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Paul Healey @[email protected] · 2025-12-29 · 07:58 UTC

Asking Google: ‘After the Ai Crypto bubble, will there be another bubble?’ It answers by being skeptical about bubbles. Bubbles are the effect of unsustainable growth, so there should be no polemics. It is just the populist excuse used by plutocrats and oligarchs to wash their hands while profiteering from the algorithmic control of information processing ground on corporate sovereignty; deregulated markets. Bubbles are justified by grifters not Ai or Ci! #CognitiveIntelligence #Ci #Ai #EcocideEmpire #DeathCultEmpire #Bubbles #ProveMeWrong #GriftingBubbles https://www.google.com/search?q=After+the+Ai+Crypto+bubble%2C+will+there+be+another+bubble%3F&client=firefox-b-m&hs=cQj9&sca_esv=5fc6a171bfa3a3e8&sxsrf=AE3TifMA8U4cyfAzQEL6qt9i05j0wlXlLQ%3A1766993643022&ei=6y5SafuOAeXw7M8P1MaD0As&oq=After+the+Ai+Crypto+bubble%2C+will+there+be+another+bubble%3F&gs_lp=EhNtb2JpbGUtZ3dzLXdpei1zZXJwIjlBZnRlciB0aGUgQWkgQ3J5cHRvIGJ1YmJsZSwgd2lsbCB0aGVyZSBiZSBhbm90aGVyIGJ1YmJsZT8yBxAjGLADGCcyChAAGLADGNYEGEcyChAAGLADGNYEGEcyChAAGLADGNYEGEcyChAAGLADGNYEGEcyChAAGLADGNYEGEcyChAAGLADGNYEGEcyChAAGLADGNYEGEcyChAAGLADGNYEGEdI6c4BUABYAHACeAGQAQCYAQCgAQCqAQC4AQPIAQCYAgKgAlGYAwCIBgGQBgmSBwEyoAcAsgcAuAcAwgcHMC4xLjUtMcgHPoAIAA&sclient=mobile-gws-wiz-serp

#cognitiveintelligence #ci #ai #ecocideempire #deathcultempire #bubbles
Modern Cryptozoology @moderncryptozoology.wordpress.com@moderncryptozoology.wordpress.com · 2026-01-03 · 14:00 UTC

Effects of AI on cryptozoology
The world of cryptids is lousy with hoaxes, and will always be. It’s enticing, and now very easy, for creative content producers to pass off fake eyewitness accounts, photos, and videos as “real”. Countless creators do it for the purpose of attention and notoriety, ad revenue, or to promote a particular view using a fraudulent piece of “evidence” with the excuse that the real evidence is out there (aka, a pious fraud). Controversial images and stories are more likely to be shared and commented upon.
In the last 20 years, we’ve seen the mainstreaming of photoshopped images, computer generated graphics, and artificial intelligence applications that can generate realistic images and video. But more importantly, the platform for freely distributing and promoting content immediately and worldwide with no filtering or vetting is a key factor. The creator of the cryptid image or story is no longer subject to fact-checking and can even be anonymous (and still profit).
We ought to know better by now than to accept visual evidence at face value. A singular instance captured by photo and video evidence was never sufficient to claim an extraordinary animal was real because of the potential for error or fakery. But now, it is blatantly obvious that the majority of cryptid media is manufactured.
Digitally manufactured cryptid content falls into two general baskets: 1. fictional/fantasy art and entertainment content, and 2. factual info intended for education. The problem is the very ambiguous and liminal area in between, where you might not be able to tell fact from fiction.
Faking evidence
Early in the flood of content generated by Artificial Intelligence (AI), blatantly fake images showing “historical” evidence of Bigfoot and Yeti were making the rounds on social media. One image was so popular that Snopes.com had to debunk it. Soon after, the image was being circulated on video platforms as evidence of the Yeti. While for some, they can immediately recognize that the AI-generated images are a rather uncreative form of modern art/commentary, there will always be the gullible who think it’s real.
Nothing about this looks reasonable/real.
In Fortean Times 452 (2024), Dr. Karl Shuker pointed out the growing problem of AI generated videos and images circulated as real cryptids. Correspondents sent him images that were said to depict real animals. Any semi-expert eye could spot the flaws in these “too good to be true” images. But, remember that people thought mermaids were real when fooled by a deceptive “documentary” in 2012. Never underestimate public gullibility.
Other images and videos are designed to be vague so you cannot immediately spot a “too good to be true” cryptid. Replicating the ambiguous and far away versions that have always been available as controversial cryptid evidence, these examples are often shared just for the public to argue about them. Controversial topics, particularly with visuals, will generate more sharing, clicks, and audience participation, as commenters feel compelled to add their positive or negative opinions.
The typical excuse of “why would people lie/hoax” is pointless now – they will do it simple because they can. The Loch Ness Centre, that tracks sightings, has to consider that every photo they get purportedly of Nessie might be AI generated. The Centre announced in 2025 that they were employing a team of consultants to examine the visual evidence for hoaxing. Actually, the direct route is to not accept this kind of evidence at all. The odds are overwhelming that any image is not going to show anything worthwhile. Evidence needs to be far better than that. However, supposed sightings, no matter how blurry, are good for tourism.
By default, if the visual is clear, we should assume it is hoaxed, manipulated, or created outright, as that is so simple to do. While people are still using costumes and makeup to fake sightings, now you don’t even need that. You simply put a description in a prompt and it’s done.
Short form video platforms were flooded with AI generated content as the software and apps become easier to use. You can quickly find many YouTube videos that purport to have collected “Real cryptids caught on video – NOT AI” that are, indeed, all AI. These often feature pale crawlers, dogmen, “skinwalkers”, goatmen, or generally giant creepy monstrous things.
Some of the AI footage (like the “Yeti” photo) are made to look old in order to hide the flaws. These are sometimes dubbed “lost media” possibly hearkening back to the TV series The Lost Tapes (2008) that introduced fictional storylines and fake visuals of cryptids and paranormal events. Viewers, usually young people, often assumed it was real content.
Besides images and video, people posting AI generated fake news is on the rise. The news consumer has to be ultra-diligent and cross check information. A blatant example of fake cryptid news was about a coelacanth was found off the coast of California. On April 23, 2025, the website “Animals Around the Globe” published an article by “Esther Evangeline” claiming an “extraordinary find” by researchers in a remote-operated vehicle probing the deep areas 80 miles offshore of San Diego, California. They found a coelacanth! This was easily fact-checked as complete fiction. After trying to contact the author and website, this article still is up on the web site that identifies itself as educational.
Lifelike and imaginary
Far less harmful, and falling into the art/entertainment category are lifelike but imaginary AI content. In June 2025, video blog shorts (vlogs) materialized that featured cryptids rendered with amazing realism. These cryptid vlogs were stunning and humorous, with the cryptids pointing the video cam at themselves and their friends, making jokes, and showing the viewer what it’s like to be them being their best selves. They talk, sing, demonstrate life skills, discover cool things, and even interact with people. The first channel that kicked it off was @bigfootvlogs on TikTok on May 28, 2025. Driven by the availability of Google’s video generator Veo 3 AI software, the scene exploded with additional Bigfoot vlogs, Yeti, Mothman, Yowie, Rougarou, Nessie, Wendigo, etc. However, the novelty seems to be wearing off quickly.
The AI generated creatures are rendered from a giant database of what the collective culture has decided it looks like. While Bigfoot’s depiction was usually consistent, the Mothman creature looks different in each clip because Mothman is not as well-defined as Bigfoot. Therefore, the face, physique and wing descriptions can be more flexible.
Another type of content is made by horror creators who use cryptid themes to produce warped and extreme versions of bizarre creatures. They exaggerate features of real animals or humans – giant size and terrifying teeth are typical examples. Assuming the viewer doesn’t take this seriously, these function as an entertaining creepy short. Mostly, the commenters play along with silly jokes about it. They get it.
Reality-adjacent vids
Videos that look more real might grab a lot more people’s attention outside of the “Nightmarefuel” crowd. Many of these videos appear to come from Central and South America and feature what is said to depict a local folklore creature come to life. You can find the most popular of these videos being promoted by paranormal sites, like Coast to Coast AM. Such sites sometimes include an entirely uncritical summary about the location and background of the stated creatures which serves to prime, reinforce, and share the legend to a wider audience. These shorts almost never have appropriate details for investigation. That’s not their purpose. They are meant to be consumed and shared, not researched.
In March 2025, a short video of what is called a Chaneque, a goblin creature of Veracruz, Mexico, was promoted as real by a local TV network. It was a manipulated real video of a rock hyrax. The reveal was never widely publicized.
Inevitably, some English-speaking commenters are either childishly gullible (or actually are children) or they are playing along with alternative reality-shifting where it’s fun to believe these creatures exist. The popularity of these creature videos, and the willingness of paranormal sites to feature them show that cryptid content now cannot be taken seriously. Cryptids are becoming even more associated with fakes.
Digital-original cryptids
An entirely new phenomena arose from text to image software: all new cryptids. There were two labeled as the “first AI cryptid”, both appeared in 2022.
Loab
Loab was created by a text to image software in April 2022 where the command was to “create the opposite” of “Brando”. Wikipedia commentary lumped Loab in with the other “terrible risks” of AI but it was simply an innocuous thing people found scary. A few over-dramatic observers went overboard, referring to Loab as an AI demon or suggesting that the images are cursed. Essentially, Loab was Creepypasta – a fictional creation that the audience played along with as “real”.
Crungus
Crungus was also called the first digital cryptid but it was probably the second, with its origin in June 2022. The grumpy goatman-orc-like being was likely derived using words that sounded like “crungus”. It was created by comedian Guy Kelly using the nonsense word prompt in DALL-E app. The more probable derivation of Crungus is via a previously named character in online games.
Erosion bird/Opium bird
Erosion bird was created by user drevfx in 2023. The creature was striking and became a popular meme, also called the Opium bird. The created backstory indicated that the creature represented the god of decay, and could be found in Antarctica. A current meme pushes the warning that 2027 will be the year of the Erosion Opium bird.
Hellkite digital fake
The Hellkite was a digital art hoax with the same template as the infamous Thunderbird photo. On November 22, 2021 the Cryptid Creation Project indicated that the creature was “created by the community.” But there were no details on how it was created. It was an unreasonable blend of a pterosaur and bird. The descriptions as “a lost avian ancestor” made no sense. It was said to have the ability to camouflage and change color. The post include manipulated photos of game cam shots, an egg, a carcass, and descriptive artwork. A site exists for people to manufacture their own evidence of the Hellkite.
Will AI ruin cryptozoology?
This is already a long post but there are two more items to address: First, there are a slew of AI written books on cryptids now. They are awful. The general quality of cryptid-themed books is low, with only 1 or 2 scholarly books on the subject each year (if we’re lucky). The second problem is AI algorithms that are intended to amplify cultural trends. With the trends for cryptids already leaning heavily towards the paranormal and away from the serious zoological aspects, this will continue and get worse. There is no stopping it. The world will turn away from zoo-cryptids and towards the controversial para-cryptids. The boundaries of the word “cryptid” will continue to weaken and include more non-animals.
Circling back to the field itself, the effort to prove cryptids real is already a heavily tainted subject. After decades of looking for infamous cryptids – that are often seen but never captured – the evidence has gotten no better, even though the technology has. This is telling. Belief is propped up by a swing towards paranormal explanations, but also by hoaxes and ambiguous images.
AI is another tool to play with belief, imagination, and reality. A philosophical take is that AI itself is revealing creatures that were hidden. Where they came from is unknown, but what if they always existed in the digital ether and now we have the tools to discover them. If you declare your imagery is a cryptid, no one can prove you wrong, right? If enough people believe in it, the creature can manifest in our world, can’t it? (That’s the view of some over-enthusiastic cryptid fans.)
These manufactured creatures are products of our collective cultural views all mashed together to reveal something new. Audiences ponder over their realness or their possibility. The creatures acquire backstories that sound plausible. They feel real in our imagination and they certainly exist and proliferate online.
Fact or fiction, real or imaginary – cryptids have always existed in liminal spaces. AI is the latest tool used to spread ideas of mysterious creatures to everyone. It is on track to entirely ruin the serious efforts of cryptozoologists, but it has greatly expanded and spread the concepts of modern popular cryptids.

