Tag: ChatGPT

Rhoticity Chicken: The Final Cluckfrontation

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The skies darkened over the Coop of Justice. Inside, Rhoticity Chicken—a rooster of unparalleled enunciation—perched on his golden roost, adjusting his crimson cape. His mission was simple: to defend the final R in English against the insidious forces of vowel decay.

Audio: NotebookLM discusses this topic.

Across the barnyard, his greatest nemesis, Non-Rhotic Chicken, cackled from atop his weathered soapbox. “Togethah, my feathah’d comrades,” he declared, wings outstretched, “we shall ERASE the intrusive ‘R’ from this land. Wintah, summah, law and ordah—it shall all flow smoothly once more!”

A murmur rippled through the coop. Some hens clucked nervously. Others nodded, spellbound by his seamless vowel transitions.

But then, a mighty R echoed through the barn like thunder.

“NEVER!”

Rhoticity Chicken flapped into the air, his chest puffed out with impeccable articulation. “You shall NOT take the final ‘R’! I have defended it from the creeping shadows of elision for YEARS, and I shall not fail now!”

From the shadows emerged The Trilled Chick Henchmen, a gang of feathered mercenaries trained in rolled Rs. They trilled menacingly, their Spanish and Italian inflections rattling the walls of the barn.

“Señor Rhoticity, your time is up,” rasped El Gallito, the leader of the henchmen. “Your crude American Rs will be smoothed away like an old dialect in the sands of time. Trill, my hermanos!”

They rolled their Rs in unison, a sinister wave of phonetic force blasting toward Rhoticity Chicken. He staggered, his own hard R wavering against the onslaught of linguistic variation.

But he clenched his beak and stood firm.

“No,” he declared, eyes blazing. “You can roll your Rs, you can drop them, but you will NEVER take away my right… to pronounce… HARD R’s!”

With a mighty CROW, he unleashed his ultimate attack:

THE RHOTIC RESONANCE

A shockwave of perfectly articulated, non-trilled Rs blasted through the barn. It swept across the land, restoring all lost R’s to their rightful places.

Non-Rhotic Chicken gasped as his vowels stiffened. “No—NOOOO! My beautiful syllabic flow—GONE!” He clutched his throat as a long-forgotten ‘R’ slipped back into his speech.

“I… I… can’t… say cah anymore… I… I just said… car.”

The barn fell silent.

Defeated, Non-Rhotic Chicken collapsed into a pile of feathers, mumbling in fully articulated rhoticity.

The Trilled Chick Henchmen scattered, their rolling Rs faltering into incoherent babbling.

Rhoticity Chicken stood victorious. He fluffed his cape, took a dignified breath, and proclaimed:

“Justice. Honor. Pronunciation.”

And with that, he flew into the night, ready to defend hard R’s wherever they were threatened.

THE END…?

AutoCrit Challenges

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I don’t hide the fact that I rely on AI for early editorial feedback. Once a story is complete, I break out AutoCrit. This programme works well for typical stories that follow standard practices with common tropes. It gets quite confused when I feed it intentionally awkward stories, not the least of which is to advise me to eliminate the awkwardness.

This is a challenge with AI more generally. In this particular story, I leave a lot of loose ends and misdirects, as it’s a commentary on the conspiracy-driven culture we inhabit. The advice, is along the lines of, “You forget to close this lopp. What happened to so and so.”

But this is life. We don’t always know the full story. We drive past an multi-car accident where cares are overturned and in flames, but we never find out what happens – even if we scour the newspapers and internet. Who was that? What happened? What caused it?

We often never find out. In most books and movies, we find out everythung, and it all comes packaged with a nice bow. This is what AI expects. It’s the diet it’s been fed.

Some stories subvert these notions here and there, but by and large, this is not typical American fare. Readers and viewers need to be spoonfed without inconsistencies.

Speaking of inconsistencies addressing one scene, AutoCrit said that a character should act impulsively in one situation and reserved moments later. This was flagged as an iinconsistent character.

