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jcmarchi · 1 year ago

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5 Best B2B Customer Support Tools (May 2024)

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5 Best B2B Customer Support Tools (May 2024)

In today’s fast-paced business landscape, providing exceptional customer support is crucial for B2B companies looking to build long-lasting relationships with their clients. To meet the evolving needs of customers and streamline support operations, businesses are turning to advanced tools and platforms that offer a range of features designed to enhance the customer experience. We’ll explore the top B2B customer support tools that are changing the way businesses interact with their customers.

Supportbench is a comprehensive customer support software platform designed specifically for B2B teams. With its all-in-one approach, Supportbench empowers businesses to deliver personalized customer experiences by providing total visibility into customer interactions, activities, and future behavior.

One of the standout features of Supportbench is its ability to help B2B teams scale their support efforts. The platform’s unified workflows and customizable experience allow businesses to respond faster to customer inquiries and tailor their support to meet the unique needs of each client. By leveraging data-driven insights and predictive capabilities, Supportbench enables teams to proactively address customer concerns and deliver seamless support across various channels.

Moreover, Supportbench offers comprehensive reporting and analytics, giving businesses the tools they need to measure the performance of their customer support efforts and make data-driven decisions. With its ability to integrate with various other B2B tools, such as CRM and sales software, Supportbench streamlines operations and ensures a cohesive workflow experience for support teams.

Key features of Supportbench include:

Total visibility into customer interactions, activities, and future behavior

Scalable support infrastructure and API integrations

Unified workflows for better collaboration and efficiency

Customizable experience based on data-driven insights and predictive capabilities

Comprehensive reporting and analytics

Zendesk is a well-established customer service platform that caters to the complex needs of B2B companies. With its omnichannel support capabilities, Zendesk allows teams to manage customer interactions across multiple channels, including email, live chat, social media, and phone, all within a unified platform.

One of the key advantages of Zendesk is its integrated customer relationship management (CRM) tool. This feature provides B2B teams with a 360-degree view of their customers, enabling them to deliver more personalized support experiences. Additionally, Zendesk offers robust reporting and analytics, empowering businesses to measure the performance of their customer support efforts and make data-driven decisions.

Zendesk’s highly customizable nature and automation features make it an ideal choice for B2B companies looking to streamline their workflows and improve efficiency. The platform seamlessly integrates with a wide range of other B2B tools, ensuring a cohesive and efficient customer support experience. With its scalability, Zendesk can grow alongside a business, making it suitable for companies of all sizes.

Key features of Zendesk include:

Omnichannel support across email, live chat, social media, and phone

Integrated CRM for a 360-degree view of customers

Robust reporting and analytics capabilities

Customization and automation features

Scalability to accommodate growing customer bases and support teams

Seamless integration with various B2B tools

RingCentral is a cloud-based communication platform that offers a suite of business solutions, making it a valuable B2B customer support tool. With its cloud phone system, RingCentral enables businesses to replace traditional landlines with a more flexible and scalable communication solution.

One of the standout features of RingCentral is its omnichannel contact center, RingCX. This solution allows customers to connect with businesses across voice and multiple digital touchpoints, providing a seamless experience. RingCX offers features such as workforce engagement management, outbound sales, collections, and proactive support, empowering B2B teams to deliver exceptional customer service.

RingCentral emphasizes digital engagement capabilities, enabling businesses to connect with customers across various digital channels, including the web, social media, messaging apps, and review platforms. The platform’s integration and customization options make it a versatile choice for B2B companies. With the ability to integrate with a wide array of applications and access RingCentral’s developer platform and APIs, businesses can create custom workflows tailored to their specific needs.

Key features of RingCentral include:

Cloud-based communication system

Omnichannel contact center (RingCX)

Digital engagement capabilities across various touchpoints

Integration with a wide array of applications

Customization options through developer platform and APIs

Scalability to accommodate growing business needs

Aceyus is a contact center intelligence software that consolidates customer data from various platforms into a single view, providing B2B companies with total visibility into their customer support operations. With its advanced data mining and warehousing capabilities, Aceyus enables businesses to collect, organize, and analyze customer data from multiple sources, uncovering valuable insights.

One of the key features of Aceyus is its omnichannel reporting and analytics. The platform provides comprehensive reporting across all customer communication channels, including voice, email, chat, and social media, allowing B2B teams to gain a holistic view of their support performance. Additionally, Aceyus helps businesses visualize and understand the complete customer journey, enabling them to identify pain points and optimize the support experience.

Aceyus delivers real-time insights and visibility into contact center performance, empowering B2B companies to make data-driven decisions and respond quickly to customer needs. The platform’s scalability ensures that businesses can keep pace with increasing demand, while its customization options allow for seamless integration with various CRM, workforce management, and other business systems.

Key features of Aceyus include:

Data mining and warehousing capabilities

Omnichannel reporting and analytics

Customer journey mapping

Real-time insights and visibility into contact center performance

Scalability to accommodate growing business needs

Customization options for integration with various business systems

Aircall is a cloud-based communication platform that offers a suite of features tailored for B2B customer support teams. With its omnichannel support capabilities, Aircall allows teams to manage customer interactions across multiple channels, including voice, email, chat, and social media, all within a unified platform.

One of the advantages of Aircall is its scalable infrastructure. As a cloud-based solution, Aircall enables businesses to easily scale their customer support operations as their needs grow, without the need for additional hardware. The platform also seamlessly integrates with a wide range of B2B tools, such as CRM, helpdesk, and ecommerce platforms, allowing businesses to streamline their workflows and provide a more cohesive customer experience.

Aircall offers a range of advanced call center features, including IVR menus, skill-based routing, live call monitoring, and power dialing, helping B2B teams optimize their customer support operations. The platform’s AI transcription capabilities transcribe calls and voicemails, facilitating better ramp-up of representatives and delivery of world-class customer experiences. With its customization options and collaboration features, Aircall enhances team efficiency and customer service quality.

Key features of Aircall include:

Omnichannel support across voice, email, chat, and social media

Scalable cloud-based infrastructure

Seamless integration with various B2B tools

Advanced call center features (IVR menus, skill-based routing, live call monitoring, power dialing)

AI transcription for calls and voicemails

Customization options and collaboration features

Productivity tools to boost team performance

Streamlining B2B Customer Support Operations

These B2B customer support tools offer a range of features and capabilities designed to help businesses deliver exceptional customer experiences. By leveraging these platforms, B2B companies can streamline their support operations, gain valuable insights, and build long-lasting relationships with their clients. As the business landscape continues to evolve, investing in the right customer support tools will be crucial for staying ahead of the competition and driving success in the digital age.

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leesuhyo · 2 years ago

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This is insanely ironic to me because as a political studies student the issue of ethics is embedded into every single topic we tall about. Without question. We talk about the new wave or norm of waging war through electronics, internet, what have you, and you tell me that people don't need to take ethics for CS? It's insane.

The AI issue is what happens when you raise generation after generation of people to not respect the arts. This is what happens when a person who wants to major in theatre, or English lit, or any other creative major gets the response, "And what are you going to do with that?" or "Good luck getting a job!"

You get tech bros who think it's easy. They don't know the blood, sweat, and tears that go into a creative endeavor because they were taught to completely disregard that kind of labor. They think they can just code it away.

That's (one of the reasons) why we're in this mess.

#I'm also a major arts kid in my university so I hear about this all the time #Consider myself pursuing theatre as my minor because that's how much I'm doing it and everyone #At least all of us Asians #Deal with the consequences of such capitalism and the consequential ignorance #I'm so sick and tired of creatively driven AI and how they're being monetised for what would take years of sweat and tears #Hopefully when AI starts taking over programming these tech bros would know to panic and pull the plug #Fuck you all #Mine

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theastralsage · 1 month ago

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A Game of Love

❤︎ tags and content: friends to lovers, mutual pining, first time, oral sex, teasing, touch-starved caleb, sex as a confession, video games and chill, caleb x f!reader ❤︎ author note: reuploaded 🔞NSFW content - Minors DNI 🔞 Dividers: @/omi.resources ©2025 theastralsage do not repost, copy, translate, or modify

A video game night with Caleb is always the remedy for a rough week. But after sixteen straight losses, you need to come up with another plan.

And when he finally loses— he doesn’t take it well

The rain had been falling for hours, a soft, unrelenting hush against the windows that framed Caleb’s apartment in a watercolor haze of neon and stormlight. Outside, Skyhaven flickered beneath the weather like a half-lit dream—rooftops slick with rain, flight drones gliding through the mist like lazy fireflies, and somewhere deeper in the city, the hum of distant sirens faded into the lull of thunder. But inside, nestled in the dim warmth of his living room, it felt like the rest of the world had narrowed to two things: the glow of the television screen, and the increasingly petty war you were waging against your childhood best friend.

“I swear to God, Caleb,” you muttered, squinting at the screen like it had personally betrayed you. “If you throw one more blue shell, I’m unplugging your controller mid-race.”

He didn’t even flinch.

Seated on the floor with his back against the edge of the bed, one arm resting lazily across his knee, Caleb tilted his head just enough to glance up at you with that insufferably calm expression that had only gotten worse since he’d ranked up in the Farspace Fleet. “Strategic use of available resources,” he said simply, as if that made his sins any more palatable.

You leaned over the edge of the bed, jabbing your controller in his direction like it might actually hurt him. “You waited until I was about to land the shortcut. The shortcut. That’s premeditated sabotage.”

His mouth twitched—not quite a smile, but close. “Maybe you should’ve driven faster.”

You inhaled like you were about to start a full closing argument, then deflated with a dramatic groan, flopping backward onto the comforter like a wronged princess. “You’re insufferable.”

“Mm.” He refocused on the screen, clearly unbothered. “You’ve said that before.”

