Artificial intelligence can now write fiction and journalism. But does it measure up to George Orwell – and can it report on Brexit?Will androids write novels about electric sheep? The dream, or nightmare, of totally machine-generated prose seemed to have come one step closer with the recent announcement of an artificial intelligence that could produce, all by itself, plausible news stories or fiction. It was the brainchild of OpenAI – a nonprofit lab backed by Elon Musk and other tech entrepreneurs – which slyly alarmed the literati by announcing that the AI (called GPT2) was too dangerous for them to release into the wild, because it could be employed to create “deepfakes for text”. “Due to our concerns about malicious applications of the technology,” they said, “we are not releasing the trained model.” Are machine-learning entities going to be the new weapons of information terrorism, or will they just put humble midlist novelists out of business?Let’s first take a step back. AI has been the next big thing for so long that it’s easy to assume “artificial intelligence” now exists. It doesn’t, if by “intelligence” we mean what we sometimes encounter in our fellow humans. GPT2 is just using methods of statistical analysis, trained on huge amounts of human-written text – 40GB of web pages, in this case, that received recommendations from Reddit readers – to predict what ought to come next. This probabilistic approach is how Google Translate works, and also the method... Continue reading at 'The Guardian'
[ The Guardian | 2019-03-25 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Legend Press and Bloomsbury both have two books on the £30,000 University of Wales Dylan... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2012-07-30 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Authors and their representatives have warned that books are being devalued to the point of... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2012-07-20 00:00:00 UTC ]
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The rise of ebooks will "fundamentally change" the types of stories that are written and who they are written by, award-winning author Denise Mina predicts. Continue reading at BBC News
[ BBC News | 2012-07-20 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Angry Robot’s ebook initiative, which sees independent bookshop customers receive a... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2012-07-19 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Penguin c.e.o. John Makinson has said there is a "natural convergence" between... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2012-07-19 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Pearson has acquired self-publishing company Author Solutions Inc for $116m (£74m) in cash... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2012-07-19 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Chen Guangcheng, whose nighttime escape and conflict with the Chinese government led to a diplomatic crisis for the United States last spring, is writing a memoir to be published next year. Continue reading at The New York Times
[ The New York Times | 2012-07-18 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Donald Sobol, author of the beloved children's book series "Encyclopedia Brown," died Wednesday in Miami. He was 87. Continue reading at Los Angeles Times
[ Los Angeles Times | 2012-07-17 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Aspiring authors are being given the chance to pitch their novels to a panel of agents at a new... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2012-07-17 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Japan is set to fully enter the ebook age with four high-profile device launches in the next few... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2012-07-16 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Although quarterly revenue dropped 2.1 percent, the newspaper publisher earned 56 cents a share, beating a forecast of 52 cents. Continue reading at The New York Times
[ The New York Times | 2012-07-16 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Syrian author Samar Yazbek was prevented from appearing at the Ways with Words literary festival... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2012-07-16 00:00:00 UTC ]
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The television star mines childhood fascination in writing 'The Land of Stories: The Wishing Spell.' When Chris Colfer was just 20, he'd already been named one of GQ magazine's men of the year, having sung and acted his way into the hearts of America as Kurt, the high-pitched, openly gay brunet... Continue reading at Los Angeles Times
[ Los Angeles Times | 2012-07-15 00:00:00 UTC ]
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The Alliance of Independent Authors has enlisted the help of agency A M Heath to represent... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2012-07-12 00:00:00 UTC ]
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The Nobel Prize-winning author's brother says the effects of dementia mean Márquez may be unable to write. Continue reading at The Christian Science Monitor
[ The Christian Science Monitor | 2012-07-11 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Angry Robot has set up an ebook initiative to support independent bookshops, with the scheme... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2012-07-03 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Cambridge University Press has seen its digital revenues rise 70% over the past year to account... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2012-06-29 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Richard Russo says his new work is a "tribute to the printed book" and will not be sold online. Continue reading at BBC News
[ BBC News | 2012-06-26 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Random House Childrens Publishing is to bring out a young adult novel written by Niall Leonard,... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2012-06-25 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Random House Children's Publishing is to bring out a young adult novel written by Niall... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2012-06-25 00:00:00 UTC ]
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