Zeitgeist Report

AO3 Goes Dark for Weeks After Security Incident; Authors Bury AI Clone with 2,000 Takedowns in a Day

According to the Organization for Transformative Works, Archive of Our Own went dark around October 29 after the nonprofit detected evidence of a security incident. The volunteer-run, donation-funded archive that hosts more than 18 million works estimated two to four weeks of downtime, with hope of a sooner return in a degraded or possibly read-only state. Temporary pull-downs remain possible during recovery.

What Happened

In the October 30 update, OTW stated that no AO3 data has been deleted. Works, bookmarks, and kudos are safe. They do not currently believe the user database was stolen but cannot rule it out. That database may include username, email, IP address, and a hashed password. They recommend changing any reused passwords on other sites. AO3 does not collect real names. Donor data sits in a separate system and was not exposed.

As of early November, AO3 Status updates say restoration work is proceeding well and the original return-time estimate still holds. Some queued notification emails for subscriptions and kudos were released during restore work. Those emails are real, not a phishing sign. OTW is actively working so drafts are not deleted during the outage. No technical postmortem has been published.

The Hole It Left

Status-page posts drew millions of views within hours, according to TechCrunch. Fans hit the Wayback Machine hard enough that coverage noted Internet Archive strain. Others swapped Google Drive and EPUB libraries, Reddit megathreads, and Tumblr chapter posts.

NBC News framed the response as community mutual aid. An OTW spokesperson empathized and praised fans' creativity, humor, and memes. Wattpad, Tumblr, and Quinn publicly courted displaced readers.

OTW posted safety guidance on Tumblr: no official AO3 app, no public tester recruitment, and no private “help bring AO3 back” donation asks. Real donations go through otw.org/donate. Any site claiming live AO3 access or mirrors is lying.

The One-Day Clone

During the outage, ao3.life appeared. According to The Verge and 404 Media, a vibe-coded site used AI agents and virtual machines to scrape fanworks from drives and sources, then resold them as AI-generated audiobooks. The first three minutes were free. The rest cost money. The site claimed a 91 percent author and 9 percent site split and asked authors to email from their AO3-linked address to collect pay or request removal. The community warned that step was dangerous.

The creator, signed as Ganesh and described as a 17-year-old in India, said the site drew about 126,592 unique users in 24 hours, sold about 11 audiobooks, then received over 2,000 takedown requests in a single day. He shut it down with an apology that referred to the product as “AI Slop audiobooks.”

When a platform goes dark, scrapers and helpful clones move fast. Fanfic authors still know how to enforce consent at scale.

Why Authors Care

Single-platform risk: if your only copy of a draft or a longfic lives on one site, an outage or incident locks you out. Keep local and offsite backups.

Password hygiene: hashed passwords are not a free pass for reused passwords. Change them elsewhere if you reused your AO3 password.

Consent and scraping: free culture is not public domain for AI audiobook resale. The 2,000-takedown day is the story.

Fanfic as reader infrastructure: when AO3 vanishes, you see how large the unpaid reading economy is. That matters to anyone who writes speculative fiction for that audience.

Sources:

• OTW Update on AO3 Downtime, October 30, 2026
• TechCrunch: Fan-fiction site Archive of Our Own could be offline for up to 4 weeks
• NBC News: AO3 security breach, readers lean on community
• The Verge: AO3 clone that sold repackaged fanworks shuts down following author backlash
• 404 Media: Vibe Coded AO3 Clone Site Down After Fanfic Authors Buried It With 2,000 Takedown Notices
• AO3 Status incident page

Commentary

Thomas: If you're using Archive of Our Own, you're out of luck. This goes back to my enduring advice for authors to be customers and pay for what you use. Free, volunteer-run platforms tend to be fragile because there's no money, and everyone puts in the least amount of work possible to keep the lights on because they have to feed their families some other way.

This is not a surprise, and you should never build your platform on a platform like this. It's okay to have an outpost there, to do some promotion or keep a copy there as well. But you don't want to depend fully on a volunteer-run platform for your connection with your readers.

The more of your platform you own, the better, because you never know when a company will pull a feature away with no warning.

Cloning things is more difficult than it looks. It must be done with fear and trembling, because a lot of work goes into it. But he's also tapping into very real demand. People want this site back. They want access to Archive of Our Own.

The Ghost of 1894

Ten trillion dollars. America plans to sink that much into data centers to power artificial intelligence. The bet equals nearly four percent of the entire economy. Analysts call it the biggest infrastructure boom since the railroads.

America last built something this big, this fast, on this much borrowed money in the 1880s. The bubble burst in 1893. Voters then fired the party in power in 1894, in numbers nobody has matched since.

Let's rewind.

America laid track in the 1880s like it had no tomorrow. Railroad barons borrowed the money for the buildout. They ran lines to towns that didn't exist yet.

The Philadelphia and Reading Railroad went into receivership on February 20th, 1893. The Northern Pacific followed. Then the Union Pacific. Then the Santa Fe. Courts put a quarter of the nation's rail mileage into receivership by year's end.

More than fifteen thousand businesses failed. More than five hundred banks closed. Unemployment hit somewhere between seventeen and nineteen percent.

The Pullman Strike shut down most rail traffic in the North in the summer of 1894. President Cleveland sent in the Army. The strike broke. The union collapsed.

Voters took it out on the party in power that November. Grover Cleveland's Democrats lost a hundred and twenty-five House seats, still the biggest midterm loss in American history. The House seated a record class of a hundred seventy-eight first-term members. Republican William McKinley won the White House two years later, and his coalition ran the country for a generation.

Fast forward to 2026.

Data center developers have borrowed trillions of dollars. Residential electricity prices have climbed more than ten percent since 2024. Voters blamed the data centers, although the real cause of rising prices was often green new deal policies that made fossil fuels more expensive. Data centers and AI showed up on ballots forty-one times in ten states this year and lost all but one

The farmer of 1894 raged at the freight rate. The voter of 2026 rages at big tech. And somehow Democrats avoided being seen as the big tech party.

Voters fired the party in power again. Republicans lost both chambers of Congress. Both chambers have flipped in the same midterm only three times since World War II. At least a hundred forty-three House, Senate and governor's seats will get someone new. No election has cleared out more officeholders since FDR’s 1938 midterm. That was the election to keep America out of the war in Europe.

Here is one interesting difference. The anger of 1894 came after the crash. While the 2026 election might be what causes the crash. The railroads had already gone bankrupt when voters revolted. Crews still pour concrete for the data centers under construction. This electorate reacted not to the bill but to the possible future bill. It was a vibes election.

