In this week’s episode, as promised I take a look at the beta of Adobe Firefly, and share my thoughts on it. I also discuss phishing scams and answer a common reader question about the GHOST NIGHT series.
TRANSCRIPT
00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates
Hello everyone. Welcome to Episode 154 of the Pulp Writer show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is April the 14th, 2023, and today we’re going to discuss Adobe Firefly generative AI, which I mentioned on a previous episode of the show. We’ll also talk about phishing scams and discuss common reader questions about the Ghost Night series.
First up, a progress update on my current writing projects. I am as of this recording on Chapter 18 of 21 of Cloak of Dragonfire which puts me at 92,500 words, so I am almost done and I think I am probably going to finish up a Monday or Tuesday of next week. Then I will write a bonus short story to give away for free to my newsletter subscribers. I already know what the short story is going to be, just haven’t decided what to call it yet and then it will be full speed ahead on editing and if all goes well, we should have Cloak of Dragonfire out and available for you to read in the first week of May. Then I will be focusing once that’s done on the next Dragonskull Book, which will be Dragonskull: Doom of the Sorceress, which I am hoping to have out in June if all goes well.
We have some exciting audiobook news. Ghost Exile Omnibus Three is out in audiobook form and get it Audible, Amazon, and Apple Books. It is a box set of the last three Ghost Exile novels: Ghost in the Throne, Ghost in the Pact, and Ghost in the Winds and it comes to 44 1/2 hours long. That’s not a mistake. It is 44 1/2 hours long. It is the longest single audiobook bundle I have ever released. Just for comparison, I looked it up and according to Google Maps, if you drove nonstop from New York to Los Angeles across the entire breadth of the continental United States, and you drove without stopping, it would take 41 hours. This audiobook is 44 hours, so if you are going to drive from Los Angeles to New York or vice versa anytime soon, we’ve got you covered. You get that at the audiobook stores I just mentioned. Recording is also underway for the second Dragonskull Book, Dragonskull: Shield of the Knight. We are hoping to have that out this summer. That will be excellently narrated by Brad Wills and of course, Ghost Exile Omnibus Three was excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy.
So before we get into our main topics, let’s have some questions from readers. Our first question is very relevant to things we just discussed is from Sonya, who asks: Hi, Jonathan, I am wondering if you are still writing the Ghost series and what is the best audio format to listen to them. I have really bad double vision now. I would love to enjoy the story again. Thank you. Hi Sonya. Thanks that you have enjoyed the book and sorry that you are having a health trouble with your eyes. That is always difficult to go through. In answer to your question, the entire Ghost series and Ghost Exile series are both currently in audiobook. The bundles (in fact, the bundles that I was just talking about) are only available on Audible, Amazon, and Apple Books. But the individual titles, you can get them on those three audiobook retailers, and you can also get them at Kobo, Google Play, Scribd, Chirp, and a whole bunch of other stores. In fact, if you live in Europe, you can get them off Storytel. I had a very good month from Findaway Voices in March because the Ghost books did so well on Storytel that month. Also the individual titles are also in the various library catalogs, so if you have a local library that can lend electronic audiobooks, it might be worthwhile talking to the librarians at your local library and see if they can add the audiobooks to their catalog, because that way you can then listen to the audiobooks at no cost to yourself (minus, of course, whatever you pay in local taxes that funds the library).
Our next question is from Todd who asks: I hope you had a happy Easter and look forward to Cloak of Dragons. But my question is about your covers. My apologies to the visual artist, but I have to say how much more like the versions on your website than the ones that originally came with the books. To me it was just something uncanny valley about the original covers, which has changed on the new covers. My question is whether you will at some point push an update to the books that will update the covers, or if there is a different way to make that happen. As always, thank you for your writing. I enjoy it a lot. Thanks, Todd. I did indeed have a happy Easter and hope you did as well. In answer to your question, I have updated the covers for all the Cloak Mage books. If they’re still showing the old version on your Kindle, what I would suggest doing is deleting the downloaded file from your Kindle and then downloading a fresh copy to your device and that should push through the new cover. It’s interesting, the taste in covers because Cloak Mage has had two different sets of covers. And I’ve had emails from people who very strongly prefer one set over the other, and it’s never consistent. But that said, the series generally sells about 20% better with new covers than they did with the old ones. So that is the direction I’m going to go in.
