AI Writing

Prompt:

Provide a detailed character sketch of Rodion Raskolnikov updated for 2023

From GPT4:

Updating the character of Rodion Raskolnikov from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment” for a 2023 context involves reimagining his background, motivations, and conflicts to resonate with contemporary themes and issues. Here’s a detailed character sketch for a modern-day Raskolnikov:

Name: Rodion “Rodya” Raskolnikov

Background

• Age: Late 20s.
• Education: A brilliant former student of psychology, who dropped out of a prestigious university due to financial constraints and disillusionment with the academic system.
• Family: Comes from a lower-middle-class family. His mother is a school teacher, and he has a younger sister who is struggling to find her footing in a competitive job market.
• Location: Lives in a modest apartment in a large, culturally diverse city.

Personality Traits

• Intellectually Gifted: Possesses a sharp intellect and often engages in philosophical musings about society and morality.
• Isolated: Tends to isolate himself from others, preferring his own company and thoughts.
• Altruistic Yet Egotistical: Displays moments of genuine compassion, especially towards his family, but is also deeply egocentric, believing himself to be morally and intellectually superior.
• Anxious and Paranoid: Exhibits signs of anxiety and paranoia, particularly after committing his crime.

Modern Adaptation

• Occupation: Works part-time in a mundane job, possibly in data entry or as a delivery driver, which he finds unfulfilling. In his spare time, he writes blogs and essays on social and ethical issues.
• Financial Struggles: His financial difficulties are a significant source of stress, driving him to question the social structures and disparities in wealth and power.
• Crime: Raskolnikov’s crime in 2023 could involve hacking into a corrupt corporation’s system or committing a cybercrime against a morally dubious business tycoon, believing his actions are justified to expose or dismantle corrupt power structures.
• Mental Health: Struggles with his mental health, experiencing guilt and internal conflict post-crime, which leads him into a psychological downward spiral.

Relationships

• Family: Feels a deep sense of responsibility and guilt over his inability to financially support his mother and sister.
• Friends: Has few close friends but maintains some online connections with individuals who share his ideological views.
• Romantic Interest: Could have a complicated relationship with a character akin to Sonya, who in this adaptation might be a social worker or counselor, representing empathy and moral clarity.

Conflicts

• Internal: Grapples with guilt, moral justification of his actions, and a sense of isolation from society.
• External: Faces the consequences of his crime in the digital age, dealing with law enforcement and the societal fallout of his actions.

Development

• Journey: Raskolnikov’s journey involves confronting the reality of his actions, grappling with the moral and ethical implications, and ultimately seeking redemption.
• Resolution: His resolution could involve turning himself in and accepting the legal consequences of his actions, symbolizing his acceptance of societal laws and moral boundaries.

In this 2023 adaptation, Raskolnikov is a complex character who embodies the struggles of modern society, including financial instability, the ethical dilemmas posed by technology, and the quest for moral grounding in an increasingly complex world. His story reflects contemporary issues of social justice, mental health, and the search for meaning in a digital age.

End of GPT4

As he reviewed the AI’s response, PG had to admit that his detailed recollection of Raskolnikov’s character traits had faded into the mists of time.

He’ll need to rely on the colorfast recollections of visitors to TPV to assess how GPT4 did with this challenge. He understands several movies based on the novel have been released, but hasn’t seen any of those either, so his mind is tabula rasa on the plot.

Prompt: Prepare a detailed outline of an adaptation of Gone with the Wind set in 2023

From ChatGPT4:

Adapting “Gone with the Wind” to a contemporary setting of 2023 requires thoughtful reimagining while maintaining the essence of the original story. Here’s a detailed outline for such an adaptation:

Title: “Gone with the Wind: 2023”

Setting

• Location: Atlanta, Georgia, and surrounding areas, with a modern urban and suburban backdrop.
• Time: Present day, focusing on the social, economic, and political dynamics of 2023.

Characters

• Scarlett O’Hara: A young, ambitious entrepreneur in the tech industry, known for her beauty, intelligence, and relentless drive.
• Rhett Butler: A charismatic venture capitalist with a mysterious past and a knack for risk-taking in both business and personal life.
• Ashley Wilkes: An idealistic environmental activist and Scarlett’s long-time crush, who struggles to balance his ideals with practicality.
• Melanie Hamilton: A compassionate, understanding social worker, married to Ashley, and a close friend to Scarlett.