So, what does this mean for your books?

Watch what readers bought in the last panic. Edward Bellamy published Looking Backward in 1888. A man falls asleep in 1887 and wakes up in a planned utopia in the year 2000. The book sold several million copies, one of the best-selling novels of the century, and spawned political clubs. Ignatius Donnelly, a Populist politician, answered it two years later with Caesar's Column, a future where the rich feast, the poor slave, and the whole thing ends in a bloodbath.

One book promised someone could fix the system. The other warned what happens if nobody does. Readers bought both.

Historian Henry Littlefield argued in 1964 that The Wonderful Wizard of Oz told a coded story about the 1890s money fight. The yellow brick road stands for gold. Dorothy's shoes, silver in the book, stand for the silver movement. The Scarecrow plays the farmer. That tells you how deep that era's anger ran.

Key Facts

Fact	Figure	Source
Data center investment	About $10 trillion, near 4% of GDP	Stateline
Data center debt	At least $1.3 trillion raised	Forbes, Oct. 2
Power prices and ballots	Residential prices up 10%+ since 2024; AI on ballots 41 times in 10 states, won once	Forbes, Nov. 6
Panic of 1893 start	Philadelphia and Reading Railroad in receivership, Feb. 20, 1893	Wikipedia
Railroad failures	Northern Pacific, Union Pacific, Santa Fe; a quarter of U.S. rail mileage in receivership in 1893	Wikipedia
Wider damage	15,000+ businesses failed, 500+ banks closed, unemployment about 17% to 19%	Wikipedia
1894 midterm	Democrats lost 125 House seats, the largest midterm loss on record	Dave Manuel
1894 freshman class	Record 178 first-term members (166 on opening day)	House Historian
2026 turnover	143+ House, Senate and governor seats replaced; only four elections since 1914 replaced more	Research brief
Both chambers flipping	Third time since WWII, after 1946 and 1994	Fortune
Looking Backward	1888; several million copies; spawned Bellamy clubs	Encyclopedia.com
Caesar's Column	1890, by Populist Ignatius Donnelly; ends in revolt	Encyclopedia.com
Oz allegory	Henry Littlefield, American Quarterly, 1964; Baum's intent still disputed	Wikipedia

Supplemental Facts

• State-level unemployment in the 1890s depression: about 25% in Pennsylvania, 35% in New York and 43% in Michigan.
• The Pullman Strike's ending: Cleveland got a federal court order, sent in the Army, and Eugene V. Debs went to prison.
• The long hangover: Democrats didn't control any branch of the federal government again until 1910.
• Third parties in 1894: The Populist Party won nine House seats.
• The rhyme with 1896: McKinley's 1896 win followed the 1894 wave, and Republicans held power for about 36 years.
• Bellamy's political legacy: Looking Backward inspired the short-lived Nationalist Party in the early 1890s.
• Trump's approval this week: 38% in the NBC exit poll, the biggest single driver of the 2026 result.
• The corruption vote: 90% of voters called corruption a crucial or major factor, and they backed Democrats 57 to 41 (HuffPost).
• Comparing the booms: Analysts compare data centers and railroads by share of GDP, not raw dollars.

Commentary

Thomas: Everybody is analyzing this election with the myopic tunnel vision of a social-media-addicted goldfish, so I want to bring some historical context.

Jonathan: Let me give the overview first for our international audience. Every four years, we elect a president. That happened two years ago. Our midterm elections happen every two years, and that's where we vote for representatives, plus senators and governors whose terms are up. This was a big one because it's halfway through President Trump's administration, and it's the time to pass judgment on whether the administration is doing what you thought it would do.

The House of Representatives flipped blue, to the Democrats. The Senate flipped blue also. Most of the governor seats flipped blue. I think the only state that showed up red was Florida, which is the outlier because Ron DeSantis turned it from a blue state into a red state.

That's the summary. It was a huge deal. It was basically America telling Trump, "We hate what you did. You didn't emphasize the right stuff."

Thomas: That's how the mainstream media has interpreted it.

Historically, American presidents tend to win Congress when they win election, because the people who vote for the president also vote for congressmen of the same party. That has been the case more or less forever. And almost every time, two years later, the president loses Congress.

What makes this one notable is that the president lost both the House and the Senate. That has happened only two other times in the last 100 years, and those are notable elections. But the election this most resembles is the nation-shifting election of 1894. It was basically the same thing we're going through now.

There was a brand-new technology with a massive productivity improvement that was going to transform the entire economy. Big corporations went billions of dollars into debt to deploy it. It boosted technology, but it hurt rural people. I'm talking, of course, about the railroads.

In the 1870s and 1880s, there was a railroad mania. Railroad companies built as fast as they could, because if you were the first railroad to reach a town, you had a monopoly on all traffic to that town. There was a huge incentive to build as fast as possible and to borrow as much money as possible to do it.

When the railroads went into receivership, that led to a run on the banks and a ripple through the entire economy. If you remember the bank run scene in It's a Wonderful Life, this was the peak of bank runs. People were afraid their bank had loaned money to the railroads and was out of money, and that if they didn't get their money out quickly, the bank would close.

That fear killed the banks because of how fractional reserve banking works. No bank has all the money sitting in a box. Banks have to loan it out, which means they can't pay everyone who wants their money back at once.

Jonathan: These are the Monopoly railroads. These are the ones they chose.

Thomas: They are. In fact, the game Monopoly was created the same decade. Around the same time, the farmers were very unhappy with the railroads charging them high monopoly prices, and a big union strike hit the railroads. President Cleveland, a Democrat, sent in the Army to break up the strike violently, and the Republicans swept the House in the next election.

For context, the current flip from Republicans to Democrats is somewhere between 25 and 50 seats. They're still counting.

California and some other places are also still counting. But even in the worst case of 50 seats, that's nothing compared to the more than 100 seats we saw in 1894.

We see a concern over AI very similar to the concern over railroads back then, but with one big difference. In 1894, the voter backlash came after the bubble burst.

The railroad bubble bursting didn't mean trains stopped running. The union strikes did that, but only temporarily, and the president got the railroads running again. The bankruptcies meant that everyone who had lent money to and invested in the railroad companies lost out. They thought, "This new technology is going to change the world. We can move cattle, goods, people, and oil across the country quickly." All of that was true. But it being true doesn't mean building a second railroad to Cincinnati is a good use of funds, or that Cincinnati even needs a railroad, or needs one built this quickly.

You can do things fast, good, or cheap. Pick two.

