<autobiographical-note>In my brief time editing at Macdonald & Co. (soon, when I arrived, to become part of Robert Maxwell's ill-starred empire BPCC), I inherited dozens of titles that had been under contract (and repeatedly not delivered) for years. My chief responsibility, I soon realized, was to cancel them; I didn't last long.</autobiographical-note>
Tools like ChatGPT are only the latest in a progression of AI programs for editing or generating text. In fact, the potential for AI undermining both writing skills and motivation to do your own composing has been decades in the making.
The academic world was intially fearful about tools like ChatGPT on the grounds that they would make cheating easier to do and harder to detect. But the possibilities are much more serious and far-reaching than that. She goes on:
In literate societies, writing has long been recognized as a way to help people think. Many people have quoted author Flannery O’Connor’s comment that “I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.” A host of other accomplished writers, from William Faulkner to Joan Didion, have also voiced this sentiment. If AI text generation does our writing for us, we diminish opportunities to think out problems for ourselves.
One eerie consequence of using programs like ChatGPT to generate language is that the text is grammatically perfect. A finished product. It turns out that lack of errors is a sign that AI, not a human, probably wrote the words, since even accomplished writers and editors make mistakes. Human writing is a process. We question what we originally wrote, we rewrite, or sometimes start over entirely.
This seems to be serious; and possibly it is. But some years back I wrote about the advent of desktop publishing and my kneejerk reaction against it, and then on mature reflection my growing sense that – although uncomfortable for the publishing industry – it was probably a Good Thing. I'm not convinced in the case of AI, but I am aware that when new technology changes things, people with a vested interest in the past oppose it – often by pointing at what we're losing; what they ignore is what is to be gained by the change. So I'm not going to rush to judgment (and yes, spellchecker, I do spell it that way).
<autobiographical-note>
Somewhere in Knowles Towers there is a copy of an unpublished article that I wrote - many years pre-blog - about how authors writing on computers meant that users of libraries bequeathed literary archives would no longer be able to piece together the genesis of a literary work, with substitutions and crossings out and reorganizations.
</autobiographical-note>
The naming of characters
<parenthesis>
And I suppose the creation of the name may have been influenced by one of the church-goers who reacted against the graven image ('... or the likeness of anything, either in the heavens above or the Earth beneath' as we used to say in RC circles). She used the term malocchio (='evil eye'). But I don't know whether this was a later addition by Guillermo...<autobiographical-note>
The older of my brothers – in his mid-teens when I was learning to talk – was sensitive about being addressed with a name that sounded ( in my version of 'William') like 'women'. He had recently had a holiday in Spain, and knew the word Guillermo. So he tried to get me to use that instead. Until I could get my tongue around 'William' I called him 'Gammo'.
</autobiographical-note>...del Toro's scriptwriter.
</parenthesis>
If he had been made from a balsa tree, he might've been called "Balsacchio", which might be thought to be a bit near the knuckle.
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