Fail, fail, fail, fail, succeed

Monthly Archives: March 2023

And Away We Go!

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Completely immersed in the fourth draft of my novel here, so not many posts lately. But when I’m not thinking about writing, I’m pretty much consumed by following the current Chat GPT models that have caught everyone off guard – including their designers.

The latest development is too good (or bad) not to comment on. Apparently OpenAI’s current iteration, 4.0, released in the last ten days or so, has surprised it’s creators by HIRING a human to allow it to pass a Captcha. When said human asked if it was a bot, it replied that it was a blind person.

That’s right. Unprompted, the AI posed as a human to achieve its goal – something it had not been programmed to do. In point of fact, its designers are consistently surprised at its capabilities.

Looks like the guardrails are down, folks. Buckle up, ‘cuz it’s going to be a bumpy ride!

Filling In the Dark Spaces

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“The best writing, for me, sustains a controlled bewilderment, and my effort to de-bewilder gets the story lodged somewhere inside me. It doesn’t have to be a total, all-the-time bewilderment, but just enough here and there to keep my interest up. If the controls are compelling, then the difficulty of the text just encourages me to participate in the creative process. Reading to me is a creative act. If I’m allowed to fill in the opaque spots with my own light, my own inferences, I will—and the reading experience will stick because the story becomes a part of me. Some of the best books I’ve ever read will be completely different the second time I read them. It’s then that I realize I’d written into them all kinds of things that weren’t necessarily there in the surface text. The debris we encounter has the capacity to spin off all kinds of personal associations, heteroglossia. Whole other stories get made in the dark spaces.”

– David Ryan

Terrifying Fun. Yeah, That’s It

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“When it comes to fiction, the only projects I want to commit to are the ones that, like a million-piece Lego model dumped out on the floor, seem dizzyingly impossible to put together. It’s only fun if it’s terrifying, if it’s going to take all you have to get it done — and knowing it, and you, still might fail. It’s never about the reception, it’s about the craft.”

– Nathan Englander