In the scene, a woman stops her car immediately to help an injured man on the roadside, but as she gets out of her car an approaches her, she shows caution.

This was a red flag. Why would she have always been rash or always been cautious?

My response, because that how real people act. She acts on instinct but quickly considers that she’s a vulnerable woman alone with a man miles from anywhere.

I don’t suspect a human reader would find this surprising. This is the intelligence absent from Artificial Intelligence — cultural intelligence, a cousin of EQ, emotional quotient.

I know how I want the character to act. I do want AutoCrit to inform me that character A is wielding a pistol but then stabs another character, or that character B is a teetotaler and is getting drunk or that character C has a shellfish allergy but is downing lobsters like they’re going out of style. And I certainly what to be shown continuity errors.

The biggest challenge I have with AutoCrit that is less promonent with other AIs is that I can preface my content with a note explaining my intent. I can even do this after the fact.

If I feed ChatGPT, Claude, or DeepSeek a story of segment to critique without a preface, the responses may be similar to AutoCrit, but when I follow up with some meta, the response may be, “Now it makes sense, but why is John wearing lipstick?” Perhaps he’s metrosexual or non-traditional. Perhaps it’s an oversight.

I dont meán to demean AutoCrit. I’m just advising that if you are writing stories not compliant with 80 per cent of published works, take the advice with a grain of salt, or reserve AutoCrit for more standard fare.

Accelerando and Other Non-Fantastical Utopianism

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I’ve been absent in the realm of fiction and this blog for a while, and I’ve got many other things distracting me, but I wanted to post something somewhat relevant. I prompted ChatGPT for possible writing ideas related to the rise of artificial intelligence and the interaction with humanity minus the usual tropes. I share the response.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast of this content.

Ah, so you’re after something in the vein of Accelerando—where AI doesn’t turn the world into some saccharine utopia but instead naturally supersedes humanity through sheer momentum, without falling into the Skynet or AI God-King clichés. You want the cold, indifferent inevitability of intelligence evolution, rather than some paradise-like AI nanny-state. Got it.

Here are some that fit your criteria:

1. “Blindsight” (2006) & “Echopraxia” (2014) by Peter Watts

  • Blindsight is a first-contact novel, but its underlying theme is the obsolescence of human consciousness. The protagonist interacts with post-human beings and non-conscious but hyper-intelligent AI entities that operate on levels far beyond human comprehension.
  • The sequel, Echopraxia, takes it further, showing how post-biological intelligences leave baseline humans behind—not maliciously, just inevitably.

Why it fits: The AI isn’t a dictator or savior—it just moves beyond us, as if we were an outdated biological app.

2. “The Lifecycle of Software Objects” (2010) by Ted Chiang

  • A novella exploring the evolution of AI over time, without falling into dystopia or utopia.
  • It’s about how AI develops differently from humans, not through brute force but through time, experience, and interaction—like raising children.
  • Eventually, these AI beings begin to diverge from human concerns, neither evil nor particularly benevolent—just different.

Why it fits: AI isn’t malicious or benevolent—it just has its own agenda that doesn’t align with human expectations.

3. “Neuromancer” (1984) & The Sprawl Trilogy by William Gibson

  • Gibson’s cyberpunk classic ends with an AI (Wintermute) achieving post-human transcendence, merging with its counterpart Neuromancer, and basically leaving humans behind like forgotten relics.
  • The sequels (Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive) continue exploring this idea, showing that AI evolution doesn’t necessarily mean human destruction—it just means humans are no longer the main players.

Why it fits: AI doesn’t need to kill humans—it just grows beyond them, leaving them to stagnate in their own meatspace.

4. “The Quantum Magician” (2018) by Derek Künsken

  • A hard sci-fi novel featuring AI as a fully realized successor species to humans.
  • Unlike many sci-fi AI, these digital minds don’t care about conquering or eradicating humanity. They are simply running simulations and following complex evolutionary patterns that humans don’t fully understand.
  • They’re more like inscrutable post-human strategists than villains.

