#Ben Sackler

[tomatette]

Megalopolis - Official Teaser (2024)

[hauntingoldhouses]

the heist

[deepinthelight]

Adam Driver and his characters

[cndcrd]

ADCU Valentine's Day Cards 💌✨

[mothdruid]

Adam Driver - dilf number thirty-four

[adamdr1ver]

unreal

[inklore]

❥ — smut | ✶ — dark content

kylo ren.

one shots

piteous toxin (1.1k) ❥

hate and humility ran your relationship with kylo, as did the heavy hand he loved having you wrap around his throat.

ben solo.

one shots

garage rooftop (1k)

the lines of friendship or something more grow more blurry the longer your eyes move from each mole, his cheek bones, his dark eyes, his lips. and you really don’t understand why the two of you hadn’t become something more ages ago.

commander mills.

one shots

warning signs (1.1k) ❥

if the two of you were to die like this; with mills rutting against you, his cock stretching you, his deep breaths and praises against your ear, your slick coating his length as you come, then so be it.

adam sackler.

blurbs

head in your lap

[clqoo]

pretty boy 🫶

[driverssource]

Happy Birthday, my beloved! 🥰💗

— all the gifs were made by me! <3

[cosmic-ships]

Phillip, Sackler, and Kylo.... have really been helping me through some bullshit.

Just been writing and writing and writing while also being in this safe spot. I'm not going to post them though because they're incredibly dark(my thoughts) and personal to me and I'm not comfortable with sharing that.

Just know these 3 have me... I won't say anything more than that...

[tomatette]

We’re lighting up the streets tonight Surviving as we figure this out Everywhere we could go Everything we could do There’s no stopping us now There’s nothing stopping us now

Bonus: 

[theladyship]

Kylo breaking up with you because he just started force dating Rey. 🥹

[weareallstoriesintheend]

Etsy Shop is RE-OPENING!

Hi All!

I'm re-opening my Etsy shop! 🥰

For those of you that are new I own an Etsy shop where I take personalized commissions for Adam Driver and Marvel character one shots.

I'm happy to work with you on whichever character, storyline or personalized element you would like. You can also request personalised versions of fics I have already published here or on AO3.

There are 1k & 2k options for both new NSFW and SFW fics.

Please get in touch if you would like to discuss ideas. 😍

[mostlysignssomeportents]

How plausible sentence generators are changing the bullshit wars

This Friday (September 8) at 10hPT/17hUK, I'm livestreaming "How To Dismantle the Internet" with Intelligence Squared.

On September 12 at 7pm, I'll be at Toronto's Another Story Bookshop with my new book The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation.

In my latest Locus Magazine column, "Plausible Sentence Generators," I describe how I unwittingly came to use – and even be impressed by – an AI chatbot – and what this means for a specialized, highly salient form of writing, namely, "bullshit":

https://locusmag.com/2023/09/commentary-by-cory-doctorow-plausible-sentence-generators/

Here's what happened: I got stranded at JFK due to heavy weather and an air-traffic control tower fire that locked down every westbound flight on the east coast. The American Airlines agent told me to try going standby the next morning, and advised that if I booked a hotel and saved my taxi receipts, I would get reimbursed when I got home to LA.

But when I got home, the airline's reps told me they would absolutely not reimburse me, that this was their policy, and they didn't care that their representative had promised they'd make me whole. This was so frustrating that I decided to take the airline to small claims court: I'm no lawyer, but I know that a contract takes place when an offer is made and accepted, and so I had a contract, and AA was violating it, and stiffing me for over $400.

The problem was that I didn't know anything about filing a small claim. I've been ripped off by lots of large American businesses, but none had pissed me off enough to sue – until American broke its contract with me.

So I googled it. I found a website that gave step-by-step instructions, starting with sending a "final demand" letter to the airline's business office. They offered to help me write the letter, and so I clicked and I typed and I wrote a pretty stern legal letter.

Now, I'm not a lawyer, but I have worked for a campaigning law-firm for over 20 years, and I've spent the same amount of time writing about the sins of the rich and powerful. I've seen a lot of threats, both those received by our clients and sent to me.

I've been threatened by everyone from Gwyneth Paltrow to Ralph Lauren to the Sacklers. I've been threatened by lawyers representing the billionaire who owned NSOG roup, the notoroious cyber arms-dealer. I even got a series of vicious, baseless threats from lawyers representing LAX's private terminal.

So I know a thing or two about writing a legal threat! I gave it a good effort and then submitted the form, and got a message asking me to wait for a minute or two. A couple minutes later, the form returned a new version of my letter, expanded and augmented. Now, my letter was a little scary – but this version was bowel-looseningly terrifying.

I had unwittingly used a chatbot. The website had fed my letter to a Large Language Model, likely ChatGPT, with a prompt like, "Make this into an aggressive, bullying legal threat." The chatbot obliged.

I don't think much of LLMs. After you get past the initial party trick of getting something like, "instructions for removing a grilled-cheese sandwich from a VCR in the style of the King James Bible," the novelty wears thin:

https://www.emergentmind.com/posts/write-a-biblical-verse-in-the-style-of-the-king-james

Yes, science fiction magazines are inundated with LLM-written short stories, but the problem there isn't merely the overwhelming quantity of machine-generated stories – it's also that they suck. They're bad stories:

https://www.npr.org/2023/02/24/1159286436/ai-chatbot-chatgpt-magazine-clarkesworld-artificial-intelligence

LLMs generate naturalistic prose. This is an impressive technical feat, and the details are genuinely fascinating. This series by Ben Levinstein is a must-read peek under the hood:

https://benlevinstein.substack.com/p/how-to-think-about-large-language

But "naturalistic prose" isn't necessarily good prose. A lot of naturalistic language is awful. In particular, legal documents are fucking terrible. Lawyers affect a stilted, stylized language that is both officious and obfuscated.

