Guest Post: Kate Heartfield Excavates Food of the Underworld

As I drank my morning coffee and scrolled through Twitter one morning, I stumbled upon a preview for the Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. At first, I didn’t quite realize where it was from. The name sounded familiar, them it hit me! It was a reboot of Sabrina the Teenage Witch. I was instantly intrigued. I thought, if the executive producers of Riverdale worked on it, it must good right?

Before I get into talking about the gritty Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, I should start at the roots. Now, I understand comparing a sitcom to a gritty satan loving Netflix original is quite silly, but hear me out.

I am one for originals so let me start with Sabrina the Teenage Witch. Of course I had watched the new version first, but for the sake of old times, I revisited the original. And may I say, it was everything I missed. Hilda and Zelda’s relationship was like every sister’s relationship. They would get on each others nerves but in the end they always looked out for each other. Sabrina was also their pride and joy and would do anything for her!

Sabrina, in the sitcom, I found to be very brave and thoughtful. The moment she found out she was a witch, she used her magic for her friends and yes, sometimes her uses could be selfish. However, all of her uses of her magic, no matter what it was used for, came from the heart. Especially when it came to Harvey, who as you may know is her soulmate. Despite him being her boyfriend throughout the series, it never stopped Sabrina from pursuing her dream. Sabrina had also always been passionate about her studies and succeeding. This is part of the reason why I have always loved her as a character.

Salem takes the cake though. He is a comedic gift from the Gods. I mean it when I say Salem is the best character on the show. As most of you probably know, Salem is their family cat and has been with Hilda and Zelda for years. Salem is their familiar, but Salem has a backstory which is undeniably hilarious. Salem was originally a witch, but after attempting world domination, he was sentenced to hundreds of years of being a cat. Despite him being a cat, that doesn’t stop him from causing tons of shenanigans throughout the series. This just gives him more character.

Yes, it may be goofy and yes, it may not be gritty, but it’s lighthearted. Sometimes, you just need a little laugh.

Now that I have clearly state my love for the 90s sitcom, I should state my thoughts on the Chilling Adventures of Sabrina.

Now, in this series being a witch is no surprise for Sabrina unlike in the Sitcom. She has known she was a witch since she was little and in this series, her parents have passed leaving Hilda and Zelda (including her cousin Ambrose, who was not in the sitcom) to take care of her. In the sitcom, Sabrina isn’t allowed contact with her mortal mother or her mother will be turned into a ball of wax. Her father, in the sitcom, was out traveling and working. The way they approached her parents in the Netflix series was just rather bleak.

Salem the cat in the new series, does not talk. He also does not have his awesome backstory not to mention that Sabrina attains Salem by summoning her own familiar. I would have nothing against this way of approaching introducing Salem. In fact, it is more or less that I’m angry that Salem doesn’t talk. He doesn’t bring anything to the table in the new series. Salem, in fact, is hardly shown in the show despite him being very important in the sitcom version.

You may say that it’s petty of me to be upset about a cat, but Salem is apart of the Spellman family, so to not include him in the new series seems ridiculous to me.

Now, let’s talk about Harvey. This is something that I hold a lot of thoughts on. In the sitcom Harvey is a doof. He’s goofy and somehow never found out that Sabrina was a witch for years. Netflix must’ve upped Harvey’s IQ because he does not skip a beat in the new series. Not to mention the fact that despite Harvey being Sabrina’s boyfriend, he was always sort of a side character.

In the Netflix series, you are introduced to Harvey’s family. Of course, you’ve had some backstory for Harvey in the sitcom. You knew his parents were together, he had sibling and his dad worked as an exterminator. In the Netflix series, Harvey has a brother and a dad, and his dad works in a mine. His dad, in the Netflix series, is rather aggressive and abusive, which was never established in the sitcom.

My final comparison about Harvey comes to his reaction to when he finds out that Sabrina is a witch. In both series Harvey is clearly did not handle Sabrina being a witch very well. In the sitcom Harvey ends up breaking up with Sabrina for a very short moment. Towards the end of the series, Harvey ends up patching up things with Sabrina. In fact, they end up becoming very good friends like they did in the beginning of the sitcom. In the Netflix series, Harvey wants to end all ties with her. He acted like being a witch was the equivalent of being a monster. In fact, even when Sabrina tries to patch things up and help Harvey, he still treats her like a monster.

