being fed/scraping other gAI images, and fewer and fewer of the “real” images are still there.
Have you noticed that more and more gAI “art” images look the same? Nine out of ten times I can spot a gAI image without it having funky fingers or eyes looking crossed, etc.
It’s the sameness that is the give away. Photos are a little harder to fake because photos are already digital numbers, right inside the phone camera or digital camera. So it’s all being mixed together to eventually become grey goo.
Generative AI is a lot like the old “Chinese knock-off” bags or shoes of the past. They can look pretty good and pretty close, but they aren’t “quite” right.
The other problem with gAI is that you never get exactly what you want. So you have to settle for “close enough.”
In the early days, I played with gAI via ArtBreeder, Disco Diffusion, and Wombo. And it was cool, like Spirograph, or splashing paint on a paper/canvas or doing acrylic pour-and-scrape or spray-paint art.
But even after playing with Leonardo and MidJourney and BlueWillow and Limewire and Playground AI and CGDream and DeepDream and ArtFlow (and the list goes on and on) I never ONCE got the image that was in my head. No matter how many tweaks and keywords and little tricks I tried.
Which means to me that it’s not my art. … My art comes from different sources: 3D, photos, hand-drawn, digital patterns. I use Daz Studio, PD Howler, Filter Forge, my graphics tablet, Affinity, Rebelle, GIMP and Corel and even a touch of Blender.
I have used pen and ink, graphite, watercolor, and colored pencil in the past to make my covers and make my art. My inspiration, for art as well as stories, come from photos, taking drives, reading articles, [my perception of] the patterns around me, and yes, sometimes—gasp—even playing around with gAI.
Which is like doodling to me because it’s like throwing torn up magazine pages on the floor and seeing what it looks like. That can be inspiring…. Legally, I don’t have to worry … because I’m creating my own things. …
But most of those places (like Canva and Creative Fabrica) will hang you out to dry if there are legal issues, because there is a tiny line somewhere in their ambiguous ToS that they can point to and say, “Tough shite. Not our fault. You should have done our job for us and checked it out better.”
So even if you have PAID for a commercial license, you are not guaranteed that you actually have one that will protect you.
There are predatory lawyers out there who specifically look for certain images or things very close to those images and then sue the users, although they usually settle before even going to court: for hundreds to thousands of dollars. So buyer beware.
[Editor’s Note: Always purchase (or in some cases, receive free) a license from a reputable royalty-free photo site that affirms the photo is original to a particular artist. That’s about the best you can do.]
And now, except for for any succinct, pertinent, and original thoughts, this topic is closed in TNDJ.
Talk with you again soon.
Of Interest
…Why I Gave Up the Security of a Stable Career for the Unstable Writer’s Life
ODBC 032 – The Big Writer’s Block Episode
Dr. Mardy’s Quotes of the Week: “Self-Deception” That only one writer reported this link was broken or missing yesterday is telling.
The Numbers
The Journal…………………………… 1020
Writing of “A Hit, and an Egress” 1676
Day 1…… 1676 words. To date…… 1676 done
Writing of Blackwell Ops 37: Temple-Schiff
Day 1…… 2012 words. To date…… 2012
Day 2…… 2487 words. To date…… 4499
Day 3…… 4597 words. To date…… 9096
Day 4…… 2790 words. To date…… 11886
Day 5…… 3430 words. To date…… 15316
Day 6…… 3353 words. To date…… 18669
Day 7…… 2811 words. To date…… 21480
Fiction for February………………….. 26960
Fiction for 2025………………………. 148315
Nonfiction for February………………. 8220
Nonfiction for 2025…………………… 40200
2025 consumable words…………….. 182005
Average Fiction WPD (February)…….. 2996
2025 Novels to Date…………………….. 3
2025 Novellas to Date…………………… 0
2025 Short Stories to Date……………… 4
Novels (since Oct 19, 2014)…………….. 107
Novellas (since Nov 1, 2015)…………… 10
Short stories (since Apr 15, 2014)……… 275
Short story collections……………………. 29
Disclaimer: Whatever you believe, unreasoning fear and the myths that outlining, revising, and rewriting will make your work better are lies. They will always slow your progress as a writer or stop you cold. I will never teach the myths on this blog.
Writing fiction should never be something that stresses you out. It should be fun. On this blog I teach Writing Into the Dark and adherence to Heinlein’s Rules. Because of WITD and because I endeavor to follow those Rules I am a prolific professional fiction writer. You can be too.