Long Delayed Update - 2026 May 28

I haven’t updated my website for a while. It isn’t that I had nothing to report, but I am in severe procrastination mode. As I get older, it seems that things get harder to do.

Scripts Posted

I posted a bunch of my scripts on my website. I’ve had a page for my scripts but had only posted one script on it. Recently I posted eighteen more. Mostly they were short scripts I did for the Script Dreams group’s writing challenges. I posted a couple older scripts as well. I have a few more short scripts and some longer ones that I intend to post. Someday. https://dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/scripts/

While preparing the files to upload, I came across short scripts I had forgotten about.

CSIF Older Filmmakers Club

I am still involved with the club, but I have struggled to organise meetings over the last year. Someone else volunteered to run some meetings, which is much appreciated. They’ve done a couple so far. I hope to recruit some other people to run meetings. Many hands make light work. I will be setting up a meeting on documentary films.

Script Dreams Group

I joined this writer’s group back in 2018. We’ve been meeting a couple times a month. One meeting devoted to writing our scripts, while the other we read the scripts aloud and we talk about writing, film, and other things that come up. Every month we get a writing prompt for a short script. Many of the scripts posted on my script page come from those prompts.

Shut Up and Write Group

I joined this writer’s group several years ago. The focus of the group is to not talk and to write instead. I’ve found it a big help in fighting my procrastination. We meet every week, although we do have the occasional gap.

Unfinished Animation Projects

I have several unfinished projects, which I try to pick up and finish off now and then. I used NAWMAL to do the animation.

“The Audience for AI Films” is my critique of AI generated films. I felt that it was too short and was stuck for ways to make it longer.

“The Dread of the Daring Rocketeer” is a sort of Science Fiction story. I ran into problems with some of the images and got stuck.

“Time Enough for the Anxious Social Media Manager” is pretty much what the title says. I recorded the audio, but I haven’t done any of the animation.

“The Urgent Phone Call”

We finished this film early last year and I have been entering it into film festivals. I think it has run its course there, so I am considering what to do with it next. https://filmfreeway.com/TheUrgentPhoneCall

Years ago Ouat Media (https://ouatmedia.com/) distributed “My Next Film” (https://dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/my-next-film/), so I have thought about approaching them about “The Urgent Phone Call.” So far I’ve done nothing about that. I’ve also thought about posting it on my YouTube channel.

 

Someday I’ll stop procrastinating and get all this done.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog

Thoughts About AI Slop

I’ve seen several videos on YouTube complaining about how AI slop is ruining videos in their field of interest. This seems to be a particular problem with history videos. Fake info didn’t start with the internet, but it has become more widely visible since it is easier to produce. I haven’t been a paragon of virtue in this regard myself, but I am trying to improve.

What is AI Slop?

I see AI Slop as not so much a problem with AI (Artificial Intelligence) technology, as the misuse of those tools by people who either don’t care about the quality of their work, or who lack the knowledge to recognize problems with their work.

There is a distinction between slop and deception. Slop is created when people don’t care. Deception is a deliberate effort to mislead.

The Cause of AI Slop

I have used AI tools in my own work and found them useful. Most of my experience has been with text to voice systems. This has given me some understanding of the short comings and problems with current AI technology.

I have used text to voice systems extensively. There are some patterns I have noticed. One is getting odd gaps in the dialogue. I usually edit these gaps out later or play around with punctuation to fix the problem.

These systems will often mispronounce uncommon words. In my own work I fix these problems by altering the spellings of these words to force the pronunciation to fit. Another common give away of AI is with words like “lead,” which pronounced differently depending on the meaning in context. Some newer systems are better at it.

When I catch these kinds of issues, it tells me that the “creator” hasn’t bothered to listen to the recording or fix it if they did.

In my own work I’ve sometimes put in gaps, mispronunciations, and “ums” to give the voice more character.

Some creators use AI to create their written material and scripts. AI writing is often repetitious, contain contradictory information, or contain incorrect information. Again, this is not purely an AI problem. In my experience I have never had AI generated writing that I didn’t need to rewrite.

My Hands Are Not Completely Clean

My hands are not completely clean, since I have done some videos and posts, in jest, which some people might see as slop. I now try to avoid creating and accepting fake information.

My film “Who Shot the President,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lSTEhH0d4E is a fake documentary. Some viewers still took it as a serious proposal. Some even sent threats because of the strong feelings about their own pet theories.

I worked on another project I called “The First Person in Space.” In it a character claims that in 1943, Werner Von Braun used a V-2 to launch a female test pilot into a mission like Shepard’s 1961 Mercury test flight. After my experience with “Who shot the President,” I worried that the idea was too plausible, and some people might think it was real. So I never posted it.

I have also made the mistake of not reviewing my videos thoroughly before I post them. Most recently, I posted a sped-up version of “The Barrier” with out rewatching it. It was only after someone pointed it out that I realised the technique I used adjusted the video and audio by different amounts. I was able to fix the problem, but it still shows how important it is to review your own work closely.

Spotting AI Slop

I have developed my own ways of spotting AI slop, and there are many sources online that have advice on how to do that. However, all these techniques take some effort. How many people will spend two hours checking if they can trust a five-minute video they just watched?

Why is AI Writing Repetitious?