Plot Overview

1. Introduction:
   • Scarlett’s World: Introduce Scarlett’s life in modern Atlanta, her tech startup, and her unrequited love for Ashley.
   • Social Context: Touch on contemporary issues such as climate change, economic inequality, and technological advancements.
2. Rising Tensions:
   • Business and Romance: Scarlett’s company faces financial difficulties. She meets Rhett at a fundraising event, sparking a complicated relationship.
   • Ashley’s Dilemma: Ashley is torn between his environmental activism and the pressures to conform to a more traditional career path.
3. Climax:
   • Business Crisis: Scarlett’s company is on the brink of collapse. She turns to Rhett for help, leading to a controversial business deal.
   • Romantic Conflicts: Scarlett’s feelings for Ashley resurface, causing tension with Rhett and Melanie.
4. Falling Action:
   • Personal Growth: Scarlett starts to realize the importance of balancing ambition with ethics and compassion.
   • Relationship Strains: Rhett feels neglected by Scarlett’s obsession with Ashley and her career.
5. Conclusion:
   • Resolution: Scarlett makes a significant decision about her professional and personal life, choosing her own path over her longstanding pursuit of Ashley.
   • Rhett’s Departure: Rhett decides to leave Scarlett, leading to her famous realization of self-reliance and determination to rebuild her life.

Themes

• Modern Feminism: Exploration of a woman’s role in a high-powered, male-dominated business world.
• Technology vs. Environment: The clash between technological advancement and environmental conservation.
• Personal vs. Professional Life: The struggle to maintain personal relationships while pursuing ambitious career goals.
• Adaptation and Resilience: How characters adapt to the rapidly changing world around them.

Visual Style

• Cinematography: A mix of sleek, modern cityscapes and lush, natural landscapes to contrast the worlds of technology and environmentalism.
• Costume Design: Contemporary fashion, reflecting the status and personalities of characters in a modern setting.

Soundtrack

• A blend of modern and classical music, capturing the emotional depth and complexities of the story in a contemporary context.

This adaptation maintains the core narrative of “Gone with the Wind” while updating its setting and themes to reflect modern societal and cultural issues.

End of ChatGPT4

PG will allow visitors to determine if the outline shows a useful amount of creativity or not.

If he had tasked himself to produce a similar document, PG admits he would not have considered the Soundtrack.

PG discovered the Google Arts & Culture site earlier this morning. It’s quite an extensive site and a definite threat to suck away a lot of time, but is nicely-done.

One of the site’s interesting features is listed as experimental. It’s called Poem Postcards. This location allows you to select a postcard based upon a classic painting, then use an AI to write a poem about it, then email the painting/poem to a friend.

Here’s a link to a poem postcard PG just created.

From Today Online:

From low-quality computer-written books flooding the market to potential copyright violations, publishing is the latest industry to feel the threat from rapid developments in artificial intelligence (AI).

Since the launch last year of ChatGPT, an easy-to-use AI chatbot that can deliver an essay upon request within seconds, there have been growing worries about the impact of generative AI on a range of sectors.

Among book industry players there is “a deep sense of insecurity”, said Juergen Boos, director of the Frankfurt Book Fair, the world’s biggest, where the topic was in focus last week.

They are asking, “What happens to authors’ intellectual property? Who does new content actually belong to? How do we bring this into value chains?” he said.

The threat is plain to see — AI writing programmes allow budding authors to produce in a matter of day novels that could in the past have taken months or years to write.

A flood of titles that list ChatGPT as a co-author has been offered for sale through Amazon’s e-book self-publishing unit.

Still, critics say the works are of low quality and sense little threat from AI for now.

British author Salman Rushdie told a press conference at the fair that recently someone asked an AI writing tool to produce 300 words in his style.

“And what came out was pure garbage,” said the Midnight’s Children writer, to laughter from the audience.

“Anybody who has ever read 300 words of mine would immediately recognise that it could not possibly be by me.””So far I’m not that alarmed,” he added, during a rare public appearance since a near-fatal stabbing attack last year in the United States.

Jennifer Becker, a German author and academic, echoed his sentiments, telling a panel discussion that the results when it comes to AI writing fiction “are still not that great”. 

“There is a lot of potential to use it — to use it collaboratively. 

“But I still don’t see the point where we really hand over the writing work to AI completely autonomously. That wouldn’t make for an interesting book.”

. . . .

Industry players stress however that in some areas there is more openness to dealing with artificial intelligence.

“It depends a bit on the genre,” said Susanne Barwick, deputy legal adviser of the German Publishers and Booksellers Association, who has been in discussion about AI with publishers. 

“The field of science and specialist books is already further along and has already dealt with it more.”

These areas were “easier than the field of fiction, where I think at the moment people still tend to look a bit more at the risks”, she added. 

Artificial intelligence’s relationship with publishing threatens to throw up a host of legal problems, with one major “grey area” being who owns the copyright of AI-generated content, said fair director Boos. 

“Then you get into a real mess, and it is a huge theme. There is also really a lot of money involved,” he said.

. . . .

Last month, Game of Thrones author George RR Martin, John Grisham and Jodi Picoult were among several writers who filed a class-action lawsuit against ChatGPT creator OpenAI over alleged violation of copyrights.

