There are three kinds of people at the moment.
There are those who don't give a damn. That's 99% of the population.
There are those who are so, so delighted that they can now make pretty pictures which they have always dreamed of but couldn't do it.
There are those who can make pretty pictures, and hate the f**k out of the fact that now everyone who wants to can make pretty pictures. These people are desperately trying to get the image AIs shut down because they violated their copyright because they were trained on the pictures "real" artists had made.
But that's not why they are so angry.
Here's Lord Lucian to explain:
I throw the sword lightly straight up and catch it by the blade, turn it and hold it out hilt first to her.
“Your sword, my lady,” I say and am rewarded with a most glorious smile, truly a sunrise on her face. She takes it with grace, steps around the chair and begins a series of training movements, a set sequence of tight cuts and parries, beautifully executed and perfectly controlled, the sequence smooth and flowing through the complex shapes, ending with the requisite forward thrust and the formal presentation of the sword. I could not have done better myself and cannot hide my astonishment in time.
It delights her of course and she tells me that these are my skills, my movements, my years of practise.
I do not know what to think.
This girl had within her what took me such blood and sweat to acquire, free of all charges, free of all the hard work under the sun that stripped the flesh off your back and the endless beatings of the drill masters; she had not taken this from me with deliberation and I could not accuse her of using what an accident had presented her and yet I could not help but feel a bitter anger towards her at that moment which unbalanced me with its intensity.
I endeavour to fight it back, the thoughts of injustice at such a thing ridiculous, for there was no justice in this world, and I did not even know there was a part of me left that would remember, never mind believe in this preposterous notion.
In Serein 1-9-1
Lucian is so upset by the injustice of Isca being able to do that which had took him "such blood and sweat to acquire" that it causes a cascade which makes him want to end the entire world so no injustice would ever take place again.
For the artists who can really draw and paint the pretty pictures, after years and decades of working at it day and night, this injustice that anyone at all can now make something without having put in the slightest bit of effort is ... off the scale.
But unlike Lucian, who has never had to worry where his next meal is going to come from in all his 600+ years of life, they also see the loss of their primary income. That's an extra factor that makes it even worse. Especially if they are providing for others, then it goes through another threshold shift.
Fundamentally, this is about tool usage.
Do the people who train hard to be super strong get upset when a weakling with a fork lift can lift up a heavy boulder whilst sitting comfortably in the driver's chair?
Do the people who train all the time to run really fast get upset when a fat bloke on a motor scooter overtakes them?
Was there a time when the people who had learned to make whole newspaper pages by assembling lead characters, one at a time, watched the new generation just use a type writer?
Well, it's a thing.
It's a thing with humans that something that took a lifetime to learn and perfect, with or without the beatings of the swordmaster under the hot sun, can be short cut into something that any Tom, Dick and Karen can do.
That's a thing. It happens. I don't think there's much you can do about it, apart from praying for that special solar flare that will put us back into the stone age, the meteor strike or the pole reversal.
Is it "fair"?
Well, that concept of injustice that caused Lucian to explode, what is that?
I don't think today's the day I get into that.
In the interim, it's a fact that we have three kinds of people. The massive majority who doesn't give a damn; the people who are so, so happy that a dream has come true for them and now they can show others what's inside their mind when they could never do it before; and those who are so bitterly angry and upset, they don't even have words for it.
Here we are. What happens next, we'll have to find out as the show continues.
Silvia Hartmann
Dec 22 2023
Stained glass image of a young red haired woman in a long turquoise robe holding a sword
Generated with AI 22 December 2023 at 7:39 am