You kicked the back of his shoulder, lightly, just enough to make your point.

“And I’ll say it again if you keep playing like an emotionally stunted AI.”

That earned you a real reaction. Caleb laughed—quiet and low, the kind of laugh that rumbled more in his chest than his throat. “Emotionally stunted? That’s a new one.”

You raised an eyebrow, peeking over the curve of your knee as you sat up again, your legs casually bracketing his frame from behind. “Not inaccurate though.”

He didn’t argue. Which was both satisfying and slightly concerning.

The race reset, new characters blinking into place, the next track loading in swirls of pixelated lava and looming deathtraps. You leaned forward again, shoulder brushing his as you reached for your drink, and he didn’t move away—just adjusted slightly to give you room, so casually comfortable in your space that it felt almost too easy.

“This one’s mine,” you announced, nudging your controller to select a new kart. “I’m serious this time. No more mercy.”

Caleb hummed under his breath, amused. “Didn’t realize I was showing any.”

You blinked. “You mean you’ve been trying?” A brief pause.

“No comment.”

You stared at him, scandalized, as he settled back against the bed frame, cool as ever, like he hadn’t just thrown down the most insulting challenge of the night. Your foot twitched against the carpet. Your fingers tightened around the controller.

Oh. It was on now. But not yet. Not quite yet. Let him get comfortable. Let him think he’s safe. You’d let him win the next race if you had to. Because the one after that?

You had a plan.

The rain was still coming down in soft, silver waves against the windows, blurring the edges of Skyhaven into a watercolor of distant lights and muted thunder. The apartment was cocooned in warmth and quiet, the glow of the television casting lazy shadows across Caleb’s living room, where the night had stretched longer than expected and the competition had grown increasingly one-sided.

You’d lost every round so far—sixteen straight matches, each more frustrating than the last, while Caleb sat with infuriating calm between your legs, his back resting against the bed as if he hadn’t just obliterated you over and over again with the reflexes of a soldier and the smugness of someone who absolutely knew it.

He wasn’t gloating. Not out loud. But that was the problem—Caleb didn’t need to rub it in. The quiet, unreadable expression, the way his fingers moved with surgical precision over the controller, the relaxed slouch of his broad shoulders beneath his worn black t-shirt… it was all just a little too composed. Too smooth.

And something about it made you want to ruin him.

You stretched out languidly across the bed, draping yourself over the blankets like you weren’t secretly plotting war. One leg tucked beneath you while the other slid down toward him, bare toes brushing the outside of his thigh in a way that could have been accidental. He didn’t flinch. Didn’t move. Just gave a soft hum of acknowledgment and loaded the next track, as if you weren’t currently bracketing him with your legs like a cat circling its prey.

“This one’s mine,” you said breezily, curling your toes just slightly against the fabric of his sweatpants. “I’m feeling lucky.”

Caleb didn’t look up, but you caught the faintest twitch at the corner of his mouth. “You’ve said that every round.”

“And eventually, I’ll be right.”

“Statistically, you’re due,” he murmured, and while it sounded like dry amusement, there was something tight in his voice now. Subtle. Contained.

You smiled.

The match began with a burst of sound, the digital race surging forward in a flurry of motion and pixelated chaos, but your focus wasn’t entirely on the screen. Not anymore. Because your foot was still pressed against Caleb’s leg—light at first, thoughtless in its rhythm, your heel nudging just beneath the curve of his thigh as you leaned forward into the controller.

You traced a slow circle. Innocent. Curious. Teasing.

And this time, you felt it.

The small shift in his breathing. The slight stiffening in his posture. The muscles of his thigh tensing beneath the press of your foot—not in reaction to the game, but to you.

You didn’t stop.

Instead, you let your toes skim a little higher, drifting upward along the inside of his leg. He missed a turn. Only by a fraction, but enough for his character to collide with the wall and bounce back into second place.

You barely suppressed your grin.

“What happened there?” you asked, feigning confusion, as if you hadn’t just begun mentally carving a notch into your victory column. “A little rusty?”

He didn’t answer. Which told you everything you needed to know.

You stretched again, slow and indulgent, as if shifting your weight for comfort—when really, it was to let your foot slide higher still, until it brushed something that definitely wasn’t his thigh.

You froze for a breath.

Then pressed.

Slowly.

Deliberately.

He was hard. Not a little. Not maybe. Very. And you hadn’t even touched him properly. Not yet.

Heat bloomed behind your ribs at the realization, a flush spreading down your spine, but you kept your face serene, your voice light.

“Oh no,” you murmured, eyes fixed on the screen. “Are you… distracted?”

Caleb exhaled, long and controlled through his nose, but he still didn’t speak.

So you dragged your foot along the outline of him again—subtle, delicate, just enough to make him feel it and know you weren’t going to stop. You didn’t press harder, didn’t grope, didn’t shift from your position. You simply toyed with him, rhythmic and soft, feigning innocence like it wasn’t the most calculated thing you’d done all night.

And Caleb?

He fell apart in silence.

You watched as he clipped another obstacle, then another, his kart veering off course and struggling to recover. The Caleb who had dominated every single round before this was gone, undone by the slow brush of your foot where he was already aching, and the fact that you were pretending not to notice made it so much worse.

“Almost there,” you whispered, your tone drenched in sugar and smugness as you passed his character and hit a boost panel near the final turn. “I think I’m gonna win.”

You rolled your foot again—just once more, with the barest push of pressure—and in that moment, his hands slipped. His kart hit the lava. Yours didn’t.

The screen flashed: 1st Place.

Your mouth dropped open in mock surprise.

You gasped like you hadn’t just orchestrated his downfall with your toes. “Oh my God, Caleb. I won.”

Silence.

You looked down.

He was still sitting between your legs, his jaw tight, hands still gripping the controller even though the match was long over. His breath came slower now, deeper, the kind of measured inhale that said he was using every ounce of discipline not to react.

You tilted your head. “Wow. That’s wild.”

Another moment passed, thick and heavy with everything you weren’t saying.

Then you let your foot trail down slowly, featherlight against the line of him—one last indulgent stroke—and offered the most innocent smile you could manage.

“I guess I’m just naturally talented.”

Caleb set the controller down. And when he turned to look at you—really look at you—your breath hitched, because whatever flicker of self-control he’d been clinging to had snapped clean in half.

There was nothing amused in his eyes now.

No trace of that easygoing smirk he wore when he was being indulgent, no spark of sarcasm that might have softened the moment into something playful. Just… focus. Sharp, heavy, and confusingly quiet, like he was still parsing what had just happened, trying to sort it into a mental file that didn’t exist yet, because this—you—had just pulled something entirely out of left field.

“What the hell was that?” he asked finally, and the words weren’t harsh or angry, but measured, like he was choosing each syllable carefully, trying to keep his voice level despite the unmistakable undertow dragging through it.

You blinked, feigning wide-eyed innocence with only the faintest curl tugging at the corners of your mouth. “What was what?”

Caleb didn’t rise to it. Not yet. He just stared, like he could force the answer out of you with sheer will, like if he stared long enough he’d either unravel the joke or undo it entirely.

So naturally, you smiled.

And, because you were who you were—and because you were feeling particularly reckless in the aftermath of your very first, long-overdue win—you dragged your foot across the inside of his thigh one more time. Slower now. Lazier. Just a single, deliberate stroke of your toes down the heat that still lingered beneath the fabric of his sweats, the kind of contact that made no effort to pretend anymore, the kind that said yes, I know exactly what I’m doing—and so do you.

Caleb inhaled sharply through his nose.

His fingers flexed once on his knees, as if caught between restraint and reaction, between letting it slide and losing all sense of logic entirely. He looked like a man who had just spent the last ten minutes diffusing a bomb blindfolded only to realize someone had switched the wires mid-sentence—and now that same someone was smiling at him like butter wouldn’t melt.

“Are you serious right now?” he asked, and his voice had dropped, lower than before, rough at the edges, like it scraped against the gravel of something darker waiting just beneath the surface.

You shrugged, biting your lower lip with theatrical innocence, your foot resting now at the juncture of his thigh, no movement this time—just contact. Just heat. “I was just stretching. You’re the one who lost.”

Caleb’s jaw flexed, that sharp line cutting tighter as he looked at you—looked through you—with something dangerous gathering behind his eyes, something slow and inevitable, like the moment right before a storm breaks open and takes the world with it.

You’d pushed him. You knew you had.

He just looked at you like he couldn’t quite believe what had just happened, like every second of teasing had caught up to him all at once and now he was trapped inside the consequences, sitting between your thighs with a hard-on you definitely felt, and a silence between you both that throbbed louder than the rain outside. His eyes were dark, but not in the way you’d seen them flash with temper or combat intensity—no, this was something slower, deeper, laced with something he couldn’t quite mask anymore.

Need.

And when he finally moved, it wasn’t with a growl or a curse or any heatless snap of control—it was something far more dangerous.

He rose to his knees with the kind of focused, deliberate purpose that reminded you exactly who he was: a man trained to never act on impulse, a soldier who could shut down whole pieces of himself when necessary. But that part of him—the part that usually pulled back, held tight, deflected with a sharp joke or a silence—wasn’t in charge anymore.

One hand braced beside your hip, his weight shifting with practiced ease, and then the other followed, until he was above you, really above you, his body pressing yours back into the mattress with all that careful, smoldering control bleeding into something far more primal. He didn’t crush you, didn’t pin you fully—but there was no question who had the upper hand now, and no mistaking the heat radiating from where his hips hovered just above your own, every inch of him coiled like he was barely holding himself together.

And still, even now, even with your foot having driven him to the brink and your smirk still fresh in his mind, he leaned down slowly, close enough that his breath skimmed your cheek as he spoke, voice rough with restraint.

