ChatGPT and This Writer

July 22, 2023 ~ susanoleksiw ~ 5 Comments

For the last several weeks much of my reading has been about AI and ChatGPT, learning as much as I can about this new technology. Thanks to a good friend from graduate school (back in the Dark Ages of landlines and library card files), I’ve learned a lot about AI and what it could mean in areas beyond writing, such as automotive, medicine, and hard science. But the only area I’m concerned with here is the AI directed toward producing word texts—articles, essays, stories, memos, ad copy, and the like.

When ChatGPT appeared on the scene for the general audience, in 2022, most people were caught off guard and stunned at what it could do. Writers, understandably, and myself among them, were horrified that a machine would soon be producing texts. What would that mean for our futures? (The writers in California are striking over the same issue.) This anxiety has not declined; some even speculate that this new technology could soon make human efforts obsolete and even lead to our end. Like the dinosaurs.

During a webinar held by the Authors Guild on Thursday, July 20, 2023, one of the participants made some important points about language, so that if nothing else, we understood what we were talking about. ChatGPT is one application of AI. It is called a large language model, borrowing some terminology from linguistics and the work of Noam Chomsky. But this is where it becomes misleading. ChatGPT requires large amounts of data—copies of the written word—in order to produce texts on demand. The designers of the application have scoured the Internet for documents to feed into their computer. Books are found on pirate sites that are often fending off take-down notices from writers (I’ve sent some of those notices). With these texts, the machine is trained to recognize acceptable sequences of words and when their use is most relevant to the question presented. Think “keywords” lined up.

The user of ChatGPT can type in a request, and the software will type out an answer. If you want an outline for a novel, type that request with some details to guide the machine such as setting, characters, and time period, and the machine will send back an outline in conformity with your guidance. The designers of ChatGPT describe the answer as being generated, as a generative text. But this isn’t accurate, as one of the webinar participants pointed out. The machine cannot generate. The machine cobbles together bits and pieces according to patterns, and spews out the result. The text is derivative; it is derived, taken from documents fed into the machine. As the participant went on to say, the result is plagiarism of someone’s work, and in fact of many works by many someones.

Why does this matter?

We are writers. Accuracy matters. As George Orwell demonstrated only too clearly in 1984, words lead us and determine how we think (or don’t think), and so we as writers should always be accurate in how we present our ideas.

The work that AI designers insist on describing as training is in fact copying, copying of a copyrighted text without permission, which is an infringement of that law and also known as plagiarism. The text derived and reproduced by the machine does not carry any acknowledgment of this fact.

The purpose of the Authors Guild webinar was to bring members up to date on their efforts to protect and maintain the rights of writers. They are lobbying for several goals: First, payments and damages for training/copying already done. Second, AI content clearly labeled as such (The White House meeting on AI this week includes a request for a watermark or something like it, to indicate an AI produced text). Third, disclosure by AI companies of what work has been used already. (A list of ISBNs used has been made available, but when I tried it there was no way to search it, though a tool is sometimes available.) Fourth, expanding the right of publicity law from name, image, etc., to include style (a writer’s or artist’s style).

The Authors Guild is also talking with publishers about contract clauses that allow the writer to deny AI companies the right to copy the text or other contents of a publication for training or any other purpose without permission.

Some writers are already adding a clause to the standard copyright statement. “All rights reserved. No part of this book . . . ” To this, authors are adding “This work may not be used in AI training without written permission by the author,” or similar statements.

AI ChatGPT has many supporters as well as detractors, and I continue to learn about it. And no, I haven’t tried to use it for my work but a friend asked it for a summary of my first novel, Murder in Mellingham. The summary was atrocious, and included a character name I’ve never used.

My firend also used ChatGPT to produce a letter requesting that OpenAI stop using my material in its training. I’ve sent the letter and am now waiting for a reply. I’ll post about it when I get one.

Words on the Page

June 24, 2023 ~ susanoleksiw ~ 6 Comments

In one of the longest-running writing groups I participated in, our discussions often wandered into related areas but never very far afield. They were always informative, at least to me. One discussion in particular has remained with me.

The de facto leader of the group asked apropos of nothing if we ever wrote anything other than fiction. Aside from the occasional memo for work, everyone said no, except for me. As both a free-lance writer/editor and later an employee in a social services agency, I wrote all the time. When I was freelancing, I wrote chapters for textbooks, articles short and long, lots of book reviews, and edited dozens of books. As an employee I wrote countless fundraising letters, newsletters for our donors, and a never-ending list of grant applications and reports. For me the job search meant finding an opportunity to write.

I wrote a novel (incredibly bad) in college along with short stories (mostly so-so), and in my first job afterwards, as a social worker, I wrote long detailed reports of my visits to children’s homes, foster homes, family court sessions, and other agencies. My long-winded exercises in leaving nothing out sat alongside the terser reports of my colleagues, who managed to say much the same thing in a tenth of the space.

This observation came to me recently when in the process of cleaning out old files and boxes I came across my original notes from an early job. All that writing, all those words, as though I just had to use as many as possible whenever possible. It reminded me of my answer to a question asked in high school. What do you want to do, a friend asked. I want to write, I replied. And so I have.