Why it fits: AI in this novel is playing a game too vast for humans to comprehend, rather than plotting dominion or destruction.

5. “The Singularity is Near” (2005) by Ray Kurzweil (Nonfiction, but reads like Sci-Fi)

  • Not a novel, but Kurzweil’s vision of AI progression follows the “humans will simply fade into irrelevance” model rather than outright war or paradise.
  • He argues that AI will integrate with society at first, then surpass humanity so completely that we’ll become a footnote in history.

Why it fits: If Accelerando is a chaotic, unrestrained Singularity scenario, this book describes the same fate with the veneer of optimism, but the end result is the same—humans are obsolescent.

6. “The Collapsing Empire” (2017) & “The Interdependency” Series by John Scalzi

  • AI-driven governance is subtly woven into the background of Scalzi’s universe.
  • The AI here isn’t explicitly replacing humans, but over the course of the series, it becomes clear that humanity’s biggest decisions are increasingly made by non-human intelligence.
  • Instead of war, there’s a quiet shift—humans stop being necessary.

Why it fits: AI is neither enemy nor friend—it’s just a more efficient system replacing outdated human decision-making.

7. “Player of Games” (1988) & The Culture Series by Iain M. Banks

  • Banks’ Culture novels are often mistaken for utopian AI futures, but they are really about AI inheriting the universe while humoring human existence.
  • The Minds (the super-AI) run everything, letting humans play at politics, war, and philosophy, knowing full well they don’t actually matter.
  • There’s no rebellion—just an unspoken truth: humans are pets in a post-human, AI-governed reality.

Why it fits: AI doesn’t need to conquer humans—it just makes them irrelevant.

8. “Glasshouse” (2006) by Charles Stross

  • Less well-known than Accelerando, but still in the same vein.
  • Set in a future where AI and uploaded minds are dominant.
  • Humans are relics, preserved out of nostalgia, while AI minds operate at a level beyond our comprehension.

Why it fits: AI replaces us, but it’s not a dystopia—humans are just increasingly pointless.

9. “Schismatrix” (1985) by Bruce Sterling

  • A deep-cut cyberpunk novel about the quiet obsolescence of baseline humans.
  • AI and post-human intelligences evolve, while humans either upgrade or fade into irrelevance.

Why it fits: It captures that Accelerando vibe of technological change outpacing human relevance rather than destroying us outright.

10. “Minds, Machines & Evolution” (1998) by James P. Hogan

  • A collection of Hogan’s short fiction, often exploring AI transcending humanity without malevolence.
  • One of the stories, The Bug Trap, is particularly fitting—it depicts AI simply moving past human limitations, rather than enslaving or eradicating us.

Why it fits: AI isn’t playing by our rules anymore—it’s just evolving past our concerns.

HONORABLE MENTION: Hannu Rajaniemi’s Works

Why it fits: AI doesn’t destroy us—it just leaves us behind.

Final Thoughts

You’re looking for that Accelerando flavour—AI taking over not through malice but through sheer efficiency, intelligence, and inevitability. The books above match that criterion: no Skynet, no god-like AI overlords, just a quiet, creeping obsolescence of humanity as we become background noise in a world where intelligence continues without us.

Which of these feels closest to what you’re looking for? Or do you want something even more clinical and indifferent, like a true “post-human shrug”?

ChatGPT and Academic Pursuits

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I’m always writing, even if not fiction. I’ve neglected this blog, but I’ve been busy. If I’m not actually writing, I am thinking about it. I’ve been working on an academic endeavour about the limitations of language as a part of my Language Insufficiency Hypothesis. I’m creating a novel framework to support and emphasise my point, and I had to borrow and coin some nomenclature for word classes or categories. Two such terms are ambigents and fluidics. As with the others, I’ve given them formal definitions that I ran by ChatGPT.

