The Consortium, the Quorum, the alien interface, depicted in 'romantic' fiction - what the heck?!

Again, the bizarre thing is the apparent inability to interface with reality via language and how telling a clue that must be if only the reader was paying attention (which I was). Some of the authors were better than others, but all of them had this problem.

I'll have to think about some (many?) of these books being written by bots.

I did some research and wrote a post that has relation to the topic of psychopathy and language.

Thought it was more appropriate to post it there.

And also found this interesting case.


A 53-year-old, right-handed man with 14-years of education presented with a 1-year history of progressive neuropsychiatric changes. He became disinhibited in conversation and in approaching strangers, unempathic in his response to friends and family, compulsive in making 10–20 phone calls per day and calling 800-numbers, and apathetic and disengaged from productive activities.

He also developed an inordinate “sweet tooth,” with a preference for strawberry milkshakes.


The past medical history and family histories were nonsignificant. Along with these changes, the patient struggled to find the right word to use and began to misuse words.

When asked about the name of the clinic, he replied “phallic” instead of “neurologic,” but could not explain why. He states that he was making “innuendos” for errors. He described his problem as a “medieval condition,” and he pointed to his head. Later, he said that he had a “molecular problem” that affected his thinking. The patient described himself as very “aesthetic” and “coexistent.” He made multiple other word substitutions throughout the interview....

This patient showed malapropisms associated with the development of FTD. He met diagnostic criteria for FTD, including inertia, disinhibition, decreased empathy, compulsive behaviors, and dietary changes.1,2

He also had alterations in word usage along with word-finding difficulty and a reduction in verbal output, common findings in the frontotemporal lobar degenerations.3

His mis-speech was consistent with malapropisms, as they were often humorous or incongruous word substitutions that had some similarity in sound to the intended words;4 for example, “medieval” for mental.

The emergence of malapropisms in FTD may be due to word-finding difficulty coupled with a combination of deficits evident in these patients. As they struggle for words, patients with malapropisms may resort to accessing words in the same “phonological neighborhood.4 Frontally-mediated deficits in working memory,5 as well as lack of self-monitoring or self-correction seen in frontally-injured patients, may sustain the malapropisms.

In sum, the new tendency to malapropisms can be a symptom of a frontally predominant disorder, and clinicians should consider conditions such as FTD when they encounter a newly-developed “Archie Bunker.”
 
Last edited:
Thinking about the subject more and wonder if the authors are just young and were exposed to reduction in the quality of education?

I've lost count of the number of times I've seen a social media post on a public board start with 'Admin, please delete if not aloud' and am reminded of a young couple who referred to each other in writing as 'my angle'
 
I'll have to think about some (many?) of these books being written by bots. Any more good samples of robots/AI critters writing stuff?
Hot stuff now in an AI field is GPT-3 language model. Books listed in the most popular article regarding GPT-3 novels:

It is also possible to play alone with AI using Holo AI:

Here is my take on writing a short story. I've parametrized their model using the tag "paranormal" and used the blurb of "The Wave Chapter 1" as a starting point. Machine-generated text is bolded:
Many physicists suggest that all that really exists are “waveforms” and our consciousness is something that “reads waves.” We give form and structure to the waves we “read” according to some agreed upon convention. And so, certain denizens of hyperdimensional space are “read” as more or less “reptilian” because that is the “essence” of their being, the frequency of their “wave form.” We actually have come to prefer calling them the “Overlords of Entropy”. They are not necessarily physical as we understand the term, nor are they necessarily “alien” as we understand the term either. We suspect that the perceptions of these levels of reality and their “consciousness units” are what is behind many religious conceptions and mythological representations of “gods and goddesses” and creatures of all sorts.

Whatever else they may be, the Overlords are clearly aware of our existence, if only through our “signals” that they can read. The far-reaching consequences of that awareness should make us consider what a staggering advantage we could gain from an alliance with them in furthering the advancement of the human species, as well as our own individual self-interest. I do not wish to leave you without an invitation for your personal investigation into the nature of those Overlords. Their home world is a relatively uninhabitable wasteland which was originally part of our solar system but which drifted off through intergalactic space when there was a calamity (possibly nuclear) on one of our neighboring planets which forced it off its orbit. Since that time, their civilization has grown to the point where it now rules large portions of both the Milky Way galaxy and much of the local universe. If you seek to find them, the main concentration of their population is currently living on a large mass in our galactic neighborhood, near a spiral arm at approximately thirteen light years distant from Earth. You will need to travel quickly and quietly by energy field technology, using high capacity power storage and then quickly refilling said storage again before continuing to your next destination. Once in range of such signals from the central planetary city, search for a very strong band signal containing the following alternating hexadecimal code: 1111111111111111. This particular transmission format will usually start the sending signal and is used throughout most transmissions made by the people who rule this alien realm. Other transmissions use other formats depending on circumstances. Do not expect much in the way of replies unless you establish communication of some sort beforehand.
Fun stuff :)

Edit:
And the same model with part of the latest session with C's as a starting point:
Q: (L) In other words, if we get a new real genuine plague/pandemic/Black Death type of situation, what would the global death rate be?

