Addicted to Sora…
and then forced to go cold turkey.
Prefer the full video interview? Click here.
What a conversation this was! I just love chatting with Sylvie, a new friend I met at the Toronto Indie Author Conference this spring.
Do yourself a favour, and watch this VIDEO first, before you listen (or watch) the podcast. It’s a deep dive into Sophie’s Sora addiction.
Not only is it hugely entertaining. (The motherfu@#*r day video is worth it alone) but it sets up some very serious concerns with social media addiction, the role of AI in our lives, and the usage of copyrighted property.
Here is the link to all awesome things Sylvie Soul related.
AF: You’ve been busy since our last chat in April. Spill?!
SS: My first print sale! The Not Quite Write podcast ran a contest. I entered last fall, didn’t win -- but they reached out afterward and published my story anyway. A month later their first anthology was out, with me in it. It’s the first time I’ve had something you can actually hold. My husband took photos, and I posted them on LinkedIn and Instagram. I usually keep my writing separate from my day job, but coworkers saw it and wanted the link. And of everything I’ve written, this is the straight-up smut one. My pen name’s separate from my legal name, but there I am, downplaying it while everyone goes “share, share, share.” It’s hilarious.
AF: It’s interesting that we can be embarrassed by our spicier or darker works. I’ve been battling with that myself.
SS: I have even more respect for writers who are that candid. There’s a line from The Life of Chuck, the Tom Hiddleston film: “I contain multitudes.” You’re not just one thing. You can write flash fiction and speculative fiction and smut and historical and nonfiction. You don’t have to pigeonhole yourself for marketing. If you really want to follow your bliss, sometimes you have to explore and put yourself out there.
(Authorial note: As a subscriber pointed out after reading this interview, “I contain multitudes” was originally written by Walt Whitman. But it is also used in the movie, Life of Chuck. And it’s the name of a song by Bob Dylan.)
AF: I hid my horror writing for years, worried it would clash with my journalism -- turns out people are more intrigued than judgmental. Speaking of exploring: I watched your video on the Death of Sora. And loved it. How long did that take to make?
SS: It’s my longest video, and it took forever to edit. Most of my old videos were just talking-head pieces on craft, but I was so moved by the canceling of Sora that I had to create something on my foray into AI video. If I strung every clip together I created with the app, it’d be half an hour -- and nobody wants to watch a half hour of AI slop.
I had the foresight to save the clips as soon as I knew Sora was going down. Now the site’s just gone.
AF: I didn’t get a chance to explore it. Just as I discovered it, it was gone.
SS: It’s fascinating to watch the rise and fall. Sora came out in full form less than a year ago. I played with it, then went all in -- I thought, this is the future, you can conceptualize anything. But at some point you step back and go: why am I feeding all my beautiful ideas into a large language model for them to keep? You have to be protective of your creativity. I value AI as a tool, but it’s easy to lose yourself taking creative cues from it. Disclaimer: I never, ever ask AI for help with my actual writing. My writing is my writing -- 100% human. Pangram, come at me.
AF: The best thing in your video just might be the Motherf$@!* Day rap.
SS: That’s the kind of weird thing that lives in my head. There was a feature where you could remix other people’s videos, so I’d find something trending and go, “okay, but do it with “Motherf$#@! Day,” and sneak it online. I was trying to force a meme. I think I was the only one who found it funny.
AF: No -- it was funny. So, you did the deep dive and still came out preferring human-driven creativity?
SS: I don’t like the way AI writes -- the metaphors are off, the cadence is wrong. It just doesn’t connect. For me it’s the word “you.” There’s an overabundance of it, because the AI is trying to inhabit your emotions -- “you’ll feel this, you feel sadness, not joy, only chaos.” And -- tinfoil hat on -- it’s not just the AI videos flooding YouTube. Now people are doing talking-head videos from AI scripts. It’s really them on camera, no avatar, but everything they say is hollow: generic lines engineered for emotional resonance with none of their own experience behind them. It’s an AI using a human avatar to spout slop. Watch for it -- people talking at you instead of relating to you.
AF: “AI using human avatars” -- whoa. That’s very Matrix.
SS: We’ve reached the singularity. It’s come full circle -- human-in-the-loop to serve the AI. It’s a mess.
But what comes to mind for me is NFT art. Remember, two or three years ago, it was NFTs and crypto and blockchain consuming the whole culture? Then the crash came, and it turned out a lot of people didn’t know what they were doing, and the art was basically worthless. People spent fortunes on ugly monkeys that are worth pennies now.
AF: I missed that craze.
SS: I was briefly tempted, because they ram it at you: this is the future, you’ll need it for everything. And then it just... stopped.
That’s how I think AI goes -- not a pin popping the balloon, but the balloon slowly deflating.
This text is just a fraction of the stuff we dove into. Listen to the podcast, or watch the video for the full experience!
