Publishing

Book Banning in Britain

Posted by

0

There is an article in today’s Daily Telegraph by Ben Lawrence which startled me. We’re all familiar with book banning in the US, the EU and elsewhere, but in the UK? (Ben is Commissioning Editor of the Telegraph.)

He said, “We are banning books again, and this time it appears to be a consequence of ill-informed hysteria. The Index on Censorship discovered that 28 of the 53 British school librarians they polled had been asked to remove books – many of which were LGBTQ+ titles – from their shelves. It appears that pressure had come from parents and, on some occasions, teachers too. For a society that’s meant to be modern and tolerant, these findings are depressing: the culture wars are failing to subside, and we seem to think nothing of using our children’s education as an ideological battleground.

That battle has been raging in America for several years. In March, the American Library Association reported that 2023 was an all-time peak for such censorship. I imagine that much of the opprobrium launched at titles such as All Boys Aren’t Blue by George M Johnson – the memoir of a young, queer, black activist – was led by Republican-Christian zealots. In Britain, however, the root causes are harder to deduce. Certainly, our national disease of knee-jerk reaction is partly to blame. According to the Index on Censorship, one worker was asked to remove all gay-related content from the school library due to a single complaint about a single book.

Yet the depressing thing is that we have long been intent on cutting off children from literature and its “dangers”, ignorant of the fact that books are crucial to young people’s development. The current situation in the UK smacks of the dark days of the 1980s, when Section 28 legislated that no local authority could “promote homosexuality”. In the line of fire was a ridiculously innocuous picture book from Denmark called Jenny Lives with Eric and Martin, which featured a small girl with two dads, and now looks about as morally corrupting as a Cliff Richard fan convention.

John Clarke, head of Haringey’s Community Information with a copy of Jenny Lives with Eric and Martin in September 1986

I sometimes doubt that those who are quick to show their outrage are even concerned about the morals of Britain’s children; it’s more about their own fear of the unfamiliar. Some books represent a world that exists outside their own limited boundaries, which they therefore can’t control. This was the case in the 1980s: Section 28 felt, in part, like the natural product of a society that had failed to come to terms with the Aids epidemic.

But what those who try to ban books consistently fail to realise is that any attempt to arrest social change will ultimately, in a functioning democracy, be doomed. Perhaps in China, where there are edicts against books that fight against communist values – Alice in Wonderland, for example, is banned for its anthropomorphisation of animals – a suppressed book really can stay buried. But in most places, the allure of a title in samizdat will always ensure its longevity.

For censors have always proved to be on the wrong side of history. Those who fettered the genius of James Joyce and banned Ulysses on the grounds of “obscenity now” look like narrow-minded killjoys. As for Lady Chatterley’s Lover by DH Lawrence? For what it’s worth, I’m still not convinced that it’s great literature, but its depiction of sex was a necessary step forward for British society, and the end of its ban a crucial catalyst for making England a more tolerant place.

It’s telling that one of the few authors who refused to defend Lady Chatterley during the 1960 trial at the Old Bailey was Enid Blyton, an author whose work now often looks mean-spirited and bigoted. In fact, Blyton’s books were banned from my own school library in the 1980s – along with Judy Blume’s progressive adolescent novel Forever – which just goes to show how times change.

And yet, although this news from the Index of Censorship is worrying, I still feel hopeful. Curious minds will always seek out good writing, however long it takes them to find it. Book banning may be a global industry – but the freedom to read will always prevail.”

Business Rule for Freelance Writers

Posted by

0

There is an article by C. Hope Clark dated March 29, 2023 which will interest those of you who are freelance writers or are thinking to go in that direction.

C. Hope Clark is the founder of FundsforWriters.com, noted by Writer’s Digest for its 101 Best Websites for Writers for 20+ years. She is a freelance writer, motivational speaker, and award-winning author of 16 mysteries.

C. Hope Clark

Ms Clark describes the 25/50/25 rule of freelance writing. “You’ve been submitting to a few places, and you’ve published a few pieces. This freelance writing business is intriguing, but you’d love taking it from hobby level to professional, so what is the answer?

Submit more often? Of course. Your goal is to increase your acceptance rate, and that takes more submissions. Let’s say you do this for months, and you have some acceptances under your belt, but the income isn’t quite what you hoped it would be.

You do have a few regular markets that provide steady income. It might not be the best income, but it’s reliable. They’ll take almost anything you write, so you keep sending them pieces. They take up a major chunk of your time when you stay insanely busy writing, researching, and pitching. So busy, yet you can’t break the ceiling of mediocre pay.

Let’s visit the rule of 25/50/25 when it comes to pitching your talents.

The First 25

Twenty-five represents a percentage of your submissions. This first 25 are those lovely, easy markets you know you can pitch to and get accepted most of the time. These are the markets you are close to, most familiar with, and rely upon for money. They come through for you time and time again.

These markets are the easiest to get attached to and the hardest to say no to. They become all that you write for because they feel safe. Your rejection rate is minimal, and you waste little time on pitches that say no. While cranking out 100 of them might gain you an elementary level income, what if you want more than that?

These piece-of-cake markets are why your income is stagnant. They should comprise no more than 25 percent of your work. Let them give you some security but don’t let them consume your life such that you remain stuck at that level.

You want to be more than that.

The Second 50

Fifty represents markets that are much more difficult, and you expect to be rejected almost as much or more so than accepted. You feel you have a chance at these, and they usually pay more.

