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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
I hope to soon do a deep dive into my contrarian thoughts on the topic using AI to write novels. (Short version: the tech isn’t there yet but I’m not opposed to the idea in principle.) For now, I’m presenting a (lightly edited) reprint of an article I did several years ago at the blog…
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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
Note for readers: This post is a reprint (with a few updates and edits) of a blog post I did for the web site Tuna for Bernadette in 2013. Despite the piece’s advanced age (ten years is like a hundred in blog years), I feel it holds up, and the approach it details is one…
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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…