Month: March 2023

AI and Art: What Goes In Is What Comes Out, At Most

John Winkelman

Back in January, I participated on two AI Art-themed panels panels at ConFusion 2023. I discussed these panel briefly in my ConFusion 2023 follow-up post, but I wanted to add some thoughts here, specifically around ChatGPT and the use of computer generated content in the context of writing.

When it comes to ChatGPT creating content, whether that content be fiction or nonfiction, it does what all of these tools do: remixes previously existing content. I make no claims about whether the thing created by an algorithm is “art” or “creative” or even “new,” but what the new content does not do is transcend its input.

ChatGPT and similar tools are trained by scanning and (hopefully) contextualizing all of the text on the internet. While ChatGPT has (or had) safeguards in place to counter the large amount of hate speech endemic to the modern internet, it still has literally centuries or even millennia of content in its input stream. A great deal of that content is regressive or even revanchist by today’s sensibilities.

And since these machine learning tools can not imagine the new, they will continue to remix the old. Even as new, human-created works become available, this new data is miniscule compared to the vast troves of work on which these tools have already been trained. And a sizeable portion of the new inputs from these tools will be previous output from the same tools, resulting in a sort of solipsism which quickly becomes untethered from any human creativity or input, thus making a large portion of the output of those tools useless except as a point of curiosity.

Additionally, here are a few points of reference:

  1. That which is called “AI” in these contexts is not artificial intelligence as it is generally understood, but is variously either neural networks, the output of machine learning tools, pattern-matching algorithms, or (usually) some combination of the three, and in all cases the output is the result of running these tools against input which was generated, overwhelmingly but not exclusively, by humans.
  2. The landscape of AI-generated art, which includes text, music, and visual arts, is rapidly evolving.
  3. Opinions on the use of AI in the arts, as well as the effects of AI generators upon the profession and livelihood of artists, are wide and varied, and continue to evolve and gain nuance.

Some more links on this general topic:

February 2023 Books and Reading Notes

John Winkelman

February was a good book month. Three of the five arrivals were from Kickstarters, and two of those were from Kickstarters over two years old. The rest were new purchases. Reading-wise, my reading list for the year caught up with my acquisition list, and I expect it to stay that way for the rest of the year, unless I either get sick of reading (not likely to happen) or I indulge in some serious emotional-support book buying.

Acquisitions

Book which arrived in the month of February 2023

  1. Jaymee Goh (editor), Don’t Touch That – A Sci-Fi & Fantasy Parenting Anthology [2023.02.04] – This one was a long time coming. I backed it back in July 2020, and of course COVID continued to happen, so the production of this anthology was, well, fraught. But it is finally here, and it is beautiful!
  2. Red Pine (translator), Dancing with the Dead – The Essential Red Pine Translations (Copper Canyon Press) [2023.02.09] – This is a reward from a recent Kickstarter run by Copper Canyon. I have been a fan of Bill Porter, and of Copper Canyon, for decades, and this is a beautiful volume.
  3. Julie Nováková, Lucas K. Law, Susan Forest (editors), Life Beyond Us (Laksa Media Groups) [2023.02.18] – Another long-delayed, eagerly-anticipated, and joyously received Kickstarter reward. I backed this book in April of 2021, and it arrived on a beautiful, unseasonably warm Saturday afternoon. I am very much looking forward to diving into this one.
  4. Jordan Kurella, When I Was Lost (Trepidation Publishing) [2023.02.22] – I met Jordan at ConFusion 2023, where he and I and my partner Zyra hung out at the bar, talking and enjoying being back at the convention. I thought his name looked familiar, and it turns out he has a story in an anthology (A Punk Rock Future) I picked up a couple of years ago because another friend had a story in it. Small world!
  5. Jordan Kurella, I Never Liked You Anyway (Lethe Press) [2023.02.27] – Another of Kurella’s works, this one a short novel, which is already near the top of my TBR pile.

