Two prominent science fiction authors have decried the impact of AI on their craft.

“I do not want or need a large language model to write my fiction for me. I write fiction compulsively – before I was published I wrote for many years as a hobbyist – so why on earth would I pay someone else to take my fun away?” wrote Charles Stross in a Saturday post. Stross graciously mentioned The Register in his Laundry Files novels.

“I maintain that any serious author should shun LLMs like the plague,” he added. “Did I mention the ‘stealing’ thing? This isn’t hyperbole: I’m one of the parties to the settlement in the class action lawsuit against Anthropic AI for pirating eBooks to train their LLMs.”

“That’s not my only grievance, either. You may have noticed this blog performing sluggishly or crapping out from time to time over the past few months. That’s because my server is old and feeble and periodically gets swarmed by Chinese and other foreign botnets scraping data for training LLMs.”

Stross labelled AI companies “absolute scum.”

“They’re stealing copyrighted material to train an LLM that is intended to compete for revenue with the authors of the works they stole, and they’re fine-tuning their LLMs to make them as addictive as possible in order to maximize future revenue once they pivot to token sales as their main source of income,” he wrote.

“In other words, they’re no different from a burglar who robs you one day then comes round to sell you your stuff back the next morning. Back in the 18th century we used to hang people like that and Sam Altman makes me question the wisdom of having stopped.”

Scalzi, whose best-known works include the Old Man’s War series and Hugo Award-winning novel Redshirts, on Friday commented on a recent article about a hotly tipped debut novel being pulled from publishing and film or television consideration over concerns that AI had been used to write it.

“The issue appears not to be that ‘AI’ material isn’t copyrightable, the issue is that ‘AI’ is trained on copyrighted material, so prose generated from it could be contested by the original copyright holders,” Scalzi wrote.

He expects publishers to look for signs of AI use, although the available detection tools are notoriously unreliable. He predicts that this will disadvantage new writers who lack a body of work dating from before the arrival of ChatGPT.

“Which is unfair,” Scalzi wrote. “It’s especially unfair when the makers of the tools writers use to write  – I’m looking at you, Microsoft and Google – are frantically stuffing ‘AI’ tools into the programs writers rely on.”

Then Scalzi dispensed with the diplomatic language.

“No, Microsoft, I don’t fucking want Copilot to ‘help me write’ in Word, and no, Google, I don’t fucking want Gemini to ‘help me write’ in Google Docs. The very fact these ‘AI’s are hovering around my writing at all is bad enough from a provenance standpoint. These ‘AI’ tools are making it harder for all writers in this regard, not easier.”

Stross raised a related concern: “If I was crazy enough to feed the outline of a story I was working on as a prompt to ChatGPT or Claude in hope of getting the stochastic parrot to do my homework for me, then it would be only my own fault and nobody else’s if the next model from the company in question was been trained [sic] on my book outline and could reproduce part or all of it for someone else.”

Scalzi advised authors not to “incorporate ‘AI’ into any part of your publishing process, either: Don’t use ‘AI’ editing, don’t use ‘AI’ art, don’t use ‘AI’ translation, don’t use ‘AI’ anything that calls into dispute whether your work is actually yours. Using ‘AI’ cover art, for example, will immediately call into question what else in the book is ‘AI.’ Every other aspect of the book is implicitly tarred with the same ‘AI’ brush. When I say that I have it in my contracts that I require every aspect of my book production to be done by humans, it’s not just because I want to honor human work and input. It’s also because I’m protecting my own reputation by doing so.”

Stross, however, admitted he “can see some circumstances where being able to train a local model on my work could be useful to me.”

“I’d quite like a tool (running entirely locally on my own hardware, with no cloud service and no copyright-thieving grifters making bank on it via subscription fees) that digests a manuscript and derives a scene-by-scene timeline, that I could then query interactively and use to plan my next round of edits,” he wrote.

He also allowed that “being able to map out where and when each protagonist and minor character shows up, and see a frequency distribution heat map of names in the manuscript, would be useful.”

“But such a tool would be useful to me in the same way a spelling checker is useful – as a decision-support tool, not as a substitute for doing the hard work (and having a copy of the Oxford English Dictionary on the shelf). The value of such a tool is considerably less than the value of a well-trained brain that can do the entire job the hard way, if necessary.”

Stross has also found one use of LLMs he thinks is valid: as a device in his work. To illustrate that, he shared the following excerpt of a space opera he has written and is currently editing:

The events described in this account have been translated into your language from the original source material using a non-sapient large language model.

