Are you interested in angels, demons, spirits, ghosts, and monsters? Are you curious about their origins, tales, and influence upon history and on the present day? If so, sit back, relax, and welcome to Southern Demonology, the podcast that explores all of this and more.
Shudder. I hate to harp on them one more time, especially after my episode last season entitled Should Shudder Be Shuddered? But I have an experience, actually, my entire Discord server did, that had me so spitting mad that I have since canceled my membership. And I want to take this experience and use it as a lens to explore one other facet that is currently attempting to railroad its way into our lives, and I think it will go just as well. Welcome back to season 3, episode 6 of Southern Demonology. As always, I'm your host, JJ.
As some of you may know, I have a TikTok account, and believe it or not, I actually find the platform very useful. I started off with an irrational hatred of it. I am more than a little chagrined to admit. Just like many others, probably out there, I viewed it as just another brainless social media platform, one in this case filled with teenagers dancing or pulling stupid stunts. And then YouTube Shorts was introduced, and I dipped a very tentative toe into those waters. And I was actually quite pleased with what I found.
Yes, there was some dancing, but there was also comedy, news, and what really perked my ears were the educational pieces I found. In fact, that's how I first ran across Hospice Nurse Julie, the same person I interviewed last year. And with that illusion largely dispersed, I figured I might as well try the real thing. So I set up a TikTok account and actively began using it. And by George, I really enjoy it. And at first I viewed it as simply another repository for audiograms and podcast clips that I already put up on both Instagram and YouTube for Southern Demonology.
But there's real education going on there, and I'll be dipping my toe more and more into those waters as time goes on. But I bring up TikTok for one key reason. There are some people on there who review horror movies that I follow, and some of the newer films that are being discussed piqued my interest. The first was Mean Spirited, which was abysmal, and starred a place in the review spotlight back in season 3, episode 1. Well, I kept hearing from multiple sources, I might add, about a movie that was A new, B a shutter original, and C received high praise.
Considering that I was looking for a movie for Wednesday night movie night on our Discord server, I decided to give it to go. And this film is named Skin Americ. For the love of all that is holy, do not make the same mistake that I did. I thought that I might be in trouble when one of the regulars heard the name of the film and said, Hmm, I haven't heard the same positive reviews. That made me worry. But I proceeded onwards like the poor, innocent soul that I was. And what followed was 50 minutes of sheer boredom and incredulity.
For those not in the know, the executive summary for this film is that one night two children wake up in their house with no exits or parents. What that conveniently leaves out is that this movie refuses to take a direct shot of anything. Let's say a scene takes place in a hallway. Well, you'll be seeing the tops of walls. How about in a living room? You'll either see a weird angle on a TV set plane or the back of a couch. Every single shot is framed so that you might as well only listen to it as the cinematography. And trust me, I use that term in a hypothetical sense only, is non-existent.
If one or two shots were like that, then maybe I could give it artistic license. Maybe. Combine that with some of the greeniest film that would make even a warped VHS tape blush, and you truly have a quote unquote hit on your hands. Combine that with nothing happening besides listening to two boys talk for 50 minutes, and you get one of the worst things I have ever seen. And mind you, I have seen mean spirited, so that's kind of saying something. The sad thing is that you can almost hear the thoughts that the director must have had when making this steaming pile of crap.
You know, nearly every movie out there captures the action or puts actors squarely in the line of the viewer. What if we didn't do that? Isn't that genius? Aren't I a genius? No one bothered to slap the poor fool upside the back of their head and say, yeah, that's because it's a bloody stupid thing to do. Now, is the movie 15 minutes long? No. But that was all I could take. I finally paused it and asked if anyone wanted to continue watching or if I could regulate this horrid thing to the trash heap. Thankfully, no one raised an objection.
In fact, I am pretty sure I heard nothing but relief in everyone's voices. Now, I bring up this movie for two reasons. The first is to simply warn you of its very existence. Consider this your college's equivalent of the friends don't let friends go to insert rival school name t-shirt. The second is to point out a general trend line with Shudder. Shudder had a pretty basic value proposition. Do you like horror movies? Even more, would you like to have those horror movies sorted by subgenre, say paranormal or slasher? Then hey, subscribe to us.
But then other horror streaming services got into the game, and so they went down the same path that Netflix did of creating their own content. And in the beginning, that was good. We had We Go On and Terrified, two of my favorite horror movies in recent years. They produced the Creep Show TV series, which is simply magnificent. They sought out distribution rights for foreign movies like the hilarious One Cut of the Dead out of Japan. And that was fantastic. In short, they focused on quality, and I loved every single minute of that. But do you know what quality entails?