Our next comment is from Diana, who says: Good morning. I felt compelled to let you know how much I love the Frostborn/Dragontiarna series. I decided to start from the beginning based on your reading order with the short stories and now I’m on Storms and there’s only one to go. Even though I’ve read at least part of each of your series and like them all, I’m very anxious for the end of this series. And I’m wondering if there will be more to tell about Ridmark, his kids, Third, or even Niall. I’m not expecting a response. I’m not asking for any spoilers. I’m actually feeling pretty awkward just sending this, but I am a fan and I recommend you to my other reader friends. Even though I adjust the gory or adult parts to be age appropriate, I even read them to my kids, ages 5 and 11. Even though the oldest says he doesn’t want me to read to him, he tends to start listening in when I read to his brother. We’re fans and I love your work and I appreciate you working as hard as you do. Have a great weekend.
Thanks, Diana. I am very glad you enjoyed the book so much. In answer to your question, the epic fantasy series I’m currently writing, Dragonskull, the main character is Gareth Arban, who you may remember is Ridmark’s oldest son and he is the main character in the series and it revolves around his adventures. I love that your kids enjoy the books because that ties into another interesting topic is that people occasionally, sometimes they ask me if my books are appropriate for children or not, and my answer is always it depends on you and it depends on your kids, because something that might be appropriate for like one particular 11 year old kid might be wildly inappropriate for a different 11 year old kid.
Because it’s interesting if you know, you watch a kid grow up from the time he or she is a baby to adolescence/adulthood, you pick up pretty quickly that some things about the kid are just…he or she are just born with them. You know, psychologists like to talk about nature versus nurture, but sometimes you just tell right away with the baby whether a baby is going to be a very outgoing person or whether the baby will be very shy or adventuresome and so forth, and I suppose I’ve rambled a bit there but to return to the main point, I am glad you liked my books. I’m glad your kids enjoyed my books. And if you are wondering whether my books would be appropriate for your kids, the answer is it depends, and the first book in most of my series are free, so you can download them at no cost to yourself and decide for yourself.
Our next question has come in pretty regularly from several people over the last couple of weeks, so I thought I’d talk about it here. I should note that this is going to have spoilers for the ending of the Ghost Night series, the most recent series with Caina as the main character. So, if you haven’t read to the end of Ghost Night, probably stop here and jump ahead like 3 minutes or so on the podcast (transcriptionist note: precise time stamp is listed below). If you have read them or you don’t care about spoilers, listen on.
00:08:14-9:37 Reader Question: Spoiler Section for Ghost in the Lore
Lately, I’ve gotten a couple of questions about the Ghost Night series that spoils the ending of Ghost in the Lore. Specifically, a few people emailed to ask about the villain Rania Scorneus, specifically one: why she didn’t appear in Ghost in the Sun, and two: will she be coming back in future books? For Point #1, Rania Scorneus basically noped out, as the modern parlance goes. She had been killed, the Umbarian order had been military defeated, and she was widely known and hated throughout the empire. But now everyone thinks she’s dead and Rania doesn’t see any reason to correct them. With her cloning alchemy, she’s effectively found a method of immortality, so long as no one destroys her alchemical laboratory. So why not let everyone keep on thinking that she’s dead? Rania can wait until most of the people who know about her die of old age and she can spend that time profitably at arcane research, experimentation, and study and also in preparing a covert network. Then in 50 or 60 years when Rania Scorneus is simply a footnote in the historical record, she can act. Trying to conquer the empire through sheer sorcerer’s might was clearly a failing strategy, given how the Ghost Night series ended, so perhaps subversion and coercion will work better a second time around. As for Point #2, will Rania come back in future books? Well, when I write a new Caina book after Dragonskull is done, we will find out one way or the other.
00:09:37 (End of Spoilers for Ghost in the Lore) Public Service Announcement about Phishing Scams
So now I’m on to sort of a public service announcement, a serious problem I almost had with Facebook ads but managed to avoid: phishing messages designed to trick you into giving up login credentials to a fake website are an ongoing scourge of the Internet. Now, most of us who are experienced Internet users can spot phishing messages a mile away, but there is something important to remember about phishing messages. It doesn’t matter how sophisticated or well written the fake message is. What matters is whether or not it hits one of your psychological or emotional weak points. Because no matter how technologically knowledgeable or experienced you are, we all have psychological or emotional weak points and a really effective phishing message is one that mashes one of those buttons.
