There are moments in life when you feel the cold chill running down your spine. A chill of realization that you are a small thing in a slightly ugly big world. Powerless against forces beyond your control.
An open door when you come back to the house and minutes after realizing you’re burgled, you’re also mortified for the state YOU left the place in. The sight of a speed van. The off-licence that closed five minutes early.
My most recent chill was almost certainly not on my predicted cold chill list. Given the scope, it was almost a Netflix cold chill.
The news came out last week that 183,000 pirated ebooks were used without their owners permission to train Artificial Intelligence.
The Atlantic put up a database where authors could search for their own name to see if their books were used.
Searching for my own name is 20% of my daily routine so I was on it like a fly on coddle. I didn’t expect my book to feature. But when “1 Result: O’Regan, Colm Ann Devine: Ready for Her Close Up” appeared in the search result, my spine went chilly from top to bottom.
I’ve written airily about AI before. I’ve used ChatGPT. I’ve used to it start annoying emails that I’d been procrastinating about.
I once asked ChatGPT to give me an estimate for a small bit of building work and it replied saying it’d call over the following day and then I never heard from it again.
It’s a slightly complicated emotion to know someone fed my novel into the maw of an AI. There is the temptation to personify the AI as an actual reader.
Part of me wants it to read the second Ann Devine novel too as it fleshes out some of the characters you might have wanted to hear more from in the first one.
Quite what it will learn from my novels is another story. That “I will in my hole” means “I won’t”? Were they hoping to fill in the gap in their knowledge about the strength of feelings a Tidy Towns competition can evoke?
The novel has a plot about an Aldi version of Game of Thrones -The Celts, Hound of Destiny- being shot in an Irish town. So if something like that crosses your streaming services let me know.
Apparently according to the top tech thinker, Maria Farrell, the scare story that AI will allow the robots to crush us and confine us to underground cities is nonsense.
In fact, it’s AI industry promote-nonsense and it distracts us from examples of real bad AI intentions – to turn creative jobs into automated jobs.
To turn a load of things that came out of the human brain, -and got shaped, edited, reshaped, and re-edited into something readable- into a series of data points that could be replicable and rearrangeable to produce anything you want.
Good AI she says could have all sorts of applications, literally.
For example, it could help people with the tedium of filling out forms to access benefits the government wants you give up on. (Read Maria’s work for a better description of all of this. I’ve done a poor AI job of describing it).
Some of the Big Cheese authors are apparently suing the big AI companies over this. I’m not sure I’ll be joining the class action.
Having once been nearly sued over a joke I tend to leave others’ lawyers to battle -until the chatbots come for their jobs.
Anyway, I prefer duelling or blood feud as a method of gaining satisfaction.
But either way for the next while I’ll be craving the small world. And avoiding catching any more chills.