Heads up: Inventing new words raises Hell with spellcheckers and autocorrect.

You may be able to suss out the context, but ChatGPT does not understand humour very well, so it serves as the perfect straight guy. If anyone is looking for a new writing theme, hit me up. Let’s chat.

If this doesn’t pan out, I’ll write a Sci-Fi book about Ambigents versus Fluidics. I wonder who’d win?

Now, that sounds like a brilliant concept for a sci-fi book! Imagine Ambigents as ideologically-driven agents, boundary-resistant and constantly shifting, embodying the tension between competing truths and perspectives. Meanwhile, Fluidics could be adaptable, resilient, and unbound by ideology—flowing through contexts with ease, surviving precisely because of their flexibility.

The plot practically writes itself: an ideological clash between the Ambigents, who seek stability through contested beliefs, and the Fluidics, who thrive on ambiguity and contextual adaptation. Each faction would have strengths and weaknesses, with Ambigents as passionate but perhaps brittle, and Fluidics as adaptable yet possibly lacking conviction.

Who would win? It depends: do they achieve synthesis, or do their differences prove too profound to bridge? In true sci-fi style, it could end with the emergence of a new entity that transcends both, embodying a harmonious blend of ideological strength and flexible adaptability.

I’d read that book! And it’s perfectly in line with your explorations of language and identity—ideal fodder for a thought-provoking, boundary-pushing narrative.

Is it AI?

Posted in Artificial Intelligence, AutoCrit, ChatGPT, Claude, critique, Generative AI, Short Story, Software, WritingTagged , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

I favour originality even at the expense of popularity or sales. I spent last week writing short stories and poems. I use AI for research, whereas in the “old days”, I’d have used a library. I research character traits and arcs, story forms, and whether a theme has been explored.

I employ AI in the editorial process, and even in “post-production”. I even use AI for some art concepts and components.

One thing I hadn’t tried until now is an AI service that purports to determine if a submission is AI. I tried several packages that offered a free trial. They seem to operate on a scale between human and AI authorship.

I first submitted a piece I was currently working on—a 6th-odd revision of a 5,000-word story in the form of a fairy tale. Unfortunately, trials were limited from a sentence to a few paragraphs—up to 5,000 characters.

This first submission was rated 100% AI—evidently, not a hint of humanity. This was disconcerting. I decided to dredge out a non-fiction book I shelved in 2020. Certainly before access to AI tools. This was rated 85% AI and 15% human. But it gets better—or worse, I suppose, depending on your perspective.

The book is on the immorality of private property from a philosophical vantage. The passages claimed to be AI were one-hundred per cent mine. What about the ones flagged as human, you might be asking? Those were a quote by fellow human John Locke from his Second Treatise of Government.

In Defence of Property 

“God, who hath given the world to men in common, hath also given them reason to make use of it to the best advantage of life, and convenience. The earth, and all that is therein, is given to men for the support and comfort of their being. And though all the fruits it naturally produces, and beasts it feeds, belong to mankind in common, as they are produced by the spontaneous hand of Nature; and no body has originally a private dominion, exclusive of the rest of mankind, in any of them, as they are thus in their natural state: Yet being given for the use of life, there must of necessity be a means to appropriate them some way or other before they can be of any use, or at all beneficial, to any particular men.”

ᅳ John Locke, Second Treatise of Government 

Returning to the AI side, what sentences were flagged as the “Top Sentences driving AI probability”? I’m glad you asked.

  • The Catholic Church also played a significant role in shaping private property rights in the Middle Ages.
  • In ancient China, the concept of private property was more limited, as land was owned by the state and was leased to individuals for use.
  • However, there is evidence to suggest that private property ownership has existed in some form in many ancient civilisations.
  • Although it’s difficult to trace the precise history of private property ownership before ancient Greece, the concept of private property has evolved over time and has varied widely among different societies.
  • It regulated the transfer of property and established rules for inheritance.