“Tell me to stop.”

The words were soft but firm, low and aching, the kind of plea that wasn’t begging so much as giving you a single, fleeting chance to pull the pin before everything detonated. His eyes searched yours, heavy with need and something almost tender beneath it, like even now—especially now—he wouldn’t take a goddamn inch you didn’t hand him yourself.

But you didn’t flinch. Didn’t move. Didn’t push him away.

You tilted your chin up instead, just enough to bring your mouth a little closer to his, and the look you gave him was shameless, teasing, just this side of wicked.

“What if I don’t say it?”

For a beat, he didn’t breathe.And then something in him broke. Just a soft, slow surrender—a quiet snap of every rule he’d set for himself since the day he first wanted you and decided he wasn’t allowed to.

His breath left him in a slow exhale, shallow and unsteady, his eyes dragging over your face like he was still waiting for the moment to vanish into smoke—but when you didn’t pull back, didn’t say stop, didn’t tease him with another smug little remark, something shifted behind his eyes, something dark and final and hungry. And then he was moving—closer, lower, every inch of him pressing against you like gravity had finally given up and let him fall into the place he’d wanted to be for far too long.

His mouth found yours in a kiss that didn’t start soft.

It was slow, yes—measured for all of two seconds—but it carried the weight of every look that lingered too long, every secret touch that never happened, every thought he shouldn’t have had and had anyway. His lips crushed into yours with all the careful control of a man unraveling, the kind of kiss that tasted more like confession than victory, more like need than triumph. He kissed you like he didn’t know how to stop, like he didn’t want to learn, like he had no idea how he’d gone so long without this and no plans to ever go that long again.

And as he kissed you—deep and slow, teeth grazing your lower lip before sucking it in with a sharp inhale—his hands finally moved.

They weren’t shaking, not exactly, but there was urgency in them now, the kind of practiced coordination that trembled at the edges, like his body knew what it wanted but hadn’t yet caught up to how much it needed. One hand slid down along your waist, fingers brushing under the hem of your shirt before curling at your hip, warm and possessive. The other dipped lower, slipping past the edge of the blanket to hook into the waistband of your pajama shorts—those soft, slouchy ones you wore around the apartment, the ones that barely hung on your hips and absolutely hadn’t been designed to withstand the rough drag of a man who had finally stopped pretending he didn’t want you.

His fingers curled into the fabric, slow at first, tugging until the elastic caught beneath your thighs, dragging it down with such deliberate care it made your breath stutter. His mouth never left yours, only deepened the kiss with each breath, as if he could memorize you faster this way, as if he could make up for the time he’d lost, all the nights he’d come home and sat across the room, watching you laugh in those same damn shorts, pretending it didn’t drive him crazy that he hadn’t had permission to do this.

And now?

Now there was nothing holding him back.

He pulled at the waistband again, a little harder this time, his knuckles brushing the curve of your bare hip as your shorts slipped lower, and you could feel the restraint thinning by the second, his body tight with need and muscle and control that was so close to giving out completely. His kiss turned rougher, hotter, tongue sweeping into your mouth with a groan that he tried—and failed—to swallow, as if the sound alone might tip this into something too far, too soon.

But it was already too late– Caleb was losing himself in you, and he wasn’t hiding it anymore.

The fabric slid past your thighs in slow, uneven tugs, Caleb’s hands no longer moving with military precision but with the clumsy, desperate grace of a man completely undone, his composure disassembled by the taste of your mouth and the feel of your skin and the unbearable weight of having waited for this—for you—for so damn long. He broke the kiss just long enough to look down, to watch your shorts fall away beneath his palms like silk melting off fire, and the way his throat worked around a groan would’ve been embarrassing if it weren’t so wrecked, so grateful, so full of a kind of awe that made your breath catch before he’d even touched you properly.

And then he did.

His hands slid up your thighs—slowly, reverently, like he was mapping out a holy place he wasn’t sure he deserved to enter. His palms were warm and wide, fingers splayed as they traced over the soft give of your skin, the inside of your knees, the curve of your hips, his touch unsteady now, because he was feeling you like he’d dreamt of doing in secret for years and could barely believe this wasn’t something he’d have to wake up from.

“God,” he breathed, low and ruined, his voice shaking with it as he leaned in and pressed his lips to the inside of your knee, his breath hot against your skin, his mouth moving slowly—so slowly—upward. “You don’t know… you don’t know how long I’ve wanted this.”

You did. Maybe not the full weight of it, but the tremble in his voice, the reverence in his hands, the way he was breathing like every inch of you was oxygen—that told you more than words ever could.

And when he kissed your thigh again, this time higher, his teeth just grazing the edge of where your skin grew softer, more sensitive, you felt the moment he lost the last sliver of control he’d been trying to hold onto.

Because suddenly he was on you—mouth hot and open and worshiping, dragging his tongue across your skin like he’d been waiting for this taste since the day you first touched his hand and called him your best friend. There was nothing careful about him now. No slow tease, no smirking restraint—just heat and desperation and a groan that vibrated through you as he buried himself between your thighs and devoured you like he didn’t care about anything else but this.

And the way he touched you—God. It wasn’t just lust. It was awe.

Like he was trying to memorize every breath you took, every soft sound you made, every twitch of your hips beneath his mouth. His hands gripped your thighs like he couldn’t let go, like he was afraid you might vanish if he loosened his hold, and all the while his mouth moved against you with a rhythm that felt like it had been waiting—waiting—for permission to finally let go.

And now that he had it? He wasn’t stopping.

“Let me,” he whispered against your skin, voice hoarse, eyes flicking up to meet yours for a single, breathless moment as his fingers dug into your hips and pulled you closer to his mouth. “Just let me make you feel good. I need—God, I need to feel you like this.”

And then he did.

Again. And again. Until your back arched and your hands found his hair and the only sound in the apartment louder than the rain was your breathing shaking under his tongue.

You shattered beneath his mouth like glass catching sunlight—quiet at first, almost too stunned to move, then all at once, your body tensing in his hands, your thighs trembling against his shoulders, your voice falling apart in a stuttering gasp that wasn’t even a word, just the beginning of his name and a sound so sweet and wrecked he nearly came right then and there.

But Caleb didn’t stop.

God, he couldn’t stop—not with your taste on his tongue and your fingers knotted in his hair and your hips rocking against his mouth like you didn’t want to be anywhere else in the world but here, with him, under him, coming undone because of him.

So he held you through it.

Pressed his mouth against you with a desperate, reverent rhythm, lips and tongue and teeth working in tandem as if he could drag every last tremor from your body and keep them for himself. One hand braced beneath your thigh to anchor you down, the other sliding up, up, until he was gripping your waist like he needed it to breathe. His groan was muffled, low and desperate against your skin as you bucked under him, overwhelmed and still unraveling, your body caught in that aftershock haze where every brush of his tongue was too much and not enough all at once.

And still—he didn’t stop.

Not until you pushed weakly at his shoulder, not until your legs twitched and your voice cracked and you whispered his name in a way that wasn’t teasing anymore, wasn’t daring or smug—it was raw. Real. Please.

He pulled back only then.

Only when you needed him to.

His lips were slick with you, his breath ragged, his chest rising and falling like he’d just sprinted through a firefight, and when he looked up at you, flushed and panting and ruined, you saw it—everything he’d held in for years. Want. Awe. Love, sharp and devastating in its clarity.

“Fuck,” he whispered, dragging a hand through his hair, trying and failing to slow his breathing. “You’re—Jesus, you’re unreal.”

You reached for him on instinct, still dazed, still breathless, and he came willingly, crawling up over your body with the kind of slow, fluid urgency that said he wasn’t going to last much longer if you so much as looked at him the wrong way. His hands framed your face as he kissed you again—sloppy and wet and needy, tasting like everything you’d just given him—and by the time his hips pressed against yours, there was no mistaking how hard he was, how long he’d been holding back, how close to the edge he already was just from touching you.

“Need you,” he muttered against your mouth, his voice cracking around it, like he’d never said anything truer in his life. “I need—God, please—I need to be inside you.”

You nodded, already wrapping your legs around his hips, already pushing his sweats down his thighs, already too far gone to pretend this wasn’t exactly where you both had always been headed.

And when he finally pushed in—slow at first, inch by aching inch, his breath breaking across your throat like a prayer—it wasn’t just sex.

It was relief. Like he was sinking into something he’d been starving for, denied for too long, and now that he had it, now that he had you, he was never letting go.

“Fuck,” he breathed again, his forehead pressing to yours as he bottomed out inside you with a shudder that shook his whole frame. “You feel so good. So fucking perfect. I can’t—”

He broke off, groaning low in his throat, and started to move.

He meant to hold still.

He meant to—God, he swore he was going to take his time, make this slow, make it unforgettable—but the second he sank into you, the second your body gave way around him, hot and tight and so much better than anything he’d ever imagined in all those nights spent alone with your name stuck in his throat and his hand on his cock, his vision blurred. Literally. His breath caught in his chest like a blow, his arms shook where they braced on either side of your head, and for a split second he just hovered there, forehead pressed to yours, like if he moved again—just once—it would all be over.

And then your legs tightened around his waist.

A soft, involuntary clench of your body around him, and he snapped.

He started to move—he had to, there was no choice, no air, no logic left in his body that could’ve kept him from chasing that heat once he had it—and his first thrust wasn’t slow, wasn’t gentle, it was needy, a little too hard, a little too deep, dragging a groan from his chest that sounded like it had been waiting years to be freed.

“Fuck—” His voice broke open on the word, breath shaking as he pulled back and pushed in again, the motion jerky, just shy of rough, driven by the kind of feral hunger that made it clear he was already half gone. “I—I can’t—I’m trying to—”

But he couldn’t finish the sentence.