After I wrote a draft of this post, I chatted with a friend. He also noticed that AI generated writing tends to repeat itself. That got me to wonder why.

I recalled seeing an interview with Marshall McLuhan where he said that he would only read every other page of an academic or technical paper. He said this was possible because if it were well written, then there would be enough redundancy in the writing that he could follow what the paper was saying. He contrasted that with fiction and other writing meant for entertainment, which wouldn’t have that redundancy.

In my own experience with technical writing, most of the writing is not intended to read. That is the material is meant as background and the writer would expect that the reader would only skim the report to confirm that the work had been done or consulted when reproducing the work. I found switching from that mindset to writing for entertainment a challenge.

I suspect that most of the writing used to train AI falls into the technical/academic style. That could be one reason why AI writing would be more redundant.

Again, it does mean that creators who don’t bother to review what AI gives them is the source of AI slop.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Me – Part 3 - Drawbacks, and Dangers

 

I intended to talk about some of the negative and positive aspects of Artificial Intelligence in this post. However, I decided that the positives and opportunities of AI deserved a more thorough examination. I will do a separate post on those later.

The focus of my post will be on the use of AI in creative work. There are issues in other areas of AI application that I won’t get into.

AI Has No Emotion or Motivation

“Well, he acts like he has genuine emotions. Um, of course he's programmed that way to make it easier for us to talk to him. But as to whether he has real feelings is something I don't think anyone can truthfully answer.” Dave Bowman talking about HAL 9000 in the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

Having watched the movie about 30 or 40 times, I think it is meant to be a question that is asked but not answered, but one that the audience is meant to ponder. Does HAL really have emotion, or are his actions just a flaw in his programming?

We have the same question about the real-world AIs we have today. Based on my reading and experience so far, I don’t think current AIs have either emotions or motivation. Maybe someday they will.

In many applications of AI, emotions and motivations are not important. But, when we call on AIs to be creative, emotions and motivations are critical.

In my own experience, and in the opinions I’ve heard from other people, stories written by AIs tend to be bland. They tend toward clichés and lack emotion. That sort of thing is OK in some contexts, like business or technical writing, but it just doesn’t work in creative writing.

Writers, and other creative people are driven to create. No one needs to prompt them. They pour their emotions into their work. That is what makes the art they create interesting to other people.

None of the existing AIs can be described as self-starters. They only react when prompted. They are not motivated to do anything. Left to themselves, they would do nothing. AIs do not want anything. They have no desires.

Homogenization of Content

I came across this idea several times. AIs that generate writing are based on the likelihood that a given word would be followed by another word. This results in writing that hews toward the most common expression. As noted by some, AIs are cliché machines. They don’t go for the unusual, they go for the common.

The trend for the future is toward more homogenized writing. As more of the writing available for training AIs is created by other AIs, less common expressions will be driven out of use. Bland writing from AIs will become blander.

False Hopes for an Easy Writing Career

I’ve seen several articles and YouTube videos claiming that you can be a successful writer using AIs.

I suspect that is unrealistic.

Mostly it is because few writers are successful. The average traditionally published book may only have 3,000 in total sales. With some books selling millions, that means that most books will sell much less than 3,000 copies. Self-published books average only 250 in total sales. (see: https://scribemedia.com/book-sales/)

In my own case, the book I published sold three copies and I made $2.87. It is still for sale if you’d like to bump up my sales to four copies. https://www.lulu.com/shop/james-morison/walk-in-the-snow-a-collection-of-stories-and-articles/ebook/product-1m4ermrp.html

Aside from the low returns on publishing in general, I doubt that many people would want to buy an AI generated book. Nowadays, anyone who wants to, can generate their own AI story, so why pay for someone else’s AI story.

I think that people may well want to generate AI stories, not to sell, but to read themselves. It is already possible to have AI generate a story to your personal specification. You can have a novel where you are the hero.

I haven’t gone to that extent myself, but I have used ChatGPT to create short stories for my own entertainment. I expect that I am not the only one who has done this. While I did get some enjoyment from this, the experience didn’t give me much encouragement about the future of creative writing with AI.

Wrestling with AI

When I experimented with systems like ChatGPT, I find myself fighting with the system to get it to write what I want. In the end, I go back to just writing it myself. If you have something you want to say, or want to say something in a specific way, working with large language models can be very frustrating.

I’m not sure that this limitation will go away any time soon. It may not be a problem if you do not care what is generated, but that isn’t something that happens often.

AI Generated Voices

Many text to voice systems have been used to create audiobooks and YouTube videos. These have the same problem of blandness and lack of emotion as AI writing systems. The reaction to these is often quite negative.

I have used text to voice systems myself in some of my projects. While I have tried some tricks to give the voices a little more character, I still had negative feedback from people. While these voices have improved, they still have that same lack of emotion and blandness that pales compared to the humanity of real actors.

If You Want to be a Writer, Why Would You Use AI?

“I write for the same reason I breathe … because if I didn’t, I would die.” - Isaac Asimov

I read another comment from Isaac Asimov that if you want to be a writer you must enjoy the act of writing. He went on to emphasis that he meant sitting at the keyboard and bleeding your ideas onto paper. (note: this was from the pre home computer days).

I write, and do the other creative activities I do, because I want to do them. Using AI to write stories for me would be like sending an AI assistant to watch a movie I want to see.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog