Mass theft automation

Hello you, enjoying the longer lighter days on this hemisphere? I am.

I am not a winter person and so the sunshine has improved my mood and inspired my work. At the very least it’s a free form of stimulation, not something that can be assumed for many other tonics.

A surprise to nobody is that I still work with and enjoy working with organisations looking to use AI. This is not just generative AI, but that’s in there too and with the wise ones we talk about ethics, morals and IP and some of the others I can only do my best to communicate clearly to them the impact of the work they are proposing.

In an interesting recent turn, The Atlantic made a little web doo-dad (I have a degree in computer science so I can use technical terminology like that) so that authors can check if their writing appears in LibGen - or Library Genesis, home to many pirated books. Personally, if I had written my opus and it was pirated so that individuals could read it, I don’t think I’d be too upset. I might not love it, but it doesn’t rankle me. But Meta and OpenAI using LibGen to train their AI models on - that’s quite the scale up - and it looks a lot more like the very rich profiting even more from authors who frankly don’t get paid much. (If you are an author who got published - high five to you for getting there and thank you for spending all those hours, days and weeks writing to get paid very little for the work. Not everyone is a best seller.)

You can’t prove with the web doo-dad that anyone’s book specifically was used to train the AI models in these cases, but you can see if your work is part of that source. It’s interesting how things cooled over piracy (You wouldn’t download a car - or screen cap an NFT right?) but mass theft automation is such a huge transgression. It eats up decades of work in a comparatively short time. That doesn’t seem right.

I continue to talk with my clients about the use of AI, legislation in various countries and of course ask them where their morals and ethics lie. Most are wonderful thoughtful people, there are a tiny few who…well, you can bring a fool to data, but you can’t make him think.

Oh! Darlings! *air kissy. Your girl has written something for theatre. A good friend sent me a link that a Bristol theatre had an open call for writers to create a monologue. I stared dumbly at the message and thought ‘but I don’t write monologues’, except maybe I do. I gave it a go, writing in a similar way to the methods I use to ghost write columns for people - but with an actor in mind in the hope that might make a difference. The punchline is that the theatre accepted my monologue and it’s going to be performed in June. That might not be much for other people, but I’m happy as a dog with two tails and I am looking forward to seeing someone doubtless very talented turn words on a page into a physical delivery, directed by someone, lit by someone else. Whoever they are, I’m grateful and if it works out, maybe I’ll try it again. In for a penny right? I’ll let you know how it goes.

As usual I am reading all over the place. I am also working on a lit review. It’s interesting but I need a break sometimes.

Here’s what’s been interesting lately -

The KLF: Chaos, Magic and the Band who Burned a Million Pounds. John Higgs. Funnier than I expected and a myriad of strange connections.

Careless People - Sarah Wynn-WIlliams. Insider story of Facebook (Meta). I’m not sure who is more naive in this story, but FB doesn’t come out well. That’s not unexpected but over the years as a tech writer I have read countless books about the tech businesses that surround us and to have a timeline and a series of events put together like this is a clearer perspective than being met with yet another headline about how awful they are. Mostly, they don’t seem to learn.

Picture Work - Diana Kamin. A history of picture libraries and stock image economies. I like this. I’ve worked as a photographer, an editor and reporter and as life became very digital and then social media ate our attention spans, pictures became more important - but now we can make them all with AI right? No need for those incredible moments captured on film that will be seared into our hearts forever…right?

The Dog Exercising Machine - Edward de Bono. If you feel uplifted by kids’ drawings (I do!) then you might like this book of kids inventing things by drawing them and not being entirely shackled to physics…or reality. Lovely.

Reading in brief has been a lot of lit review I’m not listing here. Also many short stories - the Best British Short Stories 2024 - which was a wonderful gift, 100 World’s Greatest short stories - everyone from Aesop to Woolf, The Second Virago Book of Fairy Tales - collected by Angela Carter, a bunch if Didion and Remarkably Bright Creatures which I was hoping would be more about an octopus than it is and so I felt generally meh - an easy read. I am, however, slightly obsessed by the screen writing of Abi Morgan at the moment.

Louis Toledo a.k.a. Laprisamata I love the colours adn the deteails. I generally love images I can spend time looking into. No wonder he does album cover art. Do people still see album covers? (Rhetorical - don’t @ me).

Sophie Cagniart and her maddeningly beautiful modern sashiko needlework

Ramiro Clemente - a little bit Ralph Steaman and a little bit Gerald Scarfe. My kind of scratchy energetic artwork. Lovely.

And finally - apparently it’s on Hulu but I don’t have that so I am (im)patiently waiting to watch The World According to Allee Willis to appear on the smaller screen. It looks like one hell of a career, though a certain sadness to her life.

Ok, that’s enough for now, I have work to get on with and I bet you do too. Remember to drink water, go outside at some point and share this with your friends if you think they might like it.

I might write again soon, then again.

Jx