Tag: Artificial Intelligence

America Collection
Posted on

AI on the Literary Scene? 👎

by Fran Johns

NOT READY FOR CUTESY AI BLOGGERS, THANK YOU VERY MUCH

Photo by Unseen Studio on Unsplash

I just received a link to a fellow Substack “writer.” It has a name which I will not repeat. It even says it speaks for a human, though the named human cannot be found with extensive searching. An actual human posts the clever “thoughts” of the artificial, unintelligent bot.

You may be picking up my distaste here.

Up front I want to acknowledge the fact that AI has immense, far-ranging benefits to humanity, primarily in health, science & technology. If our ethical controls were not light years behind the technology we could all just sit back and celebrate.

But AI in the writing business? Please. Pity the English teachers in high schools and colleges everywhere— not to mention those in just about every other academic field — currently having to spend endless extra hours just trying to separate out what the student wrote from what the bot wrote.

Chalk this up not just to the gaping lag between moral-ethical codes and AI capabilities but to an entire generation born into the digital age. They, and generations to come, are led to assume that anything one can click on one can claim. Think about that for a while.

My rage, however, is with AI takng over the adults in the literary room. Where does it get off, barging in as if it owns the world, a scary but likely scenario? AI is announcing that anything we can write it can write better. Faster, cleaner and thoroughly spell-checked.

Here’s what AI does not have: a brain. It has only a composite of a zillion human brains that pour themselves into an artificial universe where data collection and algorithms now take over in lieu of human thought.

Here’s what else AI does not have: a soul. It cannot feel compassion, act in kindness, respond with love.

Great writers since the stone age have labored to record human truth, to create stories that help us understand ourselves and our world. Their words engage our thoughts and emotions to help us make sense of this life.

AI now presumes to grab, by the billions and trillions, those words put forth by human brains. By human beings who put their human blood, sweat and tears into the work of creation. AI then professes to reorganize the words we humans created into its “perfect,” soulless algorithms .

Sorry, I will not be subscribing to a bot.

+. +. +

This essay also appears on my Substack, The Optimistic Eye, which (despite today’s pessimistic note) seeks optimistic observations on all things political and otherwise. C’mon over any time, it’s free. (https://franmorelandjohns.substack.com/)

America Collection/General interest
Posted on

Bot-Bomber is Coming for You

by Fran Johns

AND GOOD LUCK WITH GETTING IT TO BUTT OUT

Photo by Alex Knight on Unsplash

“Sheesh. What do u recommend? Talk tomorrow!”

I knew exactly what the text meant. It was late at night. A friend and I needed to fix the wording on a business document. I hit the Reply key to say what corrections I was making, when we could meet, where . . .

Bot Bully beat me to it.

“Sure!” he offered. Or, “Sorry, I’m busy.”

Who the heck does he think he is? He knows my mind?

Apparently. In the olden days, we used to think for ourselves. Actually, I still enjoy thinking for myself — but it’s getting tough.

“Awesome!” says Bot Bully before I get a chance to respond to somebody who sent a text containing the word ‘win.’

Someone else mentions ‘sick?’ I might have had a human-intelligent response, but here’s the Bot, butting in with “Get well soon!” or “So sorry!”

I worry that auto-think may eliminate brain cells altogether. If Bot Bully already has the answer, does human messaging have any role in our future? Artificial Intelligence v Human Brain? Bot Bully is winning.

For instance, atop my email list as I open my Inbox, suddenly here are red-emblemed Priority! messages. When they start appearing in all caps I will know our president and his co-chief Elon have taken over Apple Mail.

I miss the days when I could figure out my own priorities.

As I was typing the above, a pop-up bot announced that Genmoji and Image Playground are now available on this machine. There go my creative-illustration brain cells.

So okay, I get that AI is here, and wonderful, and all that.

I just miss thinking.

America Collection/General interest
Posted on

On Getting Too Old for Artificial Intelligence

by Fran Johns

SOME DAYS ONE JUST HAS TO COME RAGING OUT OF THE CLOSET

Photo by Andrea De Santis on Unsplash

OK, I tried. 

I didn’t want to embarrass my generation by opposing Progress. Or to expose my geezerhood by questioning the unqualified wonderfulness of Artificial Intelligence.

Even when “generative AI” started getting exuberantly talked about as the newest wonderful potential of this wonderful new thing — I smiled and listened to the limitless lists of tasks opening up. Even while knowing that “generative” is defined in my old-fashioned Merriam-Webster dictionary as “having the power or function of generating, originating, producing, or reproducing” something. 

Such as writing a far better blog titled “On Getting Too Old for Artificial Intelligence” than the one you’re reading.

All these years I have kept — well, mostly — quiet about my reflexive antipathy to the whole AI business.

I have repeatedly told my grandchildren: I know how much great good AI is doing. Medical miracles. Scientific advances. Industrial shortcuts. The tool — which was, we try to remember, invented by human beings — is working wonders. Plus, it’s here to stay.

But this is about words. Once AI takes over the writing of PhD theses, college application essays, SATs, term papers and elementary school homework assignments — it’s happening — whose words are going to be used for it all?

Yours and mine and Tolstoy’s and everybody on the New York Times bestseller list. Tolstoy doesn’t care any more, but on his behalf I do.

I’m sorry to admit this, as I am generally pro-LinkedIn, but it was LinkedIn that did me in. LinkedIn sent me a note headlined “Data for Generative AI Improvement.” A headline guaranteed to get my attention, if not my enthusiasm. Beneath the headline was this question:

Can LinkedIn and its affiliates use your personal data and content you create on LinkedIn to train generative AI models that create content?

Excuse me?

I said no. But do you think the AI-generated bots that are already creating enough generative AI content to destroy six democratic nations tomorrow need my extraordinary “content” anyway?