This leaves me to my final thoughts. I would like to end this post talking about how the two series deal with the topic of witches. In the sitcom, they treated witches differently than in the Netflix series. In Sabrina the Teenage Witch, all the witches lived harmoniously. They had their own government, The Witches Council, and lived in what they called the Other Realm. However, some witches chose to live in the mortal realm, which is earth.

In the Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, they use cliche witch backgrounds. They make them seem quite evil when they really are not. Of course I am not saying there aren’t any witch stereotypes in the sitcom. In the sitcom, they have their familiars and also make potions in cauldrons, however, those do not compare to the stereotypes portrayed in the Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. In the Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, they portray witches like every media platform does. This bothered me the most.

I love the sitcom because it is not full of stereotypes. It doesn’t make witches out to be Satan loving monsters. Not all witches, in my opinion, are Satan loving monsters. I understand they wanted to make a gritty remake, but what made the sitcom so original to me was how lighthearted it was, even if they did touch up on difficult topics.

The way Netflix portrayed witches to me was something that I’ve seen so many times before. Making witches Satan worshippers is so. . .overused and not at all true. Today, there are people who identify as witches who do not worship Satan. I find the use to having a “dark baptism” and celebrating their “lord Satan” in the Netflix series is stereotyping and frankly, rude.

I’m not saying the Netflix series is all bad. There are aspects of the show that are enjoyable. However, it was not my favorite. I found there to be a lot of things I did not enjoy. Not to mention, there are things I would definitely tweak, but overall, the editing was well done and I believe it was well produced. Although, I’d take a goofy talking cat in a silly sitcom any day.

Lou is a writer of rom coms, eater of pizza, lover of 90s boybands and cat enthusiast. You can follow her on Twitter at @aweosmewriter.

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AI is coming for your jobs, creatives! Or… it will be, eventually. Not this year. But coming soon.

Introduction
The last two years have seen surprising and indeed almost shocking advances in AI creative work. Image-generators like Dall-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion that work from text prompts using diffusion models are capable of some amazingly high quality work at times, though admittedly their understanding(1) of fingers still leaves something to be desired. The even more astonishing ChatGPT can sometimes not just hold conversations that pass the Turing Test, but can also create working computer programs, compose poetry, and also write coherent short stories, apparently from scratch.

Some may reasonably argue the work of such AI systems isn’t creative at all, but is a mere regurgitation or combination of human efforts compiled from its training sets. But on the other hand, much of human art is based on pastiche and emulation, not to mention plagiarism, and both writers and artists have to spend years of training learning the techniques passed on by their instructors.

The State of the Art

Recent developments are truly astonishing given previous struggles to get AI systems to create art, prose, and other works. It’s now possible to type a few words and get some art back in a minute that might have taken a human hours or even days to produce from scratch. The quality of the AI-generated art is quite variable; from one request to another you might get back commercially usable material or you might get worthless trash. But even considering that you may have to make quite a number of requests of the system to obtain a usable image, the results are still much faster and cheaper than using a human artist for the equivalent level of work.

It’s arguable that if created by a human, these AI-generated images would sometimes be direct plagiarism. Even when not clearly a direct copy of an existing work, it’s often the case that the AI system builders failed to obtain artist permission to incorporate their work into the system’s training data. The legal consequences of this failure will work themselves out in the courts, but for now there’s nothing stopping people from making use of these tools.

At present, complete high-quality AI art is generally unobtainable no matter how much time is taken playing with prompts, but on the one hand, commercial-grade art is often quite acceptable, and on the other hand, by using the AI’s art as a basis, a skilled digital artist can create a high-quality composite of human and AI art much more quickly than working from scratch. This, for example, is what Tor did with Christopher Paolini’s recent book cover.

In the world of prose, with suitable guidance ChatGPT can generate a coherent and consistent story, but not one that’s very high quality. Without substantial revision, the current quality of such text is typically mediocre, but at present it’s not inconceivable for some exceptional AI-generated story to make it past a slush reader’s quality threshold and at least be held for review. Quite the achievement considering the high level of competition many magazines impose on contributors. This is already motivating many AI-generated submissions, though it’s unclear if they are meant for prestige and profit for their pseudonymous submitters or to count coup. Clarkesworld, for example, has reported a recent spike in AI submissions despite their guidelines to the contrary.

