Book Trailer - The Man from Rock Bottom; Or, Why I Did It Myself

The Wasted Lands of Earth, B&W version - by Astanael - https://www.deviantart.com/astanael

While working with first my publisher, and later with a severely disappointing publicist group, I have come face to face with the reality that far too many people seem absolutely convinced that generative AI - what I like to call "iteration engines," since it's much more descriptive of what they are and what they do - is the be-all and end-all to all their creative needs. No longer will companies have to pay thousands of dollars for art or videos, but can instead just type a few choice phrases into the engine, take on the title of "director," and take whatever it produces with minimal oversight.

Just now, the iteration engine for Wix happily suggested an entire short article for this week after I provided it with the title and a brief description.

In my book, The Man from Rock Bottom, I even have a friendly artificial intelligence, the City Central Computer System, without which Sunflower City, the main site of the action in the story, simply couldn't function, since it deals with a system far too complex for any single mortal mind to fully comprehend. Even then, City Central acts as a coordinator for a host of other systems, rather than taking on the entire job by itself.

(City Central, or just Central, incidentally, as well as Sunflower City, ended up looking like an idealized version of Saudi Arabia's The Line, even though I didn't know that even existed until I'd finished the book. A friend and classmate who'd read the book mentioned the Line to me - he was from Saudi Arabia, as it turns out - and I found the idea intriguing as a parallel evolution of ideas.)

Having said all of that, I also wrote an academic article exploring the use of Gen AI, both in academia and in professional writing. To sum up my findings: on the one hand, one of the most vital skills that most companies want from new hires is the ability to do critical thinking. Conversely, the iteration engines that seem to be so popular have the unfortunate tendency to discourage critical thinking in their users, actively and very literally taking over every aspect of the creative process unless closely supervised and tightly reined in.

Based on what I discovered from messing around with ChatGPT, I discovered that it would happily take a brief question and fill up the entire screen with its answers. It did the same with any prompt, actually. The quality was highly variable, though got pretty good if I was careful and selective in my use of the engine, as well as if I edited what it produced heavily and made sure to check all facts and citations multiple times.

Or, in other words, iteration engines as they are right now have a great deal of potential as tools, but only if they're very carefully used in a supplementary role. If they're used to replace everything without consideration or editing, the products of the engines range from the mediocre to the awful, and worse yet, the users of the iteration engines end up accepting the mediocre to the awful as the new normal. I observed this personally with the last publicist group with whom I started to have dealings, and promptly cut off my association with them as soon as I realized what was happening.

So, instead of the AI-generated slop that my former publicists tried to palm off on me as a book trailer, here's my own take on the subject. It's obviously an amateur's work and I know it's got a lot of flaws, but I made it myself and I can feel a certain amount of pride in the act, because the mistakes are my own, not the product of a non-person entity that simply can't tell the difference:

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/12f6be_5e6b0c69d3a44d26902cab0c9669cdc5/720p/mp4/file.mp4