Dr. Thomas D. Lee

The pope taking a heroic stance against machine intelligence makes a lot of sense when you consider that machine intelligence has a lot in common with classical demonology. A convenient sycophantic servant can be summoned at will to help you with minor tasks, but it comes at a cost to your soul.

'I'm a busy guy, I could write a whole treatise questioning whether Christ actually owned the clothes that he wore or I could just ask Claude to tell me in five seconds. Oh sorry, I've been naming the demons. This one's called Claude.'

The pope taking a heroic stance against machine intelligence makes a lot of sense when you consider that machine intelligence has a lot in common with classical demonology. A convenient sycophantic servant can be summoned at will to help you with minor tasks, but it comes at a cost to your soul.

I was having this conversation with a good friend last night. Imagine you're in Wittenberg in the 15th C. and all of the other scholars are summoning demon familiars. 'I know it's ethically grey but I'd never tell it to actually WRITE anything, God forbid. I just use it for research.'

I run a D&D game set in 1918, in which the dastardly Hun are summoning dragons to try and win the war. One of my players, my friend Hugh, plays a trench-raiding barbarian with a wild boar painted on the side of his Sopwith Camel. My mother - a quilting extraordinaire - made him this amazing quilt!

I'm an author with historically bad mental health. In the past four years my MH has improved dramatically due to meds and therapy and having great friends. I still fall into the trap sometimes of thinking that I can ignore self-care as long as the writing's going well. I'm here to say DON'T DO THAT.

I know this rationally, but even so. Sometimes I start to treat myself like the reluctant caretaker of an inefficient biomechanical writing machine - instead of treating myself like a fully integrated human being who happens to write books and who deserves nice things like living in a tidy flat.

I'm an author with historically bad mental health. In the past four years my MH has improved dramatically due to meds and therapy and having great friends. I still fall into the trap sometimes of thinking that I can ignore self-care as long as the writing's going well. I'm here to say DON'T DO THAT.

I'm beyond proud of my good pal @padswa.bsky.social. He's one of the writers I most admire, because of his determination to pick himself up and keep writing brilliant fiction even after setbacks and rejections. I'm sure DRAGONFLY's going to be a huge success. www.thebookseller.com/rights/harpe...

Tristan: checking to see if Isolde is watching before stabbing the boar Agravain: lying on the floor having a smoke Percival: in dog form, usefully flanking the boar Kay: about to throw a giant rock at the boar Palamedes: leaning on his shield, despairing as to the whole situation

I've been doing a lot of drawing recently, and my heart goes out to illustrators everywhere. It has become insanely difficult to find decent reference images on search engines without being drowned in uncanny valley AI slop.

I have been drawing for fun and also sketching ideas for a book I'm working on and it's been bringing me great joy and contentment and fulfilment. At no point did I think 'gosh, I wish I could get a terminally stupid robot to do this for me'.

I've been doing a lot of drawing recently, and my heart goes out to illustrators everywhere. It has become insanely difficult to find decent reference images on search engines without being drowned in uncanny valley AI slop.

I want to see how an elbow actually bends so that I can draw a stylised approximation of it, I don't want to see a kleptomatic hallucination of how elbows work