This is part 10 of the 12 Days of Cryptids.
#12DaysOfCryptids #AI #AICryptids #Crungus #cryptid #ErosionBird #Hellkite #Loab

#ai #aicryptids #crungus #cryptid #erosionbird #hellkite
Modern Cryptozoology @moderncryptozoology.wordpress.com@moderncryptozoology.wordpress.com · 2026-01-03 · 14:00 UTC

Effects of AI on cryptozoology
The world of cryptids is lousy with hoaxes, and will always be. It’s enticing, and now very easy, for creative content producers to pass off fake eyewitness accounts, photos, and videos as “real”. Countless creators do it for the purpose of attention and notoriety, ad revenue, or to promote a particular view using a fraudulent piece of “evidence” with the excuse that the real evidence is out there (aka, a pious fraud). Controversial images and stories are more likely to be shared and commented upon.
In the last 20 years, we’ve seen the mainstreaming of photoshopped images, computer generated graphics, and artificial intelligence applications that can generate realistic images and video. But more importantly, the platform for freely distributing and promoting content immediately and worldwide with no filtering or vetting is a key factor. The creator of the cryptid image or story is no longer subject to fact-checking and can even be anonymous (and still profit).
We ought to know better by now than to accept visual evidence at face value. A singular instance captured by photo and video evidence was never sufficient to claim an extraordinary animal was real because of the potential for error or fakery. But now, it is blatantly obvious that the majority of cryptid media is manufactured.
Digitally manufactured cryptid content falls into two general baskets: 1. fictional/fantasy art and entertainment content, and 2. factual info intended for education. The problem is the very ambiguous and liminal area in between, where you might not be able to tell fact from fiction.
Faking evidence
Early in the flood of content generated by Artificial Intelligence (AI), blatantly fake images showing “historical” evidence of Bigfoot and Yeti were making the rounds on social media. One image was so popular that Snopes.com had to debunk it. Soon after, the image was being circulated on video platforms as evidence of the Yeti. While for some, they can immediately recognize that the AI-generated images are a rather uncreative form of modern art/commentary, there will always be the gullible who think it’s real.
Nothing about this looks reasonable/real.
In Fortean Times 452 (2024), Dr. Karl Shuker pointed out the growing problem of AI generated videos and images circulated as real cryptids. Correspondents sent him images that were said to depict real animals. Any semi-expert eye could spot the flaws in these “too good to be true” images. But, remember that people thought mermaids were real when fooled by a deceptive “documentary” in 2012. Never underestimate public gullibility.
Other images and videos are designed to be vague so you cannot immediately spot a “too good to be true” cryptid. Replicating the ambiguous and far away versions that have always been available as controversial cryptid evidence, these examples are often shared just for the public to argue about them. Controversial topics, particularly with visuals, will generate more sharing, clicks, and audience participation, as commenters feel compelled to add their positive or negative opinions.
The typical excuse of “why would people lie/hoax” is pointless now – they will do it simple because they can. The Loch Ness Centre, that tracks sightings, has to consider that every photo they get purportedly of Nessie might be AI generated. The Centre announced in 2025 that they were employing a team of consultants to examine the visual evidence for hoaxing. Actually, the direct route is to not accept this kind of evidence at all. The odds are overwhelming that any image is not going to show anything worthwhile. Evidence needs to be far better than that. However, supposed sightings, no matter how blurry, are good for tourism.
By default, if the visual is clear, we should assume it is hoaxed, manipulated, or created outright, as that is so simple to do. While people are still using costumes and makeup to fake sightings, now you don’t even need that. You simply put a description in a prompt and it’s done.
Short form video platforms were flooded with AI generated content as the software and apps become easier to use. You can quickly find many YouTube videos that purport to have collected “Real cryptids caught on video – NOT AI” that are, indeed, all AI. These often feature pale crawlers, dogmen, “skinwalkers”, goatmen, or generally giant creepy monstrous things.
Some of the AI footage (like the “Yeti” photo) are made to look old in order to hide the flaws. These are sometimes dubbed “lost media” possibly hearkening back to the TV series The Lost Tapes (2008) that introduced fictional storylines and fake visuals of cryptids and paranormal events. Viewers, usually young people, often assumed it was real content.
Besides images and video, people posting AI generated fake news is on the rise. The news consumer has to be ultra-diligent and cross check information. A blatant example of fake cryptid news was about a coelacanth was found off the coast of California. On April 23, 2025, the website “Animals Around the Globe” published an article by “Esther Evangeline” claiming an “extraordinary find” by researchers in a remote-operated vehicle probing the deep areas 80 miles offshore of San Diego, California. They found a coelacanth! This was easily fact-checked as complete fiction. After trying to contact the author and website, this article still is up on the web site that identifies itself as educational.
Lifelike and imaginary
Far less harmful, and falling into the art/entertainment category are lifelike but imaginary AI content. In June 2025, video blog shorts (vlogs) materialized that featured cryptids rendered with amazing realism. These cryptid vlogs were stunning and humorous, with the cryptids pointing the video cam at themselves and their friends, making jokes, and showing the viewer what it’s like to be them being their best selves. They talk, sing, demonstrate life skills, discover cool things, and even interact with people. The first channel that kicked it off was @bigfootvlogs on TikTok on May 28, 2025. Driven by the availability of Google’s video generator Veo 3 AI software, the scene exploded with additional Bigfoot vlogs, Yeti, Mothman, Yowie, Rougarou, Nessie, Wendigo, etc. However, the novelty seems to be wearing off quickly.
The AI generated creatures are rendered from a giant database of what the collective culture has decided it looks like. While Bigfoot’s depiction was usually consistent, the Mothman creature looks different in each clip because Mothman is not as well-defined as Bigfoot. Therefore, the face, physique and wing descriptions can be more flexible.
Another type of content is made by horror creators who use cryptid themes to produce warped and extreme versions of bizarre creatures. They exaggerate features of real animals or humans – giant size and terrifying teeth are typical examples. Assuming the viewer doesn’t take this seriously, these function as an entertaining creepy short. Mostly, the commenters play along with silly jokes about it. They get it.
Reality-adjacent vids
Videos that look more real might grab a lot more people’s attention outside of the “Nightmarefuel” crowd. Many of these videos appear to come from Central and South America and feature what is said to depict a local folklore creature come to life. You can find the most popular of these videos being promoted by paranormal sites, like Coast to Coast AM. Such sites sometimes include an entirely uncritical summary about the location and background of the stated creatures which serves to prime, reinforce, and share the legend to a wider audience. These shorts almost never have appropriate details for investigation. That’s not their purpose. They are meant to be consumed and shared, not researched.
In March 2025, a short video of what is called a Chaneque, a goblin creature of Veracruz, Mexico, was promoted as real by a local TV network. It was a manipulated real video of a rock hyrax. The reveal was never widely publicized.
Inevitably, some English-speaking commenters are either childishly gullible (or actually are children) or they are playing along with alternative reality-shifting where it’s fun to believe these creatures exist. The popularity of these creature videos, and the willingness of paranormal sites to feature them show that cryptid content now cannot be taken seriously. Cryptids are becoming even more associated with fakes.
Digital-original cryptids
An entirely new phenomena arose from text to image software: all new cryptids. There were two labeled as the “first AI cryptid”, both appeared in 2022.
Loab
Loab was created by a text to image software in April 2022 where the command was to “create the opposite” of “Brando”. Wikipedia commentary lumped Loab in with the other “terrible risks” of AI but it was simply an innocuous thing people found scary. A few over-dramatic observers went overboard, referring to Loab as an AI demon or suggesting that the images are cursed. Essentially, Loab was Creepypasta – a fictional creation that the audience played along with as “real”.
Crungus
Crungus was also called the first digital cryptid but it was probably the second, with its origin in June 2022. The grumpy goatman-orc-like being was likely derived using words that sounded like “crungus”. It was created by comedian Guy Kelly using the nonsense word prompt in DALL-E app. The more probable derivation of Crungus is via a previously named character in online games.
Erosion bird/Opium bird
Erosion bird was created by user drevfx in 2023. The creature was striking and became a popular meme, also called the Opium bird. The created backstory indicated that the creature represented the god of decay, and could be found in Antarctica. A current meme pushes the warning that 2027 will be the year of the Erosion Opium bird.
Hellkite digital fake
The Hellkite was a digital art hoax with the same template as the infamous Thunderbird photo. On November 22, 2021 the Cryptid Creation Project indicated that the creature was “created by the community.” But there were no details on how it was created. It was an unreasonable blend of a pterosaur and bird. The descriptions as “a lost avian ancestor” made no sense. It was said to have the ability to camouflage and change color. The post include manipulated photos of game cam shots, an egg, a carcass, and descriptive artwork. A site exists for people to manufacture their own evidence of the Hellkite.
Will AI ruin cryptozoology?
This is already a long post but there are two more items to address: First, there are a slew of AI written books on cryptids now. They are awful. The general quality of cryptid-themed books is low, with only 1 or 2 scholarly books on the subject each year (if we’re lucky). The second problem is AI algorithms that are intended to amplify cultural trends. With the trends for cryptids already leaning heavily towards the paranormal and away from the serious zoological aspects, this will continue and get worse. There is no stopping it. The world will turn away from zoo-cryptids and towards the controversial para-cryptids. The boundaries of the word “cryptid” will continue to weaken and include more non-animals.
Circling back to the field itself, the effort to prove cryptids real is already a heavily tainted subject. After decades of looking for infamous cryptids – that are often seen but never captured – the evidence has gotten no better, even though the technology has. This is telling. Belief is propped up by a swing towards paranormal explanations, but also by hoaxes and ambiguous images.
AI is another tool to play with belief, imagination, and reality. A philosophical take is that AI itself is revealing creatures that were hidden. Where they came from is unknown, but what if they always existed in the digital ether and now we have the tools to discover them. If you declare your imagery is a cryptid, no one can prove you wrong, right? If enough people believe in it, the creature can manifest in our world, can’t it? (That’s the view of some over-enthusiastic cryptid fans.)
These manufactured creatures are products of our collective cultural views all mashed together to reveal something new. Audiences ponder over their realness or their possibility. The creatures acquire backstories that sound plausible. They feel real in our imagination and they certainly exist and proliferate online.
Fact or fiction, real or imaginary – cryptids have always existed in liminal spaces. AI is the latest tool used to spread ideas of mysterious creatures to everyone. It is on track to entirely ruin the serious efforts of cryptozoologists, but it has greatly expanded and spread the concepts of modern popular cryptids.