The Future of the Art

Because these recent developments in AI art generation have seemed to come almost from nowhere, it’s hard to say how rapidly they will improve to match or even exceed human capabilities. We should keep in mind that autonomous cars were expected to be widely available by now on the basis of work done in the 2010s, and yet after a promising beginning, only slow progress has been made and such vehicles are still unsafe on real-world roads.

On the other hand, given the eagerness of many extremely well-funded tech groups to work in this area, including not just OpenAI but Microsoft and Google among others, it’s reasonable to expect further progress up to a point. What’s the limit? For current system architectures, I expect that limit is based on these systems’ lack of explicit real-world knowledge. Just as ChatGPT is capable of absolutely authoritative but totally incorrect and easily refutable statements, these systems will be hamstrung by the inability to reason until such capabilities are combined with their generative models.

Let’s establish three bars:

1. Acceptable low-grade commercial art. The kind of graphic art that creative freelancers currently make to order for ad campaigns and other commercial applications without much funding, but which will still pay their rent. Equivalent prose would be acceptable for publication in some token and semipro magazines and for routine copywriting assignments.
2. Acceptable high-grade commercial art. Commercial art produced for highly funded campaigns by major agencies and design firms, or prose and content that can be published in the better magazines and journals.
3. Superior-to-human fine art. Masterpieces that would displace human efforts from galleries and museums and bookstore racks and win awards if AI and humans competed on a level playing field.

We’re currently just entering stage 1 for certain applications. This means that soon some semipro freelancers may experience serious competition from AI systems, and after a while some agencies and design firms may reduce their staff because their routine low-end work can be done by machine. There will still be plenty of human work involved in revising, incorporating, or compositing AI work into larger and higher quality artistic achievements, but the amount of human touch in the overall process will diminish.

At stage 2, entire industries will be turned upside down and the effects will shake up whole economies. For example, design firms may no longer require creatives, or else the few creatives they retain will largely be employed managing requests to AI systems. There will be no more need for human touch in photoshopping or otherwise compositing AI art with human-created elements as in stage 1; the AI will do all the work on demand. (Note that while some very high quality AI art has been created already, it typically requires considerable manual effort from a human to achieve such a level).

The good news is that my average-case guess for stage 2 is at least ten years, and it may well be generations before this level is achieved. The bad news is that I could be wrong and it could be next year. I was shocked by ChatGPT’s capabilities in 2022 after years of crappy chat bots that wouldn’t fool Turing for a minute, and so I may easily be wrong again. Still, I do think that without explicit real-world knowledge and reasoning abilities these tools will be unable to really excel for quite some time. At present no one has any idea how to give a generative AI system that kind of understanding.
At stage 3, humans start wondering why they should even bother creating art, especially if such superior work can be routinely requested of AI systems by anyone without incurring much cost.

Similar considerations apply for stage 3, which to my mind requires Artificial General Intelligence to achieve. Such a system is not absolutely out of the question. We just don’t know how to build one today, nor do we even have a good idea on a direction to follow to achieve such a goal.

Still, even stage 1 is problematic enough for human creatives. I’d guess full stage 1 will be achieved within five years, and whatever the courts decide about existing systems and their theft of artist work without permission, one way or another AI-generated art will become ubiquitous for inexpensive applications.

(1) Indeed, the reason that such systems don’t know how to draw fingers properly is they don’t even understand the concept of fingers. These systems don’t have old-fashioned knowledge bases that contain explicit facts or relations. The appearance of a hand is emergent from mysterious mathematical features derived automatically from the digitized training set. Discrete counts of things that characteristically appear in fixed numbers in nature but are often hidden from view in individual images can be problematic for such systems. Human images very frequently show two clearly identifiable arms and legs and so AI images get these right more often than not (not always however!) but hands in photographs less frequently show all five fingers clearly, and so generated images often don’t do so either.

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BIO: Laurence Raphael Brothers is a writer and a technologist with five patents and a background in AI and Internet R&D. He has published over 50 short stories in such magazines as Nature, PodCastle, and Galaxy’s Edge. His noir urban fantasy novellas The Demons of Wall Street, The Demons of the Square Mile, and The Demons of Chiyoda are available from Mirror World Publishing, while his new standalone novel The World’s Shattered Shell has just been published by Water Dragon.
Pronouns: he/him.
Twitter: @lbrothers.
Mastodon: @laurence@petrous.vislae.town.
Website: https://laurencebrothers.com.