Actual work and deep subject expertise. It also means that there's a dramatically shorter list of works available out there in the world that meets that criteria. And somewhere along the way, there is a noticeable shift from quality to quantity. Again, it's almost as if you can hear some executive's thoughts echoing out into the atmosphere saying, Open the floodgates, fund every brain dead idea. We need new crap appearing every single week. There was a time when I was excited to watch a Shudder original after hearing about it. But then I saw one that was just awful. The host.
And so that was the same with the next one, Evil Seed, and the one after that. And the one after that. And now finding a quality film amongst the trash heap is the exception and not the rule. And that's why I now refuse to ever show another Shudder original unless I or someone I trust has personally vetted it beforehand as I simply cannot put any faith in the brand or the company anymore. The idea of having custom content can be an appealing one. Having new stuff to showcase in order to attract new eyes is a strategy.
Unfortunately, this is the end-all be-all for nearly every streaming platform out there. The running joke in the industry for years has been, hey, Netflix will pay for any idea, no matter how awful it is. After all, who knows what the audience will like, right? Heck, one moment from one show might go viral, and then you have a hit on your hands, right? Wrong. If all that newness is absolutely god-awful, then that will damage your brand rather than enhance it.
If you have zero quality control to police the products made, then prepare to receive either low-effort trash, or in the case of Skin American, novel ideas that have not been made a reality because they do not work, nor would they ever. I swear to God, I avoid looking at the top corner of a door because of that movie. Not because it's suddenly scary, but because such a sight reminds me of that horrible ProFootball is back, and so are the predictions.
Film and just pisses me off. Shudder, please go back to the strategy you had in the beginning. Or adapt HBO's model of new content and only accept the best. I'd respect you a hell of a lot more than I do right now. Let's change gears slightly and look at quality through another angle. And that's AI. In case you don't keep up with the news, generative AI is all the rage. And the idea of it is once again appealing. What if I could have a program answer questions or better yet, generate content for me?
Whether it's Chat GPT or BARD or any other variety of generative AI, it's being incorporated into everything from search engines to chatbots to God only knows what else. If you want a more down-to-earth explanation of generative AI, more accurately described as ML or machine learning, as there's nothing intelligent about it, then I refer you to Adam Conover's excellent YouTube video. While he doesn't get everything right as he focuses more on comedy and outrage than facts, it's a heck of a lot more correct than the hype currently surrounding the technology.
I'll have it linked in the show notes. This type of ML has caused more than a little concern in a lot of industries. From schools, will essays become a thing in the past? To writing, will those who write articles for a living be out of a job? To programming. Will AI write better code than a human? Heck, one DD creator I followed on YouTube proclaimed proudly that he was using ChatGPT to help do some of the legwork for his scripts. And please note the past tense of that sentence. Followed, I no longer do.
Just like endless new content flooding into streaming services, the idea is appealing at first flush. Considering that social media is dependent upon content, having a machine in the shadows that can generate it for essentially free certainly sounds like a good idea. But just like for streaming services, that too is only true at a skin level. I have long argued that ML as it stands is only good for tackling problems that are repeatable, have a narrow set of parameters and variables, and that have a copious amount of data that can be trained on.
Medical imaging springs to mind for a particular type of disease. At that, ML shines as the output is confined and restrained. But generative AI lacks that. And so while the output is understandable as proper English, the content itself is pure rubbish. What generative AI has accomplished in outputting is a parrot. Or, perhaps more accurately, it's a bullshitter. It may be able to put patterns together, but that's all it is at the end of the day. Patterns. Are those patterns true or insightful? No. Let me provide an example.
You can easily give ChatGPT writing samples, and it will attempt to output its crap in that style. And so I asked it a fairly in-depth question. See, I was recently a guest on Cookville Ghost Hunters podcast that was dealing with Zoroastrianism, which will be coming out later this year. And so that's been on my mind. And so I asked the chatbot, what are the similarities between Christian and Zoroastrian demonology? See, I have long thought that Zoroastrianism directly influenced both Judaism and Christianity. And here is in part what it outputted.
