Kit Walker's Blog

Book publisher Hachette has pulled out of its deal with author Mia Ballard over accusations that her novel, Shy Girl, was written with the assistance of a large language model.

I say “accusations” because the actual evidence here is pretty thin. The arguments presented are all either “the writing looks like AI” or “we ran bits of the novel through an AI detector and it told us the text was AI-generated.”

First off, human beings are quite bad at telling the difference between machine-generated and human-generated art. The logical inconsistencies in the plot and prose could be the result of a chatbot overrunning its context window, or just sloppy writing, or (considering the subject matter) a deliberate attempt at surrealism. Most of the “obvious tells” of LLM-generated text (em dashes, rule of three, etc.) are actually features of a formal African English education, because LLMs were largely trained by criminally underpaid African workers. And guess who most often gets accused of “sounding like a chatbot”?

Then we get into AI detection tools, which The New York Times claims to have used. Many “AI detectors” also use machine learning to some degree — analyzing and comparing two sets of text is something LLMs are built to do — but these tools tend to produce a lot of false results. The differences between human-generated text and machine-generated text are going to be largely invisible to an LLM designed to mechanically produce text that could plausibly pass as something a human wrote.

And that’s not even getting into the “AI detectors” that simply paste the submitted text into ChatGPT and ask it, “hey, did you write this?” To quote a friend of mine with approximate knowledge of many things, “anyone who tells you they have a tool to accurately detect AI is probably a liar, and liars love to use AI, so it’s probably just feeding the text into ChatGPT and asking.”

Three years ago, I noted that because “it looks like it was made by AI” is an accusation that can’t be proven right or wrong, it would inevitably be used as an ideological bludgeon against any art an accuser personally didn’t like very much. And now it looks as though a lot of people really didn’t like Shy Girl, didn’t think anyone else should like Shy Girl, and found the perfect way to bully it off the market.

(Does it feel good to be right all the time? No, it’s awful.)

Trying to suss out whether a book was written using an LLM or not is, in my opinion, pointless. A book should be criticized on the basis of whether it sucks — and, so far, provably LLM-written books have universally sucked. When an LLM manages to write a novel that’s actually good, we can revisit this topic.

And I’m fine with making it a rule that nobody can publish a novel they didn’t personally write, but in that case someone should have a word with Tom Clancy’s corpse.

Jason Collier is on his way up in the world. Wealthy and well-educated, he’s translated a successful business career overseas into a parliament seat at home in Britain. His marriage to one of the world’s most powerful tech executives has made him a key asset to the government. It is, in light of all this success, of little concern to anyone who matters that Collier has left a trail of violated and abused victims behind him.

Jay Moriarty isn’t anyone who matters — but twenty years ago, Jason Collier hurt a young boy named Sebastian Moran. For that, Moriarty is going to destroy him.

The final chapter of “A Reckoning in Whitehall” has been published on the Casefile of Jay Moriarty website! You can read the entire story free online, or get it as an ebook.

People who scored higher on the Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale tended to perform worse on tests measuring analytical thinking, cognitive reflection, and fluid intelligence. They also made poorer judgments in workplace decision-making scenarios designed to mimic common business problems.

In other words, the employees most impressed by corporate jargon were also the ones least likely to think critically about it.

It’s tempting to reinscribe an essentialist reading, and see Bound as a trans film now because it was made by trans filmmakers. Or we could think of transness in cinema a little more expansively. In his book Lana and Lilly Wachowski, Cáel M. Keegan suggests that we read Bound as an “invitation to sense differently.” Which is a part of the trans experience—we feel a truth via the body that appearances belie. In Bound, we find the beginnings of a journey into a certain trans sensibility that runs through all the Wachowskis’ work.

Of 28 examiners with the FBI Laboratory’s microscopic hair comparison unit, 26 overstated forensic matches in ways that favored prosecutors in more than 95 percent of the 268 trials reviewed so far.

Would you believe this is not even the first time I’ve quoted that bit from Broadcast News?