This is part 10 of the 12 Days of Cryptids.
#12DaysOfCryptids #AI #AICryptids #Crungus #cryptid #ErosionBird #Hellkite #Loab

#ai #aicryptids #crungus #cryptid #erosionbird #hellkite
Elizabeth Tai @[email protected] · 2025-07-23 · 07:28 UTC
What if using AI to write fiction isn’t an evil act?
🌸 P.S. Follow the guide on my experiment writing fiction with AI—it includes a list of all the posts about it.
When AI first came out, like all other writers, I was pissed off that our work was used to train an LLM model that would replace what made us valuable and special.
Despite all the arguments that LLMs won’t replace actual writers, you bet your socks that some companies and individuals would try.
However, I am a realist, and also a tech nerd, so I began pushing buttons to see what the fuss was all about.
What I found for myself was that AI (LLMs, anyway) gave me relief.
A lot of it.
And it may have also solved a decades-old problem that I’ve had with writing fiction.
The struggle
I have a habit of writing stories just to entertain myself. I have zero interest to sell or even distribute these stories for others to read.
I do this because I am tired of searching or waiting for people to write stories I want to read. So, I thought the most efficient way was to write the story myself.
But I’ve always had this one big problem when it comes to writing fiction.
My brain just outruns my hands.
As a neurodivergent person, you do not understand how quickly my mind can generate story ideas. And how bloody exhausting that can get.
I can generate the plot of an entire story in minutes, but from then on it’s a race against my brain. If I could write fast enough before my brain gets bored, it’s a success.
But most of the time, my brain just gets bored before I could complete the story, yanking away the precious dopamine I need to finish said story.
Instead of dropping the story, however, I force myself to continue. And fellow neurodivergent people would know what will happen next: Burnout.
So, to save myself, I often drop the story until that next elusive moment when my brain is interested enough to throw scraps of dopamine my way. But that rarely happens.
Yes, wrangling with an ADHD brain is very much like dealing with a rebellious toddler. You tell said toddler not to play with the toy that you can’t afford, but it wants to play with it whether you like it or not. If you direct said toddler to better activities, it will throw a massive fit.
Over the years, I’ve found ways to manage the toddler and have built a professional writing career for myself.
But not with fiction.
Getting analytical
The problem: I could never find the motivation or cognitive energy to write fast enough to complete a story before my speedy brain grows bored and moves on to the next thing.
Okay, so you’re probably wondering: If you have succeeded building a writing career for yourself, why couldn’t you succeed with fiction?
Easy:
1. Work is a very powerful motivator and I often use anxiety/adrenaline as a dopamine substitute. Fail at finishing work writing stuff = fired. Fired = no food on the table.
2. I have limited resources to manage activities that require executive function, and it has been prioritised for work and life.
3. Non-fiction is just easier to write than fiction.
4. Fiction, in terms of life priorities, is at the lowest rung for me, so it typically only gets scraps of dopamine and executive functioning energy.
Now, you need to understand something about me as a writer: It’s not that I don’t want to write the story, I just couldn’t. I was just so mentally tired and drained.
I know the entire arc that I want to write. But my brain is so bored, tired, and demotivated. I have to write so many sentences to get to the end of the story that it refuses to obey my request to write a word. It’s very odd, isn’t it?
Well, the key was to trick my brain.
The experiment: Using AI as a creative scaffold
I have a story that my brain has been nagging at me to finish for months. Let’s call it Forever, At Last.
The nagging has gotten so bad that at night, when I usually curl up in bed to read, my brain says: Now wouldn’t it be great if Forever, At Last was finished and you can read it?
So, at last, I decided to use AI to write it for me just to shut this nagging voice up.
I was mostly inspired by this article written by Natalie Cote-Munoz, The Accidental Pioneers: How Neurodivergent Users Are Discovering AI’s True Potential.
There has been so much shaming and cancelling when it comes to writing and AI that I never thought there was any other way to think about the subject.
Natalie’s essay made me realise that not only do we need more nuanced conversations around this topic, there needs to be more understanding. (Also, that I’ve been unknowingly using AI in a way to support my executive functioning all along!)
Still, what I did felt like a dangerous, naughty act. A traitorous act worthy of excommunication from the Writing Profession. But I didn’t care. I wanted my brain to stop hassling me when I’m trying to sleep, filling up my dreams with plots and keeping me up at night. Besides, I was not going to sell the story, I wanted to read a story for my amusement. Those Judgy Mcjudgy people on the Internet can go fly kites. Pooh!
Here’s what I did:
1. I uploaded two chapters I’d already written.
2. I used this prompt: “Please write in the same style as this author. Continue where this story left off by adding a chapter where:”
3. Then, I proceeded to write a bloody awful draft. I aimed to be as detailed as possible, with every plot point being mine.
4. I click enter and wait.
My bloody awful draft was a combination of story beats and dialogues. It is basically a stream-of-consciousness chaotic brain dump of what my brain wanted to say about the story.
Here’s an example:
```
7. tang hua said that when her body formed, the hope became a desperation that wouldn't leave. and as each month passed without her waking up, he thought that yuan zhong would just lose his life completely but fortunately she woke up. he gave her a faint smile. but now ... well, fortunately you managed to heal him. 8. tanyin was silent for a while and then said, "when i was dying, and i knew my time was near. i thought my words would leave him hope and keep him stronger. i'm afraid that my promise that i'll always be with him became a cruel joke." a tear falls down her cheek. and when i held his body, and i could feel his life ebb away. i finally understood what pain he must have been in when i finally left. she looke down and cried. 9. tanghua could only look on awkwardly. he tells her - but now that you're back. you can finally fulfil your promise. 10. she looks up, determined. yes. this time i will never leave him. i will always be by his side. always.
```
What came out was quite interesting and dare I say, impressive:
For a long moment, Tang Hua didn’t answer. He stared at the ground, his shoulders tense, as if weighing his words.
She touched his arm. “I need to know.”
Tang Hua exhaled sharply. “He never got over you leaving. For the longest time, he truly believed he’d never see you again.” A pause. “Then the envoy came. Told him there was a chance you might return.” A bitter laugh escaped him. “Sometimes I think that was the cruelest thing he could’ve said. Yuan Zhong was finally starting to accept that you were gone. But that little hope—it undid everything.”
Tanyin’s chest ached.
“He started talking to the dragonflies,” Tang Hua continued, his voice quieter now. “To the air. As if you might answer. I thought he’d lost his mind.”
A memory flickered in Tanyin’s mind—dragonflies brushing against Yuan Zhong’s cheeks, whispers on the wind. Had those been her? Fragments of her spirit, reaching out without form? Or had it only been his longing, shaping the world into something bearable?
Tang Hua rubbed his face. “When your body formed from the lotus… that hope turned into desperation. Every day you didn’t wake, it was like watching him die by inches.” He gave her a faint, tired smile. “But you did wake. And now you’ve healed him.”
Tanyin was silent for a long time. The wind rustled the leaves overhead.
“When I was dying,” she said at last, “I thought my words would give him strength. That my promise—that I’d always be with him—would comfort him.” Her voice broke. “I didn’t realize it would become a chain.”
A tear slipped down her cheek.
“And when I held him as his life faded,” she whispered, “I finally understood the pain he must have felt when I left.”
She bowed her head, shoulders shaking.
Tang Hua shifted awkwardly, then cleared his throat. “But you’re back now. You can finally keep your promise.”
Tanyin lifted her face. The tears still glistened on her lashes, but her gaze was steady.
“Yes,” she said. “This time, I will never leave him.”
She looked back toward the house, where Yuan Zhong slept.
Always.
When I first started using AI to do this, just out of curiosity to see how it writes fiction, it was really, really laughably bad.
I am actually quite stunned that the technology has improved a lot. For one, DeepSeek emulated my writing style quite closely. It was like watching myself write.
Almost.
As a lark, I continued.
I decided to go one chapter, then the next, and in just an hour, I completed the story that had been in my head for months but I had no cognitive energy or will to complete.
AI as a motivational tool
I write stories mostly to amuse myself. But even then, it has not been easy to write these stories. Photo by Alessia C_Jpg on Unsplash
And it finally occurred to me: I could actually use AI to finally focus on what I really want to do with fiction.
You see, I have no problem coming up with stories. However, I have a lot of issues writing effective prose.
But I’ve never had enough energy to focus on improving that skill because all of my executive functioning has been taken up by work, daily life and trying to force myself to the point of burnout to complete stories.
Now, you may think that I am just going to generate my prose with AI from now on.
No bloody way.
Because I could write better, damn it.
As I lay in bed that night reading the completed story DeepSeek generated, I twitched, my fingers curling in preparation to rewrite the sentences.
While my toddler brain was finally happy it got its toy, my writerly side is annoyed at the writing and already dreaming up ways to improve it.
The sentences were coherent, but the writing was still not stylistically good enough for me.
It had a lot of clichés, the plot could be refined, the dialogue was definitely very American which is tonally off for my story as it is based in ancient China.
Like I said, the LLM-generated prose just wasn’t good enough for me. But it provided what I needed: Motivation.
That elusive desire to continue improving the story by focusing on writing better prose.
Exactly the skill I want to improve with fiction writing!
I can actually now focus on improving my storytelling prose without having to worry about all the other things in the front end that used to torment me so much.
It also got rid of the tyranny of the white page.
My brain goes, “Hey, I’m not starting with an empty page. I can work on this.”
It provides me the dopamine boost I need to continue. It tricks my brain to think that the task is not as overwhelming as it seems.
What was happening?
I realised I was using AI the same way I used books and Google search in the past.
In the before-AI-times, when I was stuck writing a scene, I would often jump onto the Internet or grab a book to inspire my brain to write. I’m not sure what to call this process. Is it mirroring? Emulation? Feedback? But the result was never very satisfying as it didn’t mirror what I was trying to write.
So I asked AI (lol):