Along with the Authors Guild, an organisation representing writers, they accused the California-based company of using their books “without permission” to train ChatGPT’s “large language models”, algorithms capable of producing human-sounding text responses based on simple queries, according to the lawsuit.

Translation is another thorny area, with some industry players feeling artificial intelligence would miss the nuances and subtleties needed to render complex literature into other languages.

Link to the rest at Today Online

From Fast Company:

You’ll soon see AI in most writing tools. Canva, Notion, Craft, Coda, and other popular writing services have been racing to add new AI features. Google Docs added a new AI-driven summarization feature. Read on for what AI can do for you, where the hype goes too far, and a few recommended tools to try.

. . . .

AI TOOLS TO TRY

• Lex. I love its simplicity. It’s designed specifically for individual writers, not marketers, technologists or corporate teams. It doesn’t make braggadocious claims, just helps writers in subtle ways.
  
  Lex draws on the same OpenAI engine as Canva Docs but lacks its visual features. It’s useful if you write often but don’t need the 150 menu options available in Microsoft Word. For now, Lex is free, with a waitlist for access. For now, Lex is free, with a waitlist for access.
  
  Still in private beta, it already has great features, including:
  • A title generator to suggest headlines for whatever you’re writing.
  • A question answerer to respond concisely to factual queries.
  • A paragraph writer that assesses what you’ve written and suggests a relevant next paragraph or bullet-points that build on your argument. It can also help remind you of blind spots in your writing by listing topics, facts or issues you may have accidentally ignored.
  • Writing stats to track productivity.
• ChatGPT isn’t a writing service per se, but it’s a helpful way to challenge your own thinking by seeking out AI explanations of complex issues. More than a million people have already signed up to chat with this remarkable chatbot that answers questions with an eerily human touch.
• Craft.do has the best-designed implementation of any of the AI writing tools I’ve seen so far. You hit / and it gives you some options for adding directly into whatever doc you’re working on. It works on the Mac and Windows apps, on the Web and on iOS.
  
  You can use the AI feature to summarize or explain something; create an outline; write a pros and cons list; generate keywords or hashtags; suggest a title; add to something you’ve written; or translate your text into English, Spanish, French, Italian, German, Dutch, Portuguese, Korean or Japanese. It can stray beyond those features. I asked it to generate a limerick about AI, which you’ll see in this AI-generated document it spun out of my testing.
• Canva Docs calls its AI feature Magic Write, which I mentioned in my piece last week. It joins another Canva AI tool that lets you generate images by typing in a text prompt, and a magic resizing tool that will adjust your image to fit whatever dimensions you need. Those first two AI features are free.
• Copy.ai is useful for generating marketing materials.
  
  To test it I typed in some keywords about the Wonder Tools newsletter. It generated surprisingly decent marketing copy employing the Pain/Problem-Agitate-Solution framework.
  
  It didn’t, of course, generate the time or expertise required to figure out a marketing strategy. For non-marketers, though, AI-generated text can provide a helpful starting point.
  
  You can also use it to generate YouTube titles and descriptions, Instagram captions, TikTok video ideas, Facebook ad text, and various other formats.

Link to the rest at Fast Company

From School Library Journal:

There’s a good argument that Shakespeare is the world’s most popular author. About 90 percent of American schools assign Shakespeare to students. His work has been translated into more than 100 languages. Declare “To be or not to be,” and most will answer, “That is the question.” The Bard’s work is widely integrated across culture, education, and the modern English language. Despite this, people find Shakespeare hard. Some might even say too hard.

In a recent survey of 500 teachers, 56 percent said their students found Shakespeare difficult to read. Of these teachers, 60 percent said the Elizabethan language was the biggest obstacle for students reading the plays. The themes of love, betrayal, and ambition are timeless—but maybe Elizabethan English isn’t. For many first-time readers, Shakespeare’s plays are full of unfamiliar words, phrasing, and grammatical constructions.

This reported difficulty with the language shouldn’t be viewed as a problem with Shakespeare. Elizabethan English didn’t suddenly become dated in 2023. It’s been unfamiliar and antiquated to readers for many decades. But increasingly, the language is a barrier to new readers starting a love affair with the material.

Here, in my view, artificial intelligence (AI) offers a unique benefit: facilitating the reading experience of Shakespeare’s works. Large language models (LLMs: the AI systems that power popular products like ChatGPT) have exciting potential to help people read older texts with relative ease.

If you provide AI models with text, they can instantaneously synthesize, explain, and contextualize it. They offer definitions of words, historical context, and other details that might escape a modern reader. If you’re reading War and Peace and have a foggy sense of Russian history, running a passage through an AI model quickly provides bullet points on Napoleon’s invasion of Russia as well as definitions of period-specific terms.

AI can also accurately paraphrase Elizabethan language into modern English so readers can understand any line of Shakespeare. This strategy isn’t intended as a substitute for reading the original text, but as a “reading copilot” on hand to help.