-K

It’s fascinating to me how the cultural object of The Book, defined as a physical stack of paper with words in it, generates so much more excitement than an ebook. Both take arguably the same amount of effort, and yet one “counts” as an achievement in a way that the other doesn’t.

Anyway: The Book.

A modern day re-imagining of Sherlock Holmes’ most famous enemies!

Following his polite ejection from the SAS at the end of a decade-long military career, Captain Sebastian Moran is at loose ends. Between cheating at cards and freelance jobs as a security consultant, he’s just barely managing to keep busy — but when a routine penetration test goes awry, Moran is thrown into the path of a brilliant, short-tempered hacker named Jay Moriarty.

Up until now, Moriarty has worked alone. But Moran is clever, unpredictable, and unlike anyone Moriarty has ever met, and the attraction between them quickly escalates into an intense, confusing relationship.

Together, Moriarty and Moran must face an aerospace executive covering up a deadly secret, a real estate developer who will do anything to climb the social ladder, a famous author funding a hate movement, a holiday resort full of international gangsters, and the treasonous leader of a rogue mercenary company.

Collects the first five installments of Kit Walker’s Casefile of Jay Moriarty series, revised and edited, plus three bonus stories!

Paperbacks are currently only available from Amazon, but will be arriving on DriveThruFiction soon! If you want your copy fast, get the Amazon edition. If you’re willing to wait for higher print quality, stay tuned for a link to the DTF edition.

Practice and study are the two ways to improve in any field. Everyone knows this, which is why I kind of love this discourse. It’s so absurd that it loops around from inanity to insanity.

The message of many data labelers and of the lawyers who have been helping them is that artificial intelligence is not a magical tool built by people in San Francisco making millions of dollars a year and pushing their companies to insane valuations. Artificial intelligence is an extractive technology that relies on the brutal labor of underpaid workers around the world.

Xikipedia is a pseudo social media feed that algorithmically shows you content from Simple Wikipedia. It is made as a demonstration of how even a basic non-ML algorithm with no data from other users can quickly learn what you engage with to suggest you more similar content.

My elderly relatives keep promising/threatening to read the new collection. I can’t exactly stop them, but I’m really hoping they don’t ask me to explain all the gay stuff.

-K

When I was a kid, my mom explained to me why she didn’t really enjoy Mother’s Day: she felt as if celebrating mothers one day a year gave everyone free reign to take them for granted during the other 364. I kind of got it after a while, but I couldn’t relate — until the corporate world started making such a big fucking deal out of International Women’s Day.

A few years ago, one of my previous employers released a promotional IWD video in which various female employees explained how the company made them feel included and supported. The next year, that same company fired their majority-female office support staff and hired them back as contractors so it wouldn’t have to pay them benefits.

Another year, a different company I was working for at the time decided to commemorate IWD by giving all the women in the office (or everyone perceived as a woman, anyway) a potted plant and a personalized card featuring quotes from famous women throughout history. As a dyke with a case of the Genders who had no interest in going to paint nite, I was firmly on the margins of the “Women of [COMPANY]” social group; the card perfectly encapsulated that whole state of affairs. It featured a quote from Margaret Thatcher.

You know, noted LGBT ally Margaret Thatcher.

The plant was also a bit on-the-nose. “Here is a thing you are now responsible for keeping alive whether you like it or not. Happy International Women’s Day.”

There’s one week left before the release of my first Casefile of Jay Moriarty anthology! The collection comes out on March 16 in print and ebook formats, and includes the first five installments of the series as well as three bonus stories.

One article from The Times, published in 2022, claimed that at least 1,000 families were planning mass legal action against the Tavistock gender clinic for rushing youngsters into taking puberty blockers.

However, a freedom of information (FOI) request to the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust, shared by Yorkshire Bylines, revealed that, between 2012 and 2022, only eight complaints over healthcare provisions had been lodged.

… the bystander effect is actually more complicated than its mythological version, and it begins with a story that has been distorted beyond recognition—that of the murder of Kitty Genovese herself.

