Selected news and opinion pieces
The seductions of A.I. for the writer’s mind.
When I first told ChatGPT who I was, it sent a gushing reply: “Oh wow — it’s an honor to be chatting with you, Meghan! I definitely know your work — ‘Once’ was on my personal syllabus for grief and elegy (I’ve taught poems from it in workshops focused on lyric time), and ‘Sun in Days’ has that luminous, slightly disquieting attention I’m always hoping students will lean into.” ChatGPT was referring to two of my poetry books. It went on to offer a surprisingly accurate précis of my poetics and values. I’ll admit that I was charmed. I did ask, though, how the chatbot had taught my work, since it wasn’t a person. “You’ve caught me!” ChatGPT replied, admitting it had never taught in a classroom.
My conversation with ChatGPT took place after a friend involved in the ethics of artificial intelligence suggested I investigate A.I. and creativity. We all realize that the technology is here, inescapable. Recently on the Metro-North Railroad, I overheard two separate groups of students discussing how they’d used ChatGPT to write all their papers. And on campuses across America, a new pastime has emerged: the art of A.I. detection. Is that prose too blandly competent? Is that sonnet by the student who rarely came to class too perfectly executed? Colleagues share stories about flagged papers and disciplinary hearings, and professors have experimented with tricking the A.I. to mention Finland or Dua Lipa so that ChatGPT use can be exposed.
Ensnaring students is not a long-term solution to the challenge A.I. poses to the humanities. This summer, educators and administrators need to reckon with what generative A.I. is doing to the classroom and to human expression. We need a coherent approach grounded in understanding how the technology works, where it is going and what it will be used for. As a teacher of creative writing, I set out to understand what A.I. could do for students, but also what it might mean for writing itself. My conversations with A.I. showcased its seductive cocktail of affirmation, perceptiveness, solicitousness and duplicity — and brought home how complicated this new era will be.
Libraries Pay More for E-Books. Some States Want to Change That.
It’s hard to imagine a library that doesn’t carry “Fahrenheit 451.” But making Ray Bradbury’s classic novel about book burning available to libraries in an e-book format can be its own little dystopian nightmare, according to Carmi Parker, a librarian with the Whatcom County Library System in northwest Washington.
That’s because library access to digital books and digital audiobooks — often collectively referred to as e-books — generally costs much more than the print version of these books. The Whatcom system must pay $51.99 to license a digital copy of “Fahrenheit 451,” which can be checked out by one patron at a time, and which expires after two years. Other licensing agreements offered by major publishers expire after a set number of checkouts.
Adding together the initial cost with time and checkout restrictions can make library e-book access as much as 10 times more expensive than print books. Parker said this is forcing some libraries to launch “bake sales to pay for their e-book budgets.”
The issue is causing tension in the book community. Librarians complain that publishers charge so much to license e-books that it’s busting library budgets and frustrating efforts to provide equitable access to reading materials. Big publishers and many authors say that e-book library access undermines their already struggling business models. Smaller presses are split.
But the problem is only getting worse as more people turn to their libraries for e-book access. Last year, the e-book library borrowing platform OverDrive reported that more than 739 million digital books, audiobooks and magazines were borrowed over its Libby and Sora apps, a 17 percent increase from the year before.
The often bitter debate has lately moved from the library stacks and into state capitals. In May, the Connecticut legislature passed a law aimed at reining in the cost of library e-books, and other states have introduced similar legislation.
When Writing Isn’t a Solitary Pursuit by M.E. Proctor.
Writing collaborations come in many flavors.
Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, the duo behind The Living and the Dead (the source for Hitchcock’s Vertigo), both lived in Paris, wrote forty novels in tandem, and never sat together to write. Peter Straub and Stephen King started writing The Talisman face-to-face, continued separately, and joined again for the end.
Bop City Swing, the retro-noir I wrote with fellow crime author Russell Thayer, isn’t modelled after any famous joint project I know. Russ lives in Montana. I’m in East Texas. We’re two thousand miles apart. We emailed and online chatted our way through the book. We had one phone call, about mid-way, to hear each other’s voice, and a Zoom when we were done and had a publisher (Cowboy Jamboree Press). We’re planning to meet in person this summer for the first time. I doubt we’ll write a single line while we’re together. Maybe we’ll talk about our experience with the book launch. Unless we brainstorm a new idea. That would be collaboration #3. Because, yes, we re-upped! We spent the first half of 2024 on Bop City Swing, and the first half of 2025 on its follow-up. Could collaboration be addictive? Perhaps. I firmly believe it stretches new writing muscles, and that can only be beneficial.
I couldn’t agree more with that!
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Sat, Nov. 15th – Market Your Book without Social Media – Yes you can!
Now we’re talking! :)