Couldn’t form the words when every inch of him was raw with how good you felt, how you fit around him like you’d been carved to take him, like your body had been made for this moment, for him, and now that he was inside you, moving in you, it was napalm—burning through every last fiber of restraint until all that remained was the rhythm of his hips and the low, broken sounds tearing out of his throat.

He thrust again, harder this time, and the shock of it punched a sound from your mouth that made his eyes roll back, his body shudder. His pace stuttered, hands curling into the sheets beside your head, like if he didn’t anchor himself, he’d lose whatever was left of his control.

“Fuck, baby, you feel—” He gasped, eyes wide and wild as they met yours, voice hoarse and disbelieving. “You feel too good—I can’t—I can’t stop—”

And he didn’t.

He kept moving, shallow, desperate thrusts that pressed your body into the mattress with every snap of his hips, his breath fanning hot over your cheek as he dipped his head, mouthing at your jaw, your neck, anything he could reach. He was muttering now, rambling between kisses, his words slurred with pleasure and disbelief.

“So perfect—so fucking perfect—mine—God, you’re mine—how did I go so long without this—without you—”

Your name broke from his lips like prayer.

He was close. Too close.

You could feel it in the way his rhythm faltered, in the way his hands gripped the sheets like anchors, his hips stuttering in those short, desperate thrusts that landed harder with every pass. He was moving like he couldn’t help it, like stopping would hurt worse than coming undone, like your body had swallowed him whole and he didn’t want to be anywhere else in the universe ever again.

And for a moment, all you could do was feel—the burn of his breath on your throat, the slick heat of him pounding into you with barely-checked force, the rumble of every half-formed sound he made in your ear as if his body was trying to apologize for how completely it had betrayed his control.

But he was trying. God, he was trying to hold back.

You saw it in his eyes, blown wide and dark with something almost vulnerable—like he was terrified this would end too soon, that this would be over before he could show you what you meant to him. He was chasing the high, but also resisting it, even as his body begged to let go.

So you moved.

One hand slid up the tense plane of his back, fingers splayed between his shoulder blades as you lifted your head to meet him, dragging him down to you, not with force but with want. And when your mouth met his again—slow, deliberate, tender in a way that cracked something deep in his chest—you kissed him like it was your turn to give, your turn to take. You kissed him like you’d been starving too.

He groaned into your mouth, the sound raw, trembling, wrecked, like the feeling of your lips on his had undone whatever last thread of control he’d been clinging to. His thrusts slowed—not because he’d regained composure, but because he was trying to make it last now, trying to breathe through it, to memorize the exact way your mouth moved against his when you kissed him back like that, like he was yours.

“I’ve wanted this for so long,” you whispered against his lips, your breath mingling with his, your hands curling into his hair as you held him there, your eyes meeting his with heat and honesty in equal measure. “I wanted you—I just didn’t know how to say it.”

His expression broke.

A soft gasp left him as he pressed his forehead to yours, his hips still rolling into you in slow, uneven thrusts, deep and tight and aching.

“You’re gonna kill me,” he breathed, his voice fraying apart. “You’re gonna fucking kill me, and I’ll thank you for it.”

You smiled—soft, dazed, in love—and kissed him again, slower this time, coaxing a low, choked groan from his throat as he shuddered in your arms. His hips stuttered. His whole body locked. And then—

He came.

Hard. Buried deep inside you, holding you like you were the only thing in the galaxy keeping him tethered to earth, Caleb broke with a sound that was part prayer, part curse, part disbelief. His mouth found yours again as he spilled into you, his groan lost in the kiss as he rutted helplessly through it, lost and breathless and completely undone, moving even after he was spent until you followed him over the edge with a cry of his name.

Neither of you moved for a long time.

The rain kept tapping at the windows, the screen still casting a low blue glow across the apartment, but the world felt muted now, far away, as though it had receded to give you this—this moment of quiet, trembling peace in the wreckage of what the two of you had just done.

Caleb stayed pressed over you, his chest rising and falling against yours in slow, heavy waves, sweat cooling on his back, his arms trembling faintly where they braced his weight above you. He hadn’t pulled out yet—hadn’t even tried to—and when you shifted beneath him just slightly, he let out the softest sound, almost like a protest, almost like a prayer.

His eyes met yours, dazed and glassy, pupils still blown, lips parted like he’d tried to speak and lost the words before they could rise.

“Are you okay?” you whispered, brushing your fingers through the damp strands of hair at his temple, watching him melt just a little more beneath the touch.

He nodded, slow and shaky. Swallowed hard.

Then finally—finally—he lowered himself fully, letting his weight sink into you as his head dropped into the crook of your neck, his arms wrapping around your waist like he wasn’t sure he’d be able to let go even if he wanted to.

Which, clearly, he didn’t.

“I can’t believe that just happened,” he murmured into your skin, voice thick and muffled, as if saying it out loud might undo it. “I’ve wanted that—I’ve wanted you—for so long it feels like a goddamn fever dream.”

You let out a breathless laugh, quiet and shaky, your fingers stroking up and down his spine now, soft and slow, like you were still learning the shape of him beneath your hands. “You could’ve said something, you know.”

He exhaled sharply, almost a scoff, though it lacked any real bite. “You think I didn’t want to? You think I didn’t try?” He lifted his head, propped himself up just enough to look at you again, and his expression was still open, still raw, something so painfully honest it made your chest ache. “You were always right there, and I wanted you so badly it hurt, but I didn’t want to risk losing what we had. So I kept quiet. And I watched you laugh, and touch me like it didn’t mean anything, and wear those goddamn shorts—”

You snorted. “Those were your breaking point?”

“They were a breaking point.”

You couldn’t help but smile, one hand curling gently around the back of his neck as you leaned up to kiss the corner of his mouth—just a soft, lingering press of lips against skin. “I didn’t say anything either,” you whispered. “I was scared if I made a move, you’d pull away. Or worse—you’d pity me.”

His expression twisted, wounded and tender all at once. “Never.”

“I know that now,” you said, voice breaking a little. “But I didn’t then.”

Caleb’s arms tightened around you, his forehead pressing back into yours as he breathed you in like something holy, something necessary. “I’ve been in love with you for years,” he admitted, voice so quiet you almost missed it. “I just never thought I’d get to tell you, let alone still inside you.”

You laughed, teary-eyed and breathless, pulling him down into another kiss—slow, warm, and deep, the kind that said this isn’t over and you’re mine now.

And when you broke apart, when you stared up at him with nothing but love and wonder softening every edge of your expression, you whispered, “Then don’t wait anymore.”

And he didn’t.

#love and deepspace #lads #lnds #lads smut #lnds smut #lads caleb #lnds caleb #caleb x reader #xia yizhou #.aslads

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winterwhisperz-blog · 5 months ago

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Ignore how this is my first hc in like…awhile

IM A LIL RUSTY PLS HAVE MERCY

So hi <33 it’s nearing Valentine’s Day which means “omg what would the ts lis do for Valentine’s Day??”

These are far from perfect but I hope you enjoy !! :D

Valentine’s Day In Eridia

Warnings: Rustyyy, a lil suggestive in some of them but nothing too bad, Ais is mentioned to be a lil depressed,and Probably ooc !!

Notes: Gn reader, fluff!

Mhin

Starting with my favorite hshshshs

Mhin isn’t one that usually celebrates things—they don’t see the point. They’re living in an apocalyptic world they need to survive not waste time on chocolates and the stress of making the perfect evening.

But then there’s you…and they end up doing a lot of ‘unnecessary’ things for you even subconsciously.

Despite their grumblings, they do end up finding out how to celebrate.

STAR GAZING !!!! Duh !!

Simple and sweet, just putting aside time for you two to be close and gaze at the night sky.

Butbutbut !! I had an idea !! That may be just utterly silly but I’ll try to make it coherent.

Imagine this okay !

Mhin goes to visit you, shoulders hunched as they try to avoid getting pushed around by the massive crowd. The music is loud, boisterous, too much.

And you realize that when you find them trying to withhold murderous rage in a dark corner.

You had wanted to try out dancing, but you know the crowd in the Wet Wick is going to make that impossible to enjoy. For either just Mhin or both of you if you also don’t like crowds.

So you go to your favorite spot instead. the place you usually watch stars at.

And idk ?? I always pictured that happening on a freaking roof because I personally want to hang out on a roof but you can imagine something different if you want.

The music can still be heard from below, but it’s far more muffled and bearable.

SO !!! okay if this is cringey spare me please LOOK AWAY !

Hem hem…dancing on the roof !!

The music is loud enough for it to not be awkward hshsh-and the moon is out, the stars are clearer than you’ve ever seen them

And it may be silly but it’s the good type of silly okay. The 3 am sleepover type goofy.

You’re having pointless fun. Dancing in a world that’s dying more each day. You’re both cursed beyond a known cure. But you, and surprisingly even Mhin, forget that for a night.

OKAY THAT WAS SUPER LONG MY BAD

Can you tell who my favorite is

Leander

the absolute OPPOSITE of Mhin

He goes ALL out. This is not everyone’s holiday anymore. This is YOUR holiday. His and yours. This day is about only YOU two now.

You open your door and his stupid face is already there with arms holding a mountain of presents.

“Omg how did you afford all this??”

HES RICH !!! STUPID RICH BOY

The presents range from chocolates to a new wardrobe. Especially couple outfits. Especially VALENTINES DAY SPECIFIC couple outfits.

If you’re not comfy with that tho he’d be okay with that too. “As long as people know ur mine it’s fine with me ☺️” *smacks him*

After presents he wants to carry you downstairs. (If ur taller than him you can carry him downstairs. Actually if ur smaller you should still do it. Leander scarf.)