A few examples may demonstrate the point. Like, say you’re running a low balance in your checking account and you get a message from your bank that you’re overdrawn and overdraft fees are now applied. Or you have a teenager and you get a message saying that his or her number has gone over the data cap limit even after you’ve told the kid again and again to stop wasting data. Or you’re waiting for a test result from the doctor and you get a message that you need to log in immediately to see these urgent results. Now in all three of these cases, the messages are fake. The messages might even be badly written and have obvious errors in them. But if the message hits an emotional sore point, the emotional reaction will override critical thinking and you might click and log in to all the fake links in the email before your brain can catch up to your emotions.
This almost happened to me yesterday. I got an email from “Facebook Ads” claiming that my Facebook ads account had been suspended for undisclosed violations. My immediate reaction was massive annoyance. As I’ve mentioned before I, along with many others, had lots of problems with my Facebook ads account getting banned randomly in 2020 and 2021. It’s gotten better since then, possibly because Facebook burned up about 3/4 of its company value attempting to build a bad copy of Second Life they called the Metaverse and can’t really afford to be so ban-happy with advertisers anymore. Turns out businesses need revenue. Who knew? Nonetheless, I was very annoyed at this email. This nonsense again? But, I didn’t click on any of the links in the email. I had the Facebook Ads manager open in another tab and I checked it. Everything was firing along just fine and indeed my ads were getting a good cost per click that day.
So after a second of confusion, I realized what had happened. I had almost just been phished. It’s a good reminder to always be cautious on the Internet and to always practice good data security. Never click on links in an email from an unknown sender. Never open attachments from unknown email senders. Keep separate passwords for every account. Use two factor authentication whenever possible and avoid doing anything involving personal data on public Wi-Fi and similar practices to that. These basics aren’t terribly flashy, and there’s no such thing as perfect security, but practicing the basics will highly increase your odds of avoiding trouble. So that is your public service announcement about phishing for the week.
00:12:41 Main Topic: Adobe Firefly/Generative AI
Now on to our main topic of the week: Adobe Firefly generative AI. I mentioned on last week’s episode that I was able to get into the beta for Adobe’s new Firefly image generation tool. I have been very critical of generative AI, so I want to give it a fair shake because it is important to be fair about things, especially things you are not disposed to like. I mentioned before that Firefly might address some of my concerns about generative image AI basically, stealing images across the Internet for training data. So here are my thoughts after experimenting with Adobe Firefly for a bit.
First things first, Firefly is a lot more user friendly than something like Midjourney or Stable Diffusion. Midjourney is basically like the command prompt of image generation, more powerful and more versatile than the GUI version, but not quite as simple to use. The graphical interface of Firefly is pretty friendly. It has a right hand sidebar with a lot of buttons for adjusting the output of your image generation prompt. You can choose to create a photo, a graphic, or an artistic image. And there are numerous drop-down menus allowing you to adjust lighting and layout and so forth, which in other image generation programs usually require specific prompts you have to know to enter into the prompt line.
That said, like other generative programs, you have to adjust the prompt a great deal to get exactly what you want. The image I attached to the post on my website when I discussed this were human faces designed to look like some of my characters, and it took a lot of prompting with slightly rearranging words each time to get something even remotely close to what I wanted. It is a lot easier to use Firefly to generate things other than human faces, but this is true of anything. Any artist or CG artist will tell you that faces are the hardest things to do correctly because the human eye and subconscious can instantly spot anything that’s wrong with the face, even if the conscious mind can’t quite articulate what’s wrong. Because of that, I suspect generative AI would be a lot better at generating individual assets than completed scenes. Like when I make a book cover in Photoshop nowadays, it can have between 40 to 60 layers. People who really know what they’re doing often have a lot more. If I wanted to use Firefly to make a completed scene that seems suitable for a book cover, it will look terrible. But if I use it to make, say, a sword and then modify that sword heavily with appropriate adjustment layers in Photoshop, that would look much better.
