CJW: Welcome to the latest edition. We're glad to have you, and hope life has been treating you kindly (or you've been finding the strength if and where it hasn't).
nothing here but a dangerous and irrational toilet
issue 227 - 23rd July, 2023
CJW: Welcome back. Hope you're keeping your head above water, and taking the time to look out for yourself and those closest to you. Let's get to this fortnight's dispatch, shall we.
Despite the appealing visuals and iconography of the sabbath or witches communing with demons disguised as goats, one of the most credible sources about that topic is Carlo Ginzburg’s Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches' Sabbath Book. The historian takes about 300 pages to show you that, according to documents that survived the passage of time, possibly there were no such things as night reunions in the forest, flying witches and groups organized as covens, but a few people who were getting high on mushrooms and ointments and seeing things.
MJW: This year it is ten years since I joined twitter. I haven't been on there for much lately - I'd been dropping off for the past few years and at this point I haven't even had a scroll since the early days of the Elon take over.
CJW: Welcome back. Good to have you with us. I hope you're keeping your head above water, and reaching out to help others around you do the same. It's tough out there, and feels like it's only getting tougher. So look out for yourself and your loved one.
# Experiments in Expectation 2: ChatGPT Hours
## issue 215 - 23rd April, 2023
Corey J. White
---
It started with a tweet from [Buddy](https://buddieswithout.org/) [Matt](https://xenogothic.com/):
> I asked ChatGPT who I am and it gave me a new book and a new job. I asked it about the book it had invented for me, and it actually does sound like something I would (and probably will) write...
> [Feb. 19, 2023, 3:59 p.m.](https://twitter.com/xenogothic/status/1627337200722407426)
> [*[*Click through for Chat's full output*](https://twitter.com/xenogothic/status/1627337200722407426)*.]
On the newsletter I've previously talked about the need for a "knowledge" approach to LLMs that are to be used for search and academic queries - a way for the model to confirm the information it's giving to the user[^1] [^2]. But, of course, there are interesting uses for the bullshit that these models often regurgitate. Here, ChatGPT detailed a book by Matt Colquhoun that it had entirely dreamed up but, as mentioned by Matt, is something that they would consider writing.
I thought [I'd give it a shot myself](https://twitter.com/cjwhite/status/1635461814636134401), hoping that I'd get some interesting output, even though I have not added anywhere near as many words to the LLM collective corpus as Matt.
> **CJW: Who is Corey J. White?**
>
> **CGPT:** Corey J. White is an Australian science fiction author. He[^3] was born in the Hunter Valley region of New South Wales, Australia, in 1988. He is best known for his Voidwitch Saga, a series of science fiction novellas that follow the adventures of a genetically modified human named Mars Xi. The series includes "Killing Gravity," "Void Black Shadow," and "Static Ruin."
>
> White has also written several other science fiction works, including the novella "The Sea of the Dead," which won the Aurealis Award for Best Science Fiction Novella in 2018. He has been nominated for several other awards, including the Ditmar Award and the Norma K. Hemming Award.
>
> White is a member of the Clarion West Writing Workshop Class of 2015 and has been a finalist for the Writers of the Future contest. He currently lives in Melbourne, Australia.
Right away, and unprompted, ChatGPT also created a new book which I had supposedly written, just like it had done for Matt. So, the next thing to do is to ask it for more information...
---
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