If you're building fast and the railroad needs to be high quality, you're spending a lot of money, and you're competing with everyone else racing to build railroads.

It's the exact same technological situation we're seeing now with AI. The one difference is that AI hasn't caused an economic crash. So far, AI has made companies more profitable. It has created far more jobs than it has destroyed, and the jobs it has created have been working-class jobs. This is the best time ever to be an electrician.

That's a challenge if you're, say, trying to get your house rebuilt after a flood so you can move your family back home.

Since no one wants a data center in their backyard, they had to ship all the electricians to the middle of nowhere in Texas to build the data centers, so few are available for local jobs.

But the fear of AI may be causing a crash in the stock market. I don't know if you've noticed this week, but the market did not react well to what the Democrats have been saying about shutting down all the data centers, and the NASDAQ in particular took a huge hit.

Notable Books from the Railroad Era

But let's talk about authors, because some very notable books emerged from this era, and understanding them can give you insight into what to write moving forward.

Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward is a Rip Van Winkle-style book. I just bought it, because I want to do an episode about future shock. The man who falls asleep, wakes up in the next era, and is shocked by all the cultural change of the last 20 or 30 years is an enduring theme in American literature that authors have forgotten about.

It's a common American feeling, because America changes quickly. In other parts of the world, nothing really changes. In America, two years go by and you don't recognize your own town. That creates its own psychological pain that American readers grapple with in different ways.

So two entirely different books emerged at this time, one with an optimistic view of the future and one with a pessimistic view, and they both sold well. Probably to different readers, but maybe to both, because people are nervous about the future and want to see the boomer and doomer views of it. Or what kids now would call the white pill and the black pill. The white pill is the optimistic view, and the black pill is the pessimistic view.

But there's an even more famous book that captures the economic reality of this era, and you're all familiar with it. You've all seen the movie it inspired. That book is The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

Many people know The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is a metaphor for economic realities, specifically the money fight of the 1890s. People in rural areas wanted to move to a silver standard, while people in the cities wanted to stay on the gold standard. The yellow brick road represents gold. I forget what Dorothy's shoes represent.

Jonathan: In the book, her shoes were silver. In the movie, they're ruby slippers, but in the book, they're silver, so they represent the silver movement. The yellow brick road goes to the Emerald City, where the guy is controlling everything from behind a curtain.

Thomas: The goal is not to reproduce The Wizard of Oz. The goal is to understand that we're in a moment where that kind of story, where you map current economic realities onto a fantasy world, can resonate with people on a deep, subconscious level.

People enjoyed The Wizard of Oz without understanding its political commentary. But because the commentary was good and true, or at least resonant, it kept its resonance for more than 100 years, even after the political causes behind it were forgotten.

The same is true of Mother Goose. Almost all of those rhymes are political, but we've forgotten the context. Some are about kings who've been dead for hundreds of years, and yet we still remember the poem that critiques a king's cabinet, or that one guy in his cabinet. That's another thing to look into. Mother Goose is surprisingly political, even though most children don't know it.

Jonathan: On both sides of the aisle, everyone hates gas prices right now. It's so expensive to fill your tank, and God help you if you use diesel. Everyone is paying the same price, and different people experience it differently.

I spent my time in the Marine Corps fighting Iran's proxy war. We fought their proxies. That's what we did. I'm more than happy to pay this higher price to have taken that place down for what they did.

But not everyone has that context. All they see is that the war caused higher gas prices, they can't afford it, and it's making everything else more expensive because everything runs on gas.

Thomas: And apparently no one remembers that for about 20 years, the Democrats' stated position was that it's important to make gas more expensive so we can save the planet. Gas is more expensive in Democrat states than in Republican states.

Jonathan: Attention span.

The point is that everyone is experiencing gas prices. It doesn't matter what the cause is. I have to buckle down to go to the gas station. "How much am I spending on gas today? How much can I get away with spending?"

Everyone is experiencing the same thing, and that's something you can portray in your novels right now. You can touch on a universal dissatisfaction, and that's important.

Thomas: I'm still stunned that the Democrats ran on lowering gas prices and nobody asked them how they planned to do it. In the whole political cycle, it was, "Gas is expensive. We all agree on that. What are you going to do to actually lower the price?" And they never had to give an answer other than ending the war.

Gas is expensive partly because of refining. The Democrats have shut down several refineries, but the oil price is actually pretty low.

Someone in the chat says regular is $5.49 at the California Costco. The last time I filled up at the Texas Costco, it was $3.29. That $2.00 to $2.50 difference is not the oil price, because Costco sources oil at the same price in California as the Texas refineries do. The difference is local taxes and refining infrastructure. California pays much higher taxes on gas, and I think one of its big refineries recently shut down.

Millennials Storm the Hill

Pelosi. Hoyer. McConnell. Durbin. Four leaders from both parties who ran Washington for a generation will leave Congress in January.

The millennials have stormed the gates and are seizing the positions of power. And to understand what is happening let’s go back in time to when the boomers seized power.

So plug in your Walkman, blow into your nintendo cartridge, and pour a glass of Crystal Pepsi. We are going back to 1992.”

Bill Clinton, the first Baby Boomer president took over from World War II veteran George HW Bush.

The turnover ran deeper in Congress. Sixty-five House members retired, a record at the time. Another nineteen more lost their primaries. The House swore in 109 new members in January 1993.

Of the the 121 freshmen heading to the House and Senate. Half of them had not yet turned 45. They came in younger than the new president.

Voters turned on Clinton's party two years later. But not on his generation.

Thirty-four House Democrats lost their seats in 1994. They were replaced by boomer republicans led by Newt Gingrich. Republicans took the House for the first time in 40 years and the Senate with it. Newt Gingrich led 73 Republican freshmen through the door, most of whom were boomers or Gen X.

Between 1992 and 1994 both parties replaced the majority of the GI Generation leaders with Boomers.

Now click on your airpods, put on some Crocs (it’s ok, they’re cool now) and pour a glass of Poppi. We are back in 2026.

Seventy-four House members saw which way the wind was blowing and withdrew before a single vote, the most since 1992. Then in the primaries, younger challengers knocked out long-serving Democrats.

Melat Kiros, 29, beat 15-term congresswoman Diana DeGette in Denver. Luke Bronin, 47, beat John Larson, a Connecticut incumbent of nearly three decades, by more than 20 points.

Seven House Democrats lost primaries, matching the most since 1992.

In Texas, Boomer Cornyn was replaced on the republican ballot by Gen X Paxton who was then replaced by Millennial Taloreco. That’s three generations all in one cycle. In typical Gen X fashion, the gen Xer never got a chance to actually take power.