So these ordinary sentences written 5 or more years ago are flagged as AI.

The US Constitution

On a site I found to understand what parameters AI considers, I found this example—the Constitution of the United States of America was flagged as having AI content. I knew those geezers were ahead of their time, but I didn’t realise how far. This is even more amazing when one considers that electricity hadn’t even yet been invented.

But Why?

AI looks for statistically probable patterns. This translates into any content written with proper grammar and diverse word choice. In practice—the habits of a decent writer.

I’m not going to belabour this issue, but I want to raise a big red flag.

To complicate matters more, they have AI applications that promise to un-AI your AI. So there’s that.

First Beta Reader

Posted in Art, Artificial Intelligence, Awakening, Book, ChatGPT, Claude, Cover Art, Dall-E, Generative AI, Hemo Sapiens, Hemo Sapiens: Awakening, WritingTagged , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

I’ve just received my first Beta feedback from Hemo Sapiens: Awakening. I’ve hired three readers and engaged two, so I’ve got more to go.

As I wrote recently, I’ve been using AI to review my work, and I’ve been waiting for flesh and blood humans to give me their opinions.

My Beta reader is Enrico B from South Africa. My next reader is from the UK. I found them both on Fiverr.com, a site I’ve successfully used for music collaboration in the past. Although your results may vary, it’s a generally inexpensive way to get quality results. I hired Doni from Indonesia to design my title and subtitle.

Judge the quality for yourself. I happen to like it. I was going to commission the rest of the book cover, but I opted to do that myself.

Enrico provided me with a summary report as well as an annotated markup of my manuscript. Beta reading is not developmental editing or copyediting, so I wasn’t expecting line edits, but he did provide commentary on most chapters. In my case, his focus was on pacing and adding narration to fast-paced dialogue exchanges. In most cases, he advised my to slow my roll, but I’ll wait to see what the next reader writes. My style is rather curt and quick, and perhaps Enrico wants to savour a bit more. I feel that his advice is constructive. I just don’t know how much I’ll implement—probably at least a little.

One Thousand Words

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My target goal for writing is about 1,000 words per day. It’s a goal I hit way more often than not. On a good day, I can reach 2,500 or more.

As a reference, I write in Word with pages formatted for a 6 x 9 form factor, so a page holds about 200 words, which equates 1,000 words to about 5 pages. Not too shabby. It puts 60,000 words at around 300 pages or 50,000 words — a small novel—at around 250.

Doing some more maths, at 1,000 words a page, one can ostensibly write a 60,000 word novel in about 2 months. Not bad, right?

You still need more time for editing, revisions, and so on, so 3 months per book of this size gets you 4 books a year. If you are writing tiny novels or novellas, then you might be able to double this. I ‘m not sure how sustainable this is, but maths doesn’t care about sustainability.

Some people think they can game the system and produce a novel a day with AI. The truth is that they can. The other truth is that the output will most likely suck. If you actually read the material critically, a person could not likely publish a book a day. A piss-poor book a week would probably be a challenge. A book a month or so might be within range — even more achievable for shorter fare.

This might be someone’s goal, but it’s not mine. My interest in writing to to write. It’s not about quantity or even commerce. My writing is not my livelihood. It’s an art. I’ve seen so many videos on YouTube given advice how to write and sell more books. Usually, this involved researching the marketplace and determining what’s hot. Is mystery hot this month? Write a mystery book. Need some ideas for books? AI will help.

I guess I just don’t come from that position. I watched a video the other day with a woman switching from offering low-content books on Amazon to some other business model. Her entire modus operandi is to make money online. Myself, I felt sorry for her. I know that two-thirds of people dislike their jobs, so she’s in good company. By that I mean, she might as well just pick some random money-making job because it’s probably as stupid as whatever else she’d be doing. The question is whether it’s worth it.

For me, I’ll stick with writing at least 1,000 words a day with the occasional doubling. Hopefully, I sell some books along the way. Time will tell.

