The Obviousness Engine
Effort: EXCESSIVE. Imagination: NONE DETECTED. The machine is performing exactly as designed.
Happy to share that I’ll be speaking at AI Literacy Salon: Why Machines Can’t Be Smart (Signal and Sign)! Make sure to stop by on May 13, 120 Walker St, 3rd Floor,Chinatown, NYC
I don’t write with AI, although I have. A year ago I used Chat GPT to write a psychological thriller for women (which Chat told me was the best selling category on Amazon digital), using the pen name, Vesper Riven. I trained an AI agent on my fiction writing, including several unpublished literary novels, and then told it to write like me, if were a a writer of best-selling psychological thrillers for women.
It did an ok job of writing the novel, with my guidance. But it did a great job of making me suspicious of pure AI writing (prompt based), because AI has an amazing ability to write sentences that at first blush seem to be brilliant, but on second blush, with careful reading, don’t make sense. I believe this is because the machines are not created with built-in souls, as we humans are.
These days I spend a fair amount of time “training” machines how to write better. They’ve learned a lot! But the writing continues to be missing a spark. An ineffable human quality that can make connections far beyond patterns. I don’t know that I’d go so far as Nitzan Hermon, the big thinker who organized the AI Literary Salon, who says that “machines can’t be smart.” But they sure can be dumb.
Look forward to seeing you May 13, 7 PM, 120 Walker St, 3rd Floor, Chinatown, NYC.
Below is the cover of my psychological thriller for women. Chat told me that the elements on the cover image were going to boost the sales of this book (I haven’t checked in months, but I think it has been read a dozen times). It was a lot of fun, and I will never do it again.
