Week 9: George Colony nails it: reading stuff for us is AI’s job. Also: leveraged burnout at Simon & Schuster, KDP spies on your toolbox, plus 3 people to follow, 3 books to read, and pluggerating. Why A.I. upends everything, according to George Colony There are two common perspectives on the rise of generative A.I.,…
The Associated Press issued a set of guidelines for journalists regarding the use of AI. They should be a model for all news organizations as well as anyone else who publishes nonfiction content. The danger here is that AI text generation tools like ChatGPT are, basically, bullshitters. They make up plausible text that has no…
The entertainer Sarah Silverman and other authors sued OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. Silverman alleged that OpenAI violated her rights by ingesting her book The Bedwetter. Silverman’s suit claims that ChatGPT can summarize parts of the the book, so it has clearly read the book, and since the book is copyrighted, this constitutes a violation….
The New York Times has jumped on the “AI will take our jobs” bandwagon, in an article titled “A.I. Is Coming for Mathematics, Too.” As the author Siobhan Roberts states, “For thousands of years, mathematicians have adapted to the latest advances in logic and reasoning. Are they ready for artificial intelligence?” The analysis in the…
We’re about to see a wholesale restructuring of how people get the feeds of information that matters to them, especially news. Right now there are three types of players. News organizations create news content and surround it with advertising. Consumers consume news and ads, sometimes paying for subscriptions. And between the two are intermediaries. The…
In 1951, the science fiction writer Cyril M. Kornbluth published a story called “The Marching Morons” in Galaxy Magazine. (You can read the whole thing here.) It tells the story of a near future world in which stupid people with limited skills overpopulate the world, forcing a dwindling group of intelligent people to take on…
I admit it: I’m obsessed with why ChatGPT and other AI services can’t be funny. I’m convinced the answer is that true humor demands an unexpected shift in perspective, and AI machines, trained to mimic patterns in what they’ve read, have problems with both “unexpected” and “shift in perspective.” Monty Python is the master of…
AI can write now, but it needs supervision. And failing to supervise it will make you look very stupid. Don’t believe me? My friend Maggie Langrick, the proprietor of the hybrid publisher Wonderwell, recently received this financing pitch, which she has allowed me to share with you. From: Tanner SyftestadDate: January 31, 2023 at 6:21:22…
Real writers have wit. AI doesn’t. And that is unlikely to change. Christopher S Penn did a fascinating comparison of how an advanced AI tool, GPT-J-6B, completes writing content based on patterns it has digested from massive amounts of source material. His conclusion: I am bullish on AI creating content at scale. I am bearish…