1) I enjoyed this video: We Are The Art | Brandon Sanderson’s Keynote Speech.
Sanderson talks about artificial intelligence and art, and, while I usually resist “what is art?” discussions (which generally have a fairly high ratio of noise to signal), I am vaguely interested in the intersection of art and artificial intelligence, and Sanderson makes some good points. He starts with Roger Ebert’s opinion on whether video games can be art, which I’ve written about already, and he goes to some interesting places after that.
2) Here’s another interesting article: “We Asked the Future of Truth Author to Explain How He Used AI. It Didn’t Go Well”
The part that’s the most striking to me is how defensive the author gets about AI (the author that the article is about, not the author of the article itself). It sounds like he can’t imagine writing without it, which seems to me to fall somewhere between “scary” and “pathetic.”
I guess if AI is really that addictive, that’s the scary part.
Using AI to write is one thing (as long as you’re honest about it, of course), but to be completely dependent on a tool that was invented within the last twenty minutes…
3) What am I up to these days? Still working on the same story (Sanderson: “…if you haven’t beat your head against the wall on a story, day after day, until you break it down and find the unexpected path…”), but I’m also doing some cleanup on U-town, including the “third novel” which has revealed itself to simply be more of U-town (part four, basically).
That process is still ongoing, and includes
- punctuation fixes (the biggest priority)
- improved word choice in some places
- a few actual errors fixed.
Also, I’ve gone back to a story called “One Night at the Quarter,” which never really satisfied me. It has built-in limitations, mostly that it depends on the reader being acquainted in advance with some of my other writing (there are a lot of characters who pop in with perhaps insufficient explanation, including some who are actually the same person, which a regular reader would know).
But, even within that limitation (which is not a problem to be fixed) I’ve always thought it was not as good as it could have been.
I’m going to start re-posting it soon, part by part.
(I do enjoy thinking about this story because I had a whole plan for how it was going to end, but then a character wasn’t quite as smart as I (for some reason) thought he was, and rather than have him suddenly get smarter for a minute to advance the plot, I let the story go in an entirely different direction. So, I didn’t get a very tense Mexican standoff as I had planned — instead I got a quiet conversation on a rooftop between two crazy women in their forties.)
Note: As I was editing this post, I updated the version of WordPress that this site runs on. One of the new features is:
WordPress 7.0 introduces the foundation for AI across the platform, letting you connect your preferred provider and put it to work across your site. … The Connectors screen introduces a single hub for managing a range of external service integrations, including AI providers. Opt in by connecting your preferred AI provider, then put it to work across your site. The optional AI plugin adds a growing set of tools directly into the editor: create titles and excerpts, generate and edit images, and suggest alt text.
As the saying goes, “I would prefer not to.”
Bonus: If you made it this far, here’s something that made me laugh.