I mean. They’ve already got Tolstoy. 

America Collection/General interest
Posted on

Why I Fear AI

by Fran Johns

AND MAYBE YOU SHOULD TOO. ESPECIALLY IF YOU’RE A CREATIVE TYPE

Photo by Steve Johnson on Unsplash

A recent New York Times story tells of two voice actors, Linnea Sage and Paul Skye Lehrman, who were stunned to hear his A.I.-stolen voice coming from a podcast. They’re suing. The case is being reported elsewhere, amid theories of potential satisfaction for the couple — or not.

Nobody wants to clone my voice. Whew. Although I still do public talks and presentations, mainly on end of life issues for a nonprofit I support, my voice is old and raspy and revered primarily by my children, who advise me to think of it as sexy. (Good luck with that, Fran.) 

But my words? Trillions of them are out there in cyberspace. A.I.’s for the taking. And the world population’s for the using.

Granted, probably not many people want to clone my words either. But I have worked extremely hard, over many decades as a reporter, essayist, author, speech-writer, blogger, you name it, to put them together in a fashion that hopefully provides information, entertainment and — most importantly — Truth.

A.I. does not recognize truth. Nor does it recognize empathy, persuasion or compassion, among other valuable emotional traits.

If you’re a writer, you probably seek to build a reputation (or not) for writing truth. It doesn’t come easy. It comes by slogging through data and proven facts to create sentences and paragraphs that express truth. While you’re at it you very likely watch facial expressions in interviews, or take notice of things like the scent of flowers and forests, the mysterious elegance of a foggy morning, the mood of a crowd, the brilliance of a summer sky. Then you put it all together in words that ring true.

A.I. just takes words and puts them all together. How do you think ChatGPT writes those fine job applications or school essays? By grabbing the words someone else has sweated blood to put together.

I like to think that occasionally, over the decades, I have put together a sentence or phrase that is singularly expressive. It’s surely not going to hurt my feelings for ChatGPT to grab it for an application essay. But how about you writers just starting out, or mid-career? Once you’re paid (or not) to create effective, even borderline unique (if such a classification exists) phrases, should you not care that you’re sucked into the content provider abyss and ChatGPT gets the glory?

As much as it fails to distinguish between truth and falsehood, A.I.’s inability to know empathy or compassion gives me pause.

Voice actors Sage and Lehrman presumably built their careers on the ability to show traits like these through their vocal expressions. That ability is partly a gift, but largely a learning process. I don’t know Sage or Lehrman, but I’d guess they have invested a great deal of time and effort into perfecting ways of expressing emotions like these. A.I. just grabs and spits out.

I have a book of short stories on Audible, recorded by a professional actress who was aging out of stage work and into book readings. Though it’s still a little jarring to hear my words in accents and inflections I might not have intended, I appreciate the long, hard work that the gifted Katherine Conklin devoted to this project.

Introduced through a mutual friend, Katherine won my own friendship, and admiration, by the time the book was done. Early on, when I explained that the Central Virginia accent of the characters in these stories was not as ‘deep south’ as the accent she was using to read them, she found an interview by a radio personality in Henrico County, VA, next door to the Hanover County of my childhood, and sent it to me for reference. Another time, when struggling to communicate exactly what I’d meant by one phrase, she sent a voice recording repeating it six times with different inflections.

I’ve no idea how hard other readers work to produce the audiobooks I enjoy on daily walks, and I know they’re paid. But their voices are now floating around in the ethersphere and are A.I.’s for the taking; no hard working voice actor gets a penny.

It’s not just about the money. What creators slave over to express are the emotions and values with which they embue their words.  

I don’t want just to tell truth. I want to amuse or lift spirits, to comfort or console, to persuade. These are things words can do, but only when the wordsmith writes, rewrites and rewrites some more until, hopefully, the words fit together to evoke a desired result.

I am quick to admit the limitless potential of A.I. in fields like technology, medicine, ecology and many others. But it is artificial. Human intelligence, one would hope, will always incorporate the basic elements of humanity like those above. Empathy. Compassion. Truth.

And that, my right-brained friends, is why I worry.

America Collection/General interest
Posted on

The Brave New AI World

by Fran Johns

WITH A SALUTE TO THE HUMANOID BRAINS OF WRITERS PAST

Photo by Andrea De Santis on Unsplash

I was confronted with an ad on a busy urban thoroughfare, promoting the newest thing in my chosen profession.

That is, writing. I have been a writer forever. You could say Journalist, or occasional Essayist. Columnist. Author. Proud MFA in Short Fiction graduate. Periodic ghostwriter when I needed the money.

But over a bunch of decades I have just said, when someone asked what I do for a living, “I’m a writer.”

Alas, I have been replaced. By a bot.

Author photo

Needing to understand the competition, I looked this up. Here’s what I learned:

You — company manager, CEO, whoever — don’t really need to hire a person who knows how to write stuff, because a friendly bot can “accelerate content” while remaining “on brand.” Jeez Louise.

I already knew my once-beloved profession was in trouble the first time I heard the phrase “content provider.”

Well, anyway. Who am I to stand in the way of your unlocking the power of generative AI?

In the olden days, every press club worth its salt had a touch football team.

Photo by Francesca Runza on Unsplash

Maybe you missed a deadline, or somebody else scooped you on a great story, or you were just brain-weary from too many words. You could always find a pick-up game with a bunch of writers needing to work out their literary frustrations. (Then you went for drinks.) I’m satisfied that similar collegial opportunities to blow off steam still exist, even if my football days — as you can tell from the attitude here — are over.

All that generative AI can replicate your voice, and stay on-brand for optimum marketing potential, and you can refine its integrated content to align with your pre-approved messaging . . .

But can it play touch football?