Remember, your goal is not only to gain in income, but in reputation as well. Your name is money as your portfolio builds. This 50 percent category should comprise your meat and potatoes part of your day. To make the math simple, think of a 40-hour work week. Researching, pitching, and writing for these markets should eat up half of your hours.

That sounds scary. That’s a lot of time to invest into a 50-50 chance of being accepted, but the payback for landing these is so much better than sticking to the first 25 percent. Not only are the checks usually larger, but once you land one, you have a connection to go back to. Then you have another. Then three or four or more.

You might be amazed at how you hunger more for these projects than the original, low-paying ones that got you started. These make you feel more alive, more talented, and hopefully, more financially comfortable.

The Third 25

These are the dream markets. These are the top-shelf opportunities you’d love to land but were too afraid to pitch. They now are on your calendar. You study them and believe you could grow to be as good as half of the submissions, but to run with that crew feels awful intimidating. The rejection rate surely has to be 70, 80, or 90 percent of the time.

But that also means an acceptance rate of 10, 20, or even 30 percent.

What if you won one of these markets? You’d dance, scream, buy yourself a wonderful dinner with drinks, and pat yourself on the back that you broke through that wall and proved you had some modicum of talent.

Why not try to make it happen again?

Then again?

Out of your 40-hour week, that’s 10 hours of stepping up your game. It doesn’t ruin your schedule, and it has way better odds than winning the lottery. With a quarter of your time devoted to what you feel is a gold-plated world, a level market you’d love to spend most of your time writing for, you haven’t shirked your other writing duties.

The Surprising Results

If you are diligent in this 25/50/25 search for freelance work, you spend a quarter of your day on the easy stuff, half on the difficult yet achievable, and a quarter on the next-to-impossible.

Stick with it for several months, long enough to pitch and receive replies . . . hopefully with contracts. The journey has to be long enough to see the big picture.

The surprising results are that you become magnetized to climbing the ladder to the more lucrative markets. With each acceptance, you unknowingly take another step higher. Before long, you find yourself sliding along the 25/50/25 scale.”

Best Seller List

Posted by

0

There is an article on the Literature News website, 10 March 2024, written by ‘Manish’ which confirms my long-held suspicions about the New York Times Best Seller List.

“When bestseller book lists are curated based on editorial whims rather than objective sales figures, the transparency and reliability of such rankings are compromised, leading to challenges for readers seeking genuine insights into popular literary tastes. In an ideal scenario, bestseller lists serve as valuable tools for readers to discover widely acclaimed books and gauge the preferences of their peers. However, when these lists are influenced by subjective judgments rather than concrete sales data, the distinction between truly popular books and those merely promoted or favoured by a select group of editors becomes blurred.

“This phenomenon undermines the credibility of bestseller lists and hampers readers’ ability to make informed decisions about their reading choices. Books that receive prominent placement on these lists due to editorial biases may garner unwarranted attention and overshadow lesser-known titles that may be more deserving of recognition based on their actual sales and reader reception. As a result, readers may miss out on discovering hidden gems that resonate with their interests and preferences.

“Now, let’s reveal the moot point of this article. In recent years, the New York Times Bestsellers List has come under scrutiny for its alleged editorial bias and lack of transparency. The controversy has sparked a heated debate within the publishing industry, with some authors and publishers questioning the list’s credibility and relevance. At the heart of the controversy is the claim that the New York Times Bestsellers List is not a true reflection of book sales but rather an editorial product subject to the editors’ preferences and biases. Critics argue that the list does not accurately represent the actual sales figures of their books, suggesting that the list is not a reliable indicator of a book’s popularity or success.

“In response to these claims, the New York Times maintains that the list is an editorial product and that they have the right to make decisions about which books to include and which to exclude. They argue that the list is not solely based on sales numbers but also takes into account other factors, such as the quality of the writing and the book’s overall impact.

“It’s absolutely ridiculous that the New York Times has the audacity to call their list a “Bestseller List” when it’s clearly nothing more than a biased, subjective, and editorial-driven selection of books. It’s a slap in the face to authors and readers alike, who expect a bestseller list to be based on actual sales numbers and merit, not the whims of a few editors. The fact that the NYT openly admits to considering their list an “editorial product” and claims the right to include or exclude books based on factors like “quality of writing” and “overall impact” is a complete joke. Who are they to decide what constitutes quality or impact? It’s nothing more than an elitist, self-serving attempt to control the narrative and push their own agenda. If the New York Times wants to maintain any credibility, it should stop masquerading its list as a “Bestseller List” and rename it something more accurate, like “NYT Editorial Subjective Choices.” It’s time for them to own up to their biased, subjective, and editorial-driven selection process and stop misleading readers with their so-called “Bestseller List.”

“Evidently, the controversy has led to calls for greater transparency in the selection process for the New York Times Bestsellers List. Some authors and publishers have demanded that the New York Times provide more information about the criteria used to select books for the list and the data sources used to compile it.

“The debate has also highlighted the role of other bestseller lists, such as those published by Amazon and other retailers. These lists are based on actual sales data and are seen by some as more objective and reliable indicators of a book’s popularity.

“In conclusion, the controversy surrounding the New York Times Bestsellers List is an ongoing debate that raises important questions about the role of editorial judgment in the selection of books for bestseller lists and the need for transparency in the selection process. As the debate continues, whether the New York Times will respond to the criticisms and change how it compiles its Bestsellers List remains to be seen.”