And now we have Thomas Plamburger, someone who clearly does not possess the emotional regulation to help a partner through a difficult hike. The judge said he “struggles to switch from his own abilities to the abilities of others,” but to be clear, the actual problem (in my opinion) is that he just doesn’t view his female partners as fully human or worth considering. Their inability to keep up with him makes him angry, and so he punishes them by abandoning them in dangerous conditions — twice, that we know of.

Apparently the UK has recently been experiencing something called “blood rain.” Wasn’t me.

-K

A few days ago, a mutual of mine on Tumblr asked a pretty interesting question: “why do people get uncomfortable with political fanfic?” She went on to point out that “A lot of you love to boast that you love the dirtiest, nastiest smut ever, why can’t you handle someone writing ‘fascism is bad’?”

It reminded me of the time a book marketer told me The Casefile of Jay Moriarty was too political for queer romance readers, and too gay for political thriller readers. As if those two categories were completely mutually exclusive.

Fanfiction and romance fiction have a lot in common, and not just because fanfic tends to have a lot of sex and romance in it. Both are capable of being really really good — like, “permanently alters your brain chemistry, haunts you for the rest of your life” good — but are largely viewed as inherently frivolous. Both mediums are often read, written, and published by people who don’t particularly give a shit (much to the frustration of readers, writers, and publishers who do).

And so, very often, a reader going into a fanfic or romance novel will be doing so with the expectation that these works are low-effort; that the experience they’re about to have won’t make them think or feel anything complicated. When that assumption turns out to be untrue — when the work demands effort on the part of the reader — they respond negatively. It’s the literary equivalent of a pillow princess suddenly being asked to top.

However, just because I understand this viewpoint doesn’t mean I have to respect it. Fuck your comfort, I’m trying to do something interesting out here. To quote Bruce Sterling, “You can get a hell of a lot done in a popular medium just by knocking it off with the bullshit.”

On this episode of I Will Fight You, my co-hosts and I once again review three Romeo & Juliet adaptations at once: Romeo & Juliet (2013), Pizza My Heart, and The Lion King II: Simba’s Pride. We will keep doing this every year. You cannot stop us.

“A Reckoning in Whitehall” is now serializing on the Casefile of Jay Moriarty website. The first chapter is available now, and subsequent chapters will be posted weekly on Mondays.

There is a likeability crisis in much contemporary queer sff. Authors are unwilling to make their characters look bad, and it compromises the integrity of the story. I don’t think this is the result of individual authors’ incompetence. The state of the publishing industry and the social media ecosystem around genre fiction has refigured the reader as, primarily, a customer, and the customer is always right.

As a sadomasochistic provocation – another of the film’s stated intents – it’s equally limp. A hanged man with an erection drives a village into a Bacchanalian frenzy. A woman wears a dog collar and barks. But these scenes aren’t provocative when they’re so expressly played as a joke, mostly with a fetishistic view of class that categorises poor people as sexual deviants and rich people as clueless prudes.

The Appleby Report only examined patients of [the Gender Identity Development Service]. But in the aftermath of the Bell v Tavistock ruling, wait times for GIDS appointments skyrocketed, now sitting at an estimated average of 25 years.

Here’s some more from that Bruce Sterling speech:

I don’t think you can last by meeting the contemporary public taste, the taste from the last quarterly report. I don’t think you can last by following demographics and carefully meeting expectations. I don’t know many works of art that last that are condescending. I don’t know many works of art that last that are deliberately stupid. … Don’t aim to be civilized. Don’t hope that straight people will keep you on as some kind of pet. To hell with them; they put you here. You should fully realize what society has made of you and take a terrible revenge. Get weird. Get way weird. Get dangerously weird. Get sophisticatedly, thoroughly weird and don’t do it halfway, put every ounce of horsepower you have behind it. Have the artistic courage to recognize your own significance in culture!

-K

Conventional publishing wisdom holds that you’re supposed to adopt a buzzy, overexcited tone when announcing the release of a new book, the better to build up hype. I’m not sure that wisdom holds when the book in question is about a very serious, very horrible thing that won’t stop showing up in the news while you’re writing and publishing the book.

