My dead father is “writing” me notes again | Ars Technica
Recently, an anonymous AI hobbyist discovered that an image synthesis model called Flux can reproduce someone's handwriting very accurately if specially trained to do so. I decided to experiment with the technique using written journals my dad left behind. The results astounded me and raised deep questions about ethics, the authenticity of media artifacts, and the personal meaning behind handwriting itself.
The Memex Method – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
These repeated acts of public description adds each idea to a supersaturated, subconscious solution of fragmentary elements that have the potential to become something bigger. Every now and again, a few of these fragments will stick to each other and nucleate, crystallizing a substantial, synthetic analysis out of all of those bits and pieces I’ve salted into that solution of potential sources of inspiration. That’s how blogging is complimentary to other forms of more serious work: when you’ve done enough of it, you can get entire essays, speeches, stories, novels, spontaneously appearing in a state of near-completeness, ready to be written.
How to open pieces of narrative non-fiction writing, conference talks, and sticky jars- for people trying to get better at narrative, non-fiction, opinionated writing like essays, blog posts, and conference talks. Opening well isn't just about snapping up someone's attention and keeping them reading for a few lines. You can't write good openings without having good ideas, good arguments, good structure, and good storytelling skills. Everything hangs off that starting point, so it's worth learning how to nail it.
To check out an unwritten book, answer 6 questions, then: read; reply; repeat. Remember, as a reader-author, what you read is a reflection of what you and others have written, and where one ends a story is at least as important as where one begins. Respond in sentences. Ask to look around. Speak with others. Act upon the world. You are a reader-author. Act like it! The Library of Unwritten Books creates "novel novellas" on-demand. Unlike text-adventure games with fixed texts, these stories are an open-ended exercise in collaborative storytelling. You are a reader-author. Large language models (LLMs) mediate your collaboration, re-shaping and reflecting your words and those of authors past. This Library is a different sort of magic, for instead of transporting its readers into the mind of a single author it places us somewhere in the zeitgeist. LLMs, as we know, are machines for completing sentences. They work by predicting the next plausible string of words. As Ted Chiang observed, they are blurry JPEGs of the Web. We harness this fact to produce something novel based on the input of our reader-authors, the "compressed" writings used to train the LLM, and random chance.
The work of creation in the age of AI | Andrew Perfors
Meaning, authenticity, and the creative process – and why they matter. mediation changes the experience in a very real way; the transmission chain from the creator to the recipient becomes part of the experience and thus part of the meaning. That means that different media and different kinds of mediation fundamentally change the meaning. It also means that the longer the transmission chain – the more a creation is divorced from its original context – the more the connection between the creator and the audience is frayed. The result thing might still be valuable, but it is different. This much, to me, seems inescapable. But I am left with two questions. First, why is it different? And secondly, does any of this change when the technology involved is AI? I’m going to claim, regarding the second, that AI does change things in a deep and fundamental way. Some say that AI is “just another tool”, but I don’t think it is; I think it distinctly and qualitatively alters the relationship between ourselves, our creations, and each other.3 To explain why, I have to go into my thoughts about the first question: why and how context and connection matters for authenticity and meaning.
This is Water by David Foster Wallace (Full Transcript and Audio)
David Foster Wallace‘s 2005 commencement speech to the graduating class at Kenyon College is a timeless trove of wisdom — right up there with Hunter Thompson on finding your purpose. The speech was made into a thin book titled This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life. Wallace hits on our need to manage rather than remove our core hard-wired human instincts. Here are the links to the original audio, followed by a transcript of the entire speech.
Get feedback on your writing and become a better writer in our online writing group Scribophile is one of the largest and most award-winning online writing You’ve spent a lot of time writing your story. But how can you make it perfect before you start thinking about publishing? Scribophile is a writing group focused on getting you feedback on your manuscript. Our points-based peer critique system guarantees you’ll get feedback from writers from all walks of life. You can then use that feedback to polish your writing before you take the next step in your publishing journey.
This article is part two of a series with one, two, three articles, leading to the launch of iA Writer 7, on November 30th. In this article, we answer the following five questions: How good is AI for writing? When is AI useful for writing, when is it not? When is it right and when is it wrong to use AI? What is the problem? What should we design?
Since the introduction of ChatGPT, adding “AI” to everything has become the dominant trend in IT. We considered AI for iA Writer. But obviously, we had to make sure not to destroy everything we had built over the last 15 years. We did not want our app to become an AI feature. Writing is thinking. iA Writer is designed to make thinking enjoyable. A writing app that thinks for you is a robot that does your jogging. After a year of observation, experimentation, and testing, we may have found a careful response to the challenges we face with AI. In fact we ended up doing the opposite of adding ChatGPT. Now, let’s take one step at a time. First, let’s take a look at where we are. This is the first of three posts leading up to the launch of iA Writer 7, our cautious response to AI. In this post, we’ll review what has happened in the app industry since the introduction of AI last November.
3 ways to get ChatGPT to write like you | Descript
Everyone wants their writing to be unique, so constantly fixing generic AI outputs to match your voice can be frustrating. The question is, can we speed up this process? I turned to best-selling professional ghostwriter Jessa Gamble to bring her expertise to this challenging task, since it's her job, as she describes it, to "make that unique voice come through in the writing." We tried three different methods to generate text in a specific voice – and evaluated how well they worked. Here are our results.
What happens when AI reads a book 🤖📖 - by Ethan Mollick
So might AI, the technology of the moment, change the way we interact with books? To test this we would need both an AI with a memory large enough to hold a book, and an author who knows their own book well enough to judge the AIs results. Dear reader, we have both. Anthropic’s Claude1, one of the three major foundational Large Language Models, now has enough memory to hold a short book (technically it has a context window of 100,000 tokens, which is around 70,000 words), and I happen to have written a short book on entrepreneurship (29,868 words) a couple years ago. I pasted the latter into the former, and ran some experiments.