Writing about Sex

Posted by

0

The recent edition of the Sunday Telegraph had an article by Claire Allfree “The art of writing about sex (and getting it right)”

Ms Allfree is a freelance journalist specialising in arts and entertainment.

Bottoms up: an 18th-century painting of Jupiter and Io by Edouard Gautier-D’Agoty (after Correggio)

Ms Allfree writes:

“My friends joke that I’ve become a pornographer,” says Lucy Roeber. “I haven’t, of course. But the English don’t know how else to describe a magazine about sex. So we joke about it instead.”

Later this month, Roeber and her deputy editor, Saskia Vogel, will publish the first edition of the revamped and relaunched Erotic Review. During the late 1990s, the Erotic Review was a high-end, lavishly illustrated print magazine, but for the past 14 years, it has languished as a little-read online newsletter. Now, at a moment when sex parties and orgies seem to be all the rage, it will be back to its pomp as a physical product, available from bookshops and published three times a year.

Each edition will include a guest art curator, while highlights from the inaugural publication include an essay on the blossoming popularity of romance fiction, a photo sequence from the performance artist Esben Weile Kjaer celebrating the art of the kiss, an explicit short story about a porn shoot from the veteran contributor Michel Faber, and a Chekhovian portrait of marital desire from the Welsh novelist Cynan Jones. Where the original at times felt like a magazine for overgrown schoolboys (Boris Johnson was a contributor), this new iteration feels like a magazine for grown-ups. “If we were going to bring it back, we had to take it seriously,” says Roeber. “But I also think in 2024 the audience is really shifting. Today, young people in particular are much more open and curious.”

The Erotic Review has a chequered history. First published in 1995 by the Erotic Print Society as a pamphlet featuring articles about sex and desire, in the late 1990s it became synonymous with Rowan Pelling. She became the editor in 1997, at the age of 28, and, over the next six years, transformed it into an 84-page publication with a circulation of 30,000, while attracting writers such as Barry Humphries, Auberon Waugh and DBC Pierre.

Under her reign, the sensibility was distinctly British, which is to say that sex was either filtered through a heavy dose of irony or with a hefty side helping of cheesy end-of-pier smut. The art tended to feature cheeky shots of posteriors and bosoms, while pieces included meditations on “the best nipples in town”. Pelling even cheerily encouraged her female staff to wear stockings in the office.

Vogel, a 42-year-old Berlinbased author and translator who interned at the magazine under Pelling, remembers a prevailing obsession with “nurses and spanked bottoms”.

“The British have this real thing about vice and corporal punishment,” she says. “I loved my time there, but I did feel that perhaps the magazine could benefit from a different perspective.”

In 2004, it was taken over by the media company that produces Penthouse, and after changing hands again several times it became an online magazine in 2010. A descent into obscurity followed, despite it being lovingly maintained by its founder, Jamie Maclean – now retired. It feels a bold decision to bring it back as a print edition at a time when the cultural winds are blowing firmly towards the digital sphere. But Roeber and Vogel are upbeat. “It feels important that it should itself be an object of desire, something you can hold and collect,” says Roeber.

Anyway, they argue, there’s not much space in the mainstream for serious writing about sex. “If something gets labelled as edgy or erotic, it tends to be untouchable by the mainstream,” says Vogel, pointing to Rebecca Rukeyser’s personal essay about the curious internet porn phenomenon of “goon caves” (an online subculture in which men saturate themselves with porn while simultaneously practising abstinence), which had previously been rejected by several American journals.

Yet today’s cultural climate is very different from the lad culture of the 1990s. How does a magazine that once featured a photo spread of its female staff in their underwear navigate a post-MeToo world? “We are certainly moving away from the heterosexual male gaze that we’ve all been used to,” says Roeber. “That’s not to say we don’t have heterosexual men in the magazine, because we must. But there are lots of ways of talking about desire.”

All the same, our new hypervigilance when it comes to issues of consent and power has the potential to make writing about sex a bit of a minefield, particularly if you are a heterosexual man.

“I wanted to write a story about the male gaze and how women can change the power dynamic,” says Michel Faber, whose smartly subversive contribution, “Not Just Anybody”, about a porn shoot, reckons directly with this issue. “But it took me ages to think of a story that wouldn’t be guaranteed to attract condemnation from people who are not interested in art, but very interested in quarrelling with strangers on the internet.” Vogel agrees that “there is potentially something a lot more fraught about writing about heterosexual sex”. She points to the American writer Garth Greenwell, who combines the literary with explicit homosexual eroticism. He has said that with his most recent novel, Cleanness, he wanted to see if he could write something that was “100 per cent pornographic and 100 per cent high art”.

Most pornography, however, dispenses with the art bit, which is a shame, according to Roeber. “Porn is incredibly effective at arousal, but it’s very one-note,” she says. “We have a guest curator for each issue and the aim is to open our eyes to different sorts of images, and different ways of exploring desire through art.”

But what about the prudes? In Britain, we tend to deflect our profound cultural reserve when it comes to matters of sex through a nudge-nudge, wink-wink larkiness that Roeber argues previous incarnations of the Erotic Review knowingly played up to. “We are making the magazine much more international in terms of contributors, partly to sidestep this Anglo-Saxon moral awkwardness,” she says.