Jason Collier is on his way up in the world. Wealthy and well-educated, he’s translated a successful business career overseas into a parliament seat at home in Britain. His marriage to one of the world’s most powerful tech executives has made him a key asset to the government. It is, in light of all this success, of little concern to anyone who matters that Collier has left a trail of violated and abused victims behind him.

Jay Moriarty certainly isn’t anyone who matters — but twenty years ago, Jason Collier hurt a boy named Sebastian Moran. For that, Moriarty is going to destroy him.

“A Reckoning in Whitehall” is the tenth story in my series The Casefile of Jay Moriarty, a modern-day queer take on the iconic Sherlock Holmes villain, his partner Sebastian Moran, and the various crimes they commit together.

This one gets pretty heavy. It’s about abuse and sexual violence, and the ways in which they’re enabled by structures of power. I originally hashed out the concept early last year in an attempt to understand what were, back then, current events; I was not expecting it to be even more relevant by the time it came out.

I put a lot of love, anger, and grief into “A Reckoning in Whitehall.” It’s not a nice story, but I did my best to make it an honest one.

The surge in genetic testing coincides with rising nationalist fervour in Egypt, where economic crisis, weakening regional influence, and an influx of refugees have converged with government promotion of what some researchers call “neo-pharaonism”.

In between these two buried pieces of context–that both of these writers have an economic interest in the success of AI in the writing space because they sell courses on how to use AI to write books–this article only barely describes whether or not these books are any good or if readers like them.

Animals must have Wikipedia articles.

You have limited time, but get more time for each animal listed. When the timer runs out, that’s game over.

I can’t help feeling like I’ve pulled a mean trick on everyone who showed up after KJ Charles called the Casefile “great fun.”

-K

Draft2Digital has just rolled out distribution through Bookshop.org, which means a bunch of my books are now available on Bookshop. However, it looks like Bookshop is blocking distribution for titles that are under a certain length. My short stories haven’t made it onto the site; neither have any of the Saintstown books, nor the first Casefile of Jay Moriarty book.

Some other writers are also reporting that their erotica books were blocked from distribution through Bookshop. According to Draft2Digital, this isn’t a blanket ban; they claim “additional safeguards” are needed before erotica can be sold on Bookshop, and that “support is coming soon.” I can only assume these “safeguards” will include age verification, which presents its own issues.

It would certainly be a wild choice for Bookshop to suddenly ban sex books, considering how hard they’re riding the Heated Rivalry hype wave. I’ve seen other platforms try to thread the needle between romance and erotica by claiming erotica is “for the purpose of titillation/arousing sexual desire,” and meanwhile romance … isn’t, I guess? I think BookTok would disagree with that assessment.

And also, as I’ve pointed out before, who gets final say over the “purpose” of a piece of art? Who gets to decide whether I’m a pornographer? And why is a pornographer such a terrible thing to be?

I suspect this tension between a publishing industry going all-in on “spicy” romance and a retail industry desperate to crack down on any and all “adult” content will come to a head sooner rather than later.

Jason Collier is on his way up in the world. Wealthy and well-educated, he’s translated a successful business career overseas into a parliament seat at home in Britain. His marriage to one of the world’s most powerful tech executives has made him a key asset to the government. It is, in light of all this success, of little concern to anyone who matters that Collier has left a trail of violated and abused victims behind him.

Jay Moriarty certainly isn’t anyone who matters — but twenty years ago, Jason Collier hurt a boy named Sebastian Moran. For that, Moriarty is going to destroy him.

The tenth story in The Casefile of Jay Moriarty, titled “A Reckoning in Whitehall,” comes out on February 16.

Additionally, Ko-fi supporters who subscribe at the Early Access tier ($5 CAD/month) can download the book for free, right now.

The women have accused the company of “trafficking” them, claiming they were hired for legitimate shop-floor positions and then transferred into non-existent office roles created solely to deliver them to Al Fayed. They believe this process involved dozens of other members of Harrods staff, including those in senior roles, who enabled and were complicit in their abuse.