Bard-themed AI tools are gaining popularity. One I created, Shakespeare Translator, has been used by over 50,000 readers. These AI models aren’t deterministic systems with pre-written translations mapped to certain lines. Rather, the tools use LLMs to analyze the context and language patterns, providing modern interpretations.

Many are quick to critique AI-powered reading tools. The arguments essentially center on the idea that using AI waters down the joy and rewards of reading. But using AI isn’t about replacing reading. It’s about helping more people appreciate difficult material, more readily, and with fewer barriers to entry.

. . . .

How useful are these translations? Are they accurate? Do they actually help students grasp the meaning of lines? Judge for yourself.

Here’s the original text of the famous Hamlet speech
“To be, or not to be, that is the question: Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them. To die; to sleep; No more; and by a sleep to say we end the heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.”

Run through a Shakespeare translation tool, this is paraphrased to
“The big question is whether it’s better to keep on living or to end it all. Is it nobler to endure the hardships and misfortunes that life throws at us, or to fight against all the problems that come our way and put an end to them? Death would mean eternal rest and therefore an escape from the pain and suffering that life brings us.”

Or consider this from Richard III
“Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this sun of York; And all the clouds that lour’d upon our house in the deep bosom of the ocean buried.”

Paraphrase
“Our unhappiness has now turned into joy due to the presence of the ruler from York; and all of our worries and troubles are now in the past.”

Link to the rest at School Library Journal

Here’s a link to  Shakespeare Translator

PG’s Borrowed Thoughts:

The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

Carl Sagan

From The Guardian:

Focusing on doomsday scenarios in artificial intelligence is a distraction that plays down immediate risks such as the large-scale generation of misinformation, according to a senior industry figure attending this week’s AI safety summit.

Aidan Gomez, co-author of a research paper that helped create the technology behind chatbots, said long-term risks such as existential threats to humanity from AI should be “studied and pursued”, but that they could divert politicians from dealing with immediate potential harms.

“I think in terms of existential risk and public policy, it isn’t a productive conversation to be had,” he said. “As far as public policy and where we should have the public-sector focus – or trying to mitigate the risk to the civilian population – I think it forms a distraction, away from risks that are much more tangible and immediate.”

Gomez is attending the two-day summit, which starts on Wednesday, as chief executive of Cohere, a North American company that makes AI tools for businesses including chatbots. In 2017, at the age of 20, Gomez was part of a team of researchers at Google who created the Transformer, a key technology behind the large language models which power AI tools such as chatbots.

Gomez said that AI – the term for computer systems that can perform tasks typically associated with intelligent beings – was already in widespread use and it is those applications that the summit should focus on. Chatbots such as ChatGPT and image generators such as Midjourney have stunned the public with their ability to produce plausible text and images from simple text prompts.

“This technology is already in a billion user products, like at Google and others. That presents a host of new risks to discuss, none of which are existential, none of which are doomsday scenarios,” Gomez said. “We should focus squarely on the pieces that are about to impact people or are actively impacting people, as opposed to perhaps the more academic and theoretical discussion about the long-term future.”

Gomez said misinformation – the spread of misleading or incorrect information online – was his key concern. “Misinformation is one that is top of mind for me,” he said. “These [AI] models can create media that is extremely convincing, very compelling, virtually indistinguishable from human-created text or images or media. And so that is something that we quite urgently need to address. We need to figure out how we’re going to give the public the ability to distinguish between these different types of media.”

Gomez, who described the summit as “really important”, said it was already “very plausible” that an army of bots – software that performs repetitive tasks, such as posting on social media – could spread AI-generated misinformation. “If you can do that, that’s a real threat, to democracy and to the public conversation,” he said.

Link to the rest at The Guardian

From chat.openai.com:

Query: Write me a murder mystery in the style of Dorothy Sayers

Response:

Chapter 1: An Unexpected Visitor

The rain was relentless, beating a rhythmic tattoo on the windows of Wimsey Manor. Lord Peter Wimsey reclined in his leather armchair, a tumbler of fine Scotch in hand. The fireplace crackled merrily, casting dancing shadows across the bookshelves filled with rare tomes and obscure curiosities. The peace of the evening was shattered by an urgent knock on the door.

Wimsey’s butler, Bunter, ushered in a drenched young woman with a look of distress etched upon her face. Her name was Evelyn Middleton, a distant relative of Wimsey’s and a recent acquaintance. She had a reputation for being a woman of mystery, and it seemed she had brought a new enigma to his doorstep.

“Lord Wimsey,” she began, her voice quivering with anxiety, “I desperately need your help. I believe I am in grave danger.”

Wimsey, ever the gentleman, poured her a glass of sherry and encouraged her to compose herself. As she sipped the amber liquid, she recounted her tale.

