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Wittgenstein & Wordplay: How Mitch Hedberg & George Carlin Used Language Games
Mitch Hedberg is probably my favorite comedian. He’s dead now (he died young from a drug overdose combined with a pre-existing heart condition) but had an active career in the 90s to the 2000s. He was famous for acerbic, single-line gags like, “Rice is great if you’re really hungry and want to eat 2000 of…
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Thoughts on AI #1 – Is AI Training theft?
WARNING: THIS IS LONG AND BORING AND FULL OF TECH STUFF (Well, not that much actually.) There’s been a lot of discussion lately on the topic of what’s called generative AI, which is the term de jour for artificial intelligence software creating “art”, e.g. fiction, visual arts, animation and video and whatnot. (Technically, it would…
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Where is the Line for Plagiarism?
I ask this question because plagiarism is in the news lately. Harvard’s President recently lost her job after being accused of plagiarism in her academic work. I’ve been thinking more about plagiarism as it relates to AI tools like ChatGPT that have been trained on existing human writing. Several authors like Sarah Silverman have sued…
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No Humans Required: Exploring the Possibility of Computer Generated Fiction
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Superman, Spider-Man and the Pursuit of the Perfectly Pure Protagonist
Complaining about readers is not a wise pursuit for a humble author who desires an audience, and I acknowledge that one could read the following as doing exactly that. In my defense, I’m not so much complaining as observing a trend. What trend? That of readers celebrating protagonists who are morally pure, and condemning protagonists…
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Describing Emotions in Fiction
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A few thoughts on generative fiction
There’s no doubt the most interesting thing happening in the world of fiction writing is the development of AI tools like Chat GPT that are capable of writing readable fiction. (“Readable” is admittedly a low bar—the phone book is readable—but by this I mean the text can keep readers’ eyes on the page, at least…