Reading List

Books and Journals I Read In the Month of February 2023

Books and Journals

  1. Marlon James, Moon Witch, Spider King [2023.02.17]
  2. Catherine Stein, The Courtesan and Mr. Hyde [2023.02.20]
  3. Hieu Minh Nguyen, Not Here [2023.02.21]
  4. Jason Gillikin (editor), Surface Reflections [2023.02.22]
  5. The Lakeshore Review #1 [2023.02.24]
  6. The Lakeshore Review #2 [2023.02.26]
  7. Valérie Mréjen (Katie Shireen Assef, translator), Black Forest [2023.02.27]

Short Prose

  1. Colleen Alles, “Visitor’s Pass”, Surface Reflections [2023.02.22]
  2. Tiffany Amo, “Sea of Diamonds”, Surface Reflections [2023.02.22]
  3. Allison Hawkins, “Penelope Butterfield’s Comprehensive Guide to Self-Annihilation”, Surface Reflections [2023.02.22]
  4. Robert Charles Kubiak, “Christmas Play”, Surface Reflections [2023.02.22]
  5. Morris Lincoln, “Conversion Therapy”, Surface Reflections [2023.02.22]
  6. Melanie Meyer, “Half the Kingdom”, Surface Reflections [2023.02.22]
  7. Andrew Ronzino, “Acquired Taste”, Surface Reflections [2023.02.22]
  8. Andrew Ronzino, “The Last Day”, Surface Reflections [2023.02.22]
  9. D.L. Rosa, “Edward”, Surface Reflections [2023.02.22]
  10. Colleen Alles, “The Only Private Place”, The Lakeshore Review #1 [2023.02.23]
  11. Dominic Bryan, “The Lies You Tell Yourself”, The Lakeshore Review #1 [2023.02.23]
  12. Maggie Hill, “Only the Drunk Can Sleep”, The Lakeshore Review #1 [2023.02.23]
  13. Jonathan Lindberg, “Star Man”, The Lakeshore Review #1 [2023.02.24]
  14. Julia Poole, “Coming Clean”, The Lakeshore Review #1 [2023.02.24]
  15. Phillip Sterling, “Last Resort”, The Lakeshore Review #1 [2023.02.24]
  16. Laura Cody, “Either One Step Forward, or Two Steps Back”, The Lakeshore Review #2 [2023.03.24]
  17. Byron Spooner, “Elvis Walks the Earth”, The Lakeshore Review #2 [2023.02.26]
  18. Susan Weinstein, “Sweet Halloween”, The Lakeshore Review #2 [2023.02.26]
  19. Wally Wood, “Dropout”, The Lakeshore Review #2 [2023.02.26]

IWSG, March 2023: I Wish I’d Written That

John Winkelman

The past month was kind of hectic due to a new project at work coinciding with my girlfriend and I, after three years, finally contracting COVID. It wasn’t serious for either of us, thanks to both of us being fully vaccinated and boosted, but it was a boring two and a half weeks of being stuck in the house waiting for the home and PCR tests to come up negative.

Fortunately, we had the cats to keep us entertained.

The Insecure Writer’s Support Group question for March 2023 is: Have you ever read a line in novel or a clever plot twist that caused you to have author envy?

Well, I mean, YES!!!!!!! All the time. Almost every book I read has a turn of phrase, a scene, a twist, or something like that, which makes me say, “Well, dang! I wish I wrote that.”

The first one that comes to mind is a scene from Neil Gaiman‘s most excellent American Gods. One of the characters, let’s call him “MS,” is killed, and a few of the other characters hold a sort of wake for him, trading stories back and forth. After a little while MS is there, laughing along with the other characters and adding his own comments to the stories. It is handled so subtly that I had to go back and check that I was reading what I thought I was reading. The scene was so well written that there was no sense of disconnect, just a realization that “Well of course MS is going to show up at his own wake. That’s the kind of person [sic] he is!”

This description does scant justice to the scene.

Another is Mary Oliver‘s poem “The Poet Goes to Indiana” from her collection Why I Wake Early. In particular, this section:

…and there was once, oh wonderful,
a new horse in the pasture,
a tall, slim being-a neighbor was keeping her there—
and she put her face against my face,
put her muzzle, her nostrils, soft as violets,
against my mouth and my nose, and breathed me,
to see who I was…

Remarkable! In the fifth line, “soft as velvet” would have worked, but it would have been mundane. Ordinary. There are a million things as soft as velvet. But soft as violets? That is something unique, and enduring.

I could go on and on. Almost everything I read has at least one sentence which is noteworthy (and hopefully more than one, but not always). The moments of awe and revelation are infrequent, and valuable in their rarity.

(Also rare, fortunately, are the lines, plot twists, and scenes which make me think, “Thank the heavens I didn’t write that.” Uncommon but not unknown.)

I will repeat one of my guiding principles, as related by author Karen Lord: “Read well.” Reading well is as much a skill as writing well.

 

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