While transgender women exhibited higher lean mass than cisgender women, their physical fitness was comparable. Current evidence is mostly low certainty and has heterogenous quality but does not support theories of inherent athletic advantages for transgender women over cisgender.

It’s been a heavy one this week. Go draw a horse.

It looks like Discord is also rolling out age verification worldwide. They have already leaked age verification data at least once. Do not give Discord your ID.

-K

A friend of mine, while reading over a draft of the next Casefile of Jay Moriarty story, said, “Love how angry you are in this one.” Which is maybe one of the highest compliments I’ve received on my writing.

As I’ve explained to a few people before, I don’t see myself as a cynic or a pessimist. You need expectations to get as pissed off as I do; I’m a perpetually disappointed optimist.

I joined Tanner and Lindsay once again on a very Canadian episode of Not If I Reboot You First! This time, we resurrect the Concerned Children’s Advertisers PSAs and update them for the TikTok era. If you want a vision of the future, imagine Lord Humungus sitting on a throne of Labubus forever.

Businesses looking to sponsor July’s Future of Tech Summit, which is coordinated by Arden Strategies and tech industry lobbying group Startup Coalition, can choose from a tiered range of packages, according to a brochure sent out to prospective sponsors this week.

The most expensive costs £30,000 and entitles the sponsor to make a speech at the reception, be introduced to key policymakers and attend a “private post-conference tech dinner” with senior advisers to Keir Starmer and chancellor Rachel Reeves.

… a quick update on the new Russian visa program meant to attract foreigners who want to live by so called traditional values.

So far, about 1,500 people have signed up, and most of them seem to be having an absolutely miserable time.

“They made me feel really old,” he says. “They were like, ‘What is a wolf and why is it on parade?’ And I was like, ‘I hate both of you.’ And I was like, ‘Feist? 1,2,3,4?’ And they’re like, ‘Oh yeah, we watched that on Sesame Street.’ And I was like, ‘Again, I’d like to push you down a flight of stairs. Your youth enrages me.’”

Thanks to one of my previous newsletters, my dad ended up googling what a butt plug is.

-K

Heated Rivalry has pushed gay romance as a genre into the mainstream eye, which of course means we must now be subjected to an endless stream of video essays and thinkpieces about whether certain demographics (women, straight men, people who aren’t into hockey) are “allowed” to like it.

I do understand why this happens. Capitalist society in general (and USAmerican culture in particular) likes to frame consumption as a political act. This, among other things, fosters a desire for one’s consumption habits to convey the “correct” politics; if voting with your wallet is the only real vote you have, then buying the wrong thing — or even buying the right thing for the wrong reasons (voyeurism, ignorance, horniness, etc.) — makes you a bad person. Add to that the perennial audience desire for fictional characters’ experiences and values to perfectly reflect one’s own experiences and values, and you create a perfect storm of derangement in which reading about someone who isn’t like you is somehow stealing from people who aren’t like you.

This is stupid. Thought crime isn’t real. The point of fiction is to explore a point of view outside your own. If you needed me to tell you that, I’m glad I told you that. And speaking as someone who writes this stuff, I don’t particularly care who engages with my art or why — I just care that they’re doing it.

Yes, even if they’re jerking off to it. That’s their business, not mine.

Sebastian, sitting next to Jay on the sofa, reminded him, “You wanted to learn how to pick locks.”

Jay’s exact words at the time had been “How hard could it be?”

In the latest interlude of The Casefile of Jay Moriarty, Jay learns a new skill and Sebastian is up to something.

Trans communities have known, and sounded the alarm, about the NYT’s increasingly anti-trans stance for years. Sadly, too many cis people have ignored these warnings, especially as many of the details have often remained obscured behind the paper’s extensive corporate hierarchy and established reputation.

When openDemocracy approached Palantir to ask about its recent hires from the Ministry of Defence, it responded via a spokesperson who worked at the Ministry of Defence in 2015/16.

When police asked the woman if she’d been drinking, she responded with, “A lot.” She added she took a Jagerbomb just before driving and had been drinking Jameson and Red Bulls. A breathalyzer test came back with a blood alcohol content of 0.195, more than twice the legal limit.