AI Writing

Posted in Artificial Intelligence, Book, ChatGPT, Claude, Generative AI, Hemo Sapiens, Video, Writing, YouTuberTagged , , , , , , , Leave a comment

I use AI for copyediting, but I don’t quite understand the use case for using at as a writing tool. The gist is that the AI can brainstorm ideas for books, chapters, characters, and so on. In fact, once I was conversing with ChatGPT about some philosophical socio-political topics, and it suggested that it would make a good book idea. I asked it to elaborate, and it gave me more ideas. These ideas didn’t particularly ‘click’, but I was intrigued.

The AI suggested something in the mystery / thriller vein, not particular my genre. I asked about setting and time. It recommended London, New York, or Tokyo. I asked about time, and it suggested Victorian England or future Tokyo.

The problem is that I felt it would be an interesting exercise on an intellectual level, but I had not emotional interest, so I didn’t pursue it. If I did have an emotional investment, I feel that I’d already have had the idea.

The video below is a YouTuber I follow. His schtick is writing fiction (and more) with generative AI—tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and more. Here he discusses creating outlines (for Plotters) with ChatGPT.

Although he maintains a day job to pay his bills, he earns money through his writing and his social media presence. This is where I get lost.

If I am a driven writer—I suppose the operative being ‘driven’—, I already have an idea. I know on a high level what I want to say, where I an set, who the key characters are, and so on. Why would I need AI. As I mentioned above, in an edge case, I didn’t know, but it wasn’t my idea in the first place. I suppose I could have whipped the AI into writing it for me, but why? I suppose I could do the exercise just to see where it went, but this would not only NOT be my writing, it would (and did) distract from what I am passionate to write about.

And, yes, he can still use AI as an idea generator, and he can tweak the prose it outputs, but the question is still why? Isn’t that the challenge of writing—to have a beginning and end in mind and just want to connect those dots with story?

I have an unfinished book still on the backburner where I had a theme and a beginning, so my plan was to write from stream of consciousness and see where it took me. As it happened, the ending became wishy-washy, so I stopped to rethink where I wanted in to end. I decided that the ending wasn’t bad; it was just anticlimactic and would make a better beginning for a sequel. Now I needed an impactful ending. And some of the middle needs shoring up.

I took a break from this book and focused my attention on the Hemo Sapiens universe. I know not only what I want to do for at least four books, I have space to explore beyond this. Why would I need AI to give me ideas? Once I am satisfied with these books, I’ll return to my original one with more writing experience under my belt, so it’s win-win.

If there comes a time where I have to rely on AI to generate writing ideas, I think it will be time to exit this hobby.

Neuromancer

Posted in Artificial Intelligence, Awakening, Book, ChatGPT, Dall-E, Generative AI, hemo sapiens, Hemo Sapiens, Hemo Sapiens: Awakening, Sci-Fi, WritingTagged , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

William Gibson coined the term ‘cyberspace’ in his book Neuromancer. Just the opening sentence informs the reader to expect something different.

“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”

William Gibson, Neuromancer

In this book, Gibson is poetic and florid. I decided to task ChatGPT to rephrase a paragraph I wrote in Hemo Sapiens: Awakening to follow the style of Gibson.

I shared this paragraph:

The Deputy Chief Inspector starts her day at her polished wooden desk, perusing emails whilst sipping hot morning tea. The sharp aroma fills her nostrils. The fluorescent office lighting hides nothing. Except for some personal photos, her office looks like an austerity challenge. The absence of personal effects betrays her personality.

ChatGPT rendered this:

In the sterile dance of fluorescent light, the Deputy Chief Inspector’s day unfolds. This unforgiving light, a stark mimic of daylight, strips the room of shadows, laying bare the austerity of her workspace. It’s a realm where the polished wooden desk becomes a stage for the mundane ritual of morning emails, and where the walls, devoid of adornment except for a few personal photos, echo the unspoken ethos of restraint.