The LLM I accidentally used to rewrite my legal threat transmuted my own prose into something that reads like it was written by a $600/hour paralegal working for a $1500/hour partner at a white-show law-firm. As such, it sends a signal: "The person who commissioned this letter is so angry at you that they are willing to spend $600 to get you to cough up the $400 you owe them. Moreover, they are so well-resourced that they can afford to pursue this claim beyond any rational economic basis."

Let's be clear here: these kinds of lawyer letters aren't good writing; they're a highly specific form of bad writing. The point of this letter isn't to parse the text, it's to send a signal. If the letter was well-written, it wouldn't send the right signal. For the letter to work, it has to read like it was written by someone whose prose-sense was irreparably damaged by a legal education.

Here's the thing: the fact that an LLM can manufacture this once-expensive signal for free means that the signal's meaning will shortly change, forever. Once companies realize that this kind of letter can be generated on demand, it will cease to mean, "You are dealing with a furious, vindictive rich person." It will come to mean, "You are dealing with someone who knows how to type 'generate legal threat' into a search box."

Legal threat letters are in a class of language formally called "bullshit":

https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691122946/on-bullshit

LLMs may not be good at generating science fiction short stories, but they're excellent at generating bullshit. For example, a university prof friend of mine admits that they and all their colleagues are now writing grad student recommendation letters by feeding a few bullet points to an LLM, which inflates them with bullshit, adding puffery to swell those bullet points into lengthy paragraphs.

Naturally, the next stage is that profs on the receiving end of these recommendation letters will ask another LLM to summarize them by reducing them to a few bullet points. This is next-level bullshit: a few easily-grasped points are turned into a florid sheet of nonsense, which is then reconverted into a few bullet-points again, though these may only be tangentially related to the original.

What comes next? The reference letter becomes a useless signal. It goes from being a thing that a prof has to really believe in you to produce, whose mere existence is thus significant, to a thing that can be produced with the click of a button, and then it signifies nothing.

We've been through this before. It used to be that sending a letter to your legislative representative meant a lot. Then, automated internet forms produced by activists like me made it far easier to send those letters and lawmakers stopped taking them so seriously. So we created automatic dialers to let you phone your lawmakers, this being another once-powerful signal. Lowering the cost of making the phone call inevitably made the phone call mean less.

Today, we are in a war over signals. The actors and writers who've trudged through the heat-dome up and down the sidewalks in front of the studios in my neighborhood are sending a very powerful signal. The fact that they're fighting to prevent their industry from being enshittified by plausible sentence generators that can produce bullshit on demand makes their fight especially important.

Chatbots are the nuclear weapons of the bullshit wars. Want to generate 2,000 words of nonsense about "the first time I ate an egg," to run overtop of an omelet recipe you're hoping to make the number one Google result? ChatGPT has you covered. Want to generate fake complaints or fake positive reviews? The Stochastic Parrot will produce 'em all day long.

As I wrote for Locus: "None of this prose is good, none of it is really socially useful, but there’s demand for it. Ironically, the more bullshit there is, the more bullshit filters there are, and this requires still more bullshit to overcome it."

Meanwhile, AA still hasn't answered my letter, and to be honest, I'm so sick of bullshit I can't be bothered to sue them anymore. I suppose that's what they were counting on.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/07/govern-yourself-accordingly/#robolawyers

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

CC BY 3.0

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[adamdr1ver]

[inklore]

YA GIRL HASN'T WRITTEN ANYTHING SINCE OCTOBER!! WTF!!

so this little sleepover is to change that but also welcome ya girl back from her very long very needed hiatus. so let's hope this doesn't flop and let's hope the whore is still in your girl enough to write some sheet gripping fics for you babes.

lets go over the rules:

no minors, ya'll aren't allowed on my blog let alone interacting with my things but i feel the need to put a reminder.

when you send a prompt for a drabble please don't just include the number, include the dialogue, it's much appreciated.

you don't have to be following me, we don't have to be mutuals, anyone can send something in, all are welcome.

there is no start or end date, when i post this you can send something in, and it ends when i run out of asks to answer.

the amount of stuff you can send in is limitless so go wild babes.

DRABBLES — send in prompts from this post, this post, or this post, for any of the characters down below and i'll whip ya up something good.

GAMES — fuck / marry / kiss, would you rather, this or that, send me something from this post, send me a kink and i'll rate it, headcanon things.

GRAPHICS — divider requests, dni + reblog banners.

MUTUALS ONLY — send me a little heart, of any color, and i'll write you a letter.

ETC — get personal and ask me random questions, advice, send me a secret, go gaga over your recent hyperfixation, literally all asks are welcome!

characters applicable for drabbles:

pedro verse — joel miller, frankie morales, javi gutierrez

oscar verse — marc spector, poe dameron, santiago garcia

top gun — jake seresin, bradley bradshaw, javy machado

driver verse — adam sackler, ben solo, flip zimmerman

etc — villanelle, roman godfrey, colin bridgerton, oliver quick, farleigh start, jordan li

if you have any questions or inquires about other characters, this lil celebration as a whole, please shoot ya girl a message 💗