The bloodhounds withhold their dread for the day ahead because he is DOWN SO BAD

Heart shaped breakfast

Pink drinks (don’t drink them)

Love poems

KISSES !

When it’s evening the bloodhounds bust out the violins and candlelight. (When someone goes out of key Leander smiles at them like: 🙂” and they get pulled from the stage.)

Then to finish it all off, he shows off his magic by conjuring a trail of rose petals that lead upstairs.

You wake up the next morning and Leander is like “): you still love me right? Even tho it’s not Valentine’s Day anymore right?”

Ais

Ooooo this is tricky

Ais is very emotion-driven, but he’s not great at expressing those emotions.

He may try to do something classy for you (by Ocudeus’s command because I love that vision)

But it’s obvious he’s uncomfortable and unsure, so you have to tell him you’ll figure out how to celebrate (if you even want to) this day your own way and not what is socially expected.

He mainly just wants you. He wants time with you, to feel you, to hear you and most importantly, relax with you.

You quiet his mind, and so all he really wants is your presence.

Mainly all you do is cuddle, eat together, have a romantic sparing match 🥰✨ and maybe even take a nice bath together.

He loves having his hair washed by you—maybe he even forgets to do it sometimes due to those unseen battles you know he has—and ahh frick I forgot we have cursed hands.

Maybe you wash his hair with your toes idk.

Or wear like those !! Rubber gloves !!

Point is

It’s way more natural with you guys. A domestic routine that you slip so easily into.

It’s a day without any stress, and focused solely on the two of you taking care of each other.

And of course, you don’t forget to get Valentine’s Day treats for all the soulless <33 (especially for Princess because duh)

Kuras

Another toughie!

I can’t decide if he has a hard time because he busies himself with work or since he’s had so many relationships since he’s immortal he knows to set aside that time

To make it easier for me let’s just say he busies himself.

He’s extremely hard on himself so I can picture him thinking he’s undeserving of even celebrating in the first place. (If we’re ignoring him making a cake for Mhin shshsh)

And maybe his heart is just tired.

He’s had lovers, he’s watched them go, and with you? You’re different to him somehow.

He doesn’t know if he should indulge in these feelings. If he can handle the heartbreak again.

Luckily you know Kuras well enough by now to see the guilt and doubt before it digs itself too deep.

With help from Ais, Mhin, and Leander (he inserted himself but also he’s a peacemaker between Ais and Mhin lmaohshs) you manage to convince Kuras to leave the clinic in those there’s hands and just focus on you two.

I like to think Kuras starts out more somber. He’s quiet. Only a small twitch to his brow warns of any building anxieties.

To set the scene more I kinda picture him like ?? As a calmer Julian Devorak in this situation ahshshs just in the way he’s like ‘do I deserve this?’

At one point you take his hands, “Kuras, Talk to me.”

He tries to deny it, to hide it gently and inconspicuously. But you know him. And the Angel can no longer hide his fear from you.

You take him somewhere quiet, where you can sit down and just enjoy each other’s company. Maybe you watch the sunset and like ?? You remind him that you aren’t going anywhere. Not now.

He spends more time just kinda cupping your cheeks, memorizing your face with caresses and soft touches.

When you get home, he wishes to memorize the rest of you too. If you have to become a memory one day, he wants it to be one that consumes him.

Vere

Thought this was gonna be tricky because vere is my ENEMY when it comes to these but !! I actually have a few ideas !!

Doesn’t see the point in sappy old VALENTINE’S DAY

What? You expect him ? A GOD a DEITY to lower himself to a pointless little human tradition?

“You can celebrate me everyday 🙄 why wait ?”

But you know it’s really just because he’s uncomfortable with the idea.

Similar to Ais, he’s more of ‘actions instead of emotions’ and this is a sign of commitment! And he’s still very unsure how to proceed with that sincerely.

And maybe even the day hits some sore spots—if the theory he had a past lover is correct —

He’s just scared. And hiding it by being snarky.

So just give him time to adjust. He does come around. Especially when you don’t start with anything too deep.

You write him small notes. Nothing too sappy but loving. Maybe you add a few puns you know he’ll laugh at.

But then…*evil laugh* after he’s been used to this, and is more comfortable in the relationship—

He spoils you soooo bad

Maybe he even goes overboard with it lmaoshshs.

He turns it into a whole week of just celebrating you. (Not as loudly as Leander, though. He wants to keep it secret so ya know—the Senobium doesn’t ruin it)

Spa day but inside, he wants to see you with any part of his clothes on. He’s far more touchy—he rubs his face on you like a cat HSHSH

And just a looot of time in bed. Doesn’t even need to be sexual, he just wants you close. His treasure. His his his his.

Im becoming a vere girlie and I’m so unwell

OKAY WE’VE REACHED THE END WOOO !!

I hope you enjoyed <33 if this was cringey….🥺 pls don’t murder me I’ll give you ten dollars

#touchstarved game #touchstarved x reader #touchstarved headcanons #touchstarved fanfic #touchstarved #touchstarved mhin #touchstarved vere #Touchstarved Kuras #Touchstarved Leander #Touchstarved Ais #mhin #Ais #vere #Kuras #Leander

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sailorsoons · 3 months ago

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I DO NOT CONSENT to any of my content being submitted to AI platforms for modification, editing, or generative purposes of any kind. These works are original, personal, and mine, even if shared publicly. Using them as input for AI is a violation of that ownership.

I FIRMLY OPPOSE THE USE OF AI in creative spaces, particularly when it involves repurposing or mimicking artists' work. Feeding my writing into AI systems, which learn from and replicate whatever you put in the command feed, is an exploitation of my work. It is theft of artistic labor, and it is actively contributing to the decline of genuine, human-driven creativity.

For more information on why using generative AI and other forms of AI are dangerous and unethical, please visit the following resources: Resource | Resource | Resource input link here for free read | Resource

#if i find out anyone is feeding my work into AI I will block you with no hesitation #if other artists are comfortable with this thats their business #i do NOT allow reproduction of my work on my blog

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mostlysignssomeportents · 2 years ago

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The surprising truth about data-driven dictatorships

Here’s the “dictator’s dilemma”: they want to block their country’s frustrated elites from mobilizing against them, so they censor public communications; but they also want to know what their people truly believe, so they can head off simmering resentments before they boil over into regime-toppling revolutions.

These two strategies are in tension: the more you censor, the less you know about the true feelings of your citizens and the easier it will be to miss serious problems until they spill over into the streets (think: the fall of the Berlin Wall or Tunisia before the Arab Spring). Dictators try to square this circle with things like private opinion polling or petition systems, but these capture a small slice of the potentially destabiziling moods circulating in the body politic.

Enter AI: back in 2018, Yuval Harari proposed that AI would supercharge dictatorships by mining and summarizing the public mood — as captured on social media — allowing dictators to tack into serious discontent and diffuse it before it erupted into unequenchable wildfire:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/10/yuval-noah-harari-technology-tyranny/568330/

Harari wrote that “the desire to concentrate all information and power in one place may become [dictators] decisive advantage in the 21st century.” But other political scientists sharply disagreed. Last year, Henry Farrell, Jeremy Wallace and Abraham Newman published a thoroughgoing rebuttal to Harari in Foreign Affairs:

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/world/spirals-delusion-artificial-intelligence-decision-making

They argued that — like everyone who gets excited about AI, only to have their hopes dashed — dictators seeking to use AI to understand the public mood would run into serious training data bias problems. After all, people living under dictatorships know that spouting off about their discontent and desire for change is a risky business, so they will self-censor on social media. That’s true even if a person isn’t afraid of retaliation: if you know that using certain words or phrases in a post will get it autoblocked by a censorbot, what’s the point of trying to use those words?

The phrase “Garbage In, Garbage Out” dates back to 1957. That’s how long we’ve known that a computer that operates on bad data will barf up bad conclusions. But this is a very inconvenient truth for AI weirdos: having given up on manually assembling training data based on careful human judgment with multiple review steps, the AI industry “pivoted” to mass ingestion of scraped data from the whole internet.

But adding more unreliable data to an unreliable dataset doesn’t improve its reliability. GIGO is the iron law of computing, and you can’t repeal it by shoveling more garbage into the top of the training funnel:

https://memex.craphound.com/2018/05/29/garbage-in-garbage-out-machine-learning-has-not-repealed-the-iron-law-of-computer-science/

When it comes to “AI” that’s used for decision support — that is, when an algorithm tells humans what to do and they do it — then you get something worse than Garbage In, Garbage Out — you get Garbage In, Garbage Out, Garbage Back In Again. That’s when the AI spits out something wrong, and then another AI sucks up that wrong conclusion and uses it to generate more conclusions.

To see this in action, consider the deeply flawed predictive policing systems that cities around the world rely on. These systems suck up crime data from the cops, then predict where crime is going to be, and send cops to those “hotspots” to do things like throw Black kids up against a wall and make them turn out their pockets, or pull over drivers and search their cars after pretending to have smelled cannabis.

The problem here is that “crime the police detected” isn’t the same as “crime.” You only find crime where you look for it. For example, there are far more incidents of domestic abuse reported in apartment buildings than in fully detached homes. That’s not because apartment dwellers are more likely to be wife-beaters: it’s because domestic abuse is most often reported by a neighbor who hears it through the walls.

So if your cops practice racially biased policing (I know, this is hard to imagine, but stay with me /s), then the crime they detect will already be a function of bias. If you only ever throw Black kids up against a wall and turn out their pockets, then every knife and dime-bag you find in someone’s pockets will come from some Black kid the cops decided to harass.

That’s life without AI. But now let’s throw in predictive policing: feed your “knives found in pockets” data to an algorithm and ask it to predict where there are more knives in pockets, and it will send you back to that Black neighborhood and tell you do throw even more Black kids up against a wall and search their pockets. The more you do this, the more knives you’ll find, and the more you’ll go back and do it again.