Certain terms have been approximated, where possible, by using culturally appropriate cognates. Names of individuals have been replaced by equivalents. Similarly, institutions, ranks, religions, proverbs, idioms, quotations, and other culturally-determined signifiers have been translated into terms that will be familiar to the reader.

Units of duration and distance have also been converted.

We apologize in advance for any hallucinations our LLM may have inadvertently introduced in the process of generating this rough translation.

Neither author mentioned the fact that George R R Martin, author of the A Song of Ice and Fire novels adapted for television as Game of Thrones, writes on a PC that has no internet connection and runs DOS plus the ancient WordStar word processor. Perhaps drafts and revision histories from such setups will become another way for authors to demonstrate that their words are their own. ®

Lava’s newly launched Virat Series received a strong response on its first day of sale. The Lava Virat V1 5G and Lava Virat V1 went out of stock on Flipkart on the first day of sale. The sale began at 12 PM IST on July 31. Lava said this was the fastest stockout for the Virat Series on a sale day. The company said the response reflects the growing number of consumers buying smartphones online. According to Lava, buyers are looking for dependable performance, a clean Android experience, and affordable smartphones. The strong demand for the Virat Series highlights this growing preference.

Virat V1 Specs

Lava Virat V1 5G includes a 6.75-inch HD+ display screen with a 120Hz refresh rate. It contains a 6000mAh battery and the UNISOC T8200 chipset. The phone comes with 64GB of internal memory, expandable up to 1TB. This phone does not have any ads or bloatware; rather, it runs on the Clean Android 16 Operating System. It also has an IP64 rating for dust and water resistance.

Another version of the Lava Virat V1 phone includes a 6.75-inch HD+ screen, a 5000mAh battery, and a UNISOC SC9863A chipset. The phone includes 64GB internal memory that is also expandable. The smartphone also carries an IP64 rating for added durability. Lava confirmed that it is working with Flipkart to restore stocks as quickly as possible. Customers who could not buy the smartphones during the first sale will get another chance once the devices are back in stock.

Right now, the Internet is drowning in articles about the Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey – some loved it, others haven’t seen it, and a few have criticised it. Allow me to add another opinion to the heap.

I very much enjoyed watching The Odyssey, having bought my ticket for Waterloo BFI IMAX when the tickets went on sale (waiting in an online queue for about 50 minutes to do so). I went into the film avoiding the hype (which is always out of proportion), looking to enjoy the film.

And while I was sightly conflicted once the lights turned back on (a little more insight into Odysseus’ men, and a sight of people outside of kings, queens, soldiers and schemers would have rounded the world out some more). But it is an intense, surprisingly soulful, absorbing, and relentless film that exists on a huge canvas. Go see it on as big a screen as you can.

The stories of people going on their own odysseys, travelling thousands of miles to see the film on 15/70mm film, have added to the whirlwind of noise surrounding the film.

But with a 4K Blu-ray release certain to come out before Christmas, it had me wondering whether seeing it at home – while not the original intention of experiencing the film – might be just as good.

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A visceral experience in the cinema

I do like an IMAX viewing, and The Odyssey being the first feature film shot in full 15/70mm is all the reason I need to head to the cinema. Living in London, we’re fortunate that we have two screens capable of 15/70mm projection. With only 41 locations that can do this on the entire planet, that’s a sign of how rare this experience is.

A case can be made about elitism given the sparsity of 15/70mm IMAX venues. This goes back at least 15 years with the appearance of the ‘lie-MAX’ screenings that claimed to offer the IMAX colour and sound in proportional sizes. I’ve never liked these smaller screens. It goes against the point of IMAX in my opinion.

I’d recommend the IMAX Laser screen at the Cineworld Leicester Square, as that might possibly offer the best picture quality of any type of IMAX venue, having talked to the former CTO of IMAX way back when.

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But the actual experience of sitting in the auditorium and seeing the full screen, led to a few thoughts during the film and afterwards. I’d thought Row F and slap bang in the middle would be enough, but I think I miscalculated.

There have always been prime seats in IMAX – only the unfortunate who were too slow to buy a ticket or decided ‘the hell with it’ and lumbered in the A, B, C rows. I remember seeing Interstellar with a work colleague and while the experience of the film was great, craning your neck from row D is not ideal.

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And even in row F, I found the verticality of the IMAX screen close to intimidating at times. It’s utterly huge, and seeing Odysseus’s face loom over you is a spectacle in itself. There’s a physical side to watching the film you’ll never get watching at home, even if my neck felt a little bit like an F1 driver’s whizzing around a track for 90 minutes. The next time I see The Odyssey, my tickets are up higher.

