Life has been life-ing!
Work stays busy…
Went to Japan (!) for the first time last November, and going again in about a week.
Still retired as a Prince content creator but poking around here and there, not as an obligation or a return, just something I do when I feel like it versus something I feel obligated to do. It’s a better balance. My capacity for things has…changed. But my thoughts haven’t slowed down.
A lot of my thinking, for the majority of the time since Prince passed, has been applying what bothers me about the world to that fandom specifically. There are things that could have been done to promote him, narratives to correct, information to just share and dig into that wasn’t discussed much. There was also self-reflection, interrogating whether the grief about losing him is about him, or about the loss of your own hopes and dreams.
Since stepping back and returning to other fandoms I’ve been into since elementary school, it’s been really interesting to just receive and enjoy other creators’ work and apply those same kinds of frameworks elsewhere, whether it’s an anime like Jujutsu Kaisen, legacy IP like Sailor Moon, Ranma ½, or Fushigi Yuugi, or digging into an industry that combines many of the things I love in a fandom like Love and Deepspace (otome, action, RPG, interactive text adventures).
A fandom is going to fandom no matter what the subject is, and it has been truly fascinating, as a systems thinker, to see how these systems work for different types of IP, and even more fascinating to witness how the fans engage with them.
And then there’s AI.
So many things out there about that as well. Again, as someone who works with data analytics at scale, and especially AI in professional settings as a provider of those services, it’s been another interesting journey to be on.
Does it draw on natural resources? Yes. Is it “slop?” Eh, depends on the humans using it. Can it be useful sometimes? Yes. But the danger of it in my eyes is much more nebulous, and something I don’t think people are discussing in a meaningful way because they keep getting distracted by more emotionally driven half-truths about how it all works.
That said, I want to talk about fandom in general and apply some specific case studies about what I’ve noticed over the past several years. It’s not Prince related, it’s pattern related. And I want to do it in a way that demonstrates a use case for how to work with AI intentionally. It’s here to stay, it’s just a matter of being smart about its use.
What follows in the next couple of posts are the results of some conversations I’ve had with Claude. They began as a curiosity, me wondering about patterns I’ve noticed about outrage culture in fandom, about a lack of nuance and critical thinking, about fascination around the progression of K-pop popularity over the past 30 years being a passive observer/fan since about 2000 or so.
I’d speak into my phone using speech to text, dumping thoughts I’d had over time about all of this. Then I’d find articles that backed up what I said. I’d use that context to have Claude argue with me, using counterpoints I found or research articles on trends that spoke to my theory.
When I felt like I had enough information, I’d ask it to create an outline to make sure it understood the context of what I said. This was tedious. AI hallucinates a lot, infers a lot, inserts things I never said. It takes quite a while to iterate through it to make sure it captures only what I said and the intent behind it.
When I was satisfied with the outline, I had it write in a narrative form that an AI could pick up and run with, gathered my journal entries and articles, and dumped it all into NotebookLM to generate podcasts of two AI hosts discussing my thoughts and the sources.
I thought this would be easier than doing my podcast the way I used to do Darling Nisi, but I probably spent about the same, if not more, time doing this. The purpose is not really to discuss things with another human. I’m still gun shy from being overwhelmed as a content creator, and the actual second job that tends to be, but it’s a creative way to dig deep on topics that are spinning in my mind, just to get them out of my head in an engaging way. (And interesting to listen “people” discuss my thoughts while sitting in Atlanta traffic on the way to work).
Not sure how many people would be interested in hearing hours of my stream of thoughts about whatever nerdy thing I’m hyperfixated on, but a simulated conversation between two people discussing those thoughts, that details what my argument was, and asking thoughtful questions around it might be more engaging.
And I WISH NotebookLM existed when I was in school. Imagine uploading a textbook and telling it to explain something you don’t understand when you’re in the library at 2AM studying for a final. An interesting use case.
All that said, stay tuned, but don’t expect. I don’t plan to do this often, just when it moves me. And I DEFINTELY don’t plan to publish this on my channels. I swear I’m a retired creator and the landscape for it all has changed so much in the past few years I don’t even want to invite the eyes of fandoms that invest actual billions of dollars in their subjects.
We thought the Prince fandom was bad?
They are on another level, for real.
Dig in!
The Devotion Economy: Fandom, Identity, and the Machinery of Attachment