A: 79%

Q: (Joe) That's IF we get one.

(L) I hope ya'll know how to drive bulldozers and operating excavators. That's a lot of bodies to get rid of! Don't wanna burn 'em and waste your fossil fuels! You might run out. [laughter] Bulldoze them and put the lime on them. That's what they did in the old days.

(Learner) In which places of Europe and the rest of the Western world is it most likely that people will wake up, network and help each other while facing ever tightening screws of Covid and other tyranny, black-outs, earth changes, etc.?

A: Pockets in many places.

Q: What about the North Americas? Couldn't we assume that those on both coasts have suffered much more than the majority by virtue of being hard hit by effects of civilization wars and crazed capitalism? At least compared with other regions in the North Americas?

A: Probably. But there are some good examples in Alaska where even small towns can support their entire populace for over two weeks on food supplies and critical medical services delivered by friends who have left home as well. It helps that most of the workforce is dedicated to survival work outside of town as part of permafrost systems where food has been preserved for centuries. But still, an 80% casualty rate is a pretty significant amount.
 
Last edited:
Hot stuff now in an AI field is GPT-3 language model. Books listed in the most popular article regarding GPT-3 novels:

It is also possible to play alone with AI using Holo AI:

Here is my take on writing a short story. I've parametrized their model using the tag "paranormal" and used the blurb of "The Wave Chapter 1" as a starting point. Machine-generated text is bolded:

Fun stuff :)

Edit:
And the same model with part of the latest session with C's as a starting point:

Well now, that is totally bizarre and makes it seem quite possible that such texts could be generated.

However, it seems to me that the bot has a better grasp on language than the authors of these texts do and that takes me back to what Keit posted above about Frontotemporal Dementia. But dayyum! Can that many people engaged in writing a certain type of novel all be so afflicted? Because afflicted they certainly are! I was so fascinated by what I was seeing in the writing that I read way more of those things than was healthy! It was like the ten years I spent studying psychopathy, just trying, trying, trying to understand what I was seeing.

I thought about the breakdown in the educational system, too, but that really didn't seem to me to be the answer. The problem was way more specific and odd than that could produce.

The examples given in Keit's post are also right on target and exactly the thing I encountered in these texts.

There were some authors that mostly had issues with verbs/adverbs and reconciling verbs to nouns; that seems to be a separate issue. The bizarre part came in with the malapropisms and the authors who had that issue did not seem to have the same problem with verbs. I was also told by Joe and Niall here that there are some regions in England where the verbs were used exactly as I was seeing them, so that could be a regional thing.

But the malapropisms, apparently not knowing the meanings of so many words just blew my mind. If I didn't have better things to do, I could go through one of those books and pull out hundreds of examples.
 
Well now, that is totally bizarre and makes it seem quite possible that such texts could be generated.

However, it seems to me that the bot has a better grasp on language than the authors of these texts do and that takes me back to what Keit posted above about Frontotemporal Dementia. But dayyum! Can that many people engaged in writing a certain type of novel all be so afflicted? Because afflicted they certainly are! I was so fascinated by what I was seeing in the writing that I read way more of those things than was healthy! It was like the ten years I spent studying psychopathy, just trying, trying, trying to understand what I was seeing.
It can also be a mix of two: it depends on how the AI language model was trained. If for example training corpus was composed of a narrow selection of texts that have that kind of errors (for ex. from the same author), the model will also be generating those. In my case, I've played with Holo AI that probably has a range of models trained on a wide range of English literature. It is also worth noting that AI can generate plagiarism, as was the case of GitHub's Copilot.

It can also be possible, that the author was using machine help. Take a look at Holo AI FAQ:

Q2: How does Holo AI help me write things?​

Anytime during the course of your writing or exploring, you can click the "generate completions" button. The AI will give you several options to continue whatever you've written on its own. This is unlike any "autocomplete" you are probably be familiar with. Given the right prompt, the AI is capable of generating entirely new and coherent content.
 
I agree: psychopathy appears to be at the root of this sort of literature. And the aim appears to be to normalize, or even glorify, psychopathy, and excuse it too. Another aim appears to be normalizing ideas of total anarchy and to make killing others just "all in a day's work".

But, I don't think that all of the authors are psychopaths, though certainly they are influenced by psychopathic thinking. I'm reminded of what Lobaczewski said about schizoid psychopathy and what happens when they turn their energies to writing...

Again, the bizarre thing is the apparent inability to interface with reality via language and how telling a clue that must be if only the reader was paying attention (which I was). Some of the authors were better than others, but all of them had this problem.
That and not having someone knowledgeable to proof read their manuscripts. They probably crank these things out in a couple of weeks with little care as to whether or not the things are grammatically correct.
 