You’re engaging in:
- Creative priming (using external input to jumpstart your brain)
- Cognitive offloading (letting an external system handle the “blank page” paralysis)
- Iterative emulation (taking bits of inspiration and reshaping them into your voice)
This is how many writers work—they just use different tools:
- Some read poetry before writing prose to “tune” their rhythm.
- Others keep a “swipe file” of lines they love for inspiration.
- You used Google searches; now you use AI.
Thanks, DeepSeek! (I’ll probably explore these concepts in the future as I didn’t realise it was a thing to do what I did.)
What I’ll do in the future
My experiment in completing the story with AI gave me massive hope that I can finally have the cognitive support I need to finally complete stories that I couldn’t and maybe publish them.
You see, I have a 300,000-word novel I wrote back in 2012 (without AI!) that I couldn’t seem to push out to the world. It’s complete, but the thought of editing it, putting it online, paralyses me.
I’ve come to accept that it’s my brain seizing up at the thought of the executive functioning required, and also the knowledge that I’m the sort that would burn herself out trying anyway.
This experiment gives me hope that I can finally share this work to the world.
This also gives me hope to finish the numerous unfinished stories I’ve left hanging that my brain had gotten bored of but I’m desperate to finish.
But the danger is real. For one, there’s recent research that says AI can cause cognitive decline. I want to improve my fiction writing muscles, not lose it.
Here are the rules I’m setting up for myself:
1. Only use AI to help me when I’m burnt out, cognitively stuck due to mental exhaustion, or in despair at finishing a story.
2. Always create first. For example, always have a rough, terrible draft first, with pieces of dialogue at least, before using it on AI.
3. Do not ever let AI do the act of creation before you do.
4. Do not ever use AI copy wholesale. Rewrite AI output or come up with another spin.
5. For new stories/chapters where I’m extremely inspired to write – do not AI use at all!
The truth is, I am able to do this due to my pride as a working writer and the years of discipline I’ve built as a professional writer but do other people have the same will?
That’s the problem, unfortunately.
The temptation to rely completely on AI is very real, like the call of a beautiful siren, especially to those of us struggling with this issue.
Another narrative
My use of AI during recovery revealed something unexpected: these tools didn’t just compensate for my limitations—they actively helped rebuild my capabilities. By forcing me to break complex ideas into manageable steps through AI iteration, I gradually rediscovered my logical thinking patterns. The scaffolding effect may have actually accelerated my cognitive recovery. – The Accidental Pioneers: How Neurodivergent Users Are Discovering AI’s True Potential by Natalie Cote-Munoz
I have a lot of hope that this workflow will help me improve my prose based on what Natalie said above. 👆
There’s a lot of shaming going on in the writing circles about using AI to write fiction, even from fellow neurodivergent writers.
I get it, there are some of us afraid that we’re just using ADHD as an excuse to do things that are “not allowed”.
I’m a moderator of a subreddit, and recently had to deal with reports of a user who used AI to generate her posts (it was very obvious).
When she said that she generates her copy because she has ADHD, I paused. On the neurospicy spectrum I’m at the mild end, but what if someone out there truly needs it to make her thoughts coherent?
So, I get it: How much of a crutch can ADHD folks justify?
This is an important conversation to have in the writing space, but I’m afraid that the general writing community is just not ready for such a nuanced discussion.
If there’s any hint of AI usage when you’re writing fiction, you’re basically toast as a writer.
I suppose it’s a good thing I’m only writing fiction for my own consumption and amusement, eh?
#AI #BeingAWriter #Fiction #FictionWritingWithAI #tech #Technology #writing
#ai #beingawriter #fiction #tech #technology #writing
Elizabeth Tai @[email protected] · 2025-07-23 · 07:28 UTC
What if using AI to write fiction isn’t an evil act?
🌸 P.S. Follow the guide on my experiment writing fiction with AI—it includes a list of all the posts about it.
When AI first came out, like all other writers, I was pissed off that our work was used to train an LLM model that would replace what made us valuable and special.
Despite all the arguments that LLMs won’t replace actual writers, you bet your socks that some companies and individuals would try.
However, I am a realist, and also a tech nerd, so I began pushing buttons to see what the fuss was all about.
What I found for myself was that AI (LLMs, anyway) gave me relief.
A lot of it.
And it may have also solved a decades-old problem that I’ve had with writing fiction.
The struggle
I have a habit of writing stories just to entertain myself. I have zero interest to sell or even distribute these stories for others to read.
I do this because I am tired of searching or waiting for people to write stories I want to read. So, I thought the most efficient way was to write the story myself.
But I’ve always had this one big problem when it comes to writing fiction.
My brain just outruns my hands.
As a neurodivergent person, you do not understand how quickly my mind can generate story ideas. And how bloody exhausting that can get.
I can generate the plot of an entire story in minutes, but from then on it’s a race against my brain. If I could write fast enough before my brain gets bored, it’s a success.
But most of the time, my brain just gets bored before I could complete the story, yanking away the precious dopamine I need to finish said story.
Instead of dropping the story, however, I force myself to continue. And fellow neurodivergent people would know what will happen next: Burnout.
So, to save myself, I often drop the story until that next elusive moment when my brain is interested enough to throw scraps of dopamine my way. But that rarely happens.
Yes, wrangling with an ADHD brain is very much like dealing with a rebellious toddler. You tell said toddler not to play with the toy that you can’t afford, but it wants to play with it whether you like it or not. If you direct said toddler to better activities, it will throw a massive fit.
Over the years, I’ve found ways to manage the toddler and have built a professional writing career for myself.
But not with fiction.
Getting analytical
The problem: I could never find the motivation or cognitive energy to write fast enough to complete a story before my speedy brain grows bored and moves on to the next thing.
Okay, so you’re probably wondering: If you have succeeded building a writing career for yourself, why couldn’t you succeed with fiction?
Easy:
1. Work is a very powerful motivator and I often use anxiety/adrenaline as a dopamine substitute. Fail at finishing work writing stuff = fired. Fired = no food on the table.
2. I have limited resources to manage activities that require executive function, and it has been prioritised for work and life.
3. Non-fiction is just easier to write than fiction.
4. Fiction, in terms of life priorities, is at the lowest rung for me, so it typically only gets scraps of dopamine and executive functioning energy.
Now, you need to understand something about me as a writer: It’s not that I don’t want to write the story, I just couldn’t. I was just so mentally tired and drained.
I know the entire arc that I want to write. But my brain is so bored, tired, and demotivated. I have to write so many sentences to get to the end of the story that it refuses to obey my request to write a word. It’s very odd, isn’t it?
Well, the key was to trick my brain.
The experiment: Using AI as a creative scaffold
I have a story that my brain has been nagging at me to finish for months. Let’s call it Forever, At Last.
The nagging has gotten so bad that at night, when I usually curl up in bed to read, my brain says: Now wouldn’t it be great if Forever, At Last was finished and you can read it?
So, at last, I decided to use AI to write it for me just to shut this nagging voice up.
I was mostly inspired by this article written by Natalie Cote-Munoz, The Accidental Pioneers: How Neurodivergent Users Are Discovering AI’s True Potential.
There has been so much shaming and cancelling when it comes to writing and AI that I never thought there was any other way to think about the subject.
Natalie’s essay made me realise that not only do we need more nuanced conversations around this topic, there needs to be more understanding. (Also, that I’ve been unknowingly using AI in a way to support my executive functioning all along!)
Still, what I did felt like a dangerous, naughty act. A traitorous act worthy of excommunication from the Writing Profession. But I didn’t care. I wanted my brain to stop hassling me when I’m trying to sleep, filling up my dreams with plots and keeping me up at night. Besides, I was not going to sell the story, I wanted to read a story for my amusement. Those Judgy Mcjudgy people on the Internet can go fly kites. Pooh!
Here’s what I did:
1. I uploaded two chapters I’d already written.
2. I used this prompt: “Please write in the same style as this author. Continue where this story left off by adding a chapter where:”
3. Then, I proceeded to write a bloody awful draft. I aimed to be as detailed as possible, with every plot point being mine.
4. I click enter and wait.
My bloody awful draft was a combination of story beats and dialogues. It is basically a stream-of-consciousness chaotic brain dump of what my brain wanted to say about the story.
Here’s an example:
```
7. tang hua said that when her body formed, the hope became a desperation that wouldn't leave. and as each month passed without her waking up, he thought that yuan zhong would just lose his life completely but fortunately she woke up. he gave her a faint smile. but now ... well, fortunately you managed to heal him. 8. tanyin was silent for a while and then said, "when i was dying, and i knew my time was near. i thought my words would leave him hope and keep him stronger. i'm afraid that my promise that i'll always be with him became a cruel joke." a tear falls down her cheek. and when i held his body, and i could feel his life ebb away. i finally understood what pain he must have been in when i finally left. she looke down and cried. 9. tanghua could only look on awkwardly. he tells her - but now that you're back. you can finally fulfil your promise. 10. she looks up, determined. yes. this time i will never leave him. i will always be by his side. always.
```
What came out was quite interesting and dare I say, impressive:
For a long moment, Tang Hua didn’t answer. He stared at the ground, his shoulders tense, as if weighing his words.
She touched his arm. “I need to know.”
Tang Hua exhaled sharply. “He never got over you leaving. For the longest time, he truly believed he’d never see you again.” A pause. “Then the envoy came. Told him there was a chance you might return.” A bitter laugh escaped him. “Sometimes I think that was the cruelest thing he could’ve said. Yuan Zhong was finally starting to accept that you were gone. But that little hope—it undid everything.”
Tanyin’s chest ached.
“He started talking to the dragonflies,” Tang Hua continued, his voice quieter now. “To the air. As if you might answer. I thought he’d lost his mind.”
A memory flickered in Tanyin’s mind—dragonflies brushing against Yuan Zhong’s cheeks, whispers on the wind. Had those been her? Fragments of her spirit, reaching out without form? Or had it only been his longing, shaping the world into something bearable?
Tang Hua rubbed his face. “When your body formed from the lotus… that hope turned into desperation. Every day you didn’t wake, it was like watching him die by inches.” He gave her a faint, tired smile. “But you did wake. And now you’ve healed him.”
Tanyin was silent for a long time. The wind rustled the leaves overhead.
“When I was dying,” she said at last, “I thought my words would give him strength. That my promise—that I’d always be with him—would comfort him.” Her voice broke. “I didn’t realize it would become a chain.”
A tear slipped down her cheek.
“And when I held him as his life faded,” she whispered, “I finally understood the pain he must have felt when I left.”
She bowed her head, shoulders shaking.
Tang Hua shifted awkwardly, then cleared his throat. “But you’re back now. You can finally keep your promise.”
Tanyin lifted her face. The tears still glistened on her lashes, but her gaze was steady.
“Yes,” she said. “This time, I will never leave him.”
She looked back toward the house, where Yuan Zhong slept.
Always.
When I first started using AI to do this, just out of curiosity to see how it writes fiction, it was really, really laughably bad.
I am actually quite stunned that the technology has improved a lot. For one, DeepSeek emulated my writing style quite closely. It was like watching myself write.
Almost.
As a lark, I continued.
I decided to go one chapter, then the next, and in just an hour, I completed the story that had been in my head for months but I had no cognitive energy or will to complete.
AI as a motivational tool
I write stories mostly to amuse myself. But even then, it has not been easy to write these stories. Photo by Alessia C_Jpg on Unsplash
And it finally occurred to me: I could actually use AI to finally focus on what I really want to do with fiction.
You see, I have no problem coming up with stories. However, I have a lot of issues writing effective prose.
But I’ve never had enough energy to focus on improving that skill because all of my executive functioning has been taken up by work, daily life and trying to force myself to the point of burnout to complete stories.
Now, you may think that I am just going to generate my prose with AI from now on.
No bloody way.
Because I could write better, damn it.
As I lay in bed that night reading the completed story DeepSeek generated, I twitched, my fingers curling in preparation to rewrite the sentences.
While my toddler brain was finally happy it got its toy, my writerly side is annoyed at the writing and already dreaming up ways to improve it.
The sentences were coherent, but the writing was still not stylistically good enough for me.
It had a lot of clichés, the plot could be refined, the dialogue was definitely very American which is tonally off for my story as it is based in ancient China.
Like I said, the LLM-generated prose just wasn’t good enough for me. But it provided what I needed: Motivation.
That elusive desire to continue improving the story by focusing on writing better prose.
Exactly the skill I want to improve with fiction writing!
I can actually now focus on improving my storytelling prose without having to worry about all the other things in the front end that used to torment me so much.
It also got rid of the tyranny of the white page.
My brain goes, “Hey, I’m not starting with an empty page. I can work on this.”
It provides me the dopamine boost I need to continue. It tricks my brain to think that the task is not as overwhelming as it seems.
What was happening?
I realised I was using AI the same way I used books and Google search in the past.
In the before-AI-times, when I was stuck writing a scene, I would often jump onto the Internet or grab a book to inspire my brain to write. I’m not sure what to call this process. Is it mirroring? Emulation? Feedback? But the result was never very satisfying as it didn’t mirror what I was trying to write.
So I asked AI (lol):