At home though, this will be neutered, and it got me thinking about how, while the home experience will be a downgrade on the cinema, I’d get to enjoy the film in my own way. I won’t be craning my neck, the film won’t be slightly out of focus at times (which I can’t yet tell if that’s the film itself or the projector focus), and I’ll have the best seat in the house. I’m all for the cinema, but let’s not forget that home cinema and physical media at its best, is a great thing.

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The version of The Odyssey that will hit home entertainment will be different from the cinema release as it won’t be a 1:1 translation. IMAX film is effectively a square (Nolan uses the taller 1.43:1 ratio rather than the wider 1.90:1 ratio) – TVs are 16 x 9 rectangular. The maths have never fitted.

A truer translation of the IMAX film would have black borders left and right (pillarboxing) in the way Zack Snyder’s Justice League does. But Nolan carries his centre crop approach to home video with the film filling out the screen, so the 4K Blu-ray and other home video versions (streaming versions of Nolan films are often 2.39:1) will be a compromise in terms of cropping the top, bottom and sides.

In a way, that makes the IMAX 15/70mm exclusive to cinema, despite the humorous memes of people watching the film’s trailer on their iPod Classic with the line “As Nolan intended”. You’ll never really see the 15/70mm film outside of an IMAX screen. Ever.

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Bringing the epic home

But it’s not as if Nolan doesn’t take considerable care with his 4K Blu-rays. There are versions of the film, despite not being the version of the film, and they are crafted to reflect the intent and the way you want to see the film at home. And this is where my laboured point comes into view.

Nolan is an advocate of physical media, and as he said at the inaugural DEG Vanguard Award in 2023: “…with 4K UHD, you’re going to be able to produce a home video version of your film with a format that will actually show off to the best effect all of the effort and money put into the technical presentation of the theatrical. So, a lot of my interest in visual spectacle, in the technical aspects of filmmaking over my last few films, is definitely driven and enhanced by the idea that at the end of the day the people at home will be able to experience a very high-quality version of the film.”

And with regards to translating theatrical film to the home: “…what we would do is just project the material and then project the video and really try to match it as closely as possible and the added bandwidth the HDR, bit depth and color and so forth it really puts us in a position where we can get closer and closer to a theatrical print in the home. It’s really exciting that all that work — an increasing amount of work — carries through to the home presentation.”

This continues with the film’s soundtrack, which in the same talk Nolan has said with the 4K Blu-ray releases that they “decided to put the full theatrical sound mixes of the film” because of the quality of people’s home cinema systems.

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Given I review a fair amount of home cinema systems each year, I’m not sure I’d totally agree with that assertion. Many still opt for either basic or compact (and therefore compromised) sound systems, and Nolan’s sound mixes remain challenging. You could a good sound system to get the best from his films, not helped by many soundbars and TV brands ditching support for his favour DTS audio format.

There were moments during The Odyssey where I couldn’t pick up dialogue (a common criticism of Nolan films and not entirely false). The volume levels do get thunderously loud, the relentlessness of the third act is aided by the sound mix and Ludwig Göransson almost 80s-synth like score – it’s the loudest film I’ve seen in the cinema since a critics screening of Nolan’s Dunkirk at the BFI IMAX, which in a past life I described as a “concussive, forceful experience”.

At home, I can have the volume at more palatable (but still high) levels and not feel like my head is being pounded by the full-range IMAX speakers, though The Odyssey is the type of film that’d make people shell out for a new system.

Nolan’s version of The Odyssey is visceral and exhausting, both visually and aurally, in the way he intended it to be. I’m of the firm belief that whether you like the film or not, you won’t see anything like it from any other film this year.

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It’s very familiar if you’ve seen Nolan’s filmography – the nesting narratives, repeated imagery, and huge scale go with assured performances across the board (even in small parts).

So go see it in the cinema, as many people are currently doing – I’ll be seeing it in IMAX 15/70mm again soon – and once I’ve had my fill, I’ll be turning towards the 4K Blu-ray release, as while that won’t be the version seen in the cinemas, it’ll take the theatrical experience and translate it for home cinema as a ‘new’ version of the film in its own way.

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And I’m looking forward to having a copy of The Odyssey in the best possible version outside of the cinema, one that’ll hopefully echo and endure like the original poem.

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It’s so hard for big businesses to get AI tools working reliably that whole new organizations of forward-deployed engineers or FDEs— specialists who drop into a company to get its AI systems up and running — are springing up to help them.

“AI, paradoxically, increases the demand for professional services,” says Efrat Rapoport, a former Salesforce executive whose new company, June, emerged from stealth Monday morning. “The industry’s answer to AI implementation is, ‘let’s hire more and more and more people.”