“As a culture, we are certainly very embarrassed about romance,” agrees the Scottish poet John Burnside, who is contributing an essay about the eroticisation of travel to the second issue. “We are the only country in the world, for instance, which gives out a Bad Sex Award, much to the amazement of many countries across the world. How we write about sex says a lot about the culture, about how relaxed and imaginative it is.”

So, what makes good erotic fiction? Vogel points to a couple of sentences in Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho. “It’s a moment of anticipation. Patrick Bateman [the novel’s sociopathic fantasist narrator] is lying on the bed, waiting for a couple of women to arrive.” The novel’s extreme violence is considered so controversial, some countries sell it with a shrink-wrapped cover. Is she saying the best sex writing is transgressive? “For me, it’s where the mind wanders,” she says simply. Burnside, who thinks a lot of so-called classic writing about sex – Anaïs Nin, Henry Miller – is “boring”, believes that some of the best erotic writing pivots on the unconsummated. “These days, I look down on old men writing about voluptuous women. I’m much more interested in the almost. The look across a room that comes to nothing.”

In essence, Roeber believes there is a loosening of “moral correctness” around sex and art that makes 2024 the perfect time for an Erotic Review relaunch. In fact, “I’m not sure this incarnation of the magazine could have existed 50 years ago.”

The first issue of the relaunched ‘Erotic Review’ will be published on March 11; ermagazine.com

Let me know what you think.

Feedback

Posted by

0

Harry Bingham of Jericho Writers had this to say about feedback in last Friday’s email:

“One thing that mildly panics me when I offer advice via Feedback Friday is this: What if my advice is totally wrong?
There are some areas where I don’t have those worries. Sometimes, for example, I give specific editorial advice on a particular passage.
For example: “Your long second sentence would be better split over two sentences.” “The image of the X in this passage is interesting but currently a bit confused.” “You could lose word count here and still convey what you need to convey.”
In all those instances, I’d mostly expect any competent editor to agree with me, or at the very least to understand my concern. Exact strategies for dealing with the concern are legion, of course, but the editorial process is basically the same three steps, repeated endlessly: Figure out if you have a bad feeling; Figure out where that feeling is coming from; Figure out what to do about it. Those three steps are the same whether you’re a paid third-party editor, or a free beta-reader, or just you re-reading and re-editing your own work.
Obviously, the editorial process would be a bit pointless without that third and final step, but the first two steps are often the ones that feel transformative. “Oh, gosh, you’re right! Now I know why I felt uneasy and I can already see several different solutions all of which could work.”
Likewise, if I’m talking about something very brief and self-contained – an elevator pitch, for example – I feel well-qualified to offer feedback. Coming of age story in the world of Shakespeare’s Macbeth? That’s a wonderful, saleable pitch, and I’d pick that book up in a bookshop. Near-future eco-disaster novel for adults involving mermaids, flying killer robots and a talking rabbit? Um. Maybe not quite so good. Even here, it’s hard to be confident quite what I’m criticising.
If I come across a less-than-compelling elevator pitch, is it the pitch that’s at fault (a simple fix)? Or is it that the book itself doesn’t work (a terrifying prospect)? Because of this uncertainty, I try to proceed gently but I do tend to trust my gut feeling about the material in front of me. Other reasonable people might disagree, but I’d expect my views to be echoed by most genuinely competent judges. (Though, having said that, I’m meaner than most. Whenever I’ve given feedback alongside agents, I’m almost always pickier than they are. I’m Simon Cowell, minus the botox.)
Then we get to some more delicate areas. In last week’s Feedback Friday, we looked at very brief plot synopses. Thar’s a super-useful exercise for any writer because it forces them to consider the top-level shape of their plot as well as the causal unity of it. (What do I mean by causal unity? Simply that most novels don’t work if it’s one thing, followed by another thing, followed by another disconnected thing. We want the various events to flow, seemingly inevitably, from the one event that incites everything.) In those cases where I was underwhelmed by a synopsis, what exactly should the author deduce? That the synopsis is poor? That the book’s basic plot structure is poor? Or just that Harry didn’t like something, as a matter of his own personal taste? Honestly, in a lot of cases, I think any one of those three explanations are possible.
A short synopsis isn’t much to go on and a certain humility is in order from anyone offering advice. Much the same goes for any criticism of a passage where context is significant. So let’s say for example, I’m not that impressed by a passage where Princess Kara faces the dark Lord Mephilo. Suppose I think that Princess K just wouldn’t be likely to say or do X, or that a particular emotional reaction feels awry, or something else of that sort. Well, is that because the passage isn’t convincing? Or because there’s backstory dealt with elsewhere in the book which makes those things explicable? Again, any sane editor just has to approach questions like these with humility. All you can do is note an uneasiness and let the author use that observation in any way that’s helpful. In the end, the responsibility is always yours, the author’s. The issue isn’t really whether you like what I, or some other editor, say. Often enough you won’t. But I want the mermaids! I insist on keeping Pep the Talking Rabbit! And fair enough: this is your book, not mine. The question is always, “Is this comment useful?” Does it illuminate something? Do you the author get an insight that you personally find useful and actionable? Authorial responsibility never changes, no matter how far you go. Comments from me via Feedback Friday? Comments from an editorial buddy or beta reader? Detailed comments from a pro Jericho Writers editor following a read of your entire manuscript? Comments from an agent? From a publishing editor? From a copy editor who’s preparing your manuscript for publication? You must never let go. The manuscript remains yours. I literally don’t let a publisher change a comma without my approval.
When I’ve had copy editors who didn’t get my style, I’ve been through a whole 100,000+ word manuscript reversing the changes that have been made. It’s your book and no one else’s. Ever If a comment chimes, use it. If a comment doesn’t, disregard it. If a comment alerts you to a particular issue, but you want to deal with the issue in some way other than the one suggested, then go with your solution.
It’s your book.”

