Tag Archives: ai

Blog, creative writing, writing prompt

What is a Story? (Part 2) – Writing Prompt

A friend whose sensibility I admire and opinion I trust recommended the recent(ish) box office smash hit Obsession. In describing the film, being careful not to give up any spoilers, he used the phrase, ‘It’s about toxic masculinity’. And that got me thinking, because a story is always ‘about’ something.

Inde Navarette, star of 2026 hit film Obsession, laughing on stage during a Q and A. She has long dark hair and perfect teeth.

What’s it all About?

In my post on 1st June, I posited that, technically speaking, the one nonnegotiable ingredient of a story is that its characters undergo change. In a later post, I suggested this technical attribute implies what stories are for, in that they help us understand, amongst other things, that while learning and growing is very hard for humans it is, nevertheless, possible.

Continue reading →
Standard
Blog, writing prompt

What does AI Know? – Writing Prompt

I should specify. The real question is, ‘What Does a Large Language Model Know?’ An AI that solely crunches numbers on a superhuman scale to discover new antibiotics for combating superbugs is a different subject. What I’m interested in is whether an LLM is conscious.

Clunky old model of a desktop Macintosh computer looming out of the dark, there to ironically ask the question being posed by Gail Owen writer, can such a machine ever be conscious?


Consciousness

LLMs are so brilliant at human-style communication that they beg the question, do they understand the languages they converse in, or are they just throwing together words that frequently appear side by side? People much, much cleverer than myself claim there’s no difference between this kind of pattern recognition and consciousness, that consciousness is pattern recognition.

Continue reading →
Standard
Blog, creative writing

What even IS a story? And Can AI Truly Write One?

Writers are thinking about Artificial Intelligence a lot – understandably. The lovely (I’m a bit of a fangirl) Ben Rhodes, (I highly recommend Pod Save the World and Ben Rhodes Substack, both of which are free,) discusses AI in his recent post, ‘Why Write‘. He answers this question through describing the deep thinking that goes into composing an essay – the kinds of thought processes that increase understanding, to a level of awareness he could therefore not reach if AI were to write the essay for him.

Former UK Poet Laureate Sir Andrew Motion standing at a microphone, reading his poetry at a small and intimate event. He is tall and stands gracefully poised, holding his book of poems in his hands.

Understanding

This need to understand is not exclusive to nonfiction writers. Former UK Poet Laureate Sir Andrew Motion, (again, I’m a fangirl – for his boundlessly generous energy that I experienced at Royal Holloway, for his commitment to equality, for his poetry…,) has said, ‘My wish to write a poem is inseparable from my wish to explain something to myself.’

Continue reading →
Standard