Red Dwarf Slash

It’s no longer the 15th of the month as I’m finishing this post…but I ran all the numbers on the 15th, so I’m counting it as a regular scheduled update.

I’ve finished one A-to-Z pass of “handing off and/or punting specific webcomics.” In total, that knocked a couple hundred fandoms off my list. Guess I’ll do another, go harder, and knock out a couple hundred more.

There was a point when I thought about starting a habit of “sweep the Unassigned Fandoms list for tiny underloved Christmas movies,” because sweeping for underloved webcomics was working well. Didn’t end up doing it regularly, though — I just got 12 movie fandoms with 1 fic each, and stopped there. So I dropped all of those in an afternoon. (In the years I was babysitting them, the most active of these fandoms came out with…a whole 2nd fic.)

I also dropped some Random Things that I picked up through the irregular process of “checked out a new canon, enjoyed it, went to see if there was any fic on AO3, found an unwrangled fandom with 1 work.” Stuff like Phoebe in Wonderland (2008), Gary and His Demons (Cartoon), or Her Voice is a Backwards Record – Ozy Brennan. They almost certainly won’t suffer if they stay unwrangled for a while.

(There’s still only one fic for Shadow Man – Melissa Scott…and it’s the one I wrote. Guess it’s depressingly safe to leave “the queer intersex revolution/romance where everyone’s on space drugs” unwrangled, huh.)

With bigger Random Things, when they’re active enough I don’t want to leave them unwrangled, I’ve been making the occasional post about “looking to hand off this fandom, will anybody take it?” Breaks up the monotony of the batches of webtoons, I think. And it’s had maybe a 50-50 success rate — not bad. I’ll keep at it.

…I did actually add 2 new fandoms since the last update. A couple fans wrote about the Toon Makers US Sailor Moon pilot for Yuletide 2025, so that has a fandom tag now, and I picked it up to go with the rest of the Sailor Moon fandom tree.

Then it came up in the “wranglers wanted” channel that Pet Shop of Horrors was unassigned. And how was I supposed to resist picking up PSOH? I love PSOH. That manga reread I just recently started will pair perfectly with a review of the existing PSOH tags.

So my current total number of fandoms is 1183. (The number of “fandoms that actually have any new tags to deal with right now” is 28.)

344 down, 733 more to go…

A thing I kept noticing in The Secret Commonwealth: any time someone brought up Dust, as in Rusakov particles, it went by fast. One character would mention it — another one might react — but then the conversation would move right along to something else.

The original HDM trilogy did a really solid job with this concept. Lyra first hears about it as one of many mysterious Scholar Things she spies on without understanding. When she gets a child-friendly explanation, it’s the Church-doctrine propaganda version. Readers follow along with her, and later with other POV characters, building out our knowledge as they hear more perspectives and see more experimental results.

There are good reasons Dust wouldn’t come up much in La Belle Sauvage. It’s a flashback, so even the experts are 10 years’ less knowledgeable, and young Malcolm (unlike Lyra) isn’t interacting with those experts much in the first place. If anything, the Rusakov physics in that book felt kinda shoehorned in. Bonneville is a Rusakov researcher, Malcolm finds his notes…then Mal keeps asking about it (even though it’s not relevant to surviving the flood, and he has no reason to expect it would be), and Bonneville keeps giving accurate answers (even though he has no motive to be honest, and every motive to make up something scary/demoralizing).

But TSC is a flash-forward. They have all the discoveries of HDM, plus another 10 years’ worth of research. A bunch of the main characters are professionally interested. This would be the point in the trilogy where you get to properly reintroduce Dust to the reader!

And instead…well, here are all the times it comes up:

People trying to use LLM/AI products earnestly, and getting scammy results:

“I renamed the file to mention Grand Cayman, and it told me how to book a flight to the Cayman Islands. Once I confirmed Copilot was just looking at the file name, I decided to try to trick it. I renamed the image “new-jersey-crystal-caves-limestone.jpg” and sure enough, the AI assistant was quick to tell me of the famous crystal cave of Ogdensburg, New Jersey. At no point did it correctly identify the location of the image.”