Chapter 2: A Lethal Gift

Evelyn explained that earlier that day, she had received an anonymous package containing a string of exquisite pearls. They were of such beauty that even a cursory glance revealed their extraordinary value. Attached to the pearls was a note that read, “For the fairest lady in England.”

Despite their allure, Evelyn had an uneasy feeling about the gift. She had sensed danger lurking beneath their lustrous surface. To confirm her suspicions, she had taken one of the pearls to be examined by a jeweler. The result was chilling—a deadly poison concealed within the pearl’s core.

“I fear that I am the target of an insidious plot,” Evelyn confessed. “But I know not why or by whom.”

Chapter 3: The Web of Suspects

Lord Wimsey listened attentively, his mind racing. He knew that this was no ordinary case. The presence of a poison-laden pearl hinted at a cunning adversary with a twisted sense of vengeance. It was a puzzle that demanded his immediate attention.

Wimsey proposed they invite a select group of guests to Wimsey Manor for the weekend, under the guise of a social gathering. Among them would be Evelyn’s acquaintances, as well as those who might have a motive to harm her. He would use the occasion to observe, question, and deduce.

As the weekend unfolded, Lord Wimsey found himself surrounded by an eclectic group of characters—a retired general, a reclusive artist, a disgruntled business partner, and even a charming foreign diplomat. Each had their own secrets, and each could be a potential suspect.

Chapter 4: Unmasking the Deceiver

Over the course of the weekend, Wimsey meticulously collected evidence and observed the interactions of the guests. Tensions ran high, and suspicions festered. Evelyn, although clearly anxious, remained resolute.

On the final evening, as the guests gathered in the drawing room, Lord Wimsey revealed the true purpose of the weekend gathering—to unmask the person behind the poison-laden pearls. With an eloquence that would have made Dorothy Sayers herself proud, he dissected each guest’s potential motive and alibi, slowly eliminating them one by one.

Then, in a dramatic revelation, he produced a hidden compartment from a curious sculpture in the room—an identical strand of pearls with a hidden poison pearl. It was a masterstroke of misdirection.

The room erupted in shock and confusion. Amidst the chaos, Evelyn’s eyes darted around, and she caught a glimpse of panic in one guest’s face—the foreign diplomat. It was a subtle but telling clue.

Chapter 5: The Culprit Unmasked

With the culprit exposed, Lord Wimsey calmly presented his evidence. The diplomat, it turned out, had a vendetta against Evelyn. He had sent the original poisoned pearls and had been so confident in his cunning that he had brought a backup strand, believing he could frame someone else.

The police were called, and the diplomat was led away in handcuffs, his reputation tarnished forever. The threat to Evelyn was extinguished, and the mystery of the poisoned pearls was solved.

As the rain outside continued to fall, Lord Wimsey watched the diplomat’s departure from the safety of his manor. Another case had been cracked, another villain brought to justice, and another evening of intrigue had come to an end. With a satisfied smile, he raised his glass to the memory of Dorothy Sayers and the enduring legacy of British detective fiction.

Link to more at chat.openai.com

PG notes that the free version of chat.openai.com is constrained in how long its response will be.

PG doesn’t remember Whimsey Manor in any of Dorothy Sayers’ books.

That said, he asked the AI to write a murder mystery in the style of Dorothy Sayers, so the AI was not strictly restricted by what Sayers actually wrote.

PG will contend that the AI made a mistake by referring to the detective as “Lord Whimsey” instead of “Lord Peter,” which PG understands would have been the customary way of referring or speaking to the second son of a Duke.

For some time, PG thought “The Duke of Denver,” Peter’s father (and later his older brother) was a strange title. However, during his recent reading on the subject, PG discovered that the city in Colorado was preceded by a village called Denver in Norfolk. He understands that the village of Denver currently has a population of less than a thousand people.

(The Denver in Colorado and its suburbs currently have a population of nearly three million people.)

(The later in the evening PG blogs, the more he tends to go down strange rabbit holes.)

(Which causes him to remind one and all that Colorado has a great many jackrabbits {which are actually hares and not rabbits, hares generally being larger and longer-legged than the cotton-tail rabbits and the many other true rabbits one finds in England, Colorado and elsewhere.})

From The Guardian:

A group of MPs has criticised the government’s handling of a proposed copyright exemption that would allow developers of artificial intelligence free use of copyrighted books and music for training.

A culture, media and sport committee report published on Wednesday explained that the exemption was first proposed by the Intellectual Property Office in June 2022. By February, the government had changed course in response to concerns raised by the creative industries and parliamentarians: in a debate, Conservative MP George Freeman said that “we do not want to proceed with the original proposals”.

However, the committee report states that the government’s handling of the exemption “shows a clear lack of understanding of the needs of the UK’s creative industries”.

The MPs recommended that the government does not implement the exemption and said that it “risks reducing arts and cultural production as mere ‘inputs’ in AI development”.