Rapoport and her three cofounders — Ohad Hen, Barak Goldstein, and Idan Tsitiat — have a different idea about how to bring AI into broader use. To pursue it, the company raised $20 million in pre-seed funding led by Marc Benioff’s Time Ventures, with additional backing from tech luminaries like Michael Dell, Aaron Levie and George Kurtz. The company declined to share its valuation.

The four founders previously started Bonobo AI, a pre-transformer language model company that launched a voice-to-text service in 2017. Bonobo AI was snapped up two years later by Salesforce, and the team worked for several years on the tech giant’s AI initiatives before setting out on their own again after watching customers struggle to bring AI into their existing platforms.

Their potential was clear enough to their investors, Rapoport says, that “we didn’t even have a deck for this raise.”

While the so-called SaaSpocalypse has software firms fearing that AI might replace them, thus far no one is vibe-coding a CRM for a Fortune 500 company. Any AI model brought into a corporate setting still has to work with Salesforce, ServiceNow, DataBricks, Workday, or any of a dozen other data-management platforms.

“Before AI can create value, someone has to deal with legacy systems,” Rapoport says. “You have fragmented data across these platforms. You have complex workflows. You have years of technical debt.”

Building an agent template is the easy part, she says. The hard part is getting it to work with the mess underneath. “How does an agent know how to operate when you have 10 duplicate [database] fields that say the same thing, and different teams are using them?”

June’s platform scans a company’s existing systems to understand its business processes, find bottlenecks, and then build more optimized, agent-powered processes to replace them, automatically notifying teams through the company’s comms channels.

“We give you the full roadmap automatically of what needs to happen step by step for you to actually implement this agent successfully in an enterprise environment, which is often very complex,” Rapoport said. “We give you a step by step guide. ‘Remove these duplicates. Connect to this data source.’ And then you click on ‘build’ on each task, and June starts building it for you in the organization.”

Paul Akinmade, chief strategy officer at CMG, a major U.S. mortgage lender, moved his company’s software engineering over to Claude Code quickly, but hit roadblocks trying to integrate it with Salesforce. That was a problem since he’d promised at Salesforce’s annual conference the year before that he’d return with 100 agents running, and it wasn’t looking like he’d hit that target.

Akinmade says his team spent weeks hitting a wall — meeting with architects, talking to forward-deployed engineers, consulting everybody they could — without making progress. June changed that, he says, giving his team a clear view of where to deploy agents and letting them do so safely, even before the official kickoff call between the two companies

Rapoport sees June as a tool that complements FDEs and consultants, but her customers may be drawn to it for the opposite reason: it lets them avoid FDEs altogether.

When Akinmade was first considering piloting the tool at CMG, he says he told her: “If your product requires FDEs, I don’t want your product. I’ve already I’ve already done that and I’m getting annoyed by it. I don’t want a black box. I don’t want something only certain people can figure out. I want an easy-to-use tool.”

Evidently, June cleared the bar.

Apple is also prioritizing the 14-inch MacBook Pro over the MacBook Air.

Disclaimer: Unless otherwise stated, any opinions expressed below belong solely to the author. Data sourced from Singapore’s Ministry of Manpower.

As we know, the median salary for fresh graduates in Singapore is currently S$4,500, while the figure for the entire workforce is S$5,775. However, there are some jobs that pay their young workers much better—if not straight out of school, then at least before they hit 30.

According to the data from the Ministry of Manpower, there are 30 occupations where median salaries for workers between 25 and 29 years of age are already above the national average.

S$100,000 by age 30

The list is, unsurprisingly, dominated by jobs in the tech sector (10 occupations) and finance (nine occupations), with the rest divided among medicine, management, law, and design.

The boom in AI catapulted young engineers to the top, with IT companies already paying them over S$100,000 per year, outranking the usual high-earners with legal degrees.

But these earnings may see an even bigger rise in 2026, as international tech giants from the US and China are competing for local AI-graduates, with the Straits Times reporting packages worth as much as S$350,000, targeting the most qualified PhD holders.

This follows OpenAI’s S$300 million investment to establish a local AI lab, Google DeepMind’s announcement of its AI research lab last year, and Anthropic’s growing presence—both GIC and Temasek are investors in the latter.

This boom may be a boon for young talent, provided that it doesn’t lose steam and the generous offers do not turn into mass layoffs that the tech industry experienced over the past few years.

If that happens, though, there is hope in finding a job in one of the other occupations, which offer very good earnings to 20-somethings, putting them on track to six figure annual salaries in their 30s.

• Read other articles we’ve written on Singapore’s job landscape here.

