Twisted50... Some Questions For The Community
by Chris Jones
Yesterday, I emailed the community about Twisted50 and new projects. I decided to share that email here, along with some of the dynamic results. Feel free to add your voice to the conversation…
I am sure you will have guessed, we are considering another Create50 project. And I have a couple of simple questions for you. Just click the links and you will get instant results too.
Next…
We have a long list of things we want to improve… sending conformation emails when you upload your story, adding thumbs up or down to feedback so you can thank people without increasing your feedback count, integration with bio pages etc.
But do you have any thoughts? Just respond to this email with your thoughts.
I wrote a post about ChatGPT and feedback on my blog, you can read that HERE…
Brilliant and thank you!
So that’s what I emailed out and we have results now. Just cast your votes to see the results.
I may do a post on ideas I have been emailed too, and I am going to do a test post on AI Feedback, but only with those who opt in enthusiastically. This AI post is an exploration and not a new direction.
UPDATE: I have run the AI experiment and you can see the results on my blog HERE.
Filmmaker, author, screenwriter and founder of Twisted50. Currently directing splinter unit on Mission: Impossible 8.
6 thoughts on “Twisted50… Some Questions For The Community”
Intersting results; seems I am in the minority on all of them.
Another twisted would be great, although this year’s price hike reduced my entries to one, unlike in the previous one. How about more of the KISS and Singularity50?
My feelings are we will up it to four reads. I am a believer that community trumps individual success and there are some writers who do little to support others. I want to elevate those who do more.
I also think we will keep it private. I have had a number of emails about this and I agree on the whole.
As for AI feedback, I think its an evolving question. If AI can offer outstanding feedback, there is a very strong argument to take it. I remain agnostic and undecided and sensitive to all the conflicting arguments.
Yes the fee being increased is very real. As are the overheads for running this kind of thing. On a spreadsheet, it makes zero sense. The whole thing would be laughed out of Dragons Den. I just need to work toward not losing money.
One day a prompt writer will win a Nobel Prize. That’s my fear; that we will keep offloading our humanity to technology until there’s nothing of ourselves left but the weak murmur, ‘Hey, ChatGPT, write something really cool that makes me feel stuff’. But I’m a catastrophist and an alarmist; I tend to see the worst in things.
In the interests of being as clear-sighted as I can, I think it best that I signal my prejudices up front, the source of my frustration being simple: I love writing, and I want other people to think I’m clever and artistically impressive.
I’m aware that I’m already competing with hundreds of thousands of supremely talented people for that moment in the limelight. I just don’t want that compounded by the fact we’re all also pitting ourselves against an unsleeping generator of infinite material.
That is my primary (selfish) reason for being adverse to its use in the arts. It makes my life more difficult. Furthermore, AI can now level the playing field for all aspiring writers so increasing the competition even more. I’ve spent a not insignificant portion of my life developing my authorial voice and writerly credentials. Now anyone can throw in their splurge of words and have ChatGPT sculpt it into something readable, even compelling—I expect some painters felt the same at the advent of the camera. I realise I’m potentially being a bit of a dick by mentioning this here (after all, why should people be excluded from writing just because they can’t write?) but I promise to be candid. I have a strong inextinguishable sense of indignation that I’m trying to tamp down.
I feel like I’ve sufficiently aired my guts. I can now move on to my thoughts on what AI can offer the writer before the machine singularity hits.
It’s definitely useful. What it affords is the opportunity to get a novel perspective on your work. So long as you treat its assessments with a healthy dose of scepticism, it will inevitably generate some useful insights. Ultimately, it’s just pulling a comparison between your work and the work of people deemed successful, and letting you know where you fall short. It’s basing its critique on what worked before. Which I guess is how most teaching works.
The real question for me is whether AI can recognise original material. Say, for example, that ChatGPT was available at the beginning of the twentieth century, would it have encountered Joyce and Woolf and appreciated the potential impact of stream-of-consciousness writing? Or would it have rated it as unreadable, as several critics at the time did? This is obviously a highly contrasting example; Art likely develops more gradually than this example would imply. But could AI result in a limiting homogenisation of what good writing should be? Even if it were trained on cutting edge material, it would still need the critiques of humans to deem whether the material passed muster and then it’s a question of what role the AI actually plays.
I think you’re always going to get better feedback from a community of writers you trust than you will from AI. It can bring you up to a level but it’s a point of departure after which you will need to trust yourself. AI just tends to be a lot more prompt than the denizens of meatspace, and doesn’t mind when you tell it to fuck off.
I wrote this to better clarify my thoughts on AI, but find that I haven’t really made much progress. Putting aside my selfish reasons for disapproving of its synthetic genius, it’s probably reasonably harmless. I doubt any self-respecting writer is going to defer to it and I think any chancer coaxing it to churn out a new Harry Potter is going to be met with something… well… like Harry Potter. Unless they write, ‘Harry Potter BUT BETTER’, in which case they might have a bestseller on their hands.
It’s possibly also worth bearing in mind that AI is still a service under the control of corporate entities. While the services offered are presently free, it’s not unreasonable to suppose that its ‘higher faculties’ will be monetised at some point and its specific output impacted by vested interests. I’d love to be utopian about this but I guess I’m a tad cynical.
In conclusion I think AI is probably fine for now. Until it reduces us all to husks of former selves both figuratively and literally.
I jest.
Probably.
I hear you on all these points. The thing I worry about most is, as you end up saying, who is pulling the strings and why. The distortion of capitalism that we all live inside means that the masses are going to get squeezed more and more. I fear The Hunger Games will end up being reality, only the mundane version of it. Kind of slow and boring. Like the frog in the boiling pan, that’s how it’s done. Slowly. One silent degree at at time.
Chris, Have you considered a short story compilation on other subjects beside horror ?
i.e. Christmas 50. Travel 50. Children 50. Comedy 50 etc Or no subject at all – just random short stories ?
Or have I missed the point ?
Yes we have done a Christmas stories book in the past and we are considering new options now too. I may do a survey to see which people want most. Horror has always been very niche too, so when we do film related ones we have had submissions in the thousands.