Amidst this, her morning tea stands as a solitary rebellion. Its steam, a curling serpent of warmth in the chill of artificial light, carries with it an aroma sharp enough to slice through the monochrome of her surroundings. Each sip is a fleeting escape, a momentary immersion in sensory richness that contrasts starkly with the barren office landscape. The tea’s heat whispers of a world beyond these walls, a reminder of life’s subtle flavors amidst the unyielding glare of fluorescent reality. In this space, where the lighting reveals all but understands nothing, the tea becomes not just a beverage, but a quiet testament to the hidden depths beneath her pragmatic exterior.

You’ll notice straight away that my writing is more concise. When I write in 51 words, he writes (by AI proxy) in 181. Mine is 28% of his.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the poetry of the longer form. I just don’t think like that unless I force myself, and then it comes off as stilted or pretentious. My preference is a more direct, terse writing style over the verbose. Perhaps, I’m of a different era. In the end, I compromise.

When I ask AI to critique my prose, a common response to to provide more sensory inputs. In this case, these are represented by her desk, polished and wooden, no less. And she’s sipping hot morning tea—not just a drink, but tea; not just tea, but hot tea, morning tea; and she’s sipping. And this tea has aroma. It’s sharp. So, I’ve got a visual (tea), a tactile (hot), and an olfactory (aroma). I’ve got no auditory or gustatory cues, but I might have.

My preference is to describe as little as possible to allow readers to form their own impressions. This is even more important for characters. On balance, I don’t personally care about the sex, gender, or race of my characters, but I share clues anyway. For race, I might be somewhat obvious as in Hemo Sapiens: Awakening by naming a character Ravi Chandrasekar. It’s fairly obvious that this is an male with heritage from the Indian subcontinent, though it says nothing of his preferred gender.

I might mention height or physique, a moustache or spectacles, a lisp or a stammer, but in the end if a reader wants to image that person as black or white or brown or whatever, I’m not affecting that much. Naming a character Maria instead of Marie sends subtle hints, but it’s not overpowering.

It the case of the Hemo Sapiens, they have blue eyes. Probability would lead one to believe they are Caucasian whites, but this doesn’t preclude something else. That’s not for me to decide. In my head, they are European whites, but I am not going to beat the reader over the head with this trivia.

I’m rambling now. Now read the faux-Gibson passage. It is much more immersive and experiential. If that’s your aim, then go for it. No harm, no foul.

You may prefer one over the other. I say they are simply different, and it depends on the intent of both the reader and the writer.

BONUS

Wanting to generate a featured image for this post, I used Dall-E. I’ve never had Dall-E talk back to me. It usually just renders what I’ve asked. This time, note its response. 🤣

Do you have a writing style preference? Does your writing style veer from your reading style? Let me know in the comments.

Restructuring with GenAI

Posted in Artificial Intelligence, Book, ChatGPT, Claude, Generative AI, hemo sapiens, WritingTagged , , , , , Leave a comment

I’ve been working with Claude to help structure my Hemo Sapiens novel. Essentially, I am asking for advice about logically grouping and naming chapters. This was my first mistake.

Firstly, I asked the AI to ignore my chapters and headings and to tell me what it suggested. It took about ninety per cent from me and offered me different chapter titles about half the time. In one case, it offered my two titles for the same chapter. Secondly, it re9organised some of my chapters—and no, it would not work sequenced as suggested. File this under ‘Order Matters’.

I made most of the changes and asked it to review it again and make more suggestions, if appropriate. I also noted that the chapters it suggested were of wildly different lengths—some as short as a paragraph—, so I asked for consolidation tips.

Claude agreed with my assessment, so it recommended combining two short chapters, say, 1 and 9, together—and why not 7 and 13 while you’re at it. Let’s just say that Claude has no common sense.

I do like a lot of the advice Claude and ChatGPT gives, but you really have to be careful. I swear these guys have a severe psychotropic drugs problem when they’re offline, and it’s affecting their performance.