You’re engaging in:
- Creative priming (using external input to jumpstart your brain)
- Cognitive offloading (letting an external system handle the “blank page” paralysis)
- Iterative emulation (taking bits of inspiration and reshaping them into your voice)
This is how many writers work—they just use different tools:
- Some read poetry before writing prose to “tune” their rhythm.
- Others keep a “swipe file” of lines they love for inspiration.
- You used Google searches; now you use AI.
Thanks, DeepSeek! (I’ll probably explore these concepts in the future as I didn’t realise it was a thing to do what I did.)
What I’ll do in the future
My experiment in completing the story with AI gave me massive hope that I can finally have the cognitive support I need to finally complete stories that I couldn’t and maybe publish them.
You see, I have a 300,000-word novel I wrote back in 2012 (without AI!) that I couldn’t seem to push out to the world. It’s complete, but the thought of editing it, putting it online, paralyses me.
I’ve come to accept that it’s my brain seizing up at the thought of the executive functioning required, and also the knowledge that I’m the sort that would burn herself out trying anyway.
This experiment gives me hope that I can finally share this work to the world.
This also gives me hope to finish the numerous unfinished stories I’ve left hanging that my brain had gotten bored of but I’m desperate to finish.
But the danger is real. For one, there’s recent research that says AI can cause cognitive decline. I want to improve my fiction writing muscles, not lose it.
Here are the rules I’m setting up for myself:
1. Only use AI to help me when I’m burnt out, cognitively stuck due to mental exhaustion, or in despair at finishing a story.
2. Always create first. For example, always have a rough, terrible draft first, with pieces of dialogue at least, before using it on AI.
3. Do not ever let AI do the act of creation before you do.
4. Do not ever use AI copy wholesale. Rewrite AI output or come up with another spin.
5. For new stories/chapters where I’m extremely inspired to write – do not AI use at all!
The truth is, I am able to do this due to my pride as a working writer and the years of discipline I’ve built as a professional writer but do other people have the same will?
That’s the problem, unfortunately.
The temptation to rely completely on AI is very real, like the call of a beautiful siren, especially to those of us struggling with this issue.
Another narrative
My use of AI during recovery revealed something unexpected: these tools didn’t just compensate for my limitations—they actively helped rebuild my capabilities. By forcing me to break complex ideas into manageable steps through AI iteration, I gradually rediscovered my logical thinking patterns. The scaffolding effect may have actually accelerated my cognitive recovery. – The Accidental Pioneers: How Neurodivergent Users Are Discovering AI’s True Potential by Natalie Cote-Munoz
I have a lot of hope that this workflow will help me improve my prose based on what Natalie said above. 👆
There’s a lot of shaming going on in the writing circles about using AI to write fiction, even from fellow neurodivergent writers.
I get it, there are some of us afraid that we’re just using ADHD as an excuse to do things that are “not allowed”.
I’m a moderator of a subreddit, and recently had to deal with reports of a user who used AI to generate her posts (it was very obvious).
When she said that she generates her copy because she has ADHD, I paused. On the neurospicy spectrum I’m at the mild end, but what if someone out there truly needs it to make her thoughts coherent?
So, I get it: How much of a crutch can ADHD folks justify?
This is an important conversation to have in the writing space, but I’m afraid that the general writing community is just not ready for such a nuanced discussion.
If there’s any hint of AI usage when you’re writing fiction, you’re basically toast as a writer.
I suppose it’s a good thing I’m only writing fiction for my own consumption and amusement, eh?
#AI #BeingAWriter #Fiction #FictionWritingWithAI #tech #Technology #writing
#ai #beingawriter #fiction #tech #technology #writing
Brian Greenberg :verified: @[email protected] · 2026-03-31 · 00:43 UTC

We keep worrying about AI doing something evil. Which it might, but right now, there’s a risk in the plumbing supporting it. Three vulnerabilities in LangChain and LangGraph, path traversal, unsafe deserialization, SQL injection. Not AI-specific attacks. They’re not novel nor sophisticated but these are the kinds of bugs we've been patching since the late '90s. One of them scored a severity of 9.3 out of 10. "The biggest threat to your enterprise AI data might not be as complex as you think." Remember that you're building AI on top of frameworks you didn't write, can't fully audit, and update whenever it's convenient. That's the actual problem.
🔐 Path traversal lets attackers read arbitrary files from the host system, including credentials
🔑 Unsafe deserialization exposes API keys and environment variables at runtime
🗄️ SQL injection in the checkpointing layer leaks conversation history from your AI agents
All three are fixed now. But "fixed" only matters if you've actually applied the patches across every integration. Most organizations haven't.
The lesson isn't about AI security. It's that AI doesn't change what good security engineering looks like. Input validation, parameterized queries, strict path sandboxing. This is stuff your dev team learned before ChatGPT existed.
If you're deploying AI pipelines and you haven't done a security review of the frameworks underneath them, you're not running an AI strategy. You're running a trust exercise.
https://www.csoonline.com/article/4151814/langchain-path-traversal-bug-adds-to-input-validation-woes-in-ai-pipelines.html
#CyberSecurity #AIRisk #AppSec #security #privacy #cloud #infosec

#cybersecurity #airisk #appsec #security #privacy #cloud
Brian Greenberg :verified: @[email protected] · 2026-03-31 · 00:43 UTC

We keep worrying about AI doing something evil. Which it might, but right now, there’s a risk in the plumbing supporting it. Three vulnerabilities in LangChain and LangGraph, path traversal, unsafe deserialization, SQL injection. Not AI-specific attacks. They’re not novel nor sophisticated but these are the kinds of bugs we've been patching since the late '90s. One of them scored a severity of 9.3 out of 10. "The biggest threat to your enterprise AI data might not be as complex as you think." Remember that you're building AI on top of frameworks you didn't write, can't fully audit, and update whenever it's convenient. That's the actual problem.
🔐 Path traversal lets attackers read arbitrary files from the host system, including credentials
🔑 Unsafe deserialization exposes API keys and environment variables at runtime
🗄️ SQL injection in the checkpointing layer leaks conversation history from your AI agents
All three are fixed now. But "fixed" only matters if you've actually applied the patches across every integration. Most organizations haven't.
The lesson isn't about AI security. It's that AI doesn't change what good security engineering looks like. Input validation, parameterized queries, strict path sandboxing. This is stuff your dev team learned before ChatGPT existed.
If you're deploying AI pipelines and you haven't done a security review of the frameworks underneath them, you're not running an AI strategy. You're running a trust exercise.
https://www.csoonline.com/article/4151814/langchain-path-traversal-bug-adds-to-input-validation-woes-in-ai-pipelines.html
#CyberSecurity #AIRisk #AppSec #security #privacy #cloud #infosec

#cybersecurity #airisk #appsec #security #privacy #cloud
Brian Greenberg :verified: @[email protected] · 2026-03-31 · 00:43 UTC

We keep worrying about AI doing something evil. Which it might, but right now, there’s a risk in the plumbing supporting it. Three vulnerabilities in LangChain and LangGraph, path traversal, unsafe deserialization, SQL injection. Not AI-specific attacks. They’re not novel nor sophisticated but these are the kinds of bugs we've been patching since the late '90s. One of them scored a severity of 9.3 out of 10. "The biggest threat to your enterprise AI data might not be as complex as you think." Remember that you're building AI on top of frameworks you didn't write, can't fully audit, and update whenever it's convenient. That's the actual problem.
🔐 Path traversal lets attackers read arbitrary files from the host system, including credentials
🔑 Unsafe deserialization exposes API keys and environment variables at runtime
🗄️ SQL injection in the checkpointing layer leaks conversation history from your AI agents
All three are fixed now. But "fixed" only matters if you've actually applied the patches across every integration. Most organizations haven't.
The lesson isn't about AI security. It's that AI doesn't change what good security engineering looks like. Input validation, parameterized queries, strict path sandboxing. This is stuff your dev team learned before ChatGPT existed.
If you're deploying AI pipelines and you haven't done a security review of the frameworks underneath them, you're not running an AI strategy. You're running a trust exercise.
https://www.csoonline.com/article/4151814/langchain-path-traversal-bug-adds-to-input-validation-woes-in-ai-pipelines.html
#CyberSecurity #AIRisk #AppSec #security #privacy #cloud #infosec

#infosec #cloud #privacy #security #appsec #airisk
Brian Greenberg :verified: @[email protected] · 2026-03-31 · 00:43 UTC

We keep worrying about AI doing something evil. Which it might, but right now, there’s a risk in the plumbing supporting it. Three vulnerabilities in LangChain and LangGraph, path traversal, unsafe deserialization, SQL injection. Not AI-specific attacks. They’re not novel nor sophisticated but these are the kinds of bugs we've been patching since the late '90s. One of them scored a severity of 9.3 out of 10. "The biggest threat to your enterprise AI data might not be as complex as you think." Remember that you're building AI on top of frameworks you didn't write, can't fully audit, and update whenever it's convenient. That's the actual problem.
🔐 Path traversal lets attackers read arbitrary files from the host system, including credentials
🔑 Unsafe deserialization exposes API keys and environment variables at runtime
🗄️ SQL injection in the checkpointing layer leaks conversation history from your AI agents
All three are fixed now. But "fixed" only matters if you've actually applied the patches across every integration. Most organizations haven't.
The lesson isn't about AI security. It's that AI doesn't change what good security engineering looks like. Input validation, parameterized queries, strict path sandboxing. This is stuff your dev team learned before ChatGPT existed.
If you're deploying AI pipelines and you haven't done a security review of the frameworks underneath them, you're not running an AI strategy. You're running a trust exercise.
https://www.csoonline.com/article/4151814/langchain-path-traversal-bug-adds-to-input-validation-woes-in-ai-pipelines.html
#CyberSecurity #AIRisk #AppSec #security #privacy #cloud #infosec

#cybersecurity #airisk #appsec #security #privacy #cloud
[jan@dembowski:~]$ :idle: @[email protected] · 2023-05-31 · 15:55 UTC

If only there were some way to know in advance that using AI when it’s not even BETA was a bad idea for human interaction.
Wait a minute… #RSSFeed #SoMuchCoffeeNeeded
-
Eating Disorder Helpline Takes Down Chatbot After Its Advice Goes Horribly Wrong
https://gizmodo.com/ai-chatbot-eating-disorder-helpline-neda-1850490751
The 'not AI' chatbot was supposed to replace actual human staff who claim they were fired after trying to unionize.