People familiar with this topic have demonstrated that Midjourney is more powerful and versatile than Firefly. Computer scientist Jim Fan did a thread on Twitter where he used the same prompt in both Midjourney and Firefly and compared the results. Midjourney usually performed better. That said, this test inadvertently demonstrated one of the strengths of Firefly. Jim Fan used Deadpool, Pikachu and Super Mario in his prompts and Midjourney performed better at producing images of Deadpool, Pikachu, and Super Mario. However, the reason for that is that Firefly has been trained on Adobe stock photos and public domain stuff, and Deadpool, Pikachu and Super Mario are heavily trademarked and copyrighted characters owned by Disney and Nintendo, which means Firefly hasn’t been trained on any legitimate images of them. Midjourney, by contrast, was trained with a massive data scrape of the Internet and the legality of that for use in image generation isn’t an open question since Midjourney, as of this recording, is getting sued about it.
To put it mildly, Disney and Nintendo have lawyers who make the Nazgul from Lord of the Rings look warm and cuddly, and that shows the advantage of Firefly. If you’re commercial artist and use an AI generated image of Deadpool or Super Mario on your client’s project, obviously you are running the risk of getting sued. However, even if you’re not using trademarked characters, Midjourney might have been trained on something that will get you sued, whereas the risk for that with Adobe Firefly is much lower. Where something like Firefly would really shine, I think, is in replacing stock photos. I’ve spent a lot of time looking for exactly the right stock photo for a certain project because while you can do a lot in Photoshop, it’s much less work if you get a stock photo that’s at least initially somewhat close to what you want the end result to be. Typing 20 or 30 slightly different prompts to get what you want for a specific asset might one day replace scrolling through 20 or 30 pages of stock photo thumbnails. That said, it’s still easier to use something like DAZ or Blender to produce assets, because you can control the output exactly in a way that you simply cannot with image AI. But it’s not always possible to get what you want in DAZ or Blender.
To sum up, Firefly is easy to use. Careful sourcing of the images in its training data (if Adobe is telling the truth about that) addresses many of the ethical concerns I have about generative image AI. However, I would still exercise great caution in using AI generated images for anything, especially a commercial project. The legality of it all is still very unsettled, and as I mentioned earlier, there are several different court cases dealing with it at the moment. So I personally would wait until it pans out before using a generated image for anything commercial. Adobe’s approach to Firefly might not be able to generate high quality images of Deadpool high-fiving Super Mario or something, but it does seem more ethical and less likely to result in nasty lawsuits.
And as always, a reminder that I am not a lawyer and nothing I just said is legal advice. When I talked about this on Facebook, we had an interesting comment from reader Lynette who said: I am a photographer and therefore work with Photoshop and Lightroom. It’s cool hearing about a new Adobe program. I’ve heard nothing about it yet here in South Africa. P.S. The thing that stood out to me from your post was the amount of layers you use in a Photoshop project. Your PC must be insanely powerful for it not to stall or come almost to a standstill using so many layers at once. Oh yeah, you’re a gamer, so you probably have a gaming laptop with large RAM and a great graphics card.
To the best of my knowledge, Adobe Firefly the beta is only available in the US at the moment unfortunately, and you have to sign up with an Adobe account to get into the beta. I signed up about ten days before I got in, I think. In answer the second half, I don’t actually do any graphic design on a laptop. Back in 2020 when I started really getting into Photoshop, I managed to get my current PC then (my current desktop PC, I should say) and it has a 64 gigabytes of RAM and an NVIDIA GTX 1660. And when I get heavily into graphic design, things do still slow down quite a bit, unfortunately. That is, I have to admit, the one advantage writing has over (actually, that’s a pretty big advantage)…writing has over graphic design because I can write an entire novel and do it quite comfortably on a laptop that costs less than $300.00. But whereas if you try to use Photoshop on the same laptop, it will probably catch on fire because the Photoshop system requirements are so high. And it keeps getting…Photoshop is one those programs that keeps getting a little bigger and a little more resource intensive with every new version that comes out. So that is it for this week. Next week we will actually return to a writing topic instead of talking about generative AI.
So thanks for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platforms of choice. (Stumbles wording a bit) I should try, you know, diction lessons, it might help. Anyway, stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.
