From a techbro billionaire, of course. In this case, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison:
“Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on,” Ellison said, describing what he sees as the benefits from automated oversight from AI and automated alerts for when crime takes place. “We’re going to have supervision,” he continued. “Every police officer is going to be supervised at all times, and if there’s a problem, AI will report the problem and report it to the appropriate person.”
Because there’s no way a 24/7 surveillance state wouldn’t be abused by those in power. No way at all!
I have long-since given up on participating in National Novel Writing Month (and have no plans to take part this November), but it popped up recently for a reason I didn’t expect: The organization’s stance on AI (which they think is A-OK).
As I state in the title above, this seems like a weird stance to take and is probably insulting to the people NaNoWriMo thinks they are championing (and I’ve seen several posts from people in the target group on Mastodon saying just this). No one needs to use AI to write a novel, and I’d argue that no one should, especially for something like NaNoWriMo, where many participants are new writers just learning their way. Using the crutch of AI could easily lead them to writing worse fiction, reinforce bad habits and suck the soul from their work. It could impede them from finding their own voice by bumbling through and learning from their mistakes.
And this is all apart from the ethical arguments surrounding AI being largely or even mostly built on the theft of the work of others (sure, some AI companies are starting to make deals, but how will a writer possibly know if the AI they’re using is “clean” or not?)
I’ve toyed around with AI a few times on this blog, mostly as a kind of joke, because the results are usually awful, bland or blandly awful. I’ve stopped now because the energy costs make me feel bad about using it just to fart around.
Some have pointed out that NaNoWriMo might be beholden to its sponsors, as one of them has AI features–ProWritingAid–but they have been a sponsor since long before they adopted AI tools. Here I was going to point out that another sponsor, Ellipsus, has a very anti-AI stance, but…it looks like they pulled their sponsorship in the last day (statement here: We’re stepping down as a NaNoWriMo sponsor. Here’s why.)
I expect more fallout to continue, and it already seems like an opportunity for replacements for NaNoWriMo has begun–one is already in the works that I know of: https://writingmonth.org/.
Of course, none of this will stop anyone from trying to write a 50,000 word novel in the month of November. You don’t need a big website–or AI–you just need an idea, and a lot of dedication to see it through (and about 1–2 hours per day of free time, in my experience).
I am one of those who believes we are in a big ol’ AI bubble and that bubble is going to burst and leave a big mess that will probably leave tech CEOs unscathed, but result in more mass layoffs of workers. Such is our society as of now.
I understand and agree with those who object to AI companies hoovering up data without permission, then repackaging it in dubious and energy-sucking ways. Generally, AI is bad, and its positives are small. For me, it has been a silly diversion when I indulge in it, which is not often. For example, I have a NightCafe account (an AI image generation site) with over 3,000 unsued credits. You get 5 free credits per day. So yeah.
But I occasionally indulge and one of my interweb friends shared some silly songs he’d made using Suno. It was mildly amusing, but then he mentioned you can write your own lyrics, so I had to try it.
I brainstormed for several minutes (quite literally) and wrote a song called “Pickles and Cat.” I told Suno to make the song country and upbeat. It generated two versions. This is the first and “best” (IMO) and is likely the closest I’ll ever come to writing and performing music. I’m good with that. Garage Band is hard.
(I made the artwork in Canva, it was a labour of love.)
Pickles and Cat
I like my pickles and I like my cat My cat likes pickles, well, how about that?
I put my pickles in jars And I send 'em to Mars
Now the Martians have my pickles Nothing else rhymes with pickles
And the Martians they ate them all up I sent my cat but they wanted a pup I told them no sir, I can't do that Then they said OK, send the cat
Pickles and cat, my two favorite things Green and orange, they make my bells ring
Pickles and cat, you should get yourself some But not mine, I'm not sharing none
When my cat got to Mars he scratched a couch It was a Martian, and the Martian yelled ouch
My cat ran away to a big rocket ship Pressed all the buttons and went on a trip
Landed on a big space rock and scratched up the place Now no one goes there, it's his own private space
Pickles and cat, my two favorite things Green and orange, they make my bells ring
Pickles and cat, you should get yourself some But not mine, I'm not sharing none
This blog post doesn’t really say anything new (Facebook is bad, and overrun with bots and AI sludge), but I do like the images the author chose to highlight, especially the cats on a rollercoaster, billed by the bot posting as “Great photograph.”
I feel like “AI” always needs to be in quotation marks, because while it is clearly artificial, there is no apparent intelligence involved. It’s all just an elaborate guessing game based on a giant pool of answers that could be accurate, inaccurate, made-up, sarcastic, or some enticing combination.
Google is now rolling out an “AI Overview” in its search results, a furthering of its efforts to keep everyone on its search page (to show them ads and make $$$), with the side effect of killing off the rest of the web as all other sites slowly starve for traffic, revenue and everything else.
It is easy to find examples of this overview being hilariously and sometimes dangerously wrong. Google appears to be fixing the most egregious examples, no doubt by coming across them in their own searches and then fixing the results manually (ie. with an actual human). If this is their plan, they are going to need a lot of humans.
Here’s just one story from Ars Technica and one screenshot (below) illustrating the whole big pile of nonsense. I really don’t think this is going to improve over time in any significant way. Since this is Google, I’ll go further and say AI Overview could eventually end up in their graveyard along with the hundreds of other things they’ve killed.
This is the text of a talk Charlie Stross gave today (November 10) at the Next Frontiers Applied Fiction Day in Stuttgart. He talks about how science fiction writers influenced many of today’s most powerful tech giants–in all the wrong ways. Entertaining and also a nice section of SF history, dating back to the late 19th century.
Using the tool found here (story on it from Engadget here), I input my blurry college ID photo from 1990 (we barely had color photos back then) and here’s a before and after shot. While it clearly has trouble with glasses, I think the AI made my lips look sexier than reality, so I can’t really complain about the results.
Before: Blurry. After: Come hither.
I like that it didn’t know what to do with some of the artifacts, so it enhanced those as well. This stuff is probably going to be freaky good in a few more years.