Police arrested the woman, who told them they were going to “find a bunch of s**t” in her car. 

Not to be all Bluesky liberal about it, but if you’re worried about watching boys kiss and whether it makes you a bad person while all this is going on, maybe worry about something else.

-K

Last week one of my books hit #1 on Amazon’s Free Transgender Romance bestseller list, which was a great way to find out that Amazon still doesn’t distinguish between works like mine and, uh, forced-feminization fetish erotica:

I don’t have any particular moral opposition to forcefem erotica, but I do think anyone coming to this list for that kind of thing is likely to be disappointed by my book, and vice versa.

Whatever, I’ll take the win.

The first collected anthology of The Casefile of Jay Moriarty comes out on March 16! You can preorder the ebook version now (from those vendors that allow them); preorders for the print version will be available closer to release.

My co-hosts and I have been doing I Will Fight You for 10 years, so we decided to revisit the first movie we ever reviewed: The Swan Princess. Have a listen to hear Annie, Maq and me discuss important questions, such as: what do bats look like?

A Lucky Box is a kind of gacha machine or lootbox, a vending machine that dispenses random prizes for cash. A person puts in money and the machine spits out a random collectible. Customers pick a “type” of collectible they want—typically either a rare Pokémon card, sports card, or sports jersey—insert money and get a random item.

“I don’t know why they’re sending me very cross letters saying, ‘Stop sending items that could cause bodily harm to this country,’” Bennett said. “This sounds like a you problem. The call was coming from inside the house.”

Rankin confirmed to The Herald that all of the acts performed in his videos are “completely consensual” and responded to the takedown of his campaign advert on X.

In a now-deleted post, he wrote, as reported by The Sun: “Tells you a lot about Police Scotland’s vetting processes if they missed all the many links directing people to my porn.”

I hope the people who subscribed to this newsletter after reading my books are prepared for all the other weird shit I write about.

-K

This month marks the 10-year anniversary of the I Will Fight You podcast. In celebration, my co-hosts and I decided to revisit the first movie we ever covered: The Swan Princess.

I keep track of all the movies I own and watch via a website called Trakt, and when I looked up The Swan Princess, I noticed something unusual about the banner image attached to its Trakt listing:

I’ve seen a lot of official promo images for The Swan Princess over the years, and this didn’t look like any of them. That, plus the signature down in the corner, made me suspect this wasn’t an official image at all.

It’s sure being treated like an official image, though. It shows up in the photos section of the movie’s Rotten Tomatoes listing, its Common Sense Media listing, its TMDB listing, this listicle on Looper, and appears to be somewhere in the movie’s image library on Sky TV:

I posted this picture in the Crooked Russian Cam Discord, and eventually one of our members managed to track down the source (thanks, Zagil!). It’s a piece of fanart, drawn by an artist who goes by madam-marla on DeviantArt.

It seems that, sometime in the early 2010s, a blogger went looking for art to accompany a post about The Swan Princess and found madam-marla’s piece through Google image search. Then another blog picked up the image, and another, until inadvertent SEO pushed it near the top of the image search listings for the movie. From there, tired interns and/or automated image scrapers picked it up as an official promotional image, and now it’s everywhere.

I think madam-marla might be owed some money.

Root said she contacted a hacker who helped to exfiltrate the data. However, no hacks were required – all it took was a simple URL trick of adding “download-all-users/” to the top-level domain.

You work at a mermaid-sourcing corporation. Gamble your blood, upgrade your luck with insider deals, and sew fish tails onto human torsos. Use the profits to pay off your debts and bribe others. “Mermaids are Seafood” is a management game with choices and a branching story.

The machine, in its quest to sound authoritative, ended up sounding like a KCPE graduate who scored an ‘A’ in English Composition. It accidentally replicated the linguistic ghost of the British Empire.

By the way, the new Swan Princess episode is now recorded and will be out later this month. We talked about it for twice as long as the actual runtime of the movie.

-K