Note that I didn’t say, I want to be a writer. I don’t think I’ve ever said that, or thought it. I’m not sure what it even means. I wanted to write. I wanted to get my ideas down on paper, explore them and develop them, see those sinuous strings of letters spreading across the page, coalescing into images I didn’t know I had in my head until I saw them in blue ink on white paper. Writing was like putting seeds into the ground so they’d grow into something bigger, something unanticipated but welcomed even if at first it made no sense to me.

When I look at the various mystery series I’ve written, I can see the stories I’ve used to interpret the experience of living along the New England coast, or in India during the tumult of the 1970s with Indira Gandhi, or on a farm in an isolated rural community. Some of the things I’ve said now surprise me. Did I really think that? How interesting! Each writer has different goals for any work in progress. My goals are always to discover something, see something emerge that I didn’t expect. For me, writing is like breathing. Necessary but something more.

Keep It or Toss It?

May 27, 2023 ~ susanoleksiw ~ 9 Comments

Like many other writers, I make a lot of notes and keep files on all sorts of things that I’m sure I’ll get to someday. But when the paper files start to spill out onto the floor or the desk, I know it’s time to cull the newspaper cuttings, scribbled notes for story ideas, and quotes from books that I was sure would prove useful or important.

This week I went through a three-ring binder where I’ve kept notes on the three series I’ve been working on beginning in 1991 and a few stand-alones that I never got to. Going through material I collected some years ago brought me back to ways I’d been thinking about writing—ideas for opening scenes or character sketches that no longer seemed strong or compelling. It was interesting to look over pages of ideas and see how much my thinking has changed. I was especially interested in how my ideas on craft had developed.

Included in all this were several ideas sketched out that meant nothing to me. I had no idea what I meant by some of it. So the question became, should I keep it or toss it? The answer was easier when I went through the news clippings that recorded peculiar people or bizarre incidents or twisted crimes. Most of them seemed blah to me now, so out they went. But one note was different.

I found a typed two-page single-spaced plot description for a thriller about a group of women who have been friends for years and sign up for an overseas tour. The tour is waylaid and the women and others held hostage. (Had I just read Bel Canto by Ann Patchett?) Hostages are killed, the police storm the site, and the women are saved. They head home and celebrate, glad to be alive. That seems like enough for a straightforward thriller, but the plot description goes on, covering the years after the women return to the States.

This outline, neatly typed, stands out for its focus on plot, and the use of a story line that I had been thinking about over the years but never used. I couldn’t figure out a title, had named some of the characters, and wasn’t sure how to end it. That may be why it goes on for so long—because I couldn’t find a point of rest, of climax and recovery and ending. In some paragraph transitions it almost feels like I didn’t know where to stop or how to stop.

When I began this clearing-out I expected at most to find some of the story ideas I had set aside while I worked on other things, or at least some of the ideas that come when I wasn’t sure what I wanted to work on next. I like those because they get me thinking. They prime the pump, I suppose, and get the ideas flowing.

But that typed outline is getting into my head. And now I have to figure out what I’m going to do with it. Write it or file it again? When other writers talk about writer’s block, I keep my mouth shut. It doesn’t happen for me. I have the other problem—way too many ideas to follow up on. And right now I have that big thriller idea, all neatly laid out for me to work on. As one of my friends in India used to say, What to do? What to do? Very great problem, madam.

Books and More

April 22, 2023 ~ susanoleksiw ~ 3 Comments

Like many others in my circle, I am in constant conflict with the standards of my culture. Collecting. But then disposing.

This morning, after having coffee with a good friend, I stopped at the library to collect two nonfiction books I’d put on reserve and pick out one or two mysteries to read. This is a pretty normal visit for me—I usually leave with two fiction and two nonfiction, and keep them for the full three weeks, if not one or two more. I like to try different writers, so I’m usually in the New Fiction section, and the same is true for nonfiction. This doesn’t mean I have no books at home to read. Quite the opposite. Every room has books in it. But I’m one of those people who find going to the library a necessary activity, and borrowing books is about more than finding something to read. It’s partly the activity of discovery and partly the pleasure of just being around so many publications.

But I have a lot of books at home. And over the years thousands more have passed through my hands, rested on my shelves, been read and shared and reread, until one day I decided it was time for them to move on. It occurred to me today that I have no idea why a book suddenly comes to the end of its visit. Do I need the space? Of course not. There’s always room for more. Have I changed? Possibly.

One small shelf is dedicated to the books I had as a child and which have survived numerous cleanings-out. Another equally small shelf is dedicated to a few I kept from my teen years, including Conrad Richter’s trilogy and The Gloucester Branch by John Leggett. Another dozen or so are integrated into general fiction and nonfiction, but those that seemed to be seminal in my development as a writer are held discretely apart, and every few years I ponder the prospect of donating them to the library or a thrift shop with a book section. But it never seems to be the right time.