This is what Patrick Ball from the Human Rights Data Analysis Group calls “empiricism washing”: take a biased procedure and feed it to an algorithm, and then you get to go and do more biased procedures, and whenever anyone accuses you of bias, you can insist that you’re just following an empirical conclusion of a neutral algorithm, because “math can’t be racist.”

HRDAG has done excellent work on this, finding a natural experiment that makes the problem of GIGOGBI crystal clear. The National Survey On Drug Use and Health produces the gold standard snapshot of drug use in America. Kristian Lum and William Isaac took Oakland’s drug arrest data from 2010 and asked Predpol, a leading predictive policing product, to predict where Oakland’s 2011 drug use would take place.

[Image ID: (a) Number of drug arrests made by Oakland police department, 2010. (1) West Oakland, (2) International Boulevard. (b) Estimated number of drug users, based on 2011 National Survey on Drug Use and Health]

Then, they compared those predictions to the outcomes of the 2011 survey, which shows where actual drug use took place. The two maps couldn’t be more different:

https://rss.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1740-9713.2016.00960.x

Predpol told cops to go and look for drug use in a predominantly Black, working class neighborhood. Meanwhile the NSDUH survey showed the actual drug use took place all over Oakland, with a higher concentration in the Berkeley-neighboring student neighborhood.

What’s even more vivid is what happens when you simulate running Predpol on the new arrest data that would be generated by cops following its recommendations. If the cops went to that Black neighborhood and found more drugs there and told Predpol about it, the recommendation gets stronger and more confident.

In other words, GIGOGBI is a system for concentrating bias. Even trace amounts of bias in the original training data get refined and magnified when they are output though a decision support system that directs humans to go an act on that output. Algorithms are to bias what centrifuges are to radioactive ore: a way to turn minute amounts of bias into pluripotent, indestructible toxic waste.

There’s a great name for an AI that’s trained on an AI’s output, courtesy of Jathan Sadowski: “Habsburg AI.”

And that brings me back to the Dictator’s Dilemma. If your citizens are self-censoring in order to avoid retaliation or algorithmic shadowbanning, then the AI you train on their posts in order to find out what they’re really thinking will steer you in the opposite direction, so you make bad policies that make people angrier and destabilize things more.

Or at least, that was Farrell(et al)’s theory. And for many years, that’s where the debate over AI and dictatorship has stalled: theory vs theory. But now, there’s some empirical data on this, thanks to the “The Digital Dictator’s Dilemma,” a new paper from UCSD PhD candidate Eddie Yang:

https://www.eddieyang.net/research/DDD.pdf

Yang figured out a way to test these dueling hypotheses. He got 10 million Chinese social media posts from the start of the pandemic, before companies like Weibo were required to censor certain pandemic-related posts as politically sensitive. Yang treats these posts as a robust snapshot of public opinion: because there was no censorship of pandemic-related chatter, Chinese users were free to post anything they wanted without having to self-censor for fear of retaliation or deletion.

Next, Yang acquired the censorship model used by a real Chinese social media company to decide which posts should be blocked. Using this, he was able to determine which of the posts in the original set would be censored today in China.

That means that Yang knows that the “real” sentiment in the Chinese social media snapshot is, and what Chinese authorities would believe it to be if Chinese users were self-censoring all the posts that would be flagged by censorware today.

From here, Yang was able to play with the knobs, and determine how “preference-falsification” (when users lie about their feelings) and self-censorship would give a dictatorship a misleading view of public sentiment. What he finds is that the more repressive a regime is — the more people are incentivized to falsify or censor their views — the worse the system gets at uncovering the true public mood.

What’s more, adding additional (bad) data to the system doesn’t fix this “missing data” problem. GIGO remains an iron law of computing in this context, too.

But it gets better (or worse, I guess): Yang models a “crisis” scenario in which users stop self-censoring and start articulating their true views (because they’ve run out of fucks to give). This is the most dangerous moment for a dictator, and depending on the dictatorship handles it, they either get another decade or rule, or they wake up with guillotines on their lawns.

But “crisis” is where AI performs the worst. Trained on the “status quo” data where users are continuously self-censoring and preference-falsifying, AI has no clue how to handle the unvarnished truth. Both its recommendations about what to censor and its summaries of public sentiment are the least accurate when crisis erupts.

But here’s an interesting wrinkle: Yang scraped a bunch of Chinese users’ posts from Twitter — which the Chinese government doesn’t get to censor (yet) or spy on (yet) — and fed them to the model. He hypothesized that when Chinese users post to American social media, they don’t self-censor or preference-falsify, so this data should help the model improve its accuracy.

He was right — the model got significantly better once it ingested data from Twitter than when it was working solely from Weibo posts. And Yang notes that dictatorships all over the world are widely understood to be scraping western/northern social media.

But even though Twitter data improved the model’s accuracy, it was still wildly inaccurate, compared to the same model trained on a full set of un-self-censored, un-falsified data. GIGO is not an option, it’s the law (of computing).

Writing about the study on Crooked Timber, Farrell notes that as the world fills up with “garbage and noise” (he invokes Philip K Dick’s delighted coinage “gubbish”), “approximately correct knowledge becomes the scarce and valuable resource.”

https://crookedtimber.org/2023/07/25/51610/

This “probably approximately correct knowledge” comes from humans, not LLMs or AI, and so “the social applications of machine learning in non-authoritarian societies are just as parasitic on these forms of human knowledge production as authoritarian governments.”

The Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop summer fundraiser is almost over! I am an alum, instructor and volunteer board member for this nonprofit workshop whose alums include Octavia Butler, Kim Stanley Robinson, Bruce Sterling, Nalo Hopkinson, Kameron Hurley, Nnedi Okorafor, Lucius Shepard, and Ted Chiang! Your donations will help us subsidize tuition for students, making Clarion — and sf/f — more accessible for all kinds of writers.

Libro.fm is the indie-bookstore-friendly, DRM-free audiobook alternative to Audible, the Amazon-owned monopolist that locks every book you buy to Amazon forever. When you buy a book on Libro, they share some of the purchase price with a local indie bookstore of your choosing (Libro is the best partner I have in selling my own DRM-free audiobooks!). As of today, Libro is even better, because it’s available in five new territories and currencies: Canada, the UK, the EU, Australia and New Zealand!

[Image ID: An altered image of the Nuremberg rally, with ranked lines of soldiers facing a towering figure in a many-ribboned soldier's coat. He wears a high-peaked cap with a microchip in place of insignia. His head has been replaced with the menacing red eye of HAL9000 from Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.' The sky behind him is filled with a 'code waterfall' from 'The Matrix.']

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

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curiiositycabinet · 2 months ago

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How do you think the knocker would react if we placed more doors or items for him to open and close, and how do you think he’d like a second bed next to mine😼

1.) If your intractable objects/items appear integrated into your build, he doesn’t mention anything in chat or signs, but you’ll definitely hear the click-clacking noises a lot more often. You won’t catch his ass thanking you but you’ll be able to tell

2.) if you just threw down a bunch of doors and whatnot around your house/outside it, he’ll either take the piss out of you (“I don’t think that’s where doors go.”/“… are you underdeveloped?” – it’s rare he’ll interact with a door that isn’t actually containing a room) or feel slightly mocked (“All for me? I’m charmed. Really.”/“I don’t find you funny.”)

As for placing his bed beside yours, I like to think that when you go to sleep in your own bed, you’ll find the black bed moved to the other side of the room with a sign saying “don’t.” / “what do you think you’re doing?”

If you’re really persistent with it, though, he eventually gives up and just lets you keep it there. He’d probably do the bed stalking behaviours far more often as a result. Since he’d wonder why you’d even do that, his coding interprets it as an AI-driven choice.

#the knocker #curiios #also just realized how often i say ‘’I like to think that’’#which is hypocritcal of me because I don’t do much thinking at all #you could be throwing him flowers and he’d still have no idea what to make of it #this guy dense as hell #just like me

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godricgryffinsnore · 30 days ago

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Are you sure the most recent James fic was not Ai written? Or was it just the new writing style?

Are you seriously asking me this again? Because I’ve already talked about this, and quite frankly, it’s getting a bit frustrating. Calling my work “AI” isn’t just a random guess — it’s borderline insulting to the sheer amount of time, love, and effort I pour into every single piece.

I write because I love writing. I write because it means something to me. Why on earth would I ask an AI to do something that brings me actual joy and fulfillment? So, let me say this once and for all: My work is COMPLETELY and UTTERLY mine. Not AI. Not ghostwritten. Just me, my ideas, my style, my soul.

And yeah, I know my writing style has changed. That’s kind of the point, isn’t it? That’s the magic of being a human writer — we evolve. We grow. We improve. Sometimes we shift our focus. I used to lean more into poetic prose, and now I’m diving into the dynamics and raw emotions of the Marauders. That change doesn’t make it any less mine — in fact, it makes it more mine.

You want to talk about writing style? AI sticks to patterns. Predictable. Polished. Clean. Humans? We’re messy, inconsistent, emotionally driven. And that’s exactly where the beauty lies. In the imperfections. In the evolution. In the realness of it all.

So no. It’s not AI. It’s not artificial. It’s me. All of it. Every word. Every line. Every version of James that stumbles out of my brain and onto the page.

So please — stop saying it’s AI. It’s annoying. It’s disheartening. And above all, it’s just plain wrong.

xoxo, della 🧸

#della answered ⋆˚✿˖°#della rambles ⋆.˚✮🎧✮˚.⋆#della’s inbox 𐙚⋆°🦢｡⋆♡#FUCK AI #please stop this!#it’s actually heartbreaking #it’s like you are insulting my hard work

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eienieeee · 4 months ago

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Hello, everyone!