#rssfeed #somuchcoffeeneeded
Two Bros Game Night @[email protected] · 2025-10-11 · 15:37 UTC

https://youtu.be/ooQUJNlC_cw
Yes, I know that that the new girl in 100 Girlfriends is Nano "Eiai", not "AI". But if you think I'm ruining this audible pun, you're sorely mistaken... #Crunchyroll #Bibury #100Girlfriends #100人の彼女 #Season1 #anime #harem #comedy #parody #TBGN #SSHITAnime #SaturdayMorning

#crunchyroll #bibury #100girlfriends #100人の彼女 #season1 #anime
Marco Ciappelli🎙️✨:verified: :donor: @[email protected] · 2025-11-15 · 22:20 UTC

Who or what do we blindly trust with our #health? 🤔
White Coats or Black Boxes?
Some thoughts on AI, medicine, human judgment, and how #AI could help us think more instead of less.
Reflections from a conversation with #healthcare leaders on trust, transparency, and who really benefits from AI in #medicine
I grew up in a world where you didn't question your doctor. You didn't ask about lab results. You didn't research your medications. "Doctor's orders" was gospel.
My grandmother never saw her own test results. She wouldn't have known what to do with them anyway.
We like to think we've evolved past that. But have we? Or have we just traded blind trust in white coats for blind trust in #algorithms?
That's the question that kept surfacing in my head after this Expert Panel Discussion I hosted with Sean Martin, CISSP and an extraordinary group of people:
Dr. Robert Pearl, M.D. (former CEO, The Permanente Medical Group, Inc.)
Robert Havasy (HIMSS)
John Sapp Jr (Texas Mutual Insurance Company)
Jim St. Clair (Altarum)
Robert Booker (HITRUST)
We gathered to discuss AI in healthcare. What emerged was something deeper: a reckoning with how we've always delegated medical decisions—and whether AI might actually force us to become smarter, more analytical, more inquisitive about our own health.
Here's my theory: AI doesn't have to make us dumber. It could make us think more, not less. But only if we choose to engage. Only if we demand transparency. Only if we resist trading one form of blind trust for another.
400,000 people die annually from misdiagnoses in America. That's not AI failure—that's human failure we've learned to accept.
The question isn't whether AI will transform healthcare. It already is.
The question is: Will we finally start asking questions?
About our doctors AND our algorithms?
Then tell me—what kind of trust are we building? Who benefits? Who bears the risk?
Let's keep exploring what it means to be human in this Hybrid Analog Digital Society.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/who-what-do-we-blindly-trust-our-health-some-thoughts-marco-ciappelli-tyd3c
Comment, share, and be merry! 🙂
Studio C60 / ITSPmagazine
#HealthcareAI #MedicalEthics #DigitalHealth #technology #cybersecurity #PatientEmpowerment #HealthTech #CriticalThinking #podcast

