I asked ChatGPT to improve my latest novel and lost no sleep over the results. But I do worry about diverse voices being crowded out This summer two worlds – literature and technology – collided. News stories began appearing about authors suing OpenAI and Meta for using their works to train their large language models “without consent, without credit and without compensation”. I read them with increasing curiosity, and then I found a review of a novella, Death of an Author, which was “95% machine-generated”. I put down my quill and stared out of the window, wondering if my tried and tested productivity hacks of taking the dog for a walk or soaking in a hot tub were no longer going to cut it in this frightening new world.Be brave, I told myself. Experiment with these new technologies or prepare to be replaced by a monkey with an iPhone and a writing app. I lay on my bed and opened up Laika, one of the free creative writing tools I’d read about. Perhaps my latest novel, Love Marriage, could have been vastly improved with this genius tool. I pasted in the first paragraph: “In the Ghorami household sex was never mentioned. If the television was on and a kissing-with-tongues scene threatened the chaste and cardamom-scented home, it was swiftly terminated by a flick of the black box. When Yasmin began her first period, her mother had slipped her a pack of Kotex Maxi pads and murmured instructions not to touch the Qur’an …”This is an edited extract from Monica Ali’s 2023 PEN HG... Continue reading at 'The Guardian'
[ The Guardian | 2023-12-01 06:00:07 UTC ]
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Young-adult books are being sold to an audience that can't vote, yet they're being written by people commonly referred to on the Internet as "the olds." We should know. We're two of them. Both of us have made our living writing. One of us in journalism (Grady) and the other in literary fiction... Continue reading at Slate
[ Slate | 2011-06-23 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Written By: Charlotte Williams Publication Date: Fri, 10/06/2011 - 10:49 Weidenfeld & Nicolson has triumphed in an auction for the second novel by American author Maria Semple, staking a six-figure sum for the title. Editorial director Arzu Tahsin bought UK and Commonwealth rights to... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2011-06-10 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Written By: Graeme Neill Publication Date: Thu, 05/05/2011 - 09:10 Operating income at HarperCollins' parent NewsCorp's publishing sector slumped $207m to $36m (£21.8m) in its latest set of results. As has become customary, the NewsCorp results do not mention HarperCollins or its book... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2011-05-05 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Written By: Charlotte Williams Publication Date: Thu, 21/04/2011 - 10:29 Random House imprint Hammer has acquired the latest title by Orange-prize winner Helen Dunmore, in a special project for the Penguin author. Century and Arrow publisher Kate Elton bought UK and Commonwealth rights to The... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2011-04-21 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Written By: Benedicte Page Publication Date: Wed, 20/04/2011 - 15:13 Palazzo Editions will publish a "major" retrospective of the work of Steven Spielberg in August 2012, written in co-operation with the director. Steven Spielberg: A Retrospective will be written by film critic and documentary... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2011-04-20 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Written By: Graeme Neill Publication Date: Mon, 18/04/2011 - 15:11 Canongate will publish a book co-created by JJ Abrams, the man behind "Lost" and "Star Trek", next year after a deal was signed during London Book Fair. read more Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2011-04-18 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Publication Date: Wed, 06/04/2011 - 14:24 Quercus has won a "keenly contested" auction to a debut literary crime novel set in Hull and East Yorkshire. Editor Jon Riley acquired UK and Commonwealth rights excluding Canada to The Dark Winter from Oliver Munson at Blake Friedmann in a two-book... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2011-04-06 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Written By: Graeme Neill Publication Date: Wed, 30/03/2011 - 14:55 Fourth Estate will publish the latest novel by The Joy Luck Club author Amy Tan after HarperCollins bought The Valley of Amazement. Publication date for the novel is expected to be autumn 2012. Daniel Halpern, president and... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2011-03-30 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Publication Date: Wed, 23/03/2011 - 07:50 Writer, journalist and editor Peter Forbes' exploration of mimicry and camouflage in nature, art and warfare has been awarded the £50,000 Warwick Prize for Writing. His Dazzled and Deceived (Yale University Press) was described by chair of judges... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2011-03-23 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Written By: Lisa Campbell Publication Date: Thu, 17/03/2011 - 15:57 Luke Johnson, best known in the book trade for his spell owning Borders, and fellow Financial Times journalist Mrs Moneypenny are writing business titles for Penguin's business imprint Portfolio. read more Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2011-03-17 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Written By: Charlotte Williams Publication Date: Tue, 08/03/2011 - 08:50 Hodder author Jojo Moyes has won Romantic Novel of the Year at the Romantic Novelists' Association's (RNA) Pure Passion Awards, scooping the prize with The Last Letter from Your Lover. Both Josephine Cox and Penny Jordan,... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2011-03-08 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Written By: Charlotte Williams Publication Date: Thu, 24/02/2011 - 09:25 Hodder & Stoughton is gearing up for the launch of the final book in the Earths Children series, which began 35 years ago with an idea for a short story. read more Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2011-02-24 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Written By: Charlotte Williams Publication Date: Tue, 15/02/2011 - 09:43 Most publishers are neglecting the marketing role provided by bricks and mortar bookshops, said the head of Quarto as it unveiled its annual results. Chairman and c.e.o. Laurence Orbach said he was "pleased" with the... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2011-02-15 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Over the last few months the tech industry has been inching toward ebook nirvana. For one thing, gadget makers keep improving e-readers while slashing prices. (I'm going to renew my bet that Amazon will begin selling the Kindle for less than $100 by the end of the year.) The bigger story,... Continue reading at Slate
[ Slate | 2011-02-02 00:00:00 UTC ]
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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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In 1919, the young E.B. White, future New Yorker writer and author of Charlotte's Web, took a class at Cornell University with a drill sergeant of an English professor named William Strunk Jr. Strunk assigned his self-published manual on composition titled "The Elements of Style," a 43-page list... Continue reading at Slate
[ Slate | 2011-01-23 00:00:00 UTC ]
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As Simon & Schuster prepares to release O: A Presidential Novel, based on the Obama administration and starring a thinly veiled Barack Obama as the character "O," the publisher is trying to keep the identity of its anonymous author under wraps. Slate imagines a few possibilities.[more ...] Continue reading at Slate
[ Slate | 2011-01-19 00:00:00 UTC ]
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