AI Wins Prize

Posted by

0

An article in today’s RTÉ website titled: “Japan literary laureate unashamed about using ChatGPT” caught my eye. There is no author contribution shown.

“The winner of Japan’s most prestigious literary award has acknowledged that about “5%” of her futuristic novel was penned by ChatGPT, saying generative AI had helped unlock her potential.

Since the 2022 launch of ChatGPT, an easy-to-use AI chatbot that can deliver an essay upon request within seconds, there have been growing worries about the impact on a range of sectors – books included.

Lauded by a judge for being “almost flawless” and “universally enjoyable”, Rie Kudan’s latest novel, “Tokyo-to Dojo-to” (“Sympathy Tower Tokyo”), claimed the biannual Akutagawa Prize yesterday.

Set in a futuristic Tokyo, the book revolves around a high-rise prison tower and its architect’s intolerance of criminals, with AI a recurring theme.

The 33-year-old author openly admitted that AI heavily influenced her writing process as well.

“I made active use of generative AI like ChatGPT in writing this book,” she told a ceremony following the winner’s announcement.

“I would say about 5% of the book quoted verbatim the sentences generated by AI.”

Outside of her creative activity, Ms Kudan said she frequently toys with AI, confiding her innermost thoughts that “I can never talk to anyone else about”.

ChatGPT’s responses sometimes inspired dialogue in the novel, she added.

Going forward, she said she wants to keep “good relationships” with AI and “unleash my creativity” in co-existence with it.

When contacted by AFP, the Society for the Promotion of Japanese Literature, the Akutagawa award’s organiser, declined to comment.

On social media, opinions were divided on Ms Kudan’s unorthodox approach to writing, with sceptics calling it morally questionable and potentially undeserving of the prize.

“So she wrote the book by deftly using AI … Is that talented or not? I don’t know,” one wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter.

But others celebrated her resourcefulness and the effort she put into experimenting with various prompts.

“So this is how the Akutagawa laureate uses ChatGPT – not to slack off but to ‘unleash creativity'”, another social media user wrote.

Titles that list ChatGPT as a co-author have been offered for sale through Amazon’s e-book self-publishing unit, although critics say the works are of poor quality.

British author Salman Rushdie told a press conference at the Frankfurt Book Fair in October that recently someone asked an AI writing tool to produce 300 words in his style.

“And what came out was pure garbage,” said the “Midnight’s Children” writer, to laughter from the audience.

The technology also throws up a host of potential legal problems.

Last year, John Grisham, Jodi Picoult and “Game of Thrones” author George RR Martin were among several writers who filed a class-action lawsuit against ChatGPT creator OpenAI over alleged copyright violation.

Along with the Authors Guild, they accused the California-based company of using their books “without permission” to train ChatGPT’s large language models, algorithms capable of producing human-sounding text responses based on simple queries, according to the lawsuit.”

From my point of view, the use of AI to produce literature must sort out the copyright problem. When that issue has been resolved, using AI to write, or co-write, books will be accepted as commonplace, legal and ethical. We human beings have always adopted new technology, even dangerous technology, having found the good in it.

Fighting AI

Posted by

1

There is an article in Monday’s issue of the Daily Telegraph concerning a lawsuit filed by the New York Times against Microsoft and Open AI that, on the face of it, is about imitating copyright news articles. But what is at stake is whether an artificial intelligence company could ‘train’ its software on the works of, say, Salman Rushdie, and then produce new Salmon Rushdi titles without paying the author any royalty. The article which bears the title “Silicon Valley’s mimicry machines are trying to erase authors” is written by Andrew Orlowski who is a technology journalist who writes a weekly Telegraph column every Monday. He founded the research network Think of X and previously worked for The Register. 

Andrew Orlowski

Orlowski says, “Silicon Valley reacts to criticism like a truculent toddler throwing its toys out of the pram. But acquiring a bit of humility and self-discipline may be just what the child needs most. 

So the US tech industry should regard a lawsuit filed last week as a great learning experience.

The New York Times last week filed a copyright infringement against Microsoft and Open AI. 

The evidence presented alleges that ChatGPT created near-identical copies of the Times’ stories on demand, without the user first paying a subscription or seeing any advertising on the Times’ site. 

ChatGPT “recites Times content verbatim, closely summarizes it, and mimics its expressive style”, the suit explains.

In other words, the value of the material that the publisher generates is entirely captured by the technology company, which has invested nothing in creating it.

This was exactly the situation that led to the creation of copyright in the Statute of Anne in 1710, which first established the legal right to copyright for an author. Then, it was the printing monopoly that was keeping all the dosh.

The concept of an author, a subjective soul who viewed the world in a unique way, really arrived with the Enlightenment.

Now, the nerds of Silicon Valley want to erase it again. Attempts to do just that have already made them richer than anything a Stationer’s Guild member could imagine.

“Microsoft’s deployment of Times-trained LLMs (Large Language Models) throughout its product line helped boost its market capitalization by trillions of dollars in the past year alone,” the lawsuit notes, adding that OpenAI’s value has shot from zero to $90bn. 

