Tag Archives: writers

The Verge: How the Elon Musk biography exposes Walter Isaacson

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The Verge: How the Elon Musk biography exposes Walter Isaacson. “While Isaacson manages to detail what makes Musk awful, he seems unaware of what made Musk an inspiring figure for so long. Musk is a fantasist, the kind of person who conceives of civilizations on Mars. That’s what people liked all this time: dreaming big, thinking about new possible worlds. It’s also why Musk’s shifting political stance undercuts him. The fantasy of the conservative movement is small and sad, a limited world with nothing new to explore. Musk has gone from dreaming very, very big to seeming very, very small. In the hands of a talented biographer, this kind of tragic story would provide rich material.”

Verdict: OpenAI faces further copyright lawsuits from leading authors

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Verdict: OpenAI faces further copyright lawsuits from leading authors. “Three more authors have filed copyright lawsuits against OpenAI alleging their works were used in the training of its ChatGPT AI. The authors, Michael Chabon, Rachel Snyder and Ayelet Waldman, have all claimed their published works have been used in the training process of ChatGPT without their consent or knowledge.”

Royal Library Denmark: New research translates Holberg’s comedies into numbers and statistics

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Royal Library Denmark: New research translates Holberg’s comedies into numbers and statistics. “For the past three years, the theatre researchers Ulla Kallenbach (University of Bergen), Anna Lawaetz (Royal Danish Library) and Annelis Kuhlmann (Aarhus University) and a number of programmers from the Royal Danish Library/Deic and Centre for Humanities Computing Aarhus worked on developing tools for digital analyses of Ludvig Holberg’s drama… Here, Holberg’s comedies are converted into statistics, figures and numbers with the aim of investigating how digital analysis can be used in a stage reading.”

New York Times: Tired of Dating Apps, Some Turn to ‘Date-Me Docs’

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New York Times: Tired of Dating Apps, Some Turn to ‘Date-Me Docs’. “Writers of the online text profiles, which can read like 1,000-word versions of the personal ads of yore, hope for a more meaningful connection than a swipe might allow.”

Medium: New Partner Program incentives focus on high-quality human writing

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Medium: New Partner Program incentives focus on high-quality human writing. “Changes are coming in August to the way we pay writers for great stories and which countries we support. Here’s what’s happening, why, and what it means for you.” I wrote about my weird Medium spam experience in January 2021..

Virginia Woolf: Personal copy of debut novel resurfaces (BBC)

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BBC: Virginia Woolf: Personal copy of debut novel resurfaces. “Virginia Woolf’s personal copy of her debut novel, The Voyage Out, has been fully digitised for the first time. The book was rediscovered in 2021, having mistakenly been housed in the science section of the University of Sydney library for 25 years. It is the only publicly available copy of its kind and contains rare inscriptions and edits.”

Wall Street Journal: Thousands of Authors Ask AI Chatbot Owners to Pay for Use of Their Work

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Wall Street Journal: Thousands of Authors Ask AI Chatbot Owners to Pay for Use of Their Work. “More than 8,000 authors have signed a letter asking the leaders of companies including Microsoft, Meta Platforms and Alphabet to not use their work to train AI systems without permission or compensation.”

How-To Geek: How to Use ChatGPT to Transform Writing Into Another Format

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How-To Geek: How to Use ChatGPT to Transform Writing Into Another Format. “While most people think of ChatGPT as a way to generate new text, one of its most powerful abilities is to transform existing text into another format. Whether this is text that you have written, or text from another source.” By “another format”, the writer means things like turning blog posts into scripts for YouTube videos, not creating different types of structured data.

James Madison University: Furious Flower Poetry Center hosts more than 20 scholars and poets to create an open-access curriculum

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James Madison University: Furious Flower Poetry Center hosts more than 20 scholars and poets to create an open-access curriculum. “The Furious Flower Poetry Center, in partnership with the Furious Flower Advisory Board, hosted more than 20 scholars and poets at James Madison University in June to create an open-access curriculum for incorporating Black poetry into classrooms of all ages and levels. These pedagogical materials will be distributed to educators nationwide for free to encourage further engagement with Black poetry.”

Straits Times: Print zines make a comeback with creative designs and niche storytelling

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Straits Times: Print zines make a comeback with creative designs and niche storytelling. “Zines, typically self-published, unserialised underground print creations, have in recent years become a preferred medium of expression and consumption for some young people. Effectively miniature magazines, they cover topics from neighbourhood street cats to forgotten local stories, such as coconut toddy (palm wine) drinking in colonial Singapore. But where their predecessors might have made just a few copies to distribute among family and friends, today’s zine creators hardly bat an eyelid when printing several hundred issues.”

New York Times: TikTok Sells a Lot of Books. Now, Its Owner Wants to Publish Them, Too.

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New York Times: TikTok Sells a Lot of Books. Now, Its Owner Wants to Publish Them, Too.. “A new publishing company began courting self-published romance writers earlier this year. The pitch, delivered in a generic email, was impersonal and formulaic. The terms weren’t generous, sometimes amounting to just a few thousand dollars for the rights to a book. Then came the clincher. The publisher was ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, a social media company that traffics in short videos and has, over the past several years, helped create some of the biggest best sellers on the market.”

Library of Congress: Library of Congress National Book Festival Partners with PBS Books to Share Voices from the Festival with Viewers Nationwide

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Library of Congress: Library of Congress National Book Festival Partners with PBS Books to Share Voices from the Festival with Viewers Nationwide. “Book lovers across the nation can join the 2023 Library of Congress National Book Festival on PBS Books, which will host a series of virtual interviews with some of the festival’s featured authors beginning July 20 in partnership with PBS stations across the country.”

Washington Post: ChatGPT took their jobs. Now they walk dogs and fix air conditioners.

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Washington Post: ChatGPT took their jobs. Now they walk dogs and fix air conditioners. . “When ChatGPT came out last November, Olivia Lipkin, a 25-year-old copywriter in San Francisco, didn’t think too much about it. Then articles about how to use the chatbot on the job began appearing on internal Slack groups at the tech start-up where she worked as the company’s only writer.”