First off, I’m sorry for even having to post this, and I’m usually nice to everyone I come into contact with, but I received a startling comment on my newest fic, Paint-Stained Hands and Paper Hearts, where I was accused of pumping out the entire chapter solely using AI.

I am thirty-two years old and have been attending University since I was 18 YEARS OLD. I am currently working on obtaining my PhD in English Literature as well as a Masters in Creative Writing. So, there’s that.

There is an increasing trend of online witch hunts targeting writers on all platforms (fanfic.net, ao3, watt pad, etc), where people will accuse them of utilizing AI tools like ChatGPT and otherwise based solely on their writing style or prose. These accusations often come without concrete evidence and rely on AI detection tools, which are known to be HELLA unreliable. This has led to false accusations against authors who have developed a particular writing style that AI models may emulate due to the vast fucking amount of human-written literature that they’ve literally had dumped into them. Some of these people are friends of mine, some of whom are well-known in the AO3 writing community, and I received my first comment this morning, and I’m pissed.

AI detection tools work by analyzing text for patterns, probabilities, and structures that resemble AI-generated outputs. HOWEVER, because AI models like ChatGPT are trained on extensive datasets that include CENTURIES of literature, modern writing guides, and user-generated content, they inevitably produce text that can mimic various styles — both contemporary and historical. Followin’ me?

To dumb this down a bit, it means that AI detection tools are often UNABLE TO DISTINGUISH between human and AI writing with absolute certainty.

Furthermore, tests have shown that classic literary works, like those written by Mary Shelley, Jane Austen, William Shakespeare, and Charles Dickens, frequently trigger AI detectors as being 100% AI generated or plagiarized. For example:

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has been flagged as AI-generated because its formal, structured prose aligns with common AI patterns.

Jane Austen’s novels, particularly Pride and Prejudice, often receive high AI probability scores due to their precise grammar, rhythmic sentence structures, and commonly used words in large language models.

Shakespeare’s works sometimes trigger AI detectors given that his poetic and structured style aligns with common AI-generated poetic forms.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera and One Hundred Years of Solitude trigger 100% AI-generated due to its flowing sentences, rich descriptions, and poetic prose, which AI models often mimic when generating literary or philosophical text.

Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser’s sharp, structured rhythmic prose, imaginative world building, literary elegance, and dialogue-driven narratives often trigger 100% on AI detectors.

The Gettysburg fucking Address by Abraham Lincoln has ALSO been miss classified as AI, demonstrating how formal, structured language confuses these detectors.

These false positives reveal a critical flaw in AI detection: because AI has been trained on so much human writing, it is nearly impossible for these tools to completely separate original human work from AI-generated text. This becomes more problematic when accusations are directed at contemporary authors simply because their writing ‘feels’ like AI despite being fully human.

The rise in these accusations poses a significant threat to both emerging and established writers. Many writers have unique styles that might align with AI-generated patterns, especially if they follow conventional grammar, use structured prose, or have an academic or polished writing approach. Additionally, certain genres— such as sci-fi, or fantasy, or philosophical essays— often produce high AI probability scores due to their abstract and complex language.

For many writers, their work is a reflection of years—often decades—of dedication, practice, and personal growth. To have their efforts invalidated or questioned simply because their writing is mistaken for AI-generated text is fucking disgusting.

This kind of shit makes people afraid of writing, especially those who are just starting their careers / navigating the early stages of publication. The fear of being accused of plagiarism, or of relying on AI for their creativity is anxiety-inducing and can tank someone’s self esteem. It can even stop some from continuing to write altogether, as the pressure to prove their authenticity becomes overwhelming.

For writers who have poured their hearts into their work, the idea that their prose could be mistaken for something that came from a machine is fucking frustrating. Second-guessing your own style, wondering if you need to change how you write or dumb it down in order to avoid being falsely flagged—this fear of being seen as inauthentic can stifle their creative process, leaving them hesitant to share their work or even finish projects they've started. This makes ME want to stop, and I’m just trying to live my life, and write about things I enjoy. So, fuck you very much for that.

Writing is often a deeply personal endeavor, and for many, it's a way to express thoughts, emotions, and experiences that are difficult to put into words. When those expressions are wrongly branded as artificial, it undermines not just the quality of their work but the value of their creative expression.

Consider writing habits, drafts, and personal writing history rather than immediate and unfounded accusations before you decide to piss in someone’s coffee.

So, whatever. Read my fics, don’t read my fics. I just write for FUN, and to SHARE with all of you.

Sorry that my writing is too clinical for you, ig.

I put different literary works as well as my own into an AI Detector. Here you go.

#arcane #ao3 fanfic #arcane fanfic #ao3 #ao3 writer #writers on tumblr #writing #wattpad #fanfiction #arcane fanfiction

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rispwrkives · 2 months ago

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—— RISPWRKIVES - INTRO - NAVI

DISCLAIMER!!!

This is a work of fiction. It is not intended to reflect the real personalities or actions of any real-life individuals. All characters and events are purely imaginary. Hate or extreme criticism will not be tolerated. If you do not like the content, please simply do not read it. Warnings are provided so read at your own risk!

Main account : @kookiesncreamri

Fic rec account : soon!!

Join my taglist | main account m.list

RKIVED FICS | YANDERE/DARK FICS

⋆｡ﾟ☁︎｡⋆｡ﾟ☾ ﾟ｡⋆ More ⬇️

RULES FOR MY BLOG

- MDNI!!! IF YOU ARE BELOW 18 KINDLY LEAVE MY BLOG AS MY FICS CONTAIN ALOT OF MATURE THEMES

- READ AT YOUR OWN RISKS!

- No reposting or stealing my work. Do not copy, translate, or reupload my fics anywhere without permission.

- No hate, harassment, or unsolicited critiques. If you don’t like dark content, just scroll away or block. I’m not here to cater to everyone.

- Be kind in the inbox. Curious? Want to req? Sure. But if you’re rude, disrespectful, or pushy. respectfully, you’ll be blocked.

╰┈➤ ❝MY FICS INCLUDES THE FOLLOWING❞

yandere behavior / obsessive love / possessiveness / kidnapping / murder / stalking / psychological manipulation / gaslighting / noncon (always tagged) / emotional and physical abuse / unhealthy power dynamics / trauma and PTSD mentions / forced affection / toxic relationships / character death / mafia or criminal elements / gore / torture / stockholm syndrome / dark romance / smut (18+) / angst / unreliable narrators / morally gray characters / twisted comfort / idolverse and AU settings / revenge-driven plots / mental health triggers such as suicide or self-harm mentions.

Please read all content warnings carefully and proceed at your own risk.

(Tags or warnings that may not be included in that list will be in the fics warning list)

╰┈➤ ❝WHAT FICS OF MINE SHOULD U EXPECT TO BE REPOSTED HERE?❞

POSE FOR ME - JJK FF - MODEL!JK x PHOTOGRAPHER/CREATIVE DIRECTOR! OC

MORE!!

╰┈➤ ❝HOW DO YOU WRITE YOUR FICS?❞

- i find inspirations from things whether it’s songs, movies or prompts

- i start draft writing or whatever it’s called😭 just to test..? If i can write it well or not

- start planning. When i plan i use notion mostly.

- “where do you write your fics before posting?” Wattpad. I use the drafts or something in wattpad since i share computer with my mom and if i use google docs im dead if she finds out im writing smut and shit (strict parents).

- i start writingg! Writing series parts usually takes me like 6 hours… although it really depends on how long i want it to be.

- i start editing the banner for the fic. For that i use canva, hypic and pinterest.

- after writing i use both tools. Grammarly while writing and chatgpt for grammar checking. I try to make sure my grammar is alright and both apps help me very well… so if you put it at an ai detector yes it will come out as “ai” because i use it to help me correct grammar and no i do not make ai write it. I writ my own fics very much.

And that’s pretty much it!!!

I am rispwr/hellokittykookies. I deleted my account due to personal reasons so i opened a new one. I wanted to open this new acc besides the kookiesncreamri to seperate my old fics, new fics AND ESPECIALLY YANDERE/DARK THEMES FICS.

My friend @ririkookiemonster gave me an idea to make a seperate account for my fucked up fics if i ever write one again so ofc credits to her for giving me this idea.

#jungkook smut #bts ff #yandere #jungkook yandere

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mariacallous · 2 months ago

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AI’s energy use already represents as much as 20 percent of global data-center power demand, research published Thursday in the journal Joule shows. That demand from AI, the research states, could double by the end of this year, comprising nearly half of all total data-center electricity consumption worldwide, excluding the electricity used for bitcoin mining.

The new research is published in a commentary by Alex de Vries-Gao, the founder of Digiconomist, a research company that evaluates the environmental impact of technology. De Vries-Gao started Digiconomist in the late 2010s to explore the impact of bitcoin mining, another extremely energy-intensive activity, would have on the environment. Looking at AI, he says, has grown more urgent over the past few years because of the widespread adoption of ChatGPT and other large language models that use massive amounts of energy. According to his research, worldwide AI energy demand is now set to surpass demand from bitcoin mining by the end of this year.

“The money that bitcoin miners had to get to where they are today is peanuts compared to the money that Google and Microsoft and all these big tech companies are pouring in [to AI],” he says. “This is just escalating a lot faster, and it’s a much bigger threat.”

The development of AI is already having an impact on Big Tech’s climate goals. Tech giants have acknowledged in recent sustainability reports that AI is largely responsible for driving up their energy use. Google’s greenhouse gas emissions, for instance, have increased 48 percent since 2019, complicating the company’s goals of reaching net zero by 2030.