#health #ai #healthcare #medicine #algorithms #healthcareai
Sean @[email protected] · 2019-05-04 · 08:01 UTC
Some Thoughts on “Classical Greek Tactics: A Cultural History”
Even the most overwhelming project can be completed if you take it one stone at a time! Photo of the Cyclopean walls of Mycenae by Sharon Mollerus, Wikimedia Commons, with a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
Konijnendijk, Roel (2017) Classical Greek Tactics: A Cultural History. Mnemosyne, Supplements History and Archaeology of Classical Antiquity, Band 409 (Brill: Leiden)
Since the 1990s, there has been intense debate about early Greek warfare. Most people agreed that there was something wrong with the versions available in English, but it took time to agree on just what that wrongness was and whether it could be fixed with a few small changes or was more fundamental. This book is another Cyclopean stone in the walls of the current consensus.
Konijnendijk argues that the California School of writers on Greek warfare (John Kinloch Anderson, William K. Pritchett, and Victor Davis Hanson) were basically refining the ideas of Austrian, German, and English scholars before the First World War. The continentals were interested in a comparative history of warfare with the practices of the Prussian army at the top, the Roman army in the middle, and early Greek armies near the bottom, while the English scholars tried to explain why Greek warfare as described by the Prussians was so peculiar. For a long time it seemed like these early writers had solved the problem so little was written on the subject in English. When a new group of scholars in Cold War California became interested in warfare, they launched a flood of research in English which almost erased the original German context of their theories. In short, the ‘orthodoxy’ is really a set of received ideas from 19th century Europe which survived until a group of ‘scientific historians’ began to question them.
Konijnendijk also lays out some of the strangest ideas about Greek warfare published before 1990. Anyone who has read Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon can list story after story of Greeks chasing down their enemies, stabbing them in the back, burning them alive in sacred groves where they had taken refuge, and so on. Often they came back to find that on other parts of their field their allies had lost, or were startled by a counter-attack and routed themselves. Thucydides says that the Spartans did not like these reckless chases (Thuc. 5.73.4): a mob of excited, jostling, running Spartiates were just as vulnerable to a counter-attack as any other hoplites. Armies without enough light-armed troops or cavalry bitterly complained that when they won they could not hurt their enemy, but if they ever lost they would be wiped out (Xen. An. 3.1.2). But in many modern writers on ancient warfare we find something different:
- Rüstow and Köchly, History of the Greek Art of War from the Earliest Times until Pyrrhus (1852) p. 145 “If the hoplite line of one side gained the victory, broke the enemy line and drew the other arms with it in flight, the victorious phalanx was now poorly equipped to pursue the fleeing, unless it had cavalry and light-armed infantry for assistance. In fights of this period, the pursuit was invariably rather half-hearted. The lack of cavalry and long-ranged troops is, however, not the only ground for this. One wanted more than anything else to make an impression by means of the battle and the victory, one took control of the battlefield and thereby established one’s victory by setting up a tropaion of the captured arms …” https://archive.org/details/geschichtedesgr00ruesgoog/page/n172
- Whatley, “On the Possibility of Reconstructing Marathon” (1964 but written in the 1920s) p. 122: “There was no attempt to follow up a victory. The two sides went home with as little attempt to molest each other as do the rival teams after a modern football match.”
- Hanson, Western Way of War (1989), pp. 35, 36: “Long drawn-out pursuit was also rare; unlike Napoleon, the victors were not aiming for the complete destruction of an enemy army. Indeed, pursuit of fleeing hoplites was not even crucial: most victorious Greek armies saw no reason why they could not repeat their simple formula for success and gain further victories should the enemy regroup in a few days and mistakenly press their luck again.”
- Kurt Raaflaub, Archaic and Classical Greece,” in Kurt Raaflaub and Nathan Rosenstein, eds., War and Society in the Ancient and Medieval Worlds (Center for Hellenic Studies: Washington, DC, 1999) p. 133: “Since the goal was to defeat, not annihilate, the enemy, the fleeing losers usually were not pursued and casualties, though potentially serious, often were limited.”
Somehow the exception in the ancient sources became the norm in the moderns! I had forgotten about this because Peter Krentz debunked it in his great article “Fighting by the Rules: The Invention of the Hoplite Agôn” in 2002, and because its not one of the aspects of the California school which many people I know still believe, like many people still believe that hoplite gear was very heavy.
The book is very readable which is more than anyone can say about my German.
If I have one criticism it would be that this book is so tightly focused and text-centred that it excludes some things which could make its view even stronger. I have an article in press for a few years which argues that some of the brilliant scholars who refuted the California school unthinkingly reproduced its assumptions about what questions to ask and sources to rely on. Its one thing to ask whether hoplites fought in files two cubits wide or four cubits wide, another to ask whether we should look at Greek ethnic warfare or warfare in the Aegean region. (The article will appear has appeared in the proceedings of Melammu-Symposium 8).
The bibliography of about 380 items excludes some things, particularly works outside ‘academic’ classics and by presses that expect a book to sell thousands not hundreds of copies. This isn’t a monograph which addresses the archaeologists like Imma Killian-Dirlmeier, the writings of Peter Connolly, or the wargamers from the 1970s to the 2000s who looked at what academics had to offer in English, decided it was not helpful, and wrote their own books, some of them quite good. Looking at this wider context could have showed that the dominance of the text-focused Prussian school was not inevitable, and how these ideas spread before academics were writing books in English on them. But people writing a PhD in the UK are under strong pressure to complete it in three or four years, so they have to be ruthless about defining a research topic and not wasting time on anything else.
If you just want three books on early Greek warfare, I would still recommend Hans van Wees’ Greek Warfare: Myths and Realities, Josho Brouwers’ Henchmen of Ares, and Xenophon’s Anabasis. But if you want to read more widely, I would recommend this. I hope that the wider world interested in early Greek warfare learns to talk about the Prussian, English, and California schools, just like the world interested in Greek catapults knows about the 19th century Prussian and French scholars who built the first reconstructions.
If you can’t obtain the published version, the original dissertation is available as Konijnendijk, Roel (2015) Ideals and Pragmatism in Greek Military Thought, 490-338 BC. Doctoral thesis, University College London. http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1470175/ Scholars who want something to cite should check the printed version!
Don’t make me chase you down! Support this site with a donation on Patreon or paypal.me or even liberapay
Edit 2021-09-25: Converted to blocks, added link to published article from Melammu conferences.
Edit 2026-03-01: Cite Raaflaub
#ancient #bookReview #classicalGreek #hoplite
#ancient #bookreview #classicalgreek #hoplite
Sean @[email protected] · 2019-05-04 · 08:01 UTC
Some Thoughts on “Classical Greek Tactics: A Cultural History”
Even the most overwhelming project can be completed if you take it one stone at a time! Photo of the Cyclopean walls of Mycenae by Sharon Mollerus, Wikimedia Commons, with a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
Konijnendijk, Roel (2017) Classical Greek Tactics: A Cultural History. Mnemosyne, Supplements History and Archaeology of Classical Antiquity, Band 409 (Brill: Leiden)
Since the 1990s, there has been intense debate about early Greek warfare. Most people agreed that there was something wrong with the versions available in English, but it took time to agree on just what that wrongness was and whether it could be fixed with a few small changes or was more fundamental. This book is another Cyclopean stone in the walls of the current consensus.
Konijnendijk argues that the California School of writers on Greek warfare (John Kinloch Anderson, William K. Pritchett, and Victor Davis Hanson) were basically refining the ideas of Austrian, German, and English scholars before the First World War. The continentals were interested in a comparative history of warfare with the practices of the Prussian army at the top, the Roman army in the middle, and early Greek armies near the bottom, while the English scholars tried to explain why Greek warfare as described by the Prussians was so peculiar. For a long time it seemed like these early writers had solved the problem so little was written on the subject in English. When a new group of scholars in Cold War California became interested in warfare, they launched a flood of research in English which almost erased the original German context of their theories. In short, the ‘orthodoxy’ is really a set of received ideas from 19th century Europe which survived until a group of ‘scientific historians’ began to question them.
Konijnendijk also lays out some of the strangest ideas about Greek warfare published before 1990. Anyone who has read Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon can list story after story of Greeks chasing down their enemies, stabbing them in the back, burning them alive in sacred groves where they had taken refuge, and so on. Often they came back to find that on other parts of their field their allies had lost, or were startled by a counter-attack and routed themselves. Thucydides says that the Spartans did not like these reckless chases (Thuc. 5.73.4): a mob of excited, jostling, running Spartiates were just as vulnerable to a counter-attack as any other hoplites. Armies without enough light-armed troops or cavalry bitterly complained that when they won they could not hurt their enemy, but if they ever lost they would be wiped out (Xen. An. 3.1.2). But in many modern writers on ancient warfare we find something different:
- Rüstow and Köchly, History of the Greek Art of War from the Earliest Times until Pyrrhus (1852) p. 145 “If the hoplite line of one side gained the victory, broke the enemy line and drew the other arms with it in flight, the victorious phalanx was now poorly equipped to pursue the fleeing, unless it had cavalry and light-armed infantry for assistance. In fights of this period, the pursuit was invariably rather half-hearted. The lack of cavalry and long-ranged troops is, however, not the only ground for this. One wanted more than anything else to make an impression by means of the battle and the victory, one took control of the battlefield and thereby established one’s victory by setting up a tropaion of the captured arms …” https://archive.org/details/geschichtedesgr00ruesgoog/page/n172
- Whatley, “On the Possibility of Reconstructing Marathon” (1964 but written in the 1920s) p. 122: “There was no attempt to follow up a victory. The two sides went home with as little attempt to molest each other as do the rival teams after a modern football match.”
- Hanson, Western Way of War (1989), pp. 35, 36: “Long drawn-out pursuit was also rare; unlike Napoleon, the victors were not aiming for the complete destruction of an enemy army. Indeed, pursuit of fleeing hoplites was not even crucial: most victorious Greek armies saw no reason why they could not repeat their simple formula for success and gain further victories should the enemy regroup in a few days and mistakenly press their luck again.”
Somehow the exception in the ancient sources became the norm in the moderns! I had forgotten about this because Peter Krentz debunked it in his great article “Fighting by the Rules: The Invention of the Hoplite Agôn” in 2002, and because its not one of the aspects of the California school which many people I know still believe, like many people still believe that hoplite gear was very heavy.
The book is very readable which is more than anyone can say about my German.
If I have one criticism it would be that this book is so tightly focused and text-centred that it excludes some things which could make its view even stronger. I have an article in press for a few years which argues that some of the brilliant scholars who refuted the California school unthinkingly reproduced its assumptions about what questions to ask and sources to rely on. Its one thing to ask whether hoplites fought in files two cubits wide or four cubits wide, another to ask whether we should look at Greek ethnic warfare or warfare in the Aegean region. (The article will appear has appeared in the proceedings of Melammu-Symposium 8).
The bibliography of about 380 items excludes some things, particularly works outside ‘academic’ classics and by presses that expect a book to sell thousands not hundreds of copies. This isn’t a monograph which addresses the archaeologists like Imma Killian-Dirlmeier, the writings of Peter Connolly, or the wargamers from the 1970s to the 2000s who looked at what academics had to offer in English, decided it was not helpful, and wrote their own books, some of them quite good. Looking at this wider context could have showed that the dominance of the text-focused Prussian school was not inevitable, and how these ideas spread before academics were writing books in English on them. But people writing a PhD in the UK are under strong pressure to complete it in three or four years, so they have to be ruthless about defining a research topic and not wasting time on anything else.
If you just want three books on early Greek warfare, I would still recommend Hans van Wees’ Greek Warfare: Myths and Realities, Josho Brouwers’ Henchmen of Ares, and Xenophon’s Anabasis. But if you want to read more widely, I would recommend this. I hope that the wider world interested in early Greek warfare learns to talk about the Prussian, English, and California schools, just like the world interested in Greek catapults knows about the 19th century Prussian and French scholars who built the first reconstructions.
If you can’t obtain the published version, the original dissertation is available as Konijnendijk, Roel (2015) Ideals and Pragmatism in Greek Military Thought, 490-338 BC. Doctoral thesis, University College London. http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1470175/ Scholars who want something to cite should check the printed version!
Don’t make me chase you down! Support this site with a donation on Patreon or paypal.me or even liberapay
Edit 2021-09-25: Converted to blocks, added link to published article from Melammu conferences.
#ancient #bookReview #classicalGreek #hoplite
#ancient #bookreview #classicalgreek #hoplite
Sean @[email protected] · 2019-05-04 · 08:01 UTC
Some Thoughts on “Classical Greek Tactics: A Cultural History”
Even the most overwhelming project can be completed if you take it one stone at a time! Photo of the Cyclopean walls of Mycenae by Sharon Mollerus, Wikimedia Commons, with a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
Konijnendijk, Roel (2017) Classical Greek Tactics: A Cultural History. Mnemosyne, Supplements History and Archaeology of Classical Antiquity, Band 409 (Brill: Leiden)
Since the 1990s, there has been intense debate about early Greek warfare. Most people agreed that there was something wrong with the versions available in English, but it took time to agree on just what that wrongness was and whether it could be fixed with a few small changes or was more fundamental. This book is another Cyclopean stone in the walls of the current consensus.
Konijnendijk argues that the California School of writers on Greek warfare (John Kinloch Anderson, William K. Pritchett, and Victor Davis Hanson) were basically refining the ideas of Austrian, German, and English scholars before the First World War. The continentals were interested in a comparative history of warfare with the practices of the Prussian army at the top, the Roman army in the middle, and early Greek armies near the bottom, while the English scholars tried to explain why Greek warfare as described by the Prussians was so peculiar. For a long time it seemed like these early writers had solved the problem so little was written on the subject in English. When a new group of scholars in Cold War California became interested in warfare, they launched a flood of research in English which almost erased the original German context of their theories. In short, the ‘orthodoxy’ is really a set of received ideas from 19th century Europe which survived until a group of ‘scientific historians’ began to question them.
Konijnendijk also lays out some of the strangest ideas about Greek warfare published before 1990. Anyone who has read Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon can list story after story of Greeks chasing down their enemies, stabbing them in the back, burning them alive in sacred groves where they had taken refuge, and so on. Often they came back to find that on other parts of their field their allies had lost, or were startled by a counter-attack and routed themselves. Thucydides says that the Spartans did not like these reckless chases (Thuc. 5.73.4): a mob of excited, jostling, running Spartiates were just as vulnerable to a counter-attack as any other hoplites. Armies without enough light-armed troops or cavalry bitterly complained that when they won they could not hurt their enemy, but if they ever lost they would be wiped out (Xen. An. 3.1.2). But in many modern writers on ancient warfare we find something different:
- Rüstow and Köchly, History of the Greek Art of War from the Earliest Times until Pyrrhus (1852) p. 145 “If the hoplite line of one side gained the victory, broke the enemy line and drew the other arms with it in flight, the victorious phalanx was now poorly equipped to pursue the fleeing, unless it had cavalry and light-armed infantry for assistance. In fights of this period, the pursuit was invariably rather half-hearted. The lack of cavalry and long-ranged troops is, however, not the only ground for this. One wanted more than anything else to make an impression by means of the battle and the victory, one took control of the battlefield and thereby established one’s victory by setting up a tropaion of the captured arms …” https://archive.org/details/geschichtedesgr00ruesgoog/page/n172
- Whatley, “On the Possibility of Reconstructing Marathon” (1964 but written in the 1920s) p. 122: “There was no attempt to follow up a victory. The two sides went home with as little attempt to molest each other as do the rival teams after a modern football match.”
- Hanson, Western Way of War (1989), pp. 35, 36: “Long drawn-out pursuit was also rare; unlike Napoleon, the victors were not aiming for the complete destruction of an enemy army. Indeed, pursuit of fleeing hoplites was not even crucial: most victorious Greek armies saw no reason why they could not repeat their simple formula for success and gain further victories should the enemy regroup in a few days and mistakenly press their luck again.”
Somehow the exception in the ancient sources became the norm in the moderns! I had forgotten about this because Peter Krentz debunked it in his great article “Fighting by the Rules: The Invention of the Hoplite Agôn” in 2002, and because its not one of the aspects of the California school which many people I know still believe, like many people still believe that hoplite gear was very heavy.
The book is very readable which is more than anyone can say about my German.
If I have one criticism it would be that this book is so tightly focused and text-centred that it excludes some things which could make its view even stronger. I have an article in press for a few years which argues that some of the brilliant scholars who refuted the California school unthinkingly reproduced its assumptions about what questions to ask and sources to rely on. Its one thing to ask whether hoplites fought in files two cubits wide or four cubits wide, another to ask whether we should look at Greek ethnic warfare or warfare in the Aegean region. (The article will appear has appeared in the proceedings of Melammu-Symposium 8).
The bibliography of about 380 items excludes some things, particularly works outside ‘academic’ classics and by presses that expect a book to sell thousands not hundreds of copies. This isn’t a monograph which addresses the archaeologists like Imma Killian-Dirlmeier, the writings of Peter Connolly, or the wargamers from the 1970s to the 2000s who looked at what academics had to offer in English, decided it was not helpful, and wrote their own books, some of them quite good. Looking at this wider context could have showed that the dominance of the text-focused Prussian school was not inevitable, and how these ideas spread before academics were writing books in English on them. But people writing a PhD in the UK are under strong pressure to complete it in three or four years, so they have to be ruthless about defining a research topic and not wasting time on anything else.
If you just want three books on early Greek warfare, I would still recommend Hans van Wees’ Greek Warfare: Myths and Realities, Josho Brouwers’ Henchmen of Ares, and Xenophon’s Anabasis. But if you want to read more widely, I would recommend this. I hope that the wider world interested in early Greek warfare learns to talk about the Prussian, English, and California schools, just like the world interested in Greek catapults knows about the 19th century Prussian and French scholars who built the first reconstructions.
If you can’t obtain the published version, the original dissertation is available as Konijnendijk, Roel (2015) Ideals and Pragmatism in Greek Military Thought, 490-338 BC. Doctoral thesis, University College London. http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1470175/ Scholars who want something to cite should check the printed version!
Don’t make me chase you down! Support this site with a donation on Patreon or paypal.me or even liberapay
Edit 2021-09-25: Converted to blocks, added link to published article from Melammu conferences.
#ancient #bookReview #classicalGreek #hoplite
#hoplite #classicalgreek #bookreview #ancient
Sean @[email protected] · 2019-05-04 · 08:01 UTC
Some Thoughts on “Classical Greek Tactics: A Cultural History”
Even the most overwhelming project can be completed if you take it one stone at a time! Photo of the Cyclopean walls of Mycenae by Sharon Mollerus, Wikimedia Commons, with a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
Konijnendijk, Roel (2017) Classical Greek Tactics: A Cultural History. Mnemosyne, Supplements History and Archaeology of Classical Antiquity, Band 409 (Brill: Leiden)
Since the 1990s, there has been intense debate about early Greek warfare. Most people agreed that there was something wrong with the versions available in English, but it took time to agree on just what that wrongness was and whether it could be fixed with a few small changes or was more fundamental. This book is another Cyclopean stone in the walls of the current consensus.
Konijnendijk argues that the California School of writers on Greek warfare (John Kinloch Anderson, William K. Pritchett, and Victor Davis Hanson) were basically refining the ideas of Austrian, German, and English scholars before the First World War. The continentals were interested in a comparative history of warfare with the practices of the Prussian army at the top, the Roman army in the middle, and early Greek armies near the bottom, while the English scholars tried to explain why Greek warfare as described by the Prussians was so peculiar. For a long time it seemed like these early writers had solved the problem so little was written on the subject in English. When a new group of scholars in Cold War California became interested in warfare, they launched a flood of research in English which almost erased the original German context of their theories. In short, the ‘orthodoxy’ is really a set of received ideas from 19th century Europe which survived until a group of ‘scientific historians’ began to question them.
Konijnendijk also lays out some of the strangest ideas about Greek warfare published before 1990. Anyone who has read Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon can list story after story of Greeks chasing down their enemies, stabbing them in the back, burning them alive in sacred groves where they had taken refuge, and so on. Often they came back to find that on other parts of their field their allies had lost, or were startled by a counter-attack and routed themselves. Thucydides says that the Spartans did not like these reckless chases (Thuc. 5.73.4): a mob of excited, jostling, running Spartiates were just as vulnerable to a counter-attack as any other hoplites. Armies without enough light-armed troops or cavalry bitterly complained that when they won they could not hurt their enemy, but if they ever lost they would be wiped out (Xen. An. 3.1.2). But in many modern writers on ancient warfare we find something different:
- Rüstow and Köchly, History of the Greek Art of War from the Earliest Times until Pyrrhus (1852) p. 145 “If the hoplite line of one side gained the victory, broke the enemy line and drew the other arms with it in flight, the victorious phalanx was now poorly equipped to pursue the fleeing, unless it had cavalry and light-armed infantry for assistance. In fights of this period, the pursuit was invariably rather half-hearted. The lack of cavalry and long-ranged troops is, however, not the only ground for this. One wanted more than anything else to make an impression by means of the battle and the victory, one took control of the battlefield and thereby established one’s victory by setting up a tropaion of the captured arms …” https://archive.org/details/geschichtedesgr00ruesgoog/page/n172
- Whatley, “On the Possibility of Reconstructing Marathon” (1964 but written in the 1920s) p. 122: “There was no attempt to follow up a victory. The two sides went home with as little attempt to molest each other as do the rival teams after a modern football match.”
- Hanson, Western Way of War (1989), pp. 35, 36: “Long drawn-out pursuit was also rare; unlike Napoleon, the victors were not aiming for the complete destruction of an enemy army. Indeed, pursuit of fleeing hoplites was not even crucial: most victorious Greek armies saw no reason why they could not repeat their simple formula for success and gain further victories should the enemy regroup in a few days and mistakenly press their luck again.”
Somehow the exception in the ancient sources became the norm in the moderns! I had forgotten about this because Peter Krentz debunked it in his great article “Fighting by the Rules: The Invention of the Hoplite Agôn” in 2002, and because its not one of the aspects of the California school which many people I know still believe, like many people still believe that hoplite gear was very heavy.
The book is very readable which is more than anyone can say about my German.
If I have one criticism it would be that this book is so tightly focused and text-centred that it excludes some things which could make its view even stronger. I have an article in press for a few years which argues that some of the brilliant scholars who refuted the California school unthinkingly reproduced its assumptions about what questions to ask and sources to rely on. Its one thing to ask whether hoplites fought in files two cubits wide or four cubits wide, another to ask whether we should look at Greek ethnic warfare or warfare in the Aegean region. (The article will appear has appeared in the proceedings of Melammu-Symposium 8).
The bibliography of about 380 items excludes some things, particularly works outside ‘academic’ classics and by presses that expect a book to sell thousands not hundreds of copies. This isn’t a monograph which addresses the archaeologists like Imma Killian-Dirlmeier, the writings of Peter Connolly, or the wargamers from the 1970s to the 2000s who looked at what academics had to offer in English, decided it was not helpful, and wrote their own books, some of them quite good. Looking at this wider context could have showed that the dominance of the text-focused Prussian school was not inevitable, and how these ideas spread before academics were writing books in English on them. But people writing a PhD in the UK are under strong pressure to complete it in three or four years, so they have to be ruthless about defining a research topic and not wasting time on anything else.
If you just want three books on early Greek warfare, I would still recommend Hans van Wees’ Greek Warfare: Myths and Realities, Josho Brouwers’ Henchmen of Ares, and Xenophon’s Anabasis. But if you want to read more widely, I would recommend this. I hope that the wider world interested in early Greek warfare learns to talk about the Prussian, English, and California schools, just like the world interested in Greek catapults knows about the 19th century Prussian and French scholars who built the first reconstructions.
If you can’t obtain the published version, the original dissertation is available as Konijnendijk, Roel (2015) Ideals and Pragmatism in Greek Military Thought, 490-338 BC. Doctoral thesis, University College London. http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1470175/ Scholars who want something to cite should check the printed version!
Don’t make me chase you down! Support this site with a donation on Patreon or paypal.me or even liberapay
Edit 2021-09-25: Converted to blocks, added link to published article from Melammu conferences.
#ancient #bookReview #classicalGreek #hoplite
#ancient #bookreview #classicalgreek #hoplite
Alejandro Baez @zeab · 2026-04-17 · 23:18 UTC