It is very common in New Zealand. After living in Australia for 20 years it was one of the first things I noticed when we returned. Statements that turned into questions and /or ended with Eh? "The government is pretty crap, eh?"
Here in Mexico, upper-class or 'posh' young people tend to speak with a tone of voice similar to the "Valley Girl" - or so it sounds to me - a bit with a questioning intonation towards the end, although there's a song-like quality to their whole speech. They call them "fresas" over here - literally 'strawberries'. I always thought they were trying to immitate American culture with their voice. They are the most likely to go abroad and hang out among those circles, and back home they may want to make a point of their status. Then the practice probably becomes generalized out of imitation, I thought. Well, maybe that's the case for most, as in people trying to 'fit in', as well as being influenced by media, but perhaps there is an extra element there?

It would be interesting to see how many countries have similar versions of the "up-speak", and what those countries are, to see if it's all or mostly imitation or something more essential, as suggested above.
 
I agree: psychopathy appears to be at the root of this sort of literature. And the aim appears to be to normalize, or even glorify, psychopathy, and excuse it too. Another aim appears to be normalizing ideas of total anarchy and to make killing others just "all in a day's work".

But, I don't think that all of the authors are psychopaths, though certainly they are influenced by psychopathic thinking. I'm reminded of what Lobaczewski said about schizoid psychopathy and what happens when they turn their energies to writing...

Again, the bizarre thing is the apparent inability to interface with reality via language and how telling a clue that must be if only the reader was paying attention (which I was). Some of the authors were better than others, but all of them had this problem.
Another mystery is: Don't these people have proof-readers, spell-checkers and editors?? No one even bothers to read their stuff or are they all minds of the same quality? Or is it left like that on purpose?

I'm inclined to think they simply don't care - they just want to publish ASAP and make some money. Proof-reading takes time.
 
Another mystery is: Don't these people have proof-readers, spell-checkers and editors?? No one even bothers to read their stuff or are they all minds of the same quality? Or is it left like that on purpose?

I'm inclined to think they simply don't care - they just want to publish ASAP and make some money. Proof-reading takes time.
Exactly- they are trying to make a living, keeping the lights on and food on the table the best way they can, just like the rest of us. I have been pondering as of late even trying my hand at writing- I almost had a story I wrote in seventh grade published ( the teacher never turned it in) and I had a poem I wrote published in a local newspaper ( oddly enough I wrote it for my brother and he got the credit!) But the thing is, if creative energy flows from higher density, what or who are these people channeling? Or are they writing from first hand experience? Either way it’s kind of disturbing.
 
Many, if not most, of these authors give many thanks to their "great editors" and "beta readers". So, no editing is not the problem.
I think most readers are able to pop in the correct words themselves, and are able to get the gist even with bad grammar. The overall message is the important take away.
 
Here in Mexico, upper-class or 'posh' young people tend to speak with a tone of voice similar to the "Valley Girl" - or so it sounds to me - a bit with a questioning intonation towards the end, although there's a song-like quality to their whole speech. They call them "fresas" over here - literally 'strawberries'. I always thought they were trying to immitate American culture with their voice. They are the most likely to go abroad and hang out among those circles, and back home they may want to make a point of their status. Then the practice probably becomes generalized out of imitation, I thought. Well, maybe that's the case for most, as in people trying to 'fit in', as well as being influenced by media, but perhaps there is an extra element there?

It would be interesting to see how many countries have similar versions of the "up-speak", and what those countries are, to see if it's all or mostly imitation or something more essential, as suggested above.
Yes! There is a version of the 'upspeak in Caracas, Venezuela. It is particular in "expensive" neighborhoods and it only happens in Caracas -the capital city, nowhere else. To describe it, words are elongated, for instance, "qué bonito" is said as something like "qué boniiitooo" and the r's are rolled in a different way, more towards the middle of the palate. People who talk like that are called 'sifrinos,' which has no translation but it implies people with money and/or exposed to the good things in life. Venezuelans from Caracas who live abroad tend to speak that way, so they are easy to identify by other Venezuelans. I come from a poor area of Caracas, so Spanish speakers abroad tell me that I "don't sound Venezuelan" and other Venezuelans have a hard time guessing that I am from Caracas😁.
 
Regarding malapropisms and verbs, I wonder if something is up with Thors Pantheum? Is the beaming becoming garbled due to interference, or the receiving capacity is misattuned/stressed? My sense of the Pantheum is that it is general, not specific, inspiration. I can imagine that they may have a part to play, though it may be small, possibly just the general themes of these novels.
 
@Pluchi @Windmill knight

Every country has its own valley girl. In Argentina they are the chetos, or conchetos. Also generally upper middle class, with a nasal intonation and a use of the word Viste? (Did you see?) or in some cases the import of OK? They tend to be very superficial and pretend to be or appear to be a social stratum to which they do not really belong or fit in.
 
Back
Top Bottom