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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
An open door when you come back to the house and minutes after realizing you\u2019re burgled, you\u2019re also mortified for the state YOU left the place in. The sight of a speed van. The off-licence that closed five minutes early.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
My most recent chill was almost certainly not on my predicted cold chill list. Given the scope, it was almost a Netflix cold chill.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The news came out last week that 183,000 pirated ebooks were used without their owners permission to train Artificial Intelligence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Atlantic put up a database where authors could search for their own name to see if their books were used.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Searching for my own name is 20% of my daily routine so I was on it like a fly on coddle. I didn\u2019t expect my book to feature. But when \u201c1 Result: O\u2019Regan, Colm Ann Devine: Ready for Her Close Up\u201d appeared in the search result, my spine went chilly from top to bottom.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I\u2019ve written airily about AI before. I\u2019ve used ChatGPT. I\u2019ve used to it start annoying emails that I\u2019d been procrastinating about.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Quite what it will learn from my novels is another story. That \u201cI will in my hole\u201d means \u201cI won\u2019t\u201d? Were they hoping to fill in the gap in their knowledge about the strength of feelings a Tidy Towns competition can evoke?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In fact, it\u2019s AI industry promote-nonsense and it distracts us from examples of real bad AI intentions \u2013 to turn creative jobs into automated jobs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Good AI she says could have all sorts of applications, literally.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019s work for a better description of all of this. I\u2019ve done a poor AI job of describing it).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Some of the Big Cheese authors are apparently suing the big AI companies over this. I\u2019m not sure I\u2019ll be joining the class action.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Having once been nearly sued over a joke I tend to leave others\u2019 lawyers to battle -until the chatbots come for their jobs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Anyway, I prefer duelling or blood feud as a method of gaining satisfaction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But either way for the next while I\u2019ll be craving the small world. And avoiding catching any more chills.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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