AI-generated fiction submissions are inundating science fiction magazines. Some 35% of the stories submitted to Clarkesworld monthly are AI-generated. (Boing Boing / Thom Dunn)
Don Lemon’s statement wasn’t just sexist–it was stupid. Why should Americans trust a news organization that features this clown?
Don Lemon receives “formal training” before returning to CNN after “woman in her prime” comments (Boing Boing / Carla Sinclair)
I’m burned out on superheroes, but I could get enthusiastic about a Superman movie starring Henry Cavill that preserves Superman’s optimistic spirit and nobility.
Matthew Vaughn thinks Zack Snyder wasted Henry Cavill as Superman (Boing Boing / Devin Nealy)
Ben Stein is sad that there isn’t a “large African-American woman” on his syrup bottle (Boing Boing / Mark Frauenfelder)
Original iPhone from 2007 auctioned for $63,356, topping prior sales (Ars Technica / Scharon Harding)
Karen Green received the iPhone in 2007 as a gift, but she never even opened the box, because she’s a Verizon customer and the iPhone was then locked to AT&T.
Elsewhere on the Internet, a friend started a discussion of the Danny Dunn books, which I absolutely loved when I was a kid.
In the series, which started in 1958, Danny Dunn is an all-American boy living in the all-American college town of Midston. He lives with his mother, who works as a live-in housekeeper for Professor Bullfinch, a scientist at the local university and is a grandfather-figure to Danny. The boy hero and his young pals have adventures with the inventions Prof. Bullfinch brings home—a time machine, a computer, antigravity paint, a miniaturization ray, and so on.
Danny’s pal includes a girl named Irene who’s a budding physicist, and a sidekick, Joe Pearson, who’s a boy poet. Notably for a series that started in the 50s, Irene keeps up with the gang.
Can we really be sure the new Microsoft Bing isn't conscious or intelligent?
AI-based chatbots like the new Microsoft Bing aren’t really conscious or intelligent, right? They’re just using algorithms. They look at an existing sequence of words and use probability to select the next word. And then they do it again and again, so rapidly and fluidly that it seems like they’re talking, but they’re not.
But to leave it there seems overly simplistic. Because there’s still something amazing and (metaphorically speaking) magical going on in the interaction between a person and the Bing chatbot. Something powerful, that could potentially be very useful, and also very dangerous.
Also: to declare that Bing isn’t really conscious or intelligent presumes we know what consciousness and intelligence are. Which we don’t. Consciousness and intelligence are all around us, in all the people and animals we see and interact with. Maybe plants too. And yet we do not know what it really is.
Reading "The Poet," by Michael Connelly
I am reading “The Poet,” a murder mystery by Michael Connelly, and I notice the author does a thing that I usually find annoying, but I do not find it so in this novel.
About two-thirds of the novel is told in first person. The main character is telling the story, and he says “I did this” and “I did that.”
But the main character’s chapters are interwoven with chapters from the point-of-view of another character, and those chapters are written in third person. “He did this” and “he did that.”
Usually I find that kind of thing distracting. I want a narrator to pick a point-of-view and stick with it. If you’re going to go with first person, stick with that for the whole novel—and that means the reader is only going to be inside the head of that one character.1
I think the point-of-view switch maybe works for me because the main character, the one who tells the story, is a newspaper reporter and he writes in a journalistic style. Often, in a first-person-novel, the main character seems to be speaking intimately with the reader, but the main character of this novel is writing for a mass audience.
Some years ago, I came across an online discussion on a Stephen King fan forum, about his novel, “Dolores Claiborne.” The fans thought the novel was a huge departure for King, and they didn’t like it. They said he was pandering to the critics and putting on literary airs.
That surprised me, because I liked the novel just fine. And it seemed very much of a piece with King’s other work: A horror story, set in rural Maine, with working-class main characters who lacked formal education but who were wise, intelligent, and spoke beautifully in regional, working-class language.
But the fans who hated it noted it was much shorter than King’s other books, had almost no supernatural element–and was written in the first person, whereas King’s other novels were written in third person, with multiple point-of-view characters. To them, these differences were huge–and they didn’t like them–but to me, the differences were nearly incidental.
-
Unless it’s a fantastic fiction novel, and the character can read minds. Or the character finds and reads a document written by someone else, like a journal that was bricked up in the fireplace mantel of an old manor house or something. ↩︎
Maybe Roald Dahl books just aren’t suitable for kids today. If we have to twist them all out of shape to get rid of the fatphobia and misogyny, then maybe they shouldn’t be aggressively marketed to children anymore.