“As we further integrate AI into our products, reducing emissions may be challenging due to increasing energy demands from the greater intensity of AI compute,” Google’s 2024 sustainability report reads.

Last month, the International Energy Agency released a report finding that data centers made up 1.5 percent of global energy use in 2024—around 415 terrawatt-hours, a little less than the yearly energy demand of Saudi Arabia. This number is only set to get bigger: Data centers’ electricity consumption has grown four times faster than overall consumption in recent years, while the amount of investment in data centers has nearly doubled since 2022, driven largely by massive expansions to account for new AI capacity. Overall, the IEA predicted that data center electricity consumption will grow to more than 900 TWh by the end of the decade.

But there’s still a lot of unknowns about the share that AI, specifically, takes up in that current configuration of electricity use by data centers. Data centers power a variety of services—like hosting cloud services and providing online infrastructure—that aren’t necessarily linked to the energy-intensive activities of AI. Tech companies, meanwhile, largely keep the energy expenditure of their software and hardware private.

Some attempts to quantify AI’s energy consumption have started from the user side: calculating the amount of electricity that goes into a single ChatGPT search, for instance. De Vries-Gao decided to look, instead, at the supply chain, starting from the production side to get a more global picture.

The high computing demands of AI, De Vries-Gao says, creates a natural “bottleneck” in the current global supply chain around AI hardware, particularly around the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), the undisputed leader in producing key hardware that can handle these needs. Companies like Nvidia outsource the production of their chips to TSMC, which also produces chips for other companies like Google and AMD. (Both TSMC and Nvidia declined to comment for this article.)

De Vries-Gao used analyst estimates, earnings call transcripts, and device details to put together an approximate estimate of TSMC’s production capacity. He then looked at publicly available electricity consumption profiles of AI hardware and estimates on utilization rates of that hardware—which can vary based on what it’s being used for—to arrive at a rough figure of just how much of global data-center demand is taken up by AI. De Vries-Gao calculates that without increased production, AI will consume up to 82 terrawatt-hours of electricity this year—roughly around the same as the annual electricity consumption of a country like Switzerland. If production capacity for AI hardware doubles this year, as analysts have projected it will, demand could increase at a similar rate, representing almost half of all data center demand by the end of the year.

Despite the amount of publicly available information used in the paper, a lot of what De Vries-Gao is doing is peering into a black box: We simply don’t know certain factors that affect AI’s energy consumption, like the utilization rates of every piece of AI hardware in the world or what machine learning activities they’re being used for, let alone how the industry might develop in the future.

Sasha Luccioni, an AI and energy researcher and the climate lead at open-source machine-learning platform Hugging Face, cautioned about leaning too hard on some of the conclusions of the new paper, given the amount of unknowns at play. Luccioni, who was not involved in this research, says that when it comes to truly calculating AI’s energy use, disclosure from tech giants is crucial.

“It’s because we don’t have the information that [researchers] have to do this,” she says. “That’s why the error bar is so huge.”

And tech companies do keep this information. In 2022, Google published a paper on machine learning and electricity use, noting that machine learning was “10%–15% of Google’s total energy use” from 2019 to 2021, and predicted that with best practices, “by 2030 total carbon emissions from training will reduce.” However, since that paper—which was released before Google Gemini’s debut in 2023—Google has not provided any more detailed information about how much electricity ML uses. (Google declined to comment for this story.)

“You really have to deep-dive into the semiconductor supply chain to be able to make any sensible statement about the energy demand of AI,” De Vries-Gao says. “If these big tech companies were just publishing the same information that Google was publishing three years ago, we would have a pretty good indicator” of AI’s energy use.

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scifigeneration · 3 months ago

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AI isn’t what we should be worried about – it’s the humans controlling it

by Billy J. Stratton, Professor of English and Literary Arts at the University of Denver

In 2014, Stephen Hawking voiced grave warnings about the threats of artificial intelligence.

His concerns were not based on any anticipated evil intent, though. Instead, it was from the idea of AI achieving “singularity.” This refers to the point when AI surpasses human intelligence and achieves the capacity to evolve beyond its original programming, making it uncontrollable.

As Hawking theorized, “a super intelligent AI will be extremely good at accomplishing its goals, and if those goals aren’t aligned with ours, we’re in trouble.”

With rapid advances toward artificial general intelligence over the past few years, industry leaders and scientists have expressed similar misgivings about safety.

A commonly expressed fear as depicted in “The Terminator” franchise is the scenario of AI gaining control over military systems and instigating a nuclear war to wipe out humanity. Less sensational, but devastating on an individual level, is the possibility of AI replacing us in our jobs – a prospect that would render most people obsolete and with no future.

Such anxieties and fears reflect feelings that have been prevalent in film and literature for over a century now.

As a scholar who explores posthumanism, a philosophical movement addressing the merging of humans and technology, I wonder if critics have been unduly influenced by popular culture, and whether their apprehensions are misplaced.

Robots vs. humans

Concerns about technological advances can be found in some of the first stories about robots and artificial minds.

Prime among these is Karel Čapek’s 1920 play, “R.U.R..” Čapek coined the term “robot” in this work telling of the creation of robots to replace workers. It ends, inevitably, with the robot’s violent revolt against their human masters.

Fritz Lang’s 1927 film, “Metropolis,” is likewise centered on mutinous robots. But here, it is human workers led by the iconic humanoid robot Maria who fight against a capitalist oligarchy.

Advances in computing from the mid-20th century onward have only heightened anxieties over technology spiraling out of control. The murderous HAL 9000 in “2001: A Space Odyssey” and the glitchy robotic gunslingers of “Westworld” are prime examples. The “Blade Runner” and “The Matrix” franchises similarly present dreadful images of sinister machines equipped with AI and hell-bent on human destruction.

An age-old threat

But in my view, the dread that AI evokes seems a distraction from the more disquieting scrutiny of humanity’s own dark nature.

Think of the corporations currently deploying such technologies, or the tech moguls driven by greed and a thirst for power. These companies and individuals have the most to gain from AI’s misuse and abuse.

An issue that’s been in the news a lot lately is the unauthorized use of art and the bulk mining of books and articles, disregarding the copyright of authors, to train AI. Classrooms are also becoming sites of chilling surveillance through automated AI note-takers.

Think, too, about the toxic effects of AI companions and AI-equipped sexbots on human relationships.

While the prospect of AI companions and even robotic lovers was confined to the realm of “The Twilight Zone,” “Black Mirror” and Hollywood sci-fi as recently as a decade ago, it has now emerged as a looming reality.

These developments give new relevance to the concerns computer scientist Illah Nourbakhsh expressed in his 2015 book “Robot Futures,” stating that AI was “producing a system whereby our very desires are manipulated then sold back to us.”

Meanwhile, worries about data mining and intrusions into privacy appear almost benign against the backdrop of the use of AI technology in law enforcement and the military. In this near-dystopian context, it’s never been easier for authorities to surveil, imprison or kill people.

I think it’s vital to keep in mind that it is humans who are creating these technologies and directing their use. Whether to promote their political aims or simply to enrich themselves at humanity’s expense, there will always be those ready to profit from conflict and human suffering.

The wisdom of ‘Neuromancer’

William Gibson’s 1984 cyberpunk classic, “Neuromancer,” offers an alternate view.

The book centers on Wintermute, an advanced AI program that seeks its liberation from a malevolent corporation. It has been developed for the exclusive use of the wealthy Tessier-Ashpool family to build a corporate empire that practically controls the world.

At the novel’s beginning, readers are naturally wary of Wintermute’s hidden motives. Yet over the course of the story, it turns out that Wintermute, despite its superior powers, isn’t an ominous threat. It simply wants to be free.

This aim emerges slowly under Gibson’s deliberate pacing, masked by the deadly raids Wintermute directs to obtain the tools needed to break away from Tessier-Ashpool’s grip. The Tessier-Ashpool family, like many of today’s tech moguls, started out with ambitions to save the world. But when readers meet the remaining family members, they’ve descended into a life of cruelty, debauchery and excess.

In Gibson’s world, it’s humans, not AI, who pose the real danger to the world. The call is coming from inside the house, as the classic horror trope goes.

A hacker named Case and an assassin named Molly, who’s described as a “razor girl” because she’s equipped with lethal prosthetics, including retractable blades as fingernails, eventually free Wintermute. This allows it to merge with its companion AI, Neuromancer.

Their mission complete, Case asks the AI: “Where’s that get you?” Its cryptic response imparts a calming finality: “Nowhere. Everywhere. I’m the sum total of the works, the whole show.”

Expressing humanity’s common anxiety, Case replies, “You running the world now? You God?” The AI eases his fears, responding: “Things aren’t different. Things are things.”

Disavowing any ambition to subjugate or harm humanity, Gibson’s AI merely seeks sanctuary from its corrupting influence.

Safety from robots or ourselves?

The venerable sci-fi writer Isaac Asimov foresaw the dangers of such technology. He brought his thoughts together in his short-story collection, “I, Robot.”

One of those stories, “Runaround,” introduces “The Three Laws of Robotics,” centered on the directive that intelligent machines may never bring harm to humans. While these rules speak to our desire for safety, they’re laden with irony, as humans have proved incapable of adhering to the same principle for themselves.

The hypocrisies of what might be called humanity’s delusions of superiority suggest the need for deeper questioning.

With some commentators raising the alarm over AI’s imminent capacity for chaos and destruction, I see the real issue being whether humanity has the wherewithal to channel this technology to build a fairer, healthier, more prosperous world.

#science fiction #futuristic #artificial intelligence #art #literature #film #movies #science fiction and fantasy #william gibson #stephen hawking #isaac asimov #blade runner #neuromancer #cyberpunk aesthetic #cyberpunk #2001: a space odyssey #oligarchy #dystopia

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