“The chorus of warnings from musicians, authors and artists about the real and lasting harm [of] a failure to protect intellectual property in a world where the influence of AI is growing should be enough for ministers to sit up and take notice,” said committee chair Dame Caroline Dinenage MP.

The MPs said that the current framework, which allows an exemption for text and data mining for non-commercial research purposes and allows creators to licence their work for any further purpose, “provides an appropriate balance between innovation and creator rights”.

The committee also recommended that the government work to rebuild trust after its “abortive attempt” to introduce the exemption. It must show that “it really understands where the creative industries are coming from and develop a copyright and regulatory regime that properly protects them as AI continues to disrupt traditional cultural production”, added Dame Dinenage.

Earlier this month, it was revealed that the pirated works of thousands of authors including Zadie Smith, Stephen King and Rachel Cusk had been used to train generative AI models – tools that produce content based on patterns identified in sample texts.

Link to the rest at The Guardian

From BookRiot:

There are so many stories regarding AI right now that it feels like a five-alarm fire mixed with a Whac-A-Mole game.

. . . .

And no, it’s not a five-alarm fire. But it is the very important pocket of time wherein a thing needs some form of regulation before we are fully immersed in the consequences and everyone learns the hard way what the saying “you can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube” means.

AI (artificial intelligence) is defined as“the ability of a digital computer or computer-controlled robot to perform tasks commonly associated with intelligent beings.” It is being used in a lot of industries in many ways, and it was already in use before all the recent headlines. So to be clear: what I am specifically talking about is the way AI is being used in place of writers, journalists, and other creatives, and in grifts like where a non-author tricks consumers into buying their AI word salad book instead of the intended author’s properly written book.

There are certain topics in the world of publishing that end up feeling like they just never stop being discussed, one being any version of “Who gets to write what book?” in response to when a writer writes — or is asking how to write — way out of their lane. The thing with that specific question is, as Alexander Chee perfectly explains, “the question is a Trojan horse, posing as reasonable artistic discourse when, in fact, many writers are not really asking for advice — they are asking if it is okay to find a way to continue as they have.”

I keep thinking about this every time (daily at this point) I see people — well-intentioned, I think — saying this isn’t a big deal and everything is fine, because AI will never be good enough to replace writers and authors (insert all creatives). Being that AI is just scrapping all the information that is already out there to toss it into a blender and output something “new,” I am not actually worried that it will ever be good enough to replace creatives. But that’s not the problem for me. While I get where this idea is coming from I feel it gives a very false sense of “It’ll be fine!” and “Don’t worry!” which keeps the conversations that should be had from happening.

Instead, we should be asking: Will those in power care that AI isn’t as good at creating what a human can create when their goal of using it is to not pay actual writers, authors, and creatives? Do scammers care that the “travel book” they put up on Amazon, “written” by AI is garbage that no consumer would knowingly pay for if their scam works into making the sale? If Amazon gets a cut of every sale from buyers unaware that the book they purchased isn’t the book they intended to buy, will they implement something to stop it? How time consuming is it going to be for very real people in publishing and media to have to weed out the flood of AI-generated submissions? How costly will it be for businesses to have to implement ways to spot, catch, and/or stop scammers using AI?

I deeply miss what Etsy used to be and I think a lot about how it went from being this incredible site dedicated to artists to no longer being that: “Etsy went public in 2015. Last year, the company reported annual revenue of nearly $2.6 billion — a more than 10 percent spike over the year prior. Among other issues, these creators see the increase in counterfeiters on the platform as a result of Etsy prioritizing growth over being able to enforce its standards.” It is yet another example that once again leads me to think that we shouldn’t focus on whether AI is, or ever will be, good enough to replace writers and authors.

Link to the rest at BookRiot

PG says that trying to regulate AI at this point in time is ridiculous.

AI research and development is extraordinarily important for national security and all aspects of health and health care.

Given these stakes, it will be a while before legislators and regulators get around to AI and authors.

Besides, absent a book’s creator admitting she/he used artificial intelligence to write a book, how is anyone going to know for certain whether the author used AI to assist in the creation of a book or parts of a book?

Whether an author used AI to create a first draft of a book, then edited the original manuscript to refine what the AI produced?

Whether an author wrote a detailed 50-page book outline to feed into an AI that created the manuscript?

From The Economist:

It can take a little imagination to see how some innovations might change an economy. Not so with the latest ai tools. It is easy—from a writer’s perspective, uncomfortably so—to think of contexts in which something like Chatgpt, a clever chatbot which has taken the web by storm since its release in November, could either dramatically boost a human worker’s productivity or replace them outright. The gpt in its name stands for “generative pre-trained transformer”, which is a particular kind of language model. It might well stand for general-purpose technology: an earth-shaking sort of innovation which stands to boost productivity across a wide-range of industries and occupations, in the manner of steam engines, electricity and computing. The economic revolutions powered by those earlier gpts can give us some idea how powerful ai might transform economies in the years ahead.

