The rise of robot authors: is the writing on the wall for human novelists?

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 ]
News tagged with: #big thing #statistical analysis #web pages

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Barbara Cartland is latest author to be wooed by digital

Written By: Lisa Campbell Publication Date: Fri, 11/02/2011 - 07:59 The estate of the romance writer Barbara Cartland has fallen to the embrace of digital, in a move that sees her print publisher suffering a painful rejection. About a quarter of Cartland's extensive ouevre is to be published... Continue reading at The Bookseller

[ The Bookseller | 2011-02-11 00:00:00 UTC ]
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UK bestsellers help Hachette prove resilient as ebooks rise in the US

Written By: Charlotte Williams Publication Date: Thu, 10/02/2011 - 10:08 Bestsellers from Hachette UK helped limit the decline in sales at parent Lagardere Publishing, according to results filed by the French group, which is continuing to suffer from a year-on-year drop in sales of Stephenie... Continue reading at The Bookseller

[ The Bookseller | 2011-02-10 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Debut author wins Waterstone's Children's Book Prize

Publication Date: Wed, 09/02/2011 - 20:05 Debut author Sita Brahmachari has won the Waterstone’s Children’s Book Prize for her coming-of-age novel about life, death, friendship and love. She was awarded the £5,000 prize this evening [9th February] for Artichoke Hearts, published by Macmillan... Continue reading at The Bookseller

[ The Bookseller | 2011-02-09 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Non-agency authors are Amazon UK’s bestselling ebooks

Written By: Lisa Campbell Amazon.co.uk has reiterated its opposition to agency pricing as it revealed its top-selling ebook authors are not governed by the model. Last week Amazon.com announced ebooks had begun to outsell paperbacks in the US for the first time, with 115 ebooks bought for every... Continue reading at The Bookseller

[ The Bookseller | 2011-02-03 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Amazon.co.uk picks Rising Stars

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[ The Bookseller | 2011-02-02 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Eric Carle to write first book in four years for Puffin

Written By: Charlotte Williams Puffin is to publish a new picture book by The Very Hungry Caterpillar author Eric Carle, his first in four years. The Artist Who Painted a Blue Horse will be published in October 2011, in a global, simultaneous publication with Philomel, a Penguin Young Readers... Continue reading at The Bookseller

[ The Bookseller | 2011-01-28 00:00:00 UTC ]
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High Impact Ads on the Rise for MPA Members

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[ Folio Magazine | 2011-01-27 00:00:00 UTC ]
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NYT Pay Wall Could Debut Next Month

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[ Folio Magazine | 2011-01-24 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Adam Haslett on Stanley Fish's How To Write a Sentence.

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[ Slate | 2011-01-23 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Writers Are Asked Not to Talk About Author of ‘O’

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[ The New York Times | 2011-01-19 00:00:00 UTC ]
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