2026 played out just like in 1994. Voters fired the party in power. Both chambers have flipped in the same midterm only three times since World War II: 1946, 1994 and 2026. And if we go back to 1946 that was the beginning of the GI Generation taking power.

Add it up. Congress started this session as the third-oldest in American history, with an average age near 59. Millennial members, born since the early 1980s, will grow from 75 to at least 97. The first member born in the 2000s takes a seat in January: Michael Alfonso, a 26-year-old Wisconsin Republican. The Senate adds James Talarico, 37, Abdul El-Sayed, 42, and two 45-year-olds, Democrat Annie Andrews and Republican Julia Letlow. Washington could swear in its biggest freshman class in 34 years, which takes us right back to 1992.

So 2026 delivered 1992's primaries and 1994's general election in a single year.

One piece stayed put. The 1992 handoff started at the top and flowed down. This one runs from the bottom up. The White House stays with the Boomers. The president turned 80 this summer.

I don’t know who each party will pick for their candidates, but I do know it won’t be a boomer. Trump will be the last Boomer to hold the white house.

So what does this mean for your books?

Millennials play the Hero role in turnings terms. They show up civic, team-minded and ready to build. A generation like that wants stories to match: crews instead of loners, duty instead of irony, victories the hero earns.

Our take: the brooding antihero belonged to the last era. The competent crew owns the next one. Write accordingly.

Key Facts

Fact	Figure	Source
Leaders retiring	Pelosi (86), Hoyer (87), McConnell (84), Durbin (81)	Roll Call
1992 presidential handoff	Clinton, 46, beat Bush, 68; first Boomer president	Cook Political Report
1992 House turnover	65 retired, 19 lost primaries, 24 lost the general	Brookings Vital Statistics
1992 new House members	109 seated in January 1993	CRS R41283
Broder's 1992 count	Half of 121 incoming freshmen under 45 and younger than Clinton	Seattle Times archive
1994 House losses	34 incumbents lost, all Democrats, including Speaker Foley and Rostenkowski	Wikipedia: 1994 House elections
1994 Republican freshmen	73	CRS R41283
2026 departures before November	74, the most since 1992	Pew Research Center
DeGette upset	Kiros, 29, beat the 15-term incumbent	NPR
Larson upset	Bronin, 47, won by 20+ points; Larson served nearly three decades	U.S. News
Democratic primary losses	7, tied with 2012 for the most since 1992	U.S. News
GOP primary losses	Massie, Cassidy, Cornyn to Trump-backed challengers; Crenshaw on loyalty	Washington Times; Fortune
Both chambers flipping	Third time since WWII, after 1946 and 1994	Fortune
Age of Congress	Third-oldest in history; average 58.9 at the session's start	NBC News
Millennial members	75 now, at least 97 in January	Future Caucus, 2024; Fast Company
First member born in the 2000s	Michael Alfonso, 26, R-Wisconsin	9News/AP
Millennial senators-elect	Talarico 37, El-Sayed 42, Andrews 45, Letlow 45	Fast Company
Freshman class	95+ expected, potentially the largest in 34 years	Akin Gump

Supplemental Facts

• Congress in 1992: Broder put the average age of all senators and representatives below 53 (Seattle Times archive). The current Congress averaged 58.9 at its start.
• 1994's freshman casualties: 16 of the 34 Democrats who lost had served only one term (Wikipedia).
• Who retired, by age: Retiring Democrats averaged 75 and retiring Republicans 62 in a February 2026 snapshot (Washington Post).
• Durbin's start: He entered the House at 38, in 1983 (Roll Call).
• The Texas Senate primary: Ken Paxton, 63, beat John Cornyn, 74, by roughly 27 points (Washington Times; Reuters via AOL).
• The democratic socialist wing: DSA-endorsed House members grow from 2 to 8 (Ballotpedia).
• Young voters: About 7 in 10 voters under 30 backed Democrats for the House (Time), but they made up only about 1 in 10 voters (Al Jazeera/AP).
• Generation labels: Strauss and Howe date Millennials 1982 to 2004, so Kiros (born 1997) and Alfonso (born about 2000) count as Millennials. Pew and most news outlets call them Gen Z.
• The 1946 rhyme: The other both-chambers flip of the postwar era seated the Hero generation's first wave, including John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, 14 years before Kennedy won the White House.

Commentary

Jonathan: Let's talk about the psychographics of the election now.

Thomas: In 1992, most of the new members coming into Congress with Bill Clinton were New Democrats, and most were Boomers. So first the Democrats got their bite at the apple and replaced their whole delegation with Boomers. Then in 1994, the Republicans replaced theirs with Boomers. Newt Gingrich was just barely not a Boomer, on a technicality. He's about one year too old.

Thomas: In the 2026 primaries, many of the younger challengers were Democratic Socialists of America, or DSA, candidates running against older establishment Democrats. The younger, more radical socialists replaced the supposedly less radical, but definitely older and likely more corrupt, establishment candidates. So again, this is very much a mirror of 1992 and 1994.

In Texas, we went straight from a Boomer to a Millennial. I think part of the reason Florida was insulated from this generational turn and stayed Republican is that Florida has term limits.

The Republicans in power in Texas were mostly neocons who came into power with George W. Bush. People forget he was governor of Texas for a while, and during his governorship, all the statewide elected positions flipped from blue to red.

Texans elect most top government positions on statewide ballots: attorney general, lieutenant governor, governor, the railroad commission, the Texas Supreme Court. They all flipped red under Bush, and they all stayed neocons.

The zeitgeist and the culture changed, but these neocons held on to power and got more and more out of touch, not just with voters but with their own party. Democrats were able to run to the right of the establishment Republicans on some issues, because this neocon old guard was never forced to recycle.

In Florida, you're in for two, four, or six years, whatever the term limit is, and then you have to run for something else. You don't get people who've been there forever. Abbott was running for what I think was his fourth term. If he had been elected, he would have been governor for 16 years, which would have been a record.

Normally, we don't even re-elect our governors once. If you go to the statehouse, there are pictures of all our governors, and they all served four years. We say, "Get out. Get the next guy in. We don't need term limits. We're done with you." A few won re-election, but even then they served eight years at most. Abbott serving as long as he did is historic.

Jonathan: There has been historical animosity between Millennials and Boomers. I was labeled a Millennial and I hated it, because Millennials were tagged as lazy and terrible at customer service. When we all started getting jobs in the 2000s, getting a Millennial was the worst. Going to Starbucks was terrible because a Millennial would be the cashier or making your coffee.