Featured Image Credit: Rawpixel/ depositphotos

In this week’s Sunday Reboot, despite Apple making more money than in any previous Q3, it’s never enough to escape a beating from investors or analysts.

Sunday Reboot is a weekly column covering some of the lighter stories within the Apple reality distortion field from the past seven days. All to get the next week underway with a good first step.

The Maddest Money

I have been covering Apple and the tech industry in general for over ten years. I have a decent understanding of how things work in many areas, but I do have some blind spots.

I have trouble understanding the logic of analysts and investors around the time of Apple’s quarterly results.

Every three months, the AppleInsider editorial team has to spend a few hours analyzing a PDF spreadsheet and a press release from Apple, detailing just how much money the company made this time. In painstaking detail.

Of course, that’s followed by listening to a conference call with people asking questions of Tim Cook and Kevan Parekh. Most of the time, the responses are predictably an inability to comment on future plans or reiterating something the pair mentioned 15 minutes prior.

This quarter’s periodic money talk was a bit different, as Cook gave a farewell speech ahead of the CEO transition to John Ternus.

For nine quarters in a row, Apple has declared total revenue that’s a year-over-year improvement over the previous one. Q1 to Q3 2026 inclusive have year-over-year increases of around 16%.

Apple makes billions, but it’s never enough for analysts.

Despite repeatedly making more money than almost anyone would see in multiple lifetimes in a mere three-month period, the same pattern emerges.

Right after the results release and everyone sees Apple make deity-level bank, the share price goes down. Over the space of an hour, the price went down on July 30 from 338.45 at 4:30 P.M. Eastern to $308.03 at 5:30 P.M.

That could be explained as investors thinking they have done enough to earn that sweet $0.27 dividend and decided to shift their money right afterward. That, at least, I can get my head around.

Gordon Gekko meets Mean Girls

The real brain burner is the swathe of analysts who then decide that Apple didn’t do enough. Despite each of its units earning billions, as if they are major companies in their own right.

Goldman Sachs, after raising the price target to $370 just days before the results, cut the target by $10 after the call. Chiefly because of Apple’s guidance that it won’t meet demand for the next quarter.

You know, during a time period when people have to get a mortgage to afford more RAM.

To Cook’s credit, he said it was not a partner or supplier issue, and was simply one of “incredibly strong demand.” Apple has the nice problem to have of being too wanted by consumers.

Rosenblatt raised its price target by $24, which sounds good except it’s still underwater at $300. Cue complaints about the “volatile financial environment” and supply constraints.

Also for some reason, the iPhone 18 will be having a hard time because the iPhone 17 was such a huge success. Apparently, the high sales for the current generation mean there’s no one around to buy the next one.

More realistically, the problem here is that the iPhone 17 did really well compared to the iPhone 16, which means it’ll be harder for the iPhone 18 to show further improvement over the iPhone 17.

Growth is all-important to investors, even if they are blinkered to Apple having other products or revenue sources available.

Morgan Stanley did a similar trim of its price target as Goldman Sachs, from $364 to $360, citing higher memory costs and slowing Services growth.

Because Services only climbed a mere 12.7% instead of MorgStan’s expectation of 14.6% growth, that apparently means growth will slow to 9.5% next year.

The annual growth percentage of Apple’s Services arm. Still aggressively positive.

By that, Morgan Stanley believes Services will earn only $2.9 billion more revenue this time next year, when it really wants to see more than $4 billion.

In effect, people are somehow complaining that a company that made billions more dollars than the same time last year didn’t quite do enough. Also that it is so popular that it cannot keep up with demand, and that’s apparently equally horrific.

Then there’s JP Morgan, which also cut its price target from $345 to $340, again hammering on about the supply constraints. However, at least the analysts are realistic, pointing out that limited product availability will push revenue into later quarters, and that Services will continue to be a benefit.

It’s not as bleak as other analysts’ denouncements of Apple’s success. But it’s still a downer.

The investors and analysts probably have justifiable reasons for pointing out Apple’s deficiencies. But from here, it seems a little bit picky and weird.

It’s almost like they’re trying to pick any perceived fault or shortcoming to justify their salaries to investors, eager to understand Apple’s workings and to know if their investment is safe.

You may have a romanticized image of high-power investors similar to shows like “Billions” and “Succession.” Each quarter, the image that gets reinforced to me is more like “The Office” or an Aldi version of Statler and Waldorf.

I just hope that I don’t get jaded enough to downgrade that view further to “Sanford and Son.”

Last week’s Sunday Reboot talked about Apple TV moving into dating, the existence of “Matchbox The Movie,” and the hope for even more “Ted Lasso”.