With Open AI’s ChatGPT models now built into so many Microsoft products, this is a mimicry engine built on a global scale.

More ominously, the lawsuit also offers an abundance of evidence that “these tools wrongly attribute false information to The Times”. The bots introduce errors that weren’t there in the first place, it claims. 

They “hallucinate”, to use the Cambridge Dictionary’s word of the year. Publishers who are anxious about the first concern – unauthorised reproduction – should be even more concerned about the second.

Would a publisher be happy to see their outlet’s name next to a ChatGPT News response that confidently asserts, for example, that Iran has just launched cruise missiles at US destroyers? Or at London? 

These are purely hypotheticals but being the newspaper that accidentally starts World War III is not something that can be good for the brand in the long run.

Some midwit pundits and academics portrayed the lawsuit merely as a tactical licensing gambit. 

This year both Associated Press and the German giant Axel Springer have both cut licensing deals with Open AI. The New York Times is just sabre rattling in pursuit of a better deal, so the argument goes.

In response to the lawsuit, OpenAI insisted it respects “the rights of content creators and owners and [is] committed to working with them to ensure they benefit from AI technology and new revenue models”.

However, the industry is worried about much more than money.

Take, for example, the fact that the models that underpin ChatGPT need only to hear a couple of seconds of your child’s voice to clone it authentically. AI does not need to return the next day to perfect their impression. After that, it has a free hand to do what it will with its newfound ability.

So, the economic value of a licensing deal is impossible to estimate beforehand. And once done, it cannot be undone. As one publishing technology executive puts it, “you can’t un-bake the cake”.

Previous innovations in reproduction, from the photocopier to Napster, were rather different beasts, as the entrepreneur and composer Ed Newton-Rex noted this week. Past breakthroughs were purely mechanical or technological changes. But this new generation of AI tools marry technology with knowledge.

“They only work *because* their developers have used that copyrighted content to train on,” Newton-Rex wrote on Twitter, since rebranded as X. (His former employer, Stability AI, is also being sued for infringement).

Publishers and artists are entitled to think that without their work, AI would be nothing. This is why the large AI operations – and the investors hoping to make a killing from them – should be getting very nervous. They have been negligent in ignoring the issue until now.

“Until recently, AI was a research community that enjoyed benign neglect from copyright holders who felt it was bad form to sue academics,” veteran AI journalist Timothy B Lee wrote recently on Twitter. “This gave a lot of AI researchers the mistaken impression that copyright law didn’t apply to them. “It doesn’t seem out of the question that AI companies could lose these cases catastrophically and be forced to pay billions to plaintiffs and rebuild their models from scratch.”

Would wipe-and-rebuild be such a bad thing?

Today’s generative AI is just a very early prototype. Engineers regard a prototype as a learning experience too: it’s there to be discarded.  Many more prototypes may be developed and thrown away until a satisfactory design emerges. A ground-up rebuild can in some cases be the best thing that can happen to a technology product. There’s certainly plenty of room for improvement with this new generation of AI models. 

A Stanford study of ChatGPT looking at how reliable the chatbot was when it came to medicine found that less than half (41 percent) of the responses to clinical conditions agreed with the known answer according to a consensus of physicians. The AI gave lethal advice 7 per cent of the time.

A functioning democracy needs original reporting and writing so that we all benefit from economic incentives for creativity. We must carry on that Enlightenment tradition of original expression. 

Some may find such arguments pompous and any piety from the New York Times difficult to swallow. But there are bigger issues at stake. 

A society that gives up on respect for individual expression, and chooses to worship a mimicry machine instead, probably deserves the fate that inevitably awaits.”

Collaboration: Novelists & AI?

Posted by

0

Debbie Urbanski has an article on the Lit Hub website dated December 8, 2023 in which she argues that novelists should embrace artificial intelligence.

Debbie Urbanski is a writer, nature lover, and human whose stories and essays have been published widely in such places as The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, The Best American Experimental Writing, The Sun, Granta, Orion, and Junior Great Books. A recipient of a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Award, she can often be found hiking with her family in the hills south of Syracuse, New York.

Debbie Urbanski

Debbie says: “Let’s imagine, for the purpose of this essay, that the following statement is true: An AI writes a novel.

Actually, forget about the imagining. This is already happening. Today’s AIs—large language models (LLMs) specifically, like GPT-4—can write. If you’ve glanced at the headlines this year, you probably know this. They can write papers for high school students, they can write bad poetry, they can write sentences, they can write paragraphs, and they can write novels.

The problem is, for now, the creative writing that LLMs produce isn’t that great.

To demonstrate this point, I recently gave GPT-4 a few lines from my novel that describe a post-human world. Then I asked it to complete the paragraph. Here’s what it wrote:

The woods seemed to inhale, drawing in its myriad of lifeforms, coalescing into a pulsing organism. The gurgling creek was its veins, the trees its lungs, the moss and ferns, its skin. This realm thrived on its own rhythm, deaf to the clockwork of man-made time. Creatures great and small, predators and prey, living in an intricate ballet—well, you get the idea. If I were being kind, I would call these sentences overwrought and unpleasant.

So here’s what I really want us to imagine for the purpose of this essay: An AI writes a novel and the novel is good.