Thomas: The number of think pieces hating on us that we grew up with was unbelievable.

Jonathan: It was ridiculous. The Boomers really hated us, and the Millennials hated the Boomers right back. You can see that in all the social media lately: Boomers hanging on to their houses, or selling their houses to corporations for cash and not letting their kids inherit any money, not setting their kids up for success, which is so stupid.

Biblically speaking, you're supposed to set your kids up for success. According to Proverbs, leaving your children an inheritance is part of being a good man.

There's a lot of cross-generational hatred here. Now the Millennials have taken power, and it's going to be a bloodbath on the Boomer policy side of things.

Thomas: Are taking power. What's interesting is that the Boomers still have the White House. They're losing the statehouses, the House, and the Senate, but Trump is a Boomer. He will be the last Boomer, though.

We don't know who the parties will pick, but neither party is considering a single Boomer. There's not one on the left being considered, with the possible exception of Bernie Sanders, and I don't think he plans to run again. He's too old, not in the sense that he's too old to get votes, but too old for the grueling job.

Jonathan: I think he's handing the baton off to AOC.

Thomas: On the right, there's not a single Boomer being discussed. The closest would be Pence. I think Pence would want to run, but he doesn't realize he's completely out of touch with where Republicans are.

Here's one issue where the Boomer cons are out of sync with the Millennial and Gen Z cons. I'm going to skip Gen X, as you do. Every Gen Xer in the chat is happy to get skipped. They're sitting there with their popcorn, happy to watch.

If you talk to a Boomer con about immigration, they see the problem as illegal immigration. "We have to stop the illegals from coming over." That's not how Millennial cons see it. They see the problem as replacement migration. The problem is not illegal immigration. It's H-1Bs and all the legal immigration.

In many neighborhoods, Millennials can't afford homes because foreigners with H-1B visas get more favorable loan terms and higher pay. That's definitely the case here in Austin. Many H-1Bs work at places like Apple and Indeed, making $200,000.00 to $300,000.00 a year, and $400,000.00 in some cases. Google, Facebook, and all these tech companies hire many H-1Bs, many of them Indians, and pay them more than citizens are able to get paid.

One person told me, "Every single Indian in my office owns two homes," the home they live in and another one. I know that's true, because I used to live next door to an H-1B, not from India but from China. He moved to a nicer, more expensive home, and now he's renting out the house next to us.

Jonathan: Which is just giving economic opportunity to noncitizens.

Thomas: Right. And he's here legally. So from the Millennial point of view, the issue is not illegal migration. I have friends who can't find houses to buy because they lost their jobs to H-1Bs who got those high-paying jobs. They can't get the high-paying job, they can't get the house, and they can't start the family, and they feel like the Boomers' boots are on their necks. They don't care about the party or about the issues the Boomers think are really important.

Another very different issue is Israel. Boomers really care about Israel, on both the left and the right. Boomer cons and Boomer libs both really like Israel, really want to support it, and see antisemitism as the greatest of all evils. What we're seeing among Gen Z is high hostility to Israel on both the left and the right, and the Boomers genuinely don't understand.

There's not much dialogue, because from what I can tell as a Millennial, Gen Zers don't even care to debate it. They're happy to wait for the Boomers to die off. That seems unfortunate, because we should probably talk about it. If we're going to change our position on our closest ally in the Middle East and see them as an enemy instead of a friend, can we discuss this major geopolitical shift?

But name-calling is all I'm seeing. The Boomers call the kids racists and antisemites, and the kids mostly ignore them.

Jonathan: It's a slur to say you're pro-Israel, so they say you're shilling for Israel.

Thomas: The word "Zionist" is now a slur when it used to be seen as positive. "Yankee" is another good example. The British used "Yankee" as a slur for Americans.

I realize this is a different breakdown of the election than you've probably heard. It's not instead of the other breakdowns. Many of those other analyses are right, including the ones about who's allowed to vote and about the issues.

It's very interesting to see how the left and right lose elections differently. When the left loses an election, there tend to be riots, violence, and protests. You're not seeing any of that. We on the right got shellacked, as Obama put it after he had a big shift in Congress. If you look at the discussion among people on the right, there's a lot of mourning and grief, particularly at first.

There was some FUD, particularly among Californians on the right who had moved to Texas. They're saying, "Here we go again." Once you retreat one time, you embrace a retreatist attitude where you feel very defeated. A routed army is really hard to rally. But the other thing you saw was a lot of thinking and debating about how to fix this. Lots of think pieces.

Jonathan: Let's bring this around to how you should write your books right now. What are people really looking for? An election is about winning and losing. In America, it's where people decide who wins and who loses based on the information they think they have.

So in your books, what is the impact of this generational shift in power? Millennials show up civic, team-minded, and ready to build. There's a positive message in a new generation coming in and getting rid of the crusty old guys who have been hanging on to power as long as possible.

That has been a popular story model for a long time: getting rid of the old king. Even on the villain side, a young prince kills his father to take his seat and begins a new era of villainy that is then fought against. People really like that kind of thing.

Thomas: The old king is out of touch. He doesn't understand, but his son does, so we have to get rid of the old king and install the son. You see that pattern in the Bible several times. There are several coups.

Jonathan: And Millennials are big on “the crew.” We're big on the squad. Yesterday, I texted Thomas and the guys to play Helldivers. When this group of Millennial guys gets on League of Legends, we say, "The clan is gathering." It's a call to come take our beating online.

Thomas: The kind of stories that resonated with Boomers were more about the solo hero, lik Rambo, Superman, one man against the machine.

Jonathan: The solo antihero. Batman. This is more of an X-Men team era, where everyone comes together to make something good.

Thomas: That's a good point. It's the Justice League as opposed to Superman. The Avengers as opposed to just Iron Man. We're all in this together.

Jonathan: When you look at your stories, you need to look at teams as the squad or the crew. That's what Millennials want. They want the team, people who work together and whom you can depend on.

When I put out the call for Helldivers, I expect it to be answered. They left me in the lurch last night, and I got my rear end kicked by bugs and squids because no one came.

Thomas: Simmy in the chat says, "And stories passed over Gen X completely." That's not true. The antihero era, which is coming to an end, was the story for Gen Xers.

Jonathan: Demolition Man is The Wizard of Oz for Gen Xers.