And #discourse post speaks exactly towards why closed source move from #cal makes no sense.
Simply put, it's not security and it's not ai. 😅
https://blog.discourse.org/2026/04/discourse-is-not-going-closed-source/

#discourse #cal
Lauma Pret ♡ ᪲᪲᪲🌈 @[email protected] · 2025-11-09 · 09:34 UTC

Hey, lovely #MastoArt , could you point me where to buy some lovely Christmas postcards? Human made, not AI. EU preferred (sorry, import taxes are a thing), but at least shipped to EU. Recommending your own shop is welcome.
#postcards #ChristmasCards #HumanMade #NoAI #ShopSmall #ShopArt

#mastoart #postcards #christmascards #humanmade #noai #shopsmall
Herisson Rose @[email protected] · 2026-05-12 · 08:13 UTC

Trendy cow shop front posters in the supermarket.
(Not AI, they've been here quite a while)
#coosday #moostodon #PhotoOfTheDay #cows

#coosday #moostodon #photooftheday #cows
gypsyvegan @[email protected] · 2026-05-02 · 02:48 UTC

THREAT MODEL: COVID 🦠
for Apr. 30th, 2026
by independent journalist @violetblue
- #HHS Director #RFKjr justifies defunding #mRNA vaccines by stating “Covid is gone” in testimony to Congress
- Acting #CDC Director Jay Bhattacharya blocks publication of a report showing Covid vaccine efficacy
- 78-year-old retired scientist and former aide to Dr. Fauci arrested by the FBI at gunpoint for “concealing federal records related to the debate about the origin” of Covid
- #WHO removes its tweet from 3/22/2020 that inaccurately stated “[hashtag]COVID19 is not airbourne”
- #WhoopiGoldberg raises the alarm about #LongCovid and CDC Covid information censorship on The View
...and much more.
✨THREAT MODEL is free to read -- please help keep it accessible to all by becoming a patron, even $1 a month makes a difference!✨
https://www.patreon.com/posts/covid-april-30-156948727
#ThreatModel #ThreatModelCovid #ThreatModelNewsletters #VioletBlue #COVIDnews #PublicHealth #CovidIsNotOver

#hhs #rfkjr #mrna #cdc #who #whoopigoldberg
press.exe @[email protected] · 2026-04-10 · 15:30 UTC

T-Shirt: You Are Here To Learn Something

A long time ago, I came to the conclusion that my redbubble store exists to get me to do some graphic design every month and maybe make some things that will make good stickers or badges when CanCon rolls around. I am not aiming for universal appeal. The fanart I am making here, or fan work, or whatever, is always going to be pretty niche at the best of times.

This is a shirt referencing the […]
https://press.invincible.ink/t-shirt-you-are-here-to-learn-something/ #shirts

#shirts
press.exe @[email protected] · 2026-04-10 · 15:30 UTC

T-Shirt: You Are Here To Learn Something

A long time ago, I came to the conclusion that my redbubble store exists to get me to do some graphic design every month and maybe make some things that will make good stickers or badges when CanCon rolls around. I am not aiming for universal appeal. The fanart I am making here, or fan work, or whatever, is always going to be pretty niche at the best of times.

This is a shirt referencing the […]
https://press.invincible.ink/t-shirt-you-are-here-to-learn-something/ #shirts

#shirts
press.exe @[email protected] · 2026-04-10 · 15:30 UTC

T-Shirt: You Are Here To Learn Something

A long time ago, I came to the conclusion that my redbubble store exists to get me to do some graphic design every month and maybe make some things that will make good stickers or badges when CanCon rolls around. I am not aiming for universal appeal. The fanart I am making here, or fan work, or whatever, is always going to be pretty niche at the best of times.

This is a shirt referencing the […]
https://press.invincible.ink/t-shirt-you-are-here-to-learn-something/ #shirts

#shirts
press.exe @[email protected] · 2026-04-10 · 15:30 UTC

T-Shirt: You Are Here To Learn Something

A long time ago, I came to the conclusion that my redbubble store exists to get me to do some graphic design every month and maybe make some things that will make good stickers or badges when CanCon rolls around. I am not aiming for universal appeal. The fanart I am making here, or fan work, or whatever, is always going to be pretty niche at the best of times.

This is a shirt referencing the […]
https://press.invincible.ink/t-shirt-you-are-here-to-learn-something/ #shirts

#shirts
press.exe @[email protected] · 2026-04-10 · 15:30 UTC

T-Shirt: You Are Here To Learn Something

A long time ago, I came to the conclusion that my redbubble store exists to get me to do some graphic design every month and maybe make some things that will make good stickers or badges when CanCon rolls around. I am not aiming for universal appeal. The fanart I am making here, or fan work, or whatever, is always going to be pretty niche at the best of times.

This is a shirt referencing the […]
https://press.invincible.ink/t-shirt-you-are-here-to-learn-something/ #shirts

#shirts
Paul Healey @[email protected] · 2025-12-20 · 22:57 UTC

@br00t4c A great expose. None should doubt what ends the autonomous control of information serves. It is not Ai and it’s not an ethically sustainable morality, but the capture of minds to preserve industrial ecocide, as should be obvious. HAL 9000 is not sorry! #MetaHeuristicLies #TheAiCon #IPTheft #FascistsTools #TechIsNotASoutionJustATool #AiBS #EmpiresEnd #TheFederation #NotHAL

#metaheuristiclies #theaicon #iptheft #fasciststools #techisnotasoutionjustatool #aibs
Paul Healey @[email protected] · 2025-12-20 · 22:57 UTC

@br00t4c A great expose. None should doubt what ends the autonomous control of information serves. It is not Ai and it’s not an ethically sustainable morality, but the capture of minds to preserve industrial ecocide, as should be obvious. HAL 9000 is not sorry! #MetaHeuristicLies #TheAiCon #IPTheft #FascistsTools #TechIsNotASoutionJustATool #AiBS #EmpiresEnd #TheFederation #NotHAL

#metaheuristiclies #theaicon #iptheft #fasciststools #techisnotasoutionjustatool #aibs
Paul Healey @[email protected] · 2025-12-20 · 22:57 UTC

@br00t4c A great expose. None should doubt what ends the autonomous control of information serves. It is not Ai and it’s not an ethically sustainable morality, but the capture of minds to preserve industrial ecocide, as should be obvious. HAL 9000 is not sorry! #MetaHeuristicLies #TheAiCon #IPTheft #FascistsTools #TechIsNotASoutionJustATool #AiBS #EmpiresEnd #TheFederation #NotHAL

#metaheuristiclies #theaicon #iptheft #fasciststools #techisnotasoutionjustatool #aibs
Paul Healey @[email protected] · 2025-12-20 · 22:57 UTC

@br00t4c A great expose. None should doubt what ends the autonomous control of information serves. It is not Ai and it’s not an ethically sustainable morality, but the capture of minds to preserve industrial ecocide, as should be obvious. HAL 9000 is not sorry! #MetaHeuristicLies #TheAiCon #IPTheft #FascistsTools #TechIsNotASoutionJustATool #AiBS #EmpiresEnd #TheFederation #NotHAL

#nothal #thefederation #empiresend #aibs #techisnotasoutionjustatool #fasciststools
Paul Healey @[email protected] · 2025-12-20 · 22:57 UTC

@br00t4c A great expose. None should doubt what ends the autonomous control of information serves. It is not Ai and it’s not an ethically sustainable morality, but the capture of minds to preserve industrial ecocide, as should be obvious. HAL 9000 is not sorry! #MetaHeuristicLies #TheAiCon #IPTheft #FascistsTools #TechIsNotASoutionJustATool #AiBS #EmpiresEnd #TheFederation #NotHAL

#metaheuristiclies #theaicon #iptheft #fasciststools #techisnotasoutionjustatool #aibs