From TechCrunch: If you build it, people will try to break it. Sometimes even the people building stuff are the ones breaking it. Such is the case with Anthropic and its latest research which demonstrates an interesting vulnerability in current LLM technology. More or less if you … | Continue reading
Nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bull-fighters. Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises | Continue reading
From The Science Fiction Writers of America: Have you ever read something that you knew was incorrect? Sometimes, research has fallen short of convincing people who know better, even though other readers might not notice anything wrong. For those who know, it can be jarring and p … | Continue reading
From Writer Unboxed: I’m writing this post in a public library. It isn’t a research library, the awesome university kind where you might go to dig up fabulous story details. It’s a humble branch library. The patrons are either kids from the nearby high school or their moms. The a … | Continue reading
From The Wall Street Journal: An appalling political effort to force the people of Scotland to express only government-approved thoughts on “gender” has so far been unable to conquer the country’s most successful expresser of thoughts. Megan Bonar and Katy Scott report for the BB … | Continue reading
From Business Insider: Apple is in the early stages of looking into making home robots, a move that appears to be an effort to create its “next big thing” after it killed its self-driving car project earlier this year, sources familiar with the matter told Bloomberg. Engineers ar … | Continue reading
From The Economist: “It’s almost a moral duty that museums should be free,” said Glenn Lowry, director of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). That was in 2002, when a ticket to moma cost $12 (around $19 in today’s prices). In October moma started charging $30, the latest in a series … | Continue reading
PG glanced at some site stats for TPV and discovered that, after the U.S., the second-largest location providing visitors to TPV is China. More visitors from China than Canada or Britain. He hopes his comments about China posted earlier today don’t cause problems for his Chinese … | Continue reading
From The Wall Street Journal: The Chinese Communist Party has already crushed freedom in Hong Kong. Now it’s beating a dead horse. As directors of Next Digital, we saw three years ago the jackboot effect of the security laws Beijing has imposed on Hong Kong. The company published … | Continue reading
Distracted from distraction by distraction. T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets | Continue reading
From Publishing Perspectives: In its release today (March 26) of its December 2023 StatShot report, the Association of American Publishers (AAP) the year-to-date figures cover last year, with total revenues across all categories in December 2023 down 2.5 percent as compared to De … | Continue reading
From Writers in the Storm: Statistics are interesting. Statistics can provide us with valuable information. Like, right now, there are over 8 billion people on the planet and over 1 billion websites (most of which are inactive). One of my favorite teachers said that it only takes … | Continue reading
So the writer who breeds more words than he needs, is making a chore for the reader who reads. Dr. Seuss | Continue reading
From ZD Net: Several text-to-music generators are now on the market, including offerings from Meta and Google. However, the Suno AI music generator is becoming increasingly popular — likely because it creates original lyrics and vocals, and because it leverages the power of ChatG … | Continue reading
From The Economist: IN THE dystopia of George Orwell’s novel “1984”, Big Brother numbs the masses with the help of a “versificator”, a machine designed to automatically generate the lyrics to popular tunes, thereby ridding society of human creativity. Today, numerous artificial-i … | Continue reading
From BBC: The Great Gatsby is synonymous with parties, glitz and glamour – but this is just one of many misunderstandings about the book that began from its first publication. Few characters in literature or indeed life embody an era quite so tenaciously as Jay Gatsby does the Ja … | Continue reading
From Rebecca Tushnet’s 43(B)log: This putative class action alleged that Amazon overcharged and “[d]eceived consumers by misrepresenting that it was selling them Digital Content when, in fact, it was really only licensing it to them[.]” Plaintiffs brought claims under California, … | Continue reading
When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent left, and could say, ‘I used everything you gave me.’ Erma Bombeck | Continue reading
Without leaps of imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning. Gloria Steinem | Continue reading
From The Bookseller: Hachette has reported a rise across both its mean and median gender pay gaps for the whole company group between 2022 and 2023, while the bonus pay gap for ethnicity has also deepened, though progress in other areas has been made. The group – which encompasse … | Continue reading
From Publishing Perspectives: On Friday . . . four major publishers—Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers, Penguin Random House, and Wiley—filed a brief that opposes the Internet Archive‘s appeal of its loss on March 24, 2023, in the copyright case Hachette Book Group, et … | Continue reading
From Publishers Weekly: Workers at Shelf Life Books in Richmond, Va., have joined the United Food & Commercial Workers Local (UFCW) 400 Union, making them the first booksellers in the city to unionize. All five eligible workers at the at the store, located at 2913 W. Cary Street, … | Continue reading
From The Literary Hub: Today is the anniversary of the publication of Robert Frost’s iconic poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” a fact that spurred the Literary Hub office into a long conversation about their favorite poems, the most iconic poems written in English, and … | Continue reading
From The Wall Street Journal: Can government tell Big Tech companies how to edit content and police their platforms? That’s the question before the Supreme Court on Monday in two cases with major First Amendment implications (Moody v. NetChoice and NetChoice v. Paxton). NetChoice … | Continue reading