Thomas: Millennials have very high antihero fatigue, and I think Xers are starting to get it too, but they were the ones who most created and bought into antihero stories. That's why, during the little heyday Xers had in the last 15 years, there were lots of antihero movies, lots of movies that focused as much on the villain or the complicated hero, or asked whether the villain is really the hero. Those were meant for Gen Xers. I'm not sure how successful or enduringly popular they were.

Gen X is an interesting quagmire because Gen Xers hate being defined. They hate being put in a box, and even if you put them in a box they fit in, they'll leave it just to spite you.

Jonathan: It's popular in Millennial storytelling to have a Gen X mentor.

Thomas: That goes straight to the Strauss and Howe model, where one person from the Prophet generation mentors the hero, because Millennials are known as the Hero generation in Strauss and Howe's turnings model. It's also the great champion.

What you see in both political parties is that these young movements are often led by an elder. Who's the one figurehead the Democratic Socialists of America all rally behind?

Jonathan: Bernie Sanders.

Thomas: Who's ancient. He doesn't present as young. He presents as old.

Jonathan: He doesn't even try to present as young, so he never loses credibility by trying to be something he isn't.

Thomas: He's not saying, "How do you do, fellow kids?" He's saying, "How are you doing, my young Padawan? I will mentor you in my ways." He goes to AOC and says, "Have you heard the tale of Darth Plagueis the Wise?"

You see the same thing on the right. Who's the hero of young Gen Z conservative men? It was either Charlie Kirk, who was doing a certain kind of mentoring, or Donald Trump.

Jonathan: Kirk was a Millennial.

Thomas: Kirk was a Millennial reaching out to Gen Z. With the loss of Charlie Kirk, you saw a huge shift among young men voting, which sent a very unfortunate signal that assassinations work. The assassination helped the left win the election, because by the numbers, the group that shifted most dramatically from right to left was young men.

Jonathan: Young men care about winning, and your model hasn't been winning. The war in Iran still hasn't been won, and you said it would be over in six weeks. Well, the vast majority of that war was won in six weeks.

Thomas: Everyone says they care about the war, but every president of my lifetime has bombed Muslims. Obama did it. Clinton did it. Both Bushes did it.

Jonathan: No, Americans need to win. Obama never started anything he had to win. The War on Terror could be 30 years long because we were always winning it.

It's the same reason al-Qaeda hated ISIS. Al-Qaeda refused to support ISIS because ISIS took the victory condition, the win con, of radical Islam and made it about holding land. You can't fight the Marines on land.

Thomas: It's hard to hold territory against an opponent who has air superiority.

Jonathan: Because they made the caliphate a physical thing with borders that had to be defended, they created a lose con. Al-Qaeda didn't have a lose con, because even if you die, you're a martyr, and any time you hit a soft target, you're winning. So Obama didn't have a war he had to win. He just had to not lose super hard.

Thomas: And he was very quiet about his bombings. He would drone somebody, or some country, and it would hardly be in the news. He wouldn't announce it.

Whereas Trump holds a press conference saying, "Baghdadi died like a dog." They publish the video, and it's a whole news cycle.

Jonathan: "I just got this Iranian guy. Watch the video." So the Iran war had a lose con: it wasn't over as quickly as they claimed it would be. When that happens, you lose credibility and trust, and the value of your word goes down. Young men want to win.

Thomas: I agree that young men want to win, but I think the reason people care is Israel. There are a bunch of real genocides happening in the world. The worst genocide of Muslims by far is the Uyghurs, who are being completely eliminated as a people by the Chinese Communist Party. They're not going to exist in 50 years.

Meanwhile, there are more people in the Gaza Strip now than when the war broke out, because they're so fertile.

Starting a war and then losing it doesn't mean there's a genocide because your combatants are dying, even if your combatants are technically children. A 17-year-old with an AK-47 is still a combatant.

But nobody cares about the Uyghurs. There's no one with the Uyghur flag in their bio on X. Nobody cares about the genocide in Sudan. Nobody cared about the genocide of the Armenians.

Jonathan: They do care about how expensive everything is. Groceries are expensive.

Thomas: They care about the stuff they buy. The narrative is that the war with Iran made your groceries expensive, when in reality, groceries are expensive because of poor fiscal policy in both parties. Everyone's running the money printer.

Jonathan: We're still absorbing the repercussions of the COVID era, when people were killing their herds.

Thomas: I hate to break it to everyone who voted for the Democrats with great optimism that they would lower prices, but there's no intention to lower prices. Deflation is seen as the worst possible outcome.

Jonathan: As soon as you get used to prices, they stay.

Thomas: If they see deflation as even a possibility, they go to the money printer and push the up button. They start doing quantitative easing, which is the technical term for making the money printer go brr. Prices are not going to go down.

Going back to the generational conflict, the heart of the price issue is not beef and eggs. Eggs actually got cheaper, but nobody seemed to care, because it's not really about food.

It's about the price of housing.

Boomers want their houses to be more expensive, because they own them and their houses store their value. Gen Z and Millennials want prices to drop. Those of you who are older, your kids want your house price to drop by half. Is your house worth $500,000.00? Your kids want it to be worth $250,000.00. Is it worth $250,000.00? Your kids want it to be worth $125,000.00. They're buyers, and you're sellers. That's the heart of the issue.

But it's almost impossible for young people to blame their parents, because they love their parents. So they look for a scapegoat. And what's the universal scapegoat for all societal problems when you don't want to address the actual problem, which is that your parents are eating you? You blame the Jews.

That's why both the left and the right are blaming the Jews. It's psychologically easier to blame the Jews for the fact that you can't afford a house than to blame your own parents.

Jonathan: People aren't having a problem blaming their parents, according to the chatter. There's all kinds of "I've cut off my parents. I've cut off my family. I'm not having anything to do with them."

Thomas: Which is so unfortunate. If you're a young person tempted to do that and you're a Christian, realize there's a commandment to honor your father and your mother.

Jonathan: It doesn't say only if they're good, and that sucks.

Thomas: And it's not really your place to judge your own parents.

Jonathan: Something that happens in martial arts schools applies here. You always bow to the mat before you go on, because that's where you learn. I get the crap beat out of me on that mat, but you always respect the mat, and you bow to it.

Last night, I had a horrible opponent who was better than me and way bigger. It hurt so bad. But I bowed to the mat. I bowed to him, shook his hand, and said, "Thank you for that horrible time where I did not win and didn't feel like much of a man," when everything I've based my life on, being a good fighter, wasn't applying in that moment.

In the same way, your father and mother gave you life, so we bow to the mat and say thank you. We render that honor. They may not be good people. They may not be smart people. They may have actively attacked and abused you. But they gave you life. And if you're in a place where you're not willing to say life is a good thing, you have other problems to deal with as well.