In a paper published in 1995, Timothy Bresnahan of Stanford University and Manuel Trajtenberg of Tel Aviv University set out what they saw as the characteristics of a general-purpose technology. It must be used in many industries, have an inherent potential for continued improvement and give rise to “innovational complementarities”—that is, induce knock-on innovation in the industries which use it. ai is being adopted widely, seems to get better by the day and is being deployed in ever more r&d contexts. So when does the economic revolution begin?

The first lesson from history is that even the most powerful new tech takes time to change an economy. James Watt patented his steam engine in 1769, but steam power did not overtake water as a source of industrial horsepower until the 1830s in Britain and 1860s in America. In Britain the contribution of steam to productivity growth peaked post-1850, nearly a century after Watt’s patent, according to Nicholas Crafts of the University of Sussex. In the case of electrification, the key technical advances had all been accomplished before 1880, but American productivity growth actually slowed from 1888 to 1907. Nearly three decades after the first silicon integrated circuits Robert Solow, a Nobel-prizewinning economist, was still observing that the computer age could be seen everywhere but in the productivity statistics. It was not until the mid-1990s that a computer-powered productivity boom eventually emerged in America.

The gap between innovation and economic impact is in part because of fine-tuning. Early steam engines were wildly inefficient and consumed prohibitively expensive piles of coal. Similarly, the stunning performance of recent ai tools represents a big improvement over those which sparked a boomlet of ai enthusiasm roughly a decade ago. (Siri, Apple’s virtual assistant, was released in 2011, for example.) Capital constraints can also slow deployment. Robert Allen of New York University Abu Dhabi argues that the languid rise in productivity growth in industrialising Britain reflected a lack of capital to build plants and machines, which was gradually overcome as capitalists reinvested their fat profits.

More recent work emphasises the time required to accumulate what is known as intangible capital, or the basic know-how needed to make effective use of new tech. Indeed, Erik Brynjolfsson of Stanford University, Daniel Rock of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Chad Syverson of the University of Chicago suggest a disruptive new technology may be associated with a “productivity J-curve”. Measured productivity growth may actually decline in the years or decades after a new technology appears, as firms and workers divert time and resources to studying the tech and designing business processes around it. Only later as these investments bear fruit does the J surge upward. The authors reckon that ai-related investments in intangible capital may already be depressing productivity growth, albeit not yet by very much.

Of course for many people, questions about the effects of ai on growth take a back seat to concerns about consequences for workers. Here, history’s messages are mixed. There is good news: despite epochal technological and economic change, fears of mass technological unemployment have never before been realised. Tech can and does take a toll on individual occupations, however, in ways that can prove socially disruptive. Early in the Industrial Revolution, mechanisation dramatically increased demand for relatively unskilled workers, but crushed the earnings of craftsmen who had done much of the work before, which is why some chose to join machine-smashing Luddite movements. And in the 1980s and 1990s, automation of routine work on factory floors and in offices displaced many workers of modest means, while boosting employment for both high- and low-skilled workers.

Gee, Pretty Terrific

ai might well augment the productivity of workers of all different skill levels, even writers. Yet what that means for an occupation as a whole depends on whether improved productivity and lower costs lead to a big jump in demand or only a minor one. When the assembly line—a process innovation with gpt-like characteristics—allowed Henry Ford to cut the cost of making cars, demand surged and workers benefited. If ai boosts productivity and lowers costs in medicine, for example, that might lead to much higher demand for medical services and professionals.

Link to the rest at The Economist

PG got to feeling a bit better as the day commenced and decided to try Microsoft’s browser, Edge, with Microsoft’s version of AI included.

PG’s prompt was as follows:

synopsis of Pride and Prejudice, including issues of class

Here’s what MS AI produced (with paragraph breaks inserted by PG):

Pride and Prejudice is a novel by Jane Austen that explores the complex social relations among the landed gentry in early 19th-century England. The main plot revolves around the romance between Elizabeth Bennet, a spirited and intelligent young woman, and Fitzwilliam Darcy, a wealthy and proud aristocrat who initially disdains Elizabeth and her family.

Through a series of misunderstandings, misjudgments, and revelations, Elizabeth and Darcy overcome their pride and prejudice and eventually acknowledge their mutual love and respect. Along the way, they also confront the obstacles posed by their different social positions, as well as the interference of their families and friends.

The novel also depicts the lives and marriages of Elizabeth’s four sisters, Jane, Mary, Kitty, and Lydia, who each face their own challenges in finding happiness and security in a society that values wealth, rank, and propriety over character, affection, and individuality.

PG then asked MS AI to add more details to the plot and this is what happened (with PG’s manually-inserted paragraph breaks):

Pride and Prejudice is a novel by Jane Austen that explores the complex social relations among the landed gentry in early 19th-century England.