What if, in the end, we are done in not by intercontinental ballistic missiles or climate change, not by microscopic pathogens or a mountain-size meteor, but by … text? Simple, plain, unadorned text, but in quantities so immense as to be all but unimaginable—a tsunami of text swept into a self-perpetuating cataract of content that makes it functionally impossible to reliably communicate in any digital setting? Our relationship to the written word is fundamentally changing. So-called generative artificial intelligence has gone mainstream through programs like ChatGPT, which use large language models, or LLMs, to statistically predict the next letter or word in a sequence, yielding sentences and paragraphs that mimic the content of whatever documents they are trained on. They have brought something like autocomplete to the entirety of the internet. For now, people are still typing the actual prompts for these programs and, likewise, the models are still (mostly) trained on human prose instead of their own machine-made opuses. ... Am I worried that ChatGPT could have done that work better? No. But I am worried it may not matter. Swept up as training data for the next generation of generative AI, my words here won’t be able to help themselves: They, too, will be fossil fuel for the coming textpocalypse.
We Are All Going to Die, Thanks to AI | House of Beautiful Business
The dream: AI will exponentially enhance our productivity and creativity. It will optimize everything that can be optimized, freeing us humans up to do work that truly matters. It will lead to new breakthroughs in science, scale up mental health services, detect and cure cancer, and more. It will finally enable humanity to realize its full potential. The nightmare: present and future harm. Estimates suggest AI will eliminate 300 million jobs worldwide, with 18 percent of work to be automated, over-proportionally affecting knowledge workers in advanced economies. (As Rest of World reports, image-generating AI is already stealing the jobs of China-based video game artists and illustrators.) AI will destroy the very fabric of our societies as we know it, threaten the core of our work-based identities, exacerbate social divisions and discrimination, blur the lines between truth and fiction, unleash unprecedented waves of propagandistic misinformation (imagine Elon Musk launching an AI company named TruthGPT and training its AI based on Twitter data—oh wait…), impose a dominant, all-encompassing, all-knowing universal operating system, an aiOS, on us, start wars, and ultimately, as AI morphs into AGI, go HAL or M3GAN-style rogue and extinguish the human race.
We, the APA Style team, are not robots. We can all pass a CAPTCHA test, and we know our roles in a Turing test. And, like so many nonrobot human beings this year, we’ve spent a fair amount of time reading, learning, and thinking about issues related to large language models, artificial intelligence (AI), AI-generated text, and specifically ChatGPT. We’ve also been gathering opinions and feedback about the use and citation of ChatGPT. Thank you to everyone who has contributed and shared ideas, opinions, research, and feedback. In this post, I discuss situations where students and researchers use ChatGPT to create text and to facilitate their research, not to write the full text of their paper or manuscript. We know instructors have differing opinions about how or even whether students should use ChatGPT, and we’ll be continuing to collect feedback about instructor and student questions. As always, defer to instructor guidelines when writing student papers. For more about guidelines and policies about student and author use of ChatGPT, see the last section of this post.
How will large language models (LLMs) change the world? No one knows. With such uncertainty, a good exercise is to look for historical analogies—to think about other technologies and ask what would happen if LLMs played out the same way. I like to keep things concrete, so I’ll discuss the impact of LLMs on writing. But most of this would also apply to the impact of LLMs on other fields, as well as other AI technologies like AI art/music/video/code.
4 open source editors I use for my writing | Opensource.com
In celebration of the National Council of Teachers of English NCTE National Day on Writing 2022, I thought I'd share a few of my favorite open source writing tools.
It's simple: my biggest hope for this book is that it will inspire you both to read and also to write 100-word stories. :-) If you're just getting started as a story-writer, I think you'll find the 100-word format is a great way to begin. It's not hard to come up with ideas, and it's not hard to write one hundred words. Even more importantly, the 100-word format makes the revising process easy to manage... and, at least in my opinion, the most important part of writing is what happens in revising. With just 100 words, you can revise word by word, making sure every single word is doing the job you need it to do. (For example, this paragraph is 100 words long.)
The Paris Review - The Birth of the Semicolon - The Paris Review
The semicolon was born in Venice in 1494. It was meant to signify a pause of a length somewhere between that of the comma and that of the colon, and this heritage was reflected in its form, which combines half of each of those marks. It was born into a time period of writerly experimentation and invention, a time when there were no punctuation rules, and readers created and discarded novel punctuation marks regularly. Texts (both handwritten and printed) record the testing-out and tinkering-with of punctuation by the fifteenth-century literati known as the Italian humanists. The humanists put a premium on eloquence and excellence in writing, and they called for the study and retranscription of Greek and Roman classical texts as a way to effect a “cultural rebirth” after the gloomy Middle Ages. In the service of these two goals, humanists published new writing and revised, repunctuated, and reprinted classical texts.
Start With This is a podcast gone creativity playground designed to put your ideas in motion, from the creators of Welcome to Night Vale, Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor. Each episode centers around a topic from world building, to opening lines, and even failure. Then they give listeners two short assignments: something to consume and something to create. You might just find a creative partner in the process. Jeffrey and Joseph want you to start creating, one assignment at a time because the best way to start writing, is to start writing.
Web Writing Style Guide Version 1.0 | Writing Spaces
The Writing Spaces Web Writing Style Guide was created as a crowdsourcing project of Collaborvention 2011: A Computers and Writing Unconference. College writing teachers from around the web joined together to create this guide (see our Contributors list). The advice within it is based on contemporary theories and best practices. While the text was originally written for students in undergraduate writing classes, it can also be a suitable resource for other writers interested in learning more about writing for the web.