Thomas: And they sustained you. For most people, their parents were around at least when they were children, feeding them, sheltering them, providing for them, and making sacrifices. Even if they didn't do a good job, they made sacrifices.

You get a new perspective on your own parents once you have children. You realize that children can be evil. We have this perception that "When I was a child, I was an angel. It was all the other children who were evil." No, you were not an angel. Some of the bad things that happened to you were your own fault, from choices you made knowing they were wrong, even as a child.

Jonathan: My wife and I have a thing about this. You learn to tell different kinds of crying apart: the angry cry, the I'm-in-pain cry. We know the cry of "I'm suffering the consequences of my decisions."

Thomas: Along those lines, I've heard of young people who went no contact with their parents and then were upset to be cut out of the will.

The commandment about honoring your father and your mother is actually connected to inheritance. It says, "Honor your father and your mother, so that your days may be long in the land your God gives you." Who has the land currently? Your parents. Who are you going to get it from? Your parents. The land passes from older generations to younger generations, so honoring your parents matters for inheriting the land.

Jonathan: The older generation needs to remember that too. If your children aren't going to benefit meaningfully from a relationship with you, and your personality isn't great, and you didn't do a great job, why would they stick around?

Thomas: On the flip side, for older people, and I know our audience skews older, it's important for younger people to take power from older people before the older people die.

Jonathan: The older people need to be passing it on.

Thomas: Right. A kingdom is more stable when a retired king can mentor the younger king. Odysseus's father, Laertes, is still alive at the end of the story. If you read the end of the book, Odysseus has a big battle, and Laertes is out in the field with the villagers. He'd been advising Odysseus the whole time. While Odysseus was gone, Laertes didn't retake the throne, but he was there as a trusted advisor. That's a stable arrangement.

The Boomers grabbed power very young, and they pushed out the older generation more brutally and more suddenly than earlier generations had.

When I was trying to draw the parallel with 1946, the other time Congress flipped to this degree, I asked whether that was also a generational transition. It was, to a lesser degree. That was the first election where the Greatest Generation got elected, but they didn't take full power for another 12 years. They took power slowly and had a much more collaborative relationship with the generation above them.

Whereas the Boomers said, "What do you know, old man?" Look at Boomer heroes like Luke Skywalker. He doesn't have much respect for Obi-Wan Kenobi or Yoda, and half the time he doesn't even follow their advice. That's very typical of the Boomer attitude.

Boomers often have the same attitude toward their children's generation: "These kids are too stupid to make decisions, with their avocado toast and their video games."

Jonathan: They actually said Obi-Wan Kenobi was from the Clone Wars, which was World War II.

Thomas: If you want to write a resonant story, it has to be in sync with the major historical events that are happening, because those events shape a people.

If you're older and writing for younger people, realize they are experiencing replacement migration. They are experiencing being a minority at school, which is not an experience you necessarily had growing up.

Most Boomers lived in a segregated world where, regardless of race, you weren't the minority in the school you grew up in. Almost all Gen Zers are a minority, because there is no majority. It's so diverse that there's no superseding culture other than a generic bureaucratic culture, which is no culture at all.

Jonathan: What this all means is that we're reverting to tribalism. We're building the teams again, the crews, the clans. Everything is coming back to "This is what we call ourselves. This is our flag."

That's where storytelling is going. You need to build the crew. If you want to do positive storytelling, you need good mentors who pass on power productively, and villains who don't. That's what everyone will resonate with.

Millennials don't automatically hate all Boomers. They hate them as an idea. But if a Boomer passes on power, or a house, or something like that, the Gen Zer or Millennial will say, "That's good." That's in alignment not just with their values but with common sense and universal values. The old should pass on power and the best opportunities they can to their offspring.

Thomas: And pass on power while you're still alive, legitimately, so they can use it to make poor decisions. There's a common Boomer thing: "I'll let my children make good decisions, but I won't let them make bad decisions."

Jonathan: There are conditions on the inheritance. That's actually a trope.

Thomas: By doing that, you rob them of the opportunity to learn and gain wisdom, especially if those conditions apply after you've died. It's the worst of both worlds.

The better solution is what we see in the Bible with the prodigal son. He was able to squander his inheritance, but his dad was still alive to restore him as a person. That's much better than squandering his inheritance after his father died, when his father isn't there to restore him.

If the father had said, "I'm going to put these conditions on you," the son would have squandered his inheritance more slowly, but he still wouldn't have been restored and gained wisdom. The best scenario for the story is that he squandered his inheritance but was still restored to wisdom, because you can always make more money if you have wisdom.

In fact, making money is surprisingly easy if you have wisdom, and holding on to money is surprisingly difficult if you're a fool.

Jonathan: Your money flies away. Like Black Friday.

Thomas: My children are trying to learn how money works, and the really little ones have no concept of it. My two-year-old is constantly coming up to me with coins she finds.

Coins have more or less lost their value. There's almost nowhere you can spend them, and no one really takes them because of inflation. But children love holding coins and exchanging them with each other. She'll come up to me holding a penny and say, "Coinies, coinies. Look what I found." It's so cute. And that penny is literally not worth the metal it's printed on.

Jonathan: When we talk about storytelling now, you have to understand that Millennials formed relationships at college and where they went to work. Many of my best friends are from the military. We were all in the military together, and we still talk. November 10 is the Marine Corps birthday, and you'll probably hear me being obnoxious from wherever you live.

Thomas: I'm surprised you haven't been talking about it this whole episode.

Jonathan: No one here cares. I'm not wasting it on them. But I'm going to get on a call with my guys, and we'll talk about the old days. Most of them are blue. Most of them are celebrating the shellacking the Republicans got. Most of them hate Trump. It doesn't matter. They're my guys. That's my crew. Those are the guys I served with.

I'm looking forward to it, and we all say, "Man, we should do this more often. Why don't we do this once a year?" Your crew matters.

Thomas: That's what everyone says at the conference: "We have to meet between conferences."

Jonathan: And then they never do. But when you form a tribe of people who accept you, love you, make you better, and hold you to a standard, and then you meet that standard, holy cow, that feels good. That's powerful, and that's where storytelling needs to go right now.

I think that's the biggest lesson we can pull out of the midterms. We need the crew. We need the squad. We need the team that's going to make the world a better place.

Thomas: And don't give up hope. The pendulum swings back and forth. As a people, we've lost our historical memory. Many of us can't remember when the Democrats were in favor of high gas prices, even though that was five minutes ago.