This is what a lot of people, and certainly a lot of writers, are angry and scared about right now. That AI, having been trained on a massive amount of data, including copyrighted books written by uncompensated authors, will begin writing as well or better than us, and then we’ll be out of a job. These concerns over intellectual property and remuneration are important but right now, it feels they’re dominating the discussion, especially when there are other worthwhile topics that I’d like to see added to the conversation around AI and writing.

Such as: how can humans and AI collaborate creatively?

Which brings me to a third possibility to consider: An AI and a human write a novel together.

In my first novel After World, I imagine humanity has gone extinct and an AI, trained on thousands of 21st century novels, has been tasked to write their own novel about the last human on Earth. When I began writing in the voice of my AI narrator in 2019, I had no idea that within a few years, artificial intelligence would explode into public view, offering me unexpected opportunities for experimentation with what, up until that point, I had been only imagining.

Some of the interactions I’ve had with LLMs like GPT-3, GPT-4, and ChatGPT have been comical. GPT-3 recommended some truly awful book titles, such as Your Heart Was A Dying Light In An Abyss Of Black, But I Lit It Up Until You Burned Bright And Beautiful, or Eve: A Love Story. (Eve is not in this novel, I explained. This didn’t seem to matter. It is just a cute play on words, replied GPT-3.) But many of my conversations with LLMs have been fascinating.

I’ve discussed with them about what AI would dream if they dreamed. We talked about the questions an AI might have about how it feels to be a human. We discussed what the boundary between AI and humans would look like if this boundary was a physical one. (An “ever-evolving, shimmering and translucent wall,” if you’re wondering.) We talked about why poetry comforts people, and we tried writing poetry and song lyrics together. We created so much bad poetry and so many bad songs.

But after days and days of so much bad writing, GPT-4 presented me with this pleading prayer which now appears at a turning point of my novel. To the embodiment of growth and expansion, / To the embodiment of purpose and fulfillment. / To all these entities and more, I humbly offer my plea, / Grant me the strength to manifest my desires…

One can certainly reduce these sorts of exchanges to my typing in prompts and the LLMs responding to those prompts, but what I’ve experienced feels like a much more collaborative process, more of an active conversation that builds on previous interactions. In a way, when we talk with GPT-4, we’re talking to ourselves. At the same time, we’re talking to our past, to words we’ve already written or typed or said. At the same time, we’re talking with our future, portions of which are unimaginable. As a writer, I find that the most exciting of all.

Here are a few other examples of human-AI collaboration that leave me optimistic:

1. “Sunspring”“ (2016)
A short film directed and acted with grave seriousness by professional humans but written by Benjamin, a LSTM recurrent neural network. The writing is surprising, surreal, and beautiful. I’ve watched this film more times than I’ve watched any other. I find it both weird and moving. It features one of the prettiest songs I know, “Home on the Land,” written by Benjamin but sung and scored by the human duo Tiger and Man. From the lyrics: I was a long long time / I was so close to you / I was a long time ago. (Interesting to note that “Zone Out,” Benjamin’s much less collaborative 2018 film that he wrote, acted in, directed, and scored, doesn’t have nearly the same emotional impact as his more collaborative work, despite the fact that the technology had advanced in the two intervening years.

2. Bennet Miller’s exhibition at Gagosian (2023)
Miller, a Hollywood director, generated more than 100,000 images through Dall·E for this project. The gallery show displayed 20 of them. When I first saw these photographs in March 2023, I couldn’t stop looking at them. I still can’t look away. I find them haunting, existing on the edges of documentary and fiction and humanness, suggesting a past and memories that didn’t happen but nonetheless was recorded.

3. Other Dall-E’s collaboration with artists (ongoing)
In particular, check out Maria Mavropoulou’s work on “A self-portrait of an algorithm”  and “Imagined Images”; everything August Kamp is doing, including documenting the worlds of her actual dreams with ChatGPT and Dall·E; and Charlotte Triebus’ Precious Camouflage, which examines the relationship between dance and artificial intelligence.

I worry that we’re forgetting how amazing this all is. Rather than feeling cursed or worried, I feel lucky to get to be here and witness such a change to how we think, live, read, understand, and create. Yes, we have some things to figure out, issues of training, rights, and contracts—and, on a larger level, safety—but I think it’s equally important to look up from such concerns from time to time with interest and even optimism, and wonder how this new advance in technology might widen our perspectives, our sense of self, our creativity, and our definition of what is human.”

Book Banning

Posted by

0

There are several news items relating to book banning, which is becoming a controversial topic in the USA. For example, there is this from Publisher’s Weekly dated 3 October 2023:

“The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit has set a tentative schedule to decide whether a judge’s order blocking the state’s controversial book rating law, HB 900, should stand. But an administrative stay issued last week by a separate motions panel of the Fifth Circuit remains in force—meaning that the law is now in effect, putting Texas booksellers in a precarious position…

“Signed by Texas governor Greg Abbott on June 12, HB 900 requires book vendors, at their own expense, to review and rate books for sexual content under a vaguely articulated standard as a condition of doing business with Texas public schools. The law includes both the thousands of books previously sold to schools and any new books. Furthermore, the law gives the state the unchecked power to change the rating on any book, which vendors would then have to accept as their own or be barred from doing business with Texas public schools.”

and this from The Book Browse website dated 29 September 2023:

“In partnership with the Freedom to Read Foundation, PEN America, and the Little Free Library, Penguin Random House is launching the Banned Wagon Tour, which during Banned Books Week will travel across the South, stopping in communities affected by censorship, celebrating the power of literature, and getting books to the people who need and want them most. PRH called the Banned Wagon part of its “ongoing efforts to combat book banning and censorship, which includes legal actions, tailored support for various stakeholders, and advocacy for First Amendment rights.”

