Tagnovels
Sam Altman Was on My Favorite Writing Podcast. His View on Storytelling Surprised Me.
When we read, we want to hear from a human about what it means to be human.Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has garnered a fair share of criticism from the writing crowd for creating ChatGPT, a tool that on the surface seems to banish the need for human writers at all. However, Altman recently appeared on David Perell’s prominent writing podcast “How I Write” to talk about his own writing process, AI, and what he uses ChatGPT for. Altman and Perell talk about the importance of language for human communication, with Altman noting how he can’t imagine human life without language. AI, Altman says, is supposed to make language and the writing process “better.” In his view, that’s what computers have also sought to do: Create opportunities for humans to expand and deepen their capacities. But Read More ›
The Uniqueness of the Human Writer
LLMs are shortcuts, but sometimes the shortcut makes you miss the point of the journey
David Foster Wallace: If Screens Are Your Main Media Diet, You’re Going to Die
The novelist warned about the pitfalls of the online life“If we ate like this all the time, what would be wrong with that?” So asks David Foster Wallace, compellingly played by Jason Segel, in the 2015 film The End of the Tour. Wallace is in the car with a Rolling Stone reporter, David Lipsky, cramming down sweets from a gas station when he says that. After Lipsky quips back about obesity, Wallace says, “It has none of the substance of real food, but it’s real pleasurable.” The End of the Tour is set in 1996 shortly after Wallace’s gargantuan novel Infinite Jest hit the literary scene and impressed the nation with its length, wit, tragedy, and insight. A massive book about loneliness, Infinite Jest takes place in a semi-futuristic Read More ›
A Canticle for Leibowitz, a Canticle of Speculative Warning
A 1959 novel's speculation of nuclear fallout is yet a story of hope.This past year seems to have been the year of the atomic bomb, at least in what I’ve read and watched. I started 2023 by reading The Passenger and Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy, a pair of novels that consistently alludes to Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer arrived a few months later in July, sobering audiences worldwide and reinvigorating public interest in the godlike power these brilliant scientists had unleashed on the world. Most recently, I read the 1959 dystopian novel by Walter Miller, A Canticle for Leibowitz, a speculative tale about nuclear holocaust and the perennial human tendency for self-destruction. What a cheery year it’s been! Maybe I’ll switch things up and read Anne of Green Read More ›
Zero K: A Novel About Escaping the World Through Technology
Zero K by novelist Don DeLillo is a frightening but prophetic tale of transhumanism and the temptation to evade suffering at all costs.
Novelists Against AI
17 authors are suing OpenAI for copyright infringement17 prominent authors including George R.R. Martin and John Grisham are suing OpenAI, the company responsible for ChatGPT, for copyright infringement and “theft,” according to the Associated Press (AP). The authors are among many in the creative field who are expressing concern over the ethics of AI use. A spokesperson for the Authors Guild said that it’s imperative to stop AI’s theft to preserve America’s “incredible literary culture,” according to the AP. Hillel Italie reports, The lawsuit cites specific ChatGPT searches for each author, such as one for Martin that alleges the program generated “an infringing, unauthorized, and detailed outline for a prequel” to “A Game of Thrones” that was titled “A Dawn of Direwolves” and used “the same characters Read More ›
Is Mathematics an Illusion? Lawrence Krauss and Cormac McCarthy Discuss
McCarthy asked, "Would mathematics be here if we weren't?"In December, physicist and author Lawrence Krauss interviewed the late American novelist Cormac McCarthy, who died on June 13th at the age of 89 in Santa Fe, N.M. McCarthy is famous for his remarkable fictional works like The Road and Blood Meridian, but he was also deeply fascinated with mathematics and science. Apparently, he enjoyed reading science more than he did fiction! He moved to Santa Fe from El Paso to be closer to the Santa Fe Institute, a science think tank where McCarthy would spend time speaking with various physicists, scientists, and mathematicians. His latest two novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris, are about a brother and sister who are both brilliant mathematicians. Towards the beginning of the interview, Read More ›
Make Literature Human Again
Should the AI novel be embraced or avoided?I’ve been writing avidly since the first grade. Thumbing through a children’s nature magazine in the classroom one day, I discovered a crisp image of a red fox standing in the snow. I’d seen pictures of foxes before, but something stood out to me about this one to the point that I felt like I needed to write about it. If you’re looking for advice on owning foxes as pets, see my manual on the topic. (Full disclosure: my first-grade self was absolutely convinced having a fox for a pet is out of the question.) Years later, that fundamental impulse hasn’t left. Writing stories, novels, essays, news reports, and poetry has always been a fundamental way to try to do Read More ›
Math, Mind, and Matter
The surprising similarities between mathematics and literatureLast October, legendary American author Cormac McCarthy, who wrote Blood Meridian and The Road, released a pair of interconnected novels called The Passenger and Stella Maris. The books arrived after a sixteen-year silence from the desk of McCarthy. The books deal, per usual, with themes of mortality, fate, and the “God question,” and are predictably lyrical, vivid, and dark. But McCarthy plows new ground in these sibling novels. The books are about mathematicians. It’s fiction about math. The story revolves around the complex relationship between a brother and sister: Bobby and Alicia Western. Bobby is a deep-sea diver with some history in the field of mathematics, while Alicia is a once-in-a-generation math prodigy. Not Estranged, but Akin After reading these books myself, I marveled at McCarthy’s ability to Read More ›
Will AI Ever Write a Critically Acclaimed Novel?
AI is starting to write and some of the copy reads quite well. Other writing is garbage. What’s the capability and limitation of writing by AI? Will AI ever write a novel that wins the Nobel Prize for Literature? Robert J. Marks and Dr. Selmer Bringsjord discuss creativity, artificial intelligence, and writing. Show Notes 00:37 | Introducing Selmer Bringsjord, Professor Read More ›
2: AI Can Write Novels and Screenplays Better than the Pros!
AI help, not hype: Software can automatically generate word sequences based on material fed in from existing scripts. But with what result?“AI rites reel gud!” Seriously, the idea is not new. Back in the 1940s, George Orwell (1903–1950) thought that a machine could write popular novels so long as no creative thinking was involved. Thus, in his 1984 police state world, one of the central characters has a job minding a machine that mass produces them. In the 1960s, some film experiments were done along these lines, using Westerns (cowboy stories). At the time, there were masses of formula-based film material to work with in this popular genre. But what does the product look and sound like? In 2016, Ars Technica was proud to sponsor “the first AI-written sci-fi script:” As explained in The Guardian, a recurrent neural network “was fed the Read More ›