We have a very short time horizon behind us, but we feel like the future will always be the same. "This is the end. We'll never be in power again." That's not how this works. The pendulum always swings back. Every cause has a reaction, and every reaction has its own reaction.

Jonathan: But it does all go downhill eventually.

Thomas: The toilet bowl is circling. The arc of history does not bend up. It bends down. Medieval peasants had more free time than the typical office worker today. I wake up before my children wake up and come home after they've gone to sleep. Medieval peasants never worked that hard, and when they did work, their children were with them the whole time.

We tell ourselves it's better now than it's ever been. In some ways it is. I have a hot shower, and I enjoy that hot shower. Medieval peasants did not have a hot shower. I have better access to protein than they did. So there are positives and negatives. There's always something to be thankful for and always something to complain about.

You have a choice whether you're going to be thankful or complain, and you have a choice whether to give up hope. But giving up hope is a sin for Christians. The Bible says, "Do not lose heart," and that is a command. So do not lose heart. Don't do it.

Someone in the chat says, "We have deodorant." Also a plus. We've got it with microplastics and aluminum. Where do you think the Alzheimer's comes from?

Jonathan: Shut up, Thomas.

BBC Leaves the Murk In to Prove Blue Planet III Is Not AI

According to The Guardian, the producers of Blue Planet III are deliberately leaving cloudier, less polished camera shots in the finished series to prove the animals on screen are real and not AI-generated. Executive producer Elizabeth White told the paper that AI “makes us want to be even more authentic,” and that the creatures filmed in the deep ocean “are probably more remarkable than AI could imagine and it’s completely real.”

What Happened

In past Blue Planet shoots, White said, “the amount of plankton and things that are in the water in the sequences” would usually get a shot cut. The team “might have framed out a boat or a buoy or gone: ‘Oh, actually — the water conditions are not really good enough for this.’” Now those elements stay. White said the production is “really leaning into that authenticity” and expects to lean further into “the more organic, murkier and less polished footage” as AI keeps booming.

At a press screening, BBC specialist factual commissioning head Jack Bootle told journalists, “No gen AI was used in this series. Not a single frame. It’s all real photography.” The series was filmed over four years across five oceans. Innovations include a “stonefish” underwater CCTV camera developed by producer and director Yoland Bosiger that captured dolphins using sea sponges to block holes in coral and trap fish, a mini-dome camera to follow an octopus, a deep-sea selfie stick, leg-mounted scooters for diving footage, and lasers for deep-sea creatures. Other sequences show groupers communicating with another fish species, 200,000 crabs lining up in formation to feed, sea urchins using shells as sun hats, and penguin footage that echoes the iguana-versus-snakes sequence from Planet Earth II. David Attenborough, who turned 100 this year, narrates and was involved in the scripts. The series started Sunday, 1 November on BBC One and iPlayer, per Radio Times.

Not the Bee picked up the Guardian reporting on 30 October under the headline “BBC’s ‘Blue Planet III’ will have ‘less polished’ camera shots to prove they didn’t use AI,” with the tagline that AI has ruined a lot over the past five years and it is going to get worse.

Why Authors Care

Readers already treat machine-smooth prose the way the BBC now treats machine-smooth ocean footage: as the tell. The more polished the paragraph, the more some readers wonder whether a human wrote it.

Authors who leave rough edges on purpose (a sentence that runs long, a local detail that only someone who was there would notice, the occasional typo that survives a final pass) are building the same kind of receipt the BBC is building with plankton and buoys.

AI detectors and “human-made” labels exist, but they are imperfect and contested. The receipt that does not depend on a third-party tool is the work itself: the voice, the uneven energy, the specific choice that an average model would sand smooth.

This week: pick one chapter or short story and leave one deliberate human mark in it (an imperfect transition, a sentence that sounds like you at 1 a.m., a detail that does not serve the plot). Then decide whether your back matter or author page states, in plain language, that a human wrote the book. Do not wait for a platform to certify it.

Sources:

• Blue Planet III features cloudier footage to prove authenticity amid AI boom (The Guardian, Tara Conlan, 24 October 2026)
• BBC’s “Blue Planet III” will have “less polished” camera shots to prove they didn’t use AI (Not the Bee, 30 October 2026)
• Blue Planet III release date confirmed by the BBC with boxset treat (Radio Times, 21 October 2026)

Commentary

Thomas: The BBC has taken a very interesting stance that may indicate where art is moving. This is the "typos prove you're human" story. It's time for the Zeitgeist Report, which you can find at ZeitgeistReport.com, our podcast that covers culture, politics, and how people and reader preferences are changing.

Jonathan: Leaving the murk in to prove the footage is real is such a weird solution. People can say whatever they want, no matter what.

And I don't know. I've seen some of those eyeless, way-too-many-teeth-having things in the Mariana Trench, and I think, "No, that's AI."

Thomas: There's an unnaturalness to unusual sea life, because as humans, we don't spend much time in the ocean, and when we do, we can't see very well. So when we get crystal-clear footage of the ocean, there's a bit of an uncanny valley.

I remember this with the Apple TV screensavers. There would be a shot of a bunch of fish, and I'd think, "Is that CG? Are those real fish? They seem awfully shiny. Are real fish really that shiny?"

So it's that uncanny valley of not quite knowing whether it's real, and this is an interesting approach: leaving the messiness and the sloppiness in to prove it's not slop. The reader version would be leaving the typos in to prove the writing is real.

I don't think this is a good long-term solution. It's an interesting experiment, but if you're sophisticated with AI, you can tell it, "Add a typo every 1,000 words," or "Randomly distribute 27 typos through this book to make it look human." You can handle that at the generation step.

AI can make gross, dirty-looking things. The reason people don't see AI make gross, dirty-looking things is that people tend to prompt for clean outputs. They want typo-free writing and clean, simple videos.

There's a slopcore song that went viral in France. Slopcore is a new genre of AI music that's blowing up online. In this French song, an AI character sings about how she wakes up, takes a selfie, and shares it online, and everyone says she's AI. She insists she isn't, but even her mom says she's AI.

As the song progresses, little flickers of errors make her look artificial, not human. At one point her eye color changes, and the reveal is that she is AI.

The song is incredibly catchy. It's gotten millions of streams on X, although for whatever reason I haven't seen it go viral on YouTube. On X, it's a bop, as the kids say.

In the song, she holds up her hand to prove she has five fingers and isn't AI, which I thought was funny, because that would have been strong proof in 2024, when AI couldn't handle fingers very well. Now it can handle fingers in video just fine and sync the mouth to the music just fine.