Authors Electric

ChatGPT in action. Photo by Matheus Bertelli: https://www.pexels.com/ photo/laptop-office-working-internet-16094045/ Katherine Roberts’s  experiment with ChatGPT  got me thinking. As yet this AI writing tool can in seconds produce reams of prose, matching the prompts given, in a way that no one, adult or child, will ever want to read. So far, so good. (Or satisfyingly bad.) But any complacency on the part of genuine flesh and blood authors is misplaced. As Katherine and others have pointed out, this bot learns quickly. We can’t rule out that, sooner or later, given enough original material from an inventive editor, say, it will be able to create a gripping, heart-warming tale with all the right kind of characters, and dialogue that doesn’t make your ears bleed. Something actually readable. Publishing houses will save heaps of dosh by eliminating authors altogether from the equation and we writers will, er, be written out of history.  An alarming prospect, and not just fo...

I was looking through my Amazon orders the other day. One of my orders fell over – payment failed, apparently. Thanks so much, Amazon, for refusing to accept my VISA credit card after many years of loyal service! Although it wasn’t VISA that was declined – I had a few more weeks to go for that, so in anticipation I’d added a Mastercard to Amazon for future payments and made a test purchase (any excuse for another book). Except that the Halifax had cancelled the Mastercard without actually bothering to ask or inform me!  So I go into my local Halifax – only to be told that the card no longer existed on their system. At all. They cancelled it because I hadn’t replied to a message I never received. Of course, I could apply for a brand new card which would take around 30 minutes … 30 minutes? I went home and decided to get an American Express card instead which took me all of 5 minutes online.  Anyway, having made several test-purchases of books – these things just have to be don...

I grew up reading Louise May Alcott. I still have copies of all her books: dog-eared, broken-backed, and beloved. On the rare occasions when I get sick, it’s a toss-up between Alcott and Jane Austen as comfort reading. One of Alcott’s books, Eight Cousins , features a white character (Annabel) who marries the “highly satisfactory Chinaman” (Fun See). I remember the scene distinctly but it never affected me particularly until I read Maxine Hong Kingston’s response. Fun See was still exotically “other,” with his long fingernails and queue, his yellow skin and peculiar manners. That’s me, Kingston thought. She realized that she would never be a March sister. “I felt like I was popped out of her writing,” she said. “Out of American literature.” Hua Hsu, “The Making of Americans” in The New Yorker, 8/15 June 2020 The Other in the Room Maxine Hong Kingston Somehow, Kingston managed to pop herself back into American literature. She mined her own life and the st...