My mother, another reader, kept her Girl Scout’s uniform and another few dresses from her early years. I found them in the back of a closet after she died. My father never kept anything that could be recycled for those of greater need. A businessman since the age of 15 (this was before World War I when such was possible), his wardrobe was spare to say the least. My closet is more like his than my mother’s, and I avoid associating with anyone who might invite me to an event for which I would be expected to wear a fancy dress. You can’t take a book to something like that and read, so why would I go?

What else do I keep? Art. My walls are a record of the eclectic tastes of me, my husband, his family, and mine, not to mention our grandparents and other relatives. Furniture doesn’t interest me, though I concede its usefulness. I’ve disposed of plenty over the years.

I am convinced that any American dropped into any town or city on earth will in a matter of weeks have too many possessions to tolerate and have to set out weeding and recycling. And yet every day, on TV, the radio, in junk mail, we’re urged to buy more. As a good member of the larger community and culture, I comply and buy more books.

That’s 588 words on a topic I haven’t figured out yet. Sometimes as I sit at my desk, fingers poised over the keys, I wonder what I’ll write about. I look across the room, or to my left, at all the books piled up, sometimes neatly arranged, and I wonder about all those words. So many. Surely I have something to say about them. Then, again, maybe not. Except that they’re old friends and I can’t imagine living without them.

Writers and Their . . . Warnings?

March 25, 2023 ~ susanoleksiw ~ 14 Comments

Several articles over the last few weeks have circled around the issue of “trigger warnings.” I’m used to seeing them before certain television shows, but I haven’t seen them on books yet.

Jamie Beck’s essay in Writer Unboxed explored the perplexing and even confounding question of trigger warnings for novelists. Her publisher “engaged a sensitivity reader to evaluate the portrayal of a neurodiverse character in my summer 2023 release (The Beauty of Rain). I eagerly anticipated the reader’s feedback, whose notes on that aspect of the manuscript were ultimately helpful and unsurprising. Conversely, her recommendation that I add trigger warnings about suicidal ideation and prescription drug abuse did momentarily throw me.” In the end, after extensive discussion, she decided to add a warning in the author’s note, as an expression of her commitment to building “a trusting relationship” with her readers.

The essay is reviewed in Victoria Weisfeld’s blog, where she considers other books, including one that seemed hardly to need a trigger warning of any sort. On Fabian Nicieza’s highly comic mystery, Suburban Dicks, she comments, “A reader would have to be extremely thin-skinned indeed to take his jibes seriously, but then we do seem to be in such an era.”

The idea of trigger warnings may have grown out of academia. In 1991, when I attended Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, a young MFA student admitted in a workshop that her fellow students were paralyzed in their classes for fear of writing something that would lead the teacher to accuse them of . . . of what wasn’t clear. But in general, they feared writing something considered politically incorrect, and as a result couldn’t write anything.

At MIT students are sometimes afraid to speak for fear of consequences, which suggests we haven’t made much progress since 1991. According to an article in the Boston Globe, “A recent FIRE survey of 45,000 students at over 200 US colleges found that 60 percent were uncomfortable publicly disagreeing with a professor about a controversial topic; at MIT, it’s 68 percent. In the national survey, 63 percent of students worried about damaging their reputations because someone misinterpreted their words or actions. At MIT, 68 percent worried about this.” It should be understandable that my brain jumped to the news of Ron DeSantis, governor of Florida, shutting down the AP course on African American History.

For me the issue isn’t whether or not what I write will offend someone, a reader I’ve never met and probably never will. I write a traditional mystery, and avoid violence in any form. But the question upends my longstanding view of the reader, as someone who comes to my work with an open mind and an optimistic attitude.

Whenever I’m looking for something to read in the library, I pull several titles off the shelves until I find one that appeals to me. I check the genre (thriller, sci-fi, traditional, cozy, etc.), read the blurbs and jacket copy, and consider the author. Once I make my choice I go home wanting to like the book, and I give it my full attention as a reader, a form of respect for another writer’s best effort to date. Do I look for trigger warnings? No. Have I ever missed one and wished it had been included? No. Have I read into books that I wished I hadn’t? Yes.

I don’t think I could read a novel and notice every instance that might cause distress in a reader. Would a deadly car crash qualify? Or back story about a child taken from the home because of physical abuse? How about the story of a bully who made high school miserable for a group of students? This is the kind of information I’d expect to find in the jacket copy—a clear indication of the parameters of the story. But I also wouldn’t want the jacket copy to give away important features.

There’s no easy answer to the question of using or not using trigger warnings, but the discussions have caught my attention and made me think. I don’t want a reader to be distressed by one of my books (very unlikely, considering what I write), but I also don’t want to find myself unable to write freely out of fear or concern about a reader’s reaction. The decision will be different for each writer, and may vary with the book. I look forward to more discussion, and learning more about how this plays out for writers.

https://writerunboxed.com/2023/01/24/to-warn-or-not-to-warn

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/01/24/business/mit-students-faculty-afraid-speak-their-minds-sensitive-issues-report-says/

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/01/24/opinion/ron-desantiss-fear-american-history/

https://www.apmresearchlab.org/motn/what-americans-think-about-liberty-rights-freedom-may-2022