ghost story – Jill Domschot

I hate to admit I’ve used AI to do anything when there are authors who are using AI to write entire books. I can guarantee you I have way too much ego to do that. By that, I mean that I value my own writing voice too much to sanitize it with a whitewashed tone. I will also continue hiring a real artist to create my book covers, my friend Clorinda Fresquez-Tria. I also will continue to hire an editor who has a human brain and can make sense or not make sense of writing that comes from a real human mind. In the future, I plan to hire real voice actors to narrate my books for audio. Right now, I can’t afford it. Someday, I will be able to and until that time, I refuse to cut corners and create AI audiobooks. I hate AI vocal timbers. The closer they come to real human voices, the worse they are. You know what I’m talking about, I’m sure, because companies are using AI voices for their ads on YouTube videos and they are as annoying as heck.

However, AI is really great at scanning my own human-written 120,000 work novel and summarizing it. You can read the blurb it came up with here. Last week, I was equally inspired to use AI to create my characters. This is where my misadventures with AI came in.

As I created images, the AI program learned to develop blocks that wouldn’t allow me to ask for certain parameters. For example, I was allowed initially to specify ethnicities such as “Polish priest” or “Mexican delivery driver.” I even got away with asking AI to make my Mexican character look more indigenous Mexican rather than Spanish. Oh, boy. Then, it gave me a speech about not using ethnic stereotypes in images when I asked it to create the Irish secretary. It was the word “Irish” it didn’t like. Okay. It suggested, instead, that I use descriptors like “red hair and freckles.” Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t that an Irish stereotype? Once that block appeared, I couldn’t get away with using any ethnic descriptors and had to get really cagey with how I was asking it to create people: “maintenance man from the Southwest” or “electrical engineer at a norteño party in the Southwest.”

When I wanted my electrical engineer to be in his backyard holding his child to denote that he works from home and has children, it eventually developed a block that wouldn’t allow me to request an adult and a child in an image together, even though I was asking only for innocent images. It told me I could have a picture of a child alone in a yard or an adult alone in a yard, but not both together. Naturally, I asked it if it thought it was better for a child to be left unsupervised in a yard, and it told me it could not make moral statements about leaving children alone, only that it couldn’t get around the block that didn’t allow it to create an image of an adult with a child in the same image.

The next block I came across was regarding age. It had made my nineteen-year-old character look about thirty, so I asked it to make him a few years younger. My character suddenly became ten. I asked it to make him look nineteen again, and it developed a block that claimed that it couldn’t assume traits or features based on age, despite that there is actual science behind age progression. Sigh. AI is a hassle, but it became a weird obsession for me last week. See what you think of how I did getting around the blocks and describing my characters.

Hector
Arora
Kevin
Lorenzo
Wilford
Paco Doble
Stephen
Fr. Bartek
Detective Grazia

This weekend I took my coffee out to the back porch and sat in the orange school-style chair that’s been sitting there since we moved to this house. It makes a good outdoor chair after all the nicer ones have been stored away for the winter. New Mexico is not easy on outdoor furniture. The sun is brighter here than, say, the Pacific Northwest — literally. It’s the elevation. The sun has less atmosphere to pierce through. It also gets hot, cold, and dry, followed by deluges of rain. Sometimes, the dogs’ water is frozen solid in the morning, but by noon, people are walking their dogs in short-sleeved shirts, which is to say that it vacillates between hot and cold within hours.

The sun was particularly bright this weekend, and I sat in the orange chair in a little corner of the porch, sweating. When I checked the temperature, however, I discovered that it hadn’t even reached forty degrees. I just happened to be sitting in a spot where the south-facing sun collected. The sun is powerful. Solar energy would work well here ninety percent of the time — it’s that ten percent worth of cloud layer that would be inconvenient. Of course, farmers don’t find clouds inconvenient, especially if they bring rain.

Some people are particularly gloomy and find all the dark shade they can. Others are of sunny dispositions and are annoyingly positive all the time. Yet others seek out sunny corners where they can rest for a while. To be honest, I don’t know where I’m going with this. I have a compulsion to write every day, and I’m so low on sleep, another 1000 words towards my ghost story or my memoir isn’t happening. Yes, of course, I’m writing a memoir. I’m always writing one, as the future will be curious about the past and want to know the thoughts of ridiculous secretaries. Unselfishly, I will oblige them.

I really love my ghost story, but I’m afraid it does require some intelligence to write, which I have very little of right now. In its initial version, a widow buys an old, decrepit house that’s haunted and manages to lure the hapless co-owner of a hardware store into helping her solve the mystery of her house. In its current version, I swapped the hardware store owner with a UPS driver…except I call the delivery service the PDex, and him the PDex man. I know, it’s dumb, but the name PDex makes me giggle like a teenage girl. Or guffaw like a teenage boy; I’m not sure which. I changed my male protag to a delivery driver because it occurred to me that delivery drivers in a city like Roswell know everyone’s names and where they live, and their presence on private property goes unquestioned. It didn’t just occur to me, honestly. One of the local drivers noted that she knew where I lived, where my daughter worked, etc., and I still don’t know her name. It wasn’t as creepy as it sounds. I just have an unusual last name, which she recognized after I started signing for the bulletins delivered to the church.

My ghost story ought to be gloomy, but it isn’t. I can’t help it. I want to create little sunny corners even when murdered femme fatales come out to haunt them. If you’re wondering how theologically correct my ghost story is, I’ll try to stifle a yawn…not because I’m bored, though. Oh, no. I’m simply too tired. I already said that. I find these are important questions to ask, as some Christians believe ghosts can only be demons, and not the spirit of the dead walking about, half here, and half there.

I don’t hold to such a rigid perspective, though. I’ve listened to enough question and answer sessions with exorcists to know that the “ghosts are demons” is the predominant position Catholic authorities take, too. But there is room for mystery in Catholicism. There is a willingness to accept that God might allow the spirit of a person in heaven to visit earth for a special purpose. I’ve often contemplated why there are places with weird “energy” to them, as well. I recognize that sounds new-agey. What I mean is, could there be places where the heavenly dimension has bled over into the earthly dimension? I don’t know. I don’t seek out these “energies,” as it were, and I certainly don’t go looking for ghosts with a special purpose. I’m only using the ghost trope because gothic elements in stories work. They work because we know at an inner level there is more to life than meets the eye.

Also, I think my poor widow woman needs help being ushered back to a land of hope where sunny corners can be found on Saturday or Sunday mornings. Whether it’s the spirit of a dead woman who will bring about a powerfully sunny justice, or the PDex man with his Santa Claus vibe (the real St. Nick was, after all, from the sunny Mediterranean world), who am I to deny my poor heroine her sun just because she will get a sunburn?