#5. Hallucinating and Memorising
and other tricks of the generative AI trade
In my uni job we’ve just launched our series of webinars on Writing and Technology where we are mostly focussing on AI by which I mean Large Language Models (LLMs) and their impact on and benefits for creative writers. Here’s a bit of blurb:
From generative writing tools to augmented publishing processes, artificial intelligence is rapidly changing and challenging the landscape of creative writing and publishing. This free four-part webinar series from MyWorld and Bath Spa University’s Centre for Cultural and Creative Industries’ Narrative and Emerging Technologies (NET) Lab offers an in-depth look at AI’s emerging influence across writing, publishing, pedagogy and performance.
The first webinar is AI and Writing Practices: Exploring Generative Tools for Enhancing Creativity Across Genre, 24th Jan 2024, from 12:00-13:00 UK time. For more information on this and the other webinars in the monthly series, look here.
Meanwhile the AI landscape continues to be fast-moving and confusing. There’s a good write-up in The Atlantic, The Flaw That Could Ruin Generative AI by Alex Reisner, which uses two of the current court cases, New York Times vs Microsoft and Open AI as well as Universal Music Group’s corresponding case, to explain and explore the now key concept of ‘memorisation’ which is what LLMs do with copyright texts - with the right prompts, yes, the LLM will spew out half your novel verbatim because it has memorised it. Like ‘hallucination’ (which is a lovely woozy very human word annoyingly co-opted to mean, basically, INCORRECT INFORMATION, nothing to do with having one too many and seeing your long dead lover dancing in the moonlight), memorisation seems to be a bug that AI developers think will be fixed. In the meantime, as my father would have said, hoo boy. Hopefully our webinars will help us think through both the uses and abuses of AI tools for writers.
Over the Christmas period there was a report in the Guardian newspaper about an airplane stowaway who survived a flight from Algeria to Paris hidden in the plane’s landing gear. I have been following the stories of airplane stowaways for many years, since first reading a report about a supermarket car park in west London where the bodies of stowaways are sometimes found to have fallen when planes lower their wheels before landing. I collaborated with Chris Joseph on Flight Paths, a digital fiction project that explored the story of a stowaway survivor and the woman on whose car he lands, and I wrote a novel based on this same story, Landing Gear, which came out in 2014. According to this report, the mortality rate for wheel-way stowaways is 77%, which means that, amazingly, 23% of people survive these incredibly perilous high altitude journeys at temperatures of -50 degrees. To want to get somewhere - or leave somewhere - so badly that this seems like a reasonable way to travel is extraordinary.
Lastly, my novel-in-waiting is a novel-in-waiting no more; its status has changed back to work-in-progress! My agent’s feedback last week was more of a back-to-the-drawing-board vibe than aren’t-you-a-genius-here’s-your-publishing-contract type thing. But that’s okay. As a lot of writers I know would agree, I prefer writing to just about any other writing-related activity, including publishing. So a few more months sequestered away trying to make this damn manuscript work is not a bad fate.
I hope 2024 is treating you well so far and you are not too freaked out by EVERYTHING THAT IS HAPPENING.