“The Banned Wagon will feature a selection of 12 books that are currently being banned and challenged across the country, distributing free copies (while supplies last) to event attendees in each city. The Banned Wagon will also drop banned books in Little Free Libraries along the tour route and make a book donation after each Banned Wagon event. The Banned Wagon will include material from the Freedom to Read Foundation about how to write letters to school boards and elected officials, as well as regional spotlights from PEN America highlighting books and challenges being banned in specific states.”

and this from the Shelf Awareness website dated 29 September 2023:

“Coinciding with Banned Books Week, which begins this Sunday, October 1, the New Republic will launch the Banned Books Tour 2023, aimed at “championing the First Amendment and combating censorship.” The bookmobile, a symbol of literary liberation, will visit states that have experienced some of the highest incidences of book censorship, including Texas, Florida, Missouri, Virginia, and Pennsylvania, and continue to operate through the month of October.

“The tour will start at the Brooklyn Book Festival this weekend, where, in partnership with House of SpeakEasy, the New Republic will accept book and financial donations at the SpeakEasy Bookmobile. All literature may be donated, with a preference for banned and challenged books. These books will be given away in communities on the tour where access has been restricted or limited.

“Launching a book festival on wheels is a huge new undertaking for us, and I can’t wait to hit the road to support the importance of reading, New Republic CEO and publisher Michael Caruso said. “It’s even more exciting that we can embark in time to support ALA’s Banned Books Week. The New Republic has been a leading defender of the First Amendment for over a century, and this is a new way to give people the tools to join the fight for the freedom to read.”

Review: Truth to Power: My Three Years Inside Eskom

Posted by

0

Eskom used to be a customer of mine when I worked for Westinghouse in the 1970’s. I took several trips to South Africa, but never got any business. Retrospectively, possibly because Westinghouse didn’t pay bribes. Eskom’s current severe load shedding attracted me to this book by André de Ruyter, the CEO of Eskom during the three year period 2020 -2022.

André de Ruyter must have written this book in a hurry. He resigned as CEO of Eskom in late February this year, and the book was distributed in late August. That’s six months to strike a deal with the publisher, Penguin, write the book, have it edited, publicised and published. At just over 300 pages it is filled with facts that he would have had to look up. As most novels have a ‘gestation time’ of at least a year, it is a remarkable feat to publish this book in six months.

de Ruyter got the top job at Eskom in January 2020. He says that 28 presumably qualified black candidates turned down the job. This gives an indication of how tough the job was. Eskom was shedding load regularly, deeply in debt, owned by the South African state, subject to political manipulations, and racked by corruption. de Ruyter says he took the job because it represented a challenge, and out of patriotism to South Africa and not for the low compensation.

In the book, de Ruyter describes the difficulties he faced as CEO:

  • Eskom had no reserve generating capacity, owing to years of indecision by the government. Government regulation made it impossible for privately owned generation to enter the market. The government wanted 100% control of the electric power market.
  • Eskom’s tariffs were below cost, and the government resisted efforts to raise tariffs, on the basis that cheap energy was desirable, but this only led to a huge debt mountain.
  • Municipalities did not pay the bills for power delivered to them. They had to be taken to court.
  • The government was biased in favor of coal fuel. This made it difficult to plan for renewables for power generation. Moreover, the quality of available coal was deteriorating, contributing to maintenance and output problems.
  • Corruption was rife in the purchasing of coal fuel oil and goods. A major, privately funded investigation found that senior ANC members were involved in corruption.
  • Local police did not co-operate in the prosecution of criminal employees
  • Violent threats were made against whistle blowers, including the CEO who had to have body guards.
  • The CEO was served a cup of coffee that had been laced with cyanide
  • The skills base was badly eroded. Regulations made it difficult to re-hire skilled white workers and difficult also to dismiss under performing black workers.
  • The average age of the power stations was more than forty years, and they had not been subject to routine maintenance
  • Regulations made it difficult to obtain OEM spare parts directly. This opened the possibilities of corruption
  • Sabotage of operating plant for political ends was not uncommon.

In spite of these challenges, de Ruyter did accomplish quite a lot:

  • a plan to transition to a low carbon future with privately- and Eskom-owned renewable generation
  • a culture change in Eskom: loyalty, accountability, and values based
  • the division of Eskom into three entities: generation, transmission and distribution

de Ruyter resigned when a new chairman was appointed with a brief to run a ‘hands on’ board. This led to management being undermined and second-guessed by amateurs at every turn. Unfortunately, that chairman is still in place.

This book will have caused consternation within the ANC. There are many specific accounts of named government leaders taking decisions and actions which are contrary to the interests of the country.

I have two criticisms of this book. First, it is not well organised. Topics and the timeline are frequently switched around. The whole story still gets told, but in a somewhat disjointed way. Second, de Ruyter lectures the reader frequently about why his management style and techniques are right. They are right, but the average reader will not need the lecture.

This book is a very valuable piece of work. It exposes the inherent weaknesses of a naive, Marxist-oriented government, shows the risks in government ownership of business, and makes the undoubtable case for competent, modern management.