Salad Days for Con Men
"How long can a grift go on before the mark catches on?"
The Great Change began nearly twenty years ago as a series of unscheduled posts to Blogger dot com. I had been putting out a quarterly newsletter in print for at least twenty years before that and writing for other people’s publications since I was in grade school. In 2008, I paused to ponder why I write but decided to keep at it anyway. This is my 809th post to The Great Change.
Artificial intelligence has reached an inflection point, as we all see. Many creative artists are struggling to decide whether to embrace that or reject it. Justine Bateman just concluded a remarkable film festival in Hollywood that featured all A.I.-free content and 100% of the proceeds went to the filmmakers so they could be less inhibited by not having to curry favor with distributors to make their films. At the same time, Bateman-the-filmmaker is also experimenting with A.I. and making no secret about it.
An interview with Mark Cuban hipped me to the potential for A.I. platforms like NotebookLM to turn written blogs like The Great Change into a podcast, using human voice simulation to imitate a talk-show-style conversation from the text.
Then, using a transcript of your faked podcast, other software can be used to produce a short video segment, perhaps 10 minutes long, using public domain clips to accompany fake, narrated content.
The examples I found on YouTube could easily pass for something you might find on a business channel in the seatback in front of you on a commercial flight, or maybe on the TV screen of a filling station gas pump as you fill your tank. The production costs, beginning from an existing blog post, are perhaps less than a dollar per post.
That is only a short step from what I have been doing here this year with my Batman parody. I am using subscription software—Dzine and Image Creator—to generate images from text. I tried using A.I. wares like Chat GPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Deep Seek to script the story, but I gradually abandoned those because their A.I. engines were less creative than I am.
Here is the next installment—the last in our origin sequence on Oswald Cobblepot—before returning next week to Batman and his battle with Penguin, Joker and Riddler at DOGE. As in the previous week, any thoughts I have on other subjects are being relegated to Substack Notes for the time being.
Enjoy.
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Meanwhile, let’s end these wars. We support peace in the West Bank and Gaza and the efforts to cease the war immediately. Global Village Institute’s Peace Thru Permaculture initiative has sponsored the Green Kibbutz network in Israel and the Marda Permaculture Farm in the West Bank for over 30 years. It will continue to do so with your assistance. We aid Ukrainian families seeking refuge in ecovillages and permaculture farms along the Green Road and work to heal collective trauma everywhere through the Pocket Project. You can read about it on the Global Village Institute website (GVIx.org). Thank you for your support.
And speaking of resettling refugees, did you know? A study by Poland’s National Development Bank found that the influx of Ukrainians added between 0.5% and 2.5% to GDP growth and paid more in taxes than they received in benefits.
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#RestorationGeneration.
When humans are locked in a cage, the Earth continues to be beautiful. Therefore, the lesson for us is that human beings are not necessary. The air, soil, sky and water are still beautiful without you. So, when you step out of the cage, please remember that you are guests of the Earth, not its hosts.
We have a complete solution. We can restore whales to the ocean and bison to the plains. We can recover all the tremendous old-growth forests. We possess the knowledge and tools to rebuild savannah and wetland ecosystems. Coral reefs rebuilt with biorock build beaches faster than the seas are rising. It is not too late. All of these great works of nature are recoverable. We can have a human population sized to harmonize, not destabilize. We can have an atmosphere that heats and cools just the right amount, is easy on our lungs and sweet to our nostrils with the scent of ten thousand flowers. All of that beckons. All of that is within reach.
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