Betteridge’s law of headlines strikes again! No, it cannot. Apparently Chat­GPT can regurgitate general points of writing advice often given to emerging writers (more description, shorter paragraphs, shorter sentences, more dialogue and internal thoughts to shed light on characters, “show don’t tell”, expand on symbolism, incorporate foreshadowing, provide a resolution rather than leaving the ending open-ended), but it can’t really do anything specific.

We asked ChatGPT to take a more practical, interventionist approach and rework the text in line with its own editorial suggestions[…] That’s where things fell apart.

ChatGPT offered a radically shorter, changed story. The atmospheric descriptions, evocative imagery and nods towards (unspoken) mystery were replaced with unsubtle phrases – which Rose swears she would never have written, or signed off on.

Lines added included: “my daughter has always been an enigma to me”, “little did I know” and “a sense of unease washed over me”. Later in the story, this phrasing was clumsily suggested a second time: “relief washed over me”.

The author’s unique descriptions were changed to familiar cliches: “rugged beauty”, “roar of the ocean”, “unbreakable bond”. ChatGPT also changed the text from Australian English (which all Australian publications require) to US spelling and style (“realization”, “mom”).

If anything, I feel like the article is a bit too soft on Chat­GPT, concluding at the end that it’s just like any other tool – as good, or bad, as the tradesperson who wields it. The other day on Mastodon I saw someone make the comparison between AI-generated books and the novel-writing machines Julia works in Nineteen Eighty-Four, and the comparison is apt. Who would ever read an AI-generated book? We live in a world of billions of people, many of whom have brilliant ideas and exciting stories to tell… why would we reject all that in favour of some chewed-up, regurgitated mélange of tropes, smoothed out of anything unique or creative? And a good editor, in my view, is helping to steer an author to find their own unique voice, and away from clichés and genericness (while also making the writing stronger, of course). I don’t see how AI can ever fill this role. Its entire schtick is producing the most generic shit possible. Not to mention the colossal damage to the environment that comes from powering all those AI data centres. Creative work requires creatives; we should never accept being told that computers can do all the creativity for us instead.

An article about the routine violations of privacy universities engage in against their students, from tracking their movements around campus to monitoring their every keystroke as they use online portals to do their readings or complete assignments. Absolutely should not be happening, and as mentioned in the article it has a chilling effect on students’ ability to organise and wage campaigns, as they’ve always done.

A South Korean man has been killed at work by a malfunctioning robot which apparently mistook him for a box of capsicums. The article goes on to say:

This is hardly the first incident of an autonomous system harming a human. Last month an empty self-driving Cruise robotaxi hit and then proceeded to drag and trap a woman who had seconds earlier been struck by a human hit-and-run driver and fallen in the way of the autonomous vehicle.

The incident left the woman in critical condition and Cruise’s operations in limbo amid an investigation by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. As we reported Wednesday, Cruise issued an update to its self-driving taxis to prevent similar incidents.

Beyond agricultural, industrial, and transportation industries, datacenters are looking to robots to address personnel shortages. Last month, Microsoft listed an opening for a Hardware Automation Team Manager to oversee among other things the use of robotic systems throughout its network of datacenters.

It’s worth noting: there is no actual shortage of human beings to provide their labour. There is a shortage of employers willing to pay enough humans enough money to live in dignity. That’s the reason for automation and artificial intelligence, not “personnel shortages”; let’s not get it twisted.

Direct action at work 😄

Neat retrospective on how the internet grew from a niche communication protocol for academics to a mass medium over the 1990s in Australia. (And, honestly, it seems like the mass growth was in 1995–1996 alone.) Very interesting.

A neat little detective story, investigating the origins of one of those online urban legends, in this case that a memory error that appeared when you quit Wing Commander I was simply rewritten to say “Thank you for playing Wing Commander!” instead of being fixed.

Concerning story about the City of Buenos Aires’ efforts to have blanket coverage of CCTV cameras on the city’s streets, with facial recognition systems. The article talks about one man who was arrested and held in custody for six days when the system falsely identified him as a criminal from a part of the country he’d never even been to. It also points out that as a politically polarised country, the system runs the risk of being used for opponents of whoever’s in power and not just for “criminals”, and that the system already seems to be being used corruptly, with the logs tampered with to cover the culprits’ tracks.