From Yahoo News: A University of North Georgia (UNG) student is on academic probation after she says she used Grammarly to proofread a paper. The school says the action was taken because they detected the use of artificial intelligence in violation of their plagiarism clause in t … | Continue reading
From Vanderbilt University: In April of this year, Turnitin released an update to their product that reviewed submitted papers and presented their determination of how much of a paper was written by AI. As we outlined at that time, many people had important concerns and questions … | Continue reading
From The Wall Street Journal: Elon Musk wants you offended. His fight to protect free speech didn’t end with buying Twitter and simply loosening content moderation. More than a year into owning the social-media platform now known as X, Musk’s aggressive tactics to defend myriad s … | Continue reading
From Literary Review: The Remigia cave, about eighty miles north of Valencia, features paintings dating from around 6500 BC. Some depict bands of archers hunting ibex; others appear to show executions. These are the ones tourists come for. But the most significant image is the le … | Continue reading
From Jane Friedman: The following are some of the so-called rules of writing fiction that I take a special delight in breaking. Creative writing is about possibilities, not about restrictions and limitations. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down.In 1962, in a le … | Continue reading
From Ars Technica: A US district judge in California has largely sided with OpenAI, dismissing the majority of claims raised by authors alleging that large language models powering ChatGPT were illegally trained on pirated copies of their books without their permission. By allege … | Continue reading
From Art News: Artists have secured a small but meaningful win in their lawsuit against generative artificial intelligence art generators in what’s considered the leading case over the uncompensated and unauthorized use of billions of images downloaded from the internet to train … | Continue reading
What you need is a fundamental humility – the belief that you can learn from anyone. Clayton Christensen | Continue reading
From Nieman Lab: Uncertainty in the news industry, hype around AI, and hope for better business models and new revenue streams have all helped to drive news organizations to adopt AI technology, a new report from the Tow Center of Digital Journalism at Columbia University finds. … | Continue reading
From Abraham Lincoln Online: On June 1, 1865, Senator Charles Sumner referred to the most famous speech ever given by President Abraham Lincoln. In his eulogy on the slain president, he called the Gettysburg Address a “monumental act.” He said Lincoln was mistaken that “the world … | Continue reading
As dealing with change becomes a regular activity, leading it becomes a skill to hone, an internal capacity to master. Arnaud Henneville | Continue reading
There’s no such thing as writer’s block. That was invented by people in California who couldn’t write. Terry Pratchett | Continue reading
From Helena Fairfax: How important is the first line in a romantic novel? In these days of “Click to look inside!”, if the book you’re thinking of buying doesn’t have an immediately arresting opening, does that make you put it back on the cyber-shelf? If you can get a free sam … | Continue reading
From The Economist: The high-heeled shoe, popular among men in pre-revolutionary France, is losing favour among women on the streets of Paris. The once familiar click of stiletto on cobble is giving way to the silence of rubber soles. Today fashion writers offer French women advi … | Continue reading
From The Point: A writer is a creature of solitude: Has there ever been a bigger lie? And yet the myth persists. We treat writers as individuals, but only in precisely those ways that melt their individuality down, the better to recast it in more agreeable forms. Neglected, misun … | Continue reading
From The New Publishing Standard: Apple has been slow to jump on the AI bandwagon in any meaningful way, which has given rivals a head-start, but also let them make the mistakes and the public-relations fails so Apple can jump in now looking like the good guy. “Apple has reached … | Continue reading
From The Wall Street Journal: The first sentence of “Fahrenheit 451” is one of literature’s great opening lines: “It was a pleasure to burn.” In the 1953 novel, now a modern classic, author Ray Bradbury went on to describe a future in which books are banned and firemen burn them. … | Continue reading
Fact and fiction carry the same intrinsic weight in the marketplace of ideas. Fortunately, reality has no advertising budget. Daniel Suarez | Continue reading
From The Literary Hub: Toward the end of the nineteenth century, people were said to lead novelesque lives if they traveled extensively, experienced major twists of fate—at times disastrous (and someone would come to the rescue), at times lucky (in which case an enemy would try t … | Continue reading
From Writer Unboxed: There’s a character in a novel I’m writing at the moment who, despite having passed on some time before the beginning of the action, haunts the story. Not in the literal way of a ghost story, but their memory and influence shapes a good deal of what one of th … | Continue reading
From Fox Business: An upcoming news station will be broadcasting the first ever AI-generated news anchors to viewers across America next year. New Los Angeles-based station Channel 1, which will launch in 2024, aims to be the first nationally syndicated news station to use AI ava … | Continue reading
I see the lights blinking on in the dark room where Tess was keeping her illusions. Bernard Lee DeLeo, Hard Case | Continue reading
From TechCrunch: On Monday morning, numerous writers woke up to learn that their books had been uploaded and scanned into a massive dataset without their consent. A project of cloud word processor Shaxpir, Prosecraft compiled over 27,000 books, comparing, ranking and analyzing th … | Continue reading
From Automation Alley: The remarkably prophetic capacity of humans to imagine and harness the future has shaped the evolution of humankind. Straight-line extrapolations and nonlinear predictions based on present-day facts have helped civilization discover mesmerizing technologies … | Continue reading