The main plot revolves around the romance between Elizabeth Bennet, a spirited and intelligent young woman, and Fitzwilliam Darcy, a wealthy and proud aristocrat who initially disdains Elizabeth and her family. Elizabeth meets Darcy at a ball where he snubs her, while his friend Bingley is smitten with her sister Jane. Elizabeth is further prejudiced against Darcy when she hears from Wickham, a charming officer, that Darcy cheated him out of his inheritance.

Darcy, however, gradually falls in love with Elizabeth’s wit and beauty, and surprises her with a proposal of marriage, which she rejects, accusing him of separating Bingley and Jane, and mistreating Wickham.

Darcy then writes a letter to Elizabeth, explaining his actions and revealing Wickham’s true character. Elizabeth realizes that she has been too hasty and prideful in her judgments, and begins to admire Darcy’s sense of honor and generosity.

Meanwhile, Elizabeth’s younger sisters, Kitty and Lydia, are dazzled by the militia officers stationed in their town, especially by Wickham, who elopes with Lydia, putting the Bennet family’s reputation at risk. Darcy secretly intervenes to find the couple and force Wickham to marry Lydia, thus saving the Bennets from disgrace.

Elizabeth learns of Darcy’s involvement from his aunt, Lady Catherine de Bourgh, who visits Longbourn to dissuade Elizabeth from marrying Darcy, as she has planned a match between him and her own daughter. Elizabeth refuses to comply, and asserts her equal worth and right to love whom she chooses.

Darcy is delighted by Elizabeth’s spirited defense of their relationship, and renews his proposal, which she accepts with joy. Jane and Bingley also reunite and marry, and the novel ends with a happy resolution for the two couples who have overcome their pride and prejudice.

Then PG asked the AI to include more about the social consequences of Lydia’s elopement and added paragraph breaks.

Pride and Prejudice is a novel by Jane Austen that explores the complex social relations among the landed gentry in early 19th-century England. The main plot revolves around the romance between Elizabeth Bennet, a spirited and intelligent young woman, and Fitzwilliam Darcy, a wealthy and proud aristocrat who initially disdains Elizabeth and her family. Elizabeth meets Darcy at a ball where he snubs her, while his friend Bingley is smitten with her sister Jane. Elizabeth is further prejudiced against Darcy when she hears from Wickham, a charming officer, that Darcy cheated him out of his inheritance.

Darcy, however, gradually falls in love with Elizabeth’s wit and beauty, and surprises her with a proposal of marriage, which she rejects, accusing him of separating Bingley and Jane, and mistreating Wickham. Darcy then writes a letter to Elizabeth, explaining his actions and revealing Wickham’s true character. Elizabeth realizes that she has been too hasty and prideful in her judgments, and begins to admire Darcy’s sense of honor and generosity.

Meanwhile, Elizabeth’s younger sisters, Kitty and Lydia, are dazzled by the militia officers stationed in their town, especially by Wickham, who elopes with Lydia, putting the Bennet family’s reputation at risk.

Lydia’s elopement is a major crisis in the novel, as it threatens to ruin not only her own prospects of marriage, but also those of her sisters. In the society of that time, living together without marriage was considered a scandalous and disgraceful act that would result in social ostracism and loss of respectability. Lydia’s behavior also reflects poorly on her parents’ upbringing and exposes their lack of discipline and boundaries.

Lydia herself is oblivious to the consequences of her actions, and thinks only of her own importance and pleasure. She does not care about the feelings or opinions of her family or friends, nor does she show any gratitude or remorse for the trouble she has caused.

Darcy secretly intervenes to find the couple and force Wickham to marry Lydia, thus saving the Bennets from disgrace. Elizabeth learns of Darcy’s involvement from his aunt, Lady Catherine de Bourgh, who visits Longbourn to dissuade Elizabeth from marrying Darcy, as she has planned a match between him and her own daughter.

Elizabeth refuses to comply, and asserts her equal worth and right to love whom she chooses. Darcy is delighted by Elizabeth’s spirited defense of their relationship, and renews his proposal, which she accepts with joy. Jane and Bingley also reunite and marry, and the novel ends with a happy resolution for the two couples who have overcome their pride and prejudice.

PG thinks that, while he wouldn’t recommend the current iteration of Bing AI writing for a Ph.D. thesis, it would be a big help for a lot of middle and high school students.

This does raise interesting plagiarism and honesty issues regarding schoolwork produced by Bing. PG wonders whether using the Bing AI for a first draft, then making significant student-created modifications and additions to that draft before turning in the final paper.

PG was going to run the Bing AI output through Grammarly, which is also advertising AI features, but ran out of time and energy.

He does wonder what the problem is with Microsoft’s AI entering paragraph breaks in its output, however.