u/Zathura2

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I've been consuming a lot of triops content lately and have seen a lot of sensationalized click-baity titles, but watching this one left a sour taste in my mouth.

This is the second in a series of videos, in which the YT'er *barely* kept a single triops alive during his first attempt, then ordered an absurd amount of eggs (who knows if it was even close to a million or not,) with no prior planning or apparently any learning from the first attempt, and had a mass die-off.

The end of the video is him contacting another youtuber for *more* eggs.

(Edit: Middle of the video. I didn't realize I had clicked away in disgust the first time I watched it. The latter half doesn't really make it any better but *some* survived.)

Now look, I know triops are: Short-lived, cheap, have naturally high attrition rates.

That still doesn't make them targets for neglect and abuse for clicks. However I very much doubt there's anything that can actually be done except for people correcting the misinformation and husbandry failures and making this kind of content shameful to make, where the end result is thousands of dead animals.

I'm also honestly surprised the youtubers he collaborated with were even willing to send him eggs after the second failed attempt. I'm sure long-time keepers have an excess for sure, but does that mean you'd want to send them somewhere you know they'd meet a horrible end?

(I'm a little emotional this morning as I had to euthanize one of my triops that had been struggling with molts the last few days. It survived one bad molt and I thought it might pull through, but today all the fight had left it. I've been really enjoying watching them and learning their behaviors and they deserve better than this.)

Spending time both here and on the discord; I've noticed something that seems to be common and which does really throw into question what the definition of an author or writer is, and how people are choosing to interpret that.

To be clear, this is not an anti-AI post. Just a discussion about the process, what I see people doing, and how I feel about it as someone who's been writing for over 30 years, only having picked up AI as a tool about three years ago.

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The thing I see far too much of are the following:
- Relying on the AI to remember details and events from the past, especially in large corpuses.
- Relying on the AI to make creative decisions, sometimes dozens or hundreds at a time.
- Relying on the AI to build your plot, or make your characters act true to their profiles.
- Relying on the AI to *tell you if your writing is any good or not.*

Listen...we're writers.

*You* should know what needs to exist in a scene, and what the characters should remember, and what callbacks would be meaningful in a scene. The answer is not uploading 14 lore documents and the first three novels and throwing your hands up and hoping.

*You* should not be handing the AI 4-5 sentences of plot and asking it to write entire chapters. It is then having to make hundreds of tiny creative decisions in order to try and make something coherent. It is no longer your vision but what the AI thinks the story should look like based on the averages of every story it ever saw in its training data.

*You* should know your own plot, and how your characters should speak and act, and direct to that effect.

*You* should know, immediately, whether the output sounds good, or whether something is off or missing, or if details are wrong, or if there are plot-holes, or inconsistencies with previous chapters and scenes, or whether it's setting up a future plot-thread.

The human element is what's going to create engagement, not the way the AI strings words together. *Your* input is the most important thing in the process, and *your* mind is where the story should live.

It seems a lot of people are treating the AI as a replacement for knowing how to write, and that isn't going to work.

I don't see anything wrong with leveraging AI to brainstorm, to draft, to help you mull things over, but it should never take the place of the creative director. It should not be determining how your story is laid out, or what counts as emotional or a plot-twist or a character being clever. Use it as a tool to make the writing process easier, not to replace it entirely. Don't let your creativity be overridden by what the AI thinks sounds good based on its training data and how it sees other stories being formatted.

Those are your job as the author. As the writer. If you're actually letting the AI make creative decisions for you and deciding how your story should go, are you really authoring it? Is it really your story?

I've finally collaborated with Claude to address something that I've felt was missing, not just from this community but in AI spaces in general; and that's an easy-to-digest, practical guide to how LLM's work and how to leverage that to get the best output.

I've tried to keep it as objective and evidence-based as possible, and tailored for the webui crowd; though the concepts scale. More advanced tools will give you more control, but the underlying methodology doesn't change.

Hopefully this will help some people understand LLM's, the prompt, and the context window more intuitively and answer a lot of questions.

https://8u6man.github.io/SotM---Prompt-Engineering-101.io/

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