BoM/TWS Message Forum

I totally get the AI hallucination thing. I've tried using it to track down movies I only vaguely remember, and it has hallucinated some doozies for me. (My favorite was when it tried attaching the plot to the TV movie "The Eyes of Charles Sand" to "Rosemary's Baby.") But every complaint that can be made about AI can be made about the internet. Every such complaint can also be made humans, too. I've stopped paying attention to YouTubers who talk about movies, etc., because I've caught them hallucinating "facts" that are so wrong they aren't even false.

Again, my point has to do with how far the characters will go in trusting AI over trusting the tools that were available a dozen years ago, and this is a matter of psychology and behavior, not the trustworthiness of the tool.

1. Online tools must be able to translate the Libra, otherwise Will or his friends would have to be very good at translating Latin. If you cast doubt on AI's ability to translate Latin, then you have to cast doubt on any online tool's ability to translate Latin, and that is a non-starter for the story. So long as one assumes, for the sake of the story, that the translation algorithm can deliver accurate results, the only question is how far the characters themselves will trust it.

2. Tools like Google Translate are/were so funky that it is very easy to doubt them even when they deliver accurate results. That GT cannot even explain why it gives the translations it does is enough to make one wonder if the meaning has been correctly given. It is also very easy to "break" a GT-provided translation by reversing the translation. Translate "The Book of Masks" into Latin, and it gives you "In libra ex persona." Ask it to translate "In libra ex persona" to English, and it gives you "In the book of a person." That kind of thing is enough to destroy any trust in the Latin translation it has given you, and would stop any amateur translator dead in his tracks.

3. This is why I say that the introduction of AI can somewhat alter the reception of the story. The characters have been very cagey about trusting the translations in earlier chapters; but it seems to me they would be more trusting if those chapters assumed the presence of AI, because AI's results are less easy to "break."

But perhaps I worry too much. I have always tried to be cagey about what online tools they use; and if they seem very hesitant about their translations (at least at first) perhaps it's believable that they would be hesitant even with assistance they would otherwise trust.

Regarding "brand names": That too is something I've tried to be careful about, and only reference things that seem such a permanent part of the landscape that they seem unlikely to vanish. That is why people post and look at videos on YouTube, but the social media site of choice is a fictional one; and it's why the big comic-book blockbusters are a fictional MCU stand-in rather than the MCU itself. If TikTok seems like a jolt, is that because it is too intrusive, or is it intrusive because you were reading the story ten years before TikTok became a thing? Is Instagram a jolt?

At any rate, I wouldn't worry about references to Grok or ChatGPT showing up. They are too new, and no one has any idea if they will last. My great worry is that lack of references to AI will make new readers (and new readers can crop up still) question the verisimilitude of the story through what it lacks, while long-time readers will be jolted out of it if it is mentioned.

Put it this way. The Hardy Boys started in 1920-something. So what do you do if you tell a new Hardy Boys story, one supposedly canonically set in the same universe as the original? Do you just make it a period piece? I'm not sure I want to do that with BoM. But the alternative is to pretend that chunky land lines and slim iPhones exist simultaneously.