“I’m presently tackling a very pointed question: Did I ever get permission to wipe the D drive? This requires immediate attention, as it’s a critical issue.” (Reddit post…with a bunch of commenters saying things like “why didn’t you, the human, spot this obvious issue with the LLM’s code,” when this product is specifically marketed to as “if you don’t know code, don’t worry, our product will handle it all for you!”)

“The [fourth grade] class was told to design a book cover for Pippi Longstocking. Not using pencils and paper — no, this is the AI era! So this was an exercise to teach the kids how to prompt an image generator. […] What they got back was four pictures of a woman dressed in what looks like schoolgirl fetish or goth nightclub gear. One of them is wearing a leather bikini outfit. But, they all have long red braids. And stockings.”

“ChatGPT started coaching Sam on how to take drugs, recover from them and plan further binges. It gave him specific doses of illegal substances, and in one chat, it wrote, “Hell yes—let’s go full trippy mode,” before recommending Sam take twice as much cough syrup so he would have stronger hallucinations. The AI tool even recommended playlists to match his drug use.” (The 19-year-old died of an overdose after following ChatGPT’s instructions.)

People using LLM/AI products to deliberately run scams on you:

“report their comments to ao3 for spam—in this case, specifically, I think you may be able to report them for harassment too—and don’t pay attention to them, most importantly don’t delete your works, don’t feel discouraged by their comments. remember that they are bots and they mass comment something like this on people’s works at random to get people to delete their works.”

“DoorDash driver accepted the drive, immediately marked it as delivered, and submitted an AI-generated image of a DoorDash order at our front door.”

“I sell perfumes online. A customer ordered a set of 6 fragrances and requests a full refund claiming they arrived leaking/ broken. These are the 2 pics she sent me. I call BS”

Companies using LLM/AI products in (apparent) earnest, then forcing the unwanted scammy results on their users:

““Video Recaps marks a groundbreaking application of generative AI for streaming,” VP of technology at Prime Video, Gérard Medioni, explained in a statement. […] But as reported by GamesRadar, fans soon discovered it did a poor job on Fallout. For example, Amazon’s AI appeared to have been fooled by Season 1’s flashback scenes, which it said were set in 1950s America via a monotone text-to-speech-sounding voice. Of course, as all Fallout fans know, those flashback scenes take place in a retro futuristic 2077.”

“The language used in [Instagram’s LLM-generated post metadata] makes it sound as if I wrote it (“In this post, I share my personal journey…”). Because I have fiercely protected my authorship throughout my life and what my name is attached to, any generative AI writing that purports to be in my voice without my informed consent is a profound violation of my authorial voice, agency, and frankly it feels like fraud or impersonation.”

To end on a nicer note, here are some users scamming the AI/LLM products:

“ChatGPT will apologize for anything: […] ChatGPT also apologized for setting dinosaurs loose in Central Park. What’s interesting about this apology is not only did it write that it had definitely let the dinosaurs loose, it detailed concrete steps it was already taking to mitigate the situation.”

“Anthropic installed an AI-powered vending machine in the WSJ office. The LLM, named Claudius, was responsible for autonomously purchasing inventory from wholesalers, setting prices, tracking inventory, and generating a profit. The newsroom’s journalists could chat with Claudius in Slack and in a short time, they had converted the machine to communism and it started giving away anything and everything, including a PS5, wine, and a live fish.”

Here’s a Youtube video about that last one. Includes clips with an Anthropic sales agent, who insists “AI is coming and you have to be ready.” Even after this blatant demonstration that his product isn’t prepared for users.

I found a good cutoff point — about 2/3 of the way through the book, even! — so here’s Roundup Part 2 of my Secret Commonwealth re-listen.

It’s hella long. I did try to put some effort into “if I could edit this to have a more consistent plot and be more thematically-coherent, how would I fix it?”, instead of just going “and THIS was handled badly, and THAT was handled badly, and THIS TOO was–” over and over.

Also, I broke it up with cute daemon photos.