In Christianity, demons are understood as fallen angels who rebelled against God and were cast out of heaven. They are often depicted as malevolent beings who seek to do harm to humanity, and are associated with sin, temptation, and other forms of evil. Christianity teaches that demons can possess humans, and that exorcism is the process of casting out demons from a possessed person. Now, let's turn to Zoroastrian demonology. Zoroastrianism is one of the world's oldest religions, and it was founded in ancient Persia around 3,500 years ago.
In Zoroastrianism, demons are known as divas, and are understood as malevolent spirits who oppose the forces of good. They are associated with deception, chaos, and corruption, and are said to be the enemies of humanity. Zoroastrianism also teaches that demons can possess humans, and that exorcism is the process of removing the influence of divas from a person. So, what are the similarities between Christian and Zoroastrian demonology? One of the most striking similarities is the belief that demons are evil spirits who seek to harm humanity.
Both religions teach that demons are malevolent beings who work to bring about chaos and destruction in the world. Additionally, both Christianity and Zoroastrianism believe in the power of exorcism to rid a person of demonic possession. Another similarity between these two religions is the idea that demons are fallen or corrupted beings. In Christianity, demons are fallen angels who rebelled against God and were cast out of heaven. In Zoroastrianism, Devas are said to be former Yazitas, or divine beings, who were corrupted by Engramu, the Zoroastrian equivalent of Satan.
Both religions share the belief that demons were once good. But were corrupted by their own rebellion or by the influence of evil.
That makes sense. It sort of mimics my writing style. So, does this mean that I can replace my carefully written and research scripts for Chat GPT for all future episodes? Two words. Hell no. Besides sounding like a high schooler's first attempt at an essay, it's just plain bullshit. And I mean that in two ways. Yes, it's obviously wrong, but it's also just a mashup of different sources that portrays something as definitive sounding, but couldn't be further from the truth. First, there are two names for both dualities and Zoroastrianism.
In the Gathas, the oldest writings, the goddess named Uchmazd and the Devil Akhraman. In the Avestan, the newer ones, those names have been morphed to Ahramazda and Angra Mainu. But this quote-unquote article only mentions the latter. Second, this idea that Angramainu corrupted Yazatas into Devas is a much, much later viewpoint. And the Gathas is clearly written that Akriman created the Devas to perpetuate the war he started. If you go back to my episode on Zoriasteranism and the riddle I began that episode with, you'll know exactly to what I reference.
But in particular, I'm talking about verses 15 through 17 of the greater Bundaiism. The evil spirit, on account of his slowness of knowledge, was not aware of the existence of Uhmaz. Then he arose from the deep and came to the boundary and beheld the light. When he saw the intangible light of Uhmaz, he rushed forward. Because of his lust to smite and his envious nature, he attacked to destroy it. Then he saw valor and supremacy greater than his own. He crawled back to the darkness and shaped many divas, the destructive creation. Then and he rose for battle.
As with all things, time plays a factor. And Zoroasteranism has been around for a very long time indeed, considering it has the world's oldest holy writings. Yet in that time, there will be many interpretations, movements, and branches of thought. Considering that Zoroastrianism also had so much of its knowledge lost, due in large part to Alexander the Great's methodical burning of both Zoroasteran books and priests, whenever he came across them, the religion itself would have more fluctuation in perhaps the norm.
Yet this article attempts to outlay these generated statements as objective reality when they're nothing more than just that. Generated statements. And that is not only false, but patently dangerous. I could go on ad nauseum on this topic, but let me wrap up by saying that if I wanted free content, I could type queries into a chat box, trust what it says, or to be honest, simply not give a damn, and then go about my day.
But the entire reason I started this channel was both to share knowledge, but to also chip away at these sort of surface-level interpretations and show that the world and religious viewpoints are a heck of a lot more complex than what is commonly thought of as to be true or correct. What I have always strove for is ultimate quality. Hell, I have benched entire episodes and interviews just because I thought at the end of the day that they did not meet that high bar quality that I have set for myself.
So for my listeners, I can absolutely promise you that I will never use a dang chatbot to generate the content I create for this podcast. Okay, well, besides for this one particular instance to show how bad that they are at it, my goal has never been endless content. What I will always insist upon is the highest quality. I just hope that Shudder will someday learn that lesson. If so, then perhaps they might attract me back as a customer. Thank you for listening to Southern Demonology. Find us online at Southern Demonology.com where you can find all of our social and podcasting links.
Also, if you have a moment, please feel free to rate this podcast and leave any encouraging feedbacks that you may have. As always, I am JJ and it has been a pleasure getting to talk to you today.