Government Technology: AI ‘Essay Mills’ Advertise on Social Media, Help Students Cheat. “Though their services are illegal in some countries, companies that combine generative AI and human labor to write essays that are undetectable by anti-cheating software are soliciting clients on TikTok and Meta.”
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. “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: We Used A.I. to Write Essays for Harvard, Yale and Princeton. Here’s How It Went.. “While the chatbots are not yet great at simulating long-form personal essays with authentic student voices, I wondered how the A.I. tools would do on some of the shorter essay questions that elite schools like Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Dartmouth are requiring high school applicants to answer this year. So I used several free tools to generate short essays for some Ivy League applications. The A.I. chatbots’ answers have been edited for brevity and clarity.”
WIRED: The Weird, Big-Money World of Cybercrime Writing Contests . “CYBERCRIMINALS CAN BE inventive—especially if there’s money on the table. One hacker has penned a 50-page essay on how to invest in cryptocurrency and sell at the right time to make a profit. Another put together a guide for how to create a fake version of blockchain.com that could be used to steal people’s usernames and passwords. And another produced instructions—cryptically titled “Elegantly breed daddies on lavender”—explaining how to scam money from people who pay to watch webcam models perform. The unusual collection of documents and tutorials were all produced by cybercriminals and hackers trying to win money for their ideas, technical skills, and writing ability.”
The Forward: Thousands of Yiddish pulp fiction stories finally seeing the light of day. “Beginning in the 1890s, newspapers, including the Forverts, tried to appeal to a broader audience by publishing popular fiction derisively called ‘shund’ or ‘trash.’ Yiddish authors like Sholem Aleichem and Y.L. Peretz strove to create a national literature. Shund stories, on the other hand, were written to make a profit, veering into the sensational and melodramatic — tales of romance, adventure, anything that would sell.”
The Messenger: Authors Are Calling Out A Computer Scientist For Adding Their Work To His AI-Powered Website. “In recent Book Twitter controversy, a computer scientist shut down his AI website following backlash from authors — some of whom he stole from. In 2017, Benji Smith created Prosecraft, a linguistic tool meant to help aspiring writers with their work. This was done by writers inserting their stories into a desktop word processor Smith made called Shaxpir and comparing them to over 25,000 books in Prosecraft’s database.”
Lifehacker: Use Text Expanders to Email More Efficiently. “We all waste a lot of time writing out emails. Many of these emails say the same basic thing, too, when you’re following up on something, sending an introduction, or emailing a process explanation—and it can be mind-numbing to type it all out over and over again. But you actually don’t need to repeat common messages all the time, nor do you need to frequently copy and paste: Instead, try a text expander to quickly send out pre-defined paragraphs and get your day moving faster. You have a few different options, but in general, they work the same way: You type one word to trigger the insertion of another, pre-written sequence of words.”
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. “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..
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. “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. “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. “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.”
Ars Technica: Why AI detectors think the US Constitution was written by AI. “If you feed America’s most important legal document—the US Constitution—into a tool designed to detect text written by AI models like ChatGPT, it will tell you that the document was almost certainly written by AI. But unless James Madison was a time traveler, that can’t be the case. Why do AI writing detection tools give false positives? We spoke to several experts—and the creator of AI writing detector GPTZero—to find out.”
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