To put any thoughtful labour into crafting words online today is to watch them get sucked up, repurposed, and often monetized by someone else. It feels a bit like a digital wasteland; overrun with pirates, replete with armies of robots regurgitating everything into a gooey cocktail of digital sludge.
I want to live in a future where Artificial Intelligences can relieve humans of the drudgery of labour. But I don’t want to live in a future which is built by ripping-off people against their will.
The twelve(!) year old photo that Ethan has illustrated this post with still makes my heart sing.
But in calling these programs “artificial intelligence” we grant them a claim to authorship that is simply untrue. Each of those tokens used by programs like ChatGPT—the “language” in their “large language model”—represents a tiny, tiny piece of material that someone else created. And those authors are not credited for it, paid for it or asked permission for its use. In a sense, these machine-learning bots are actually the most advanced form of a chop shop: They steal material from creators (that is, they use it without permission), cut that material into parts so small that no one can trace them and then repurpose them to form new products.
Such an elegant idea!
Bookfeed.io is a simple tool that allows you to specify a list of authors, and generates an RSS feed with each author’s most recently released book.
Small pieces, loosely joined.
What you see is the big map of a sea of literature, one where each island represents a single author, and each city represents a book. The map represents a selection of 113 008 authors and 145 162 books.
This is a poetic experiment where we hope you will get lost for a while.
Join your favorite authors on Zoom where you can have spirited discussions from the privacy of our own quarantined space!
A great initiative from the folks at Mule Design. As well as chatting to talented authors, you can also chat to me: this Thursday at 4pm UTC I’ll be discussing Resilient Web Design.
Three authors pick their favourite book by Philip K Dick:
Now that Five Simple Steps has closed down, the individual authors are in charge of distributing their own books. This site links to all of those books.
A beautiful PDF literary magazine, designed to be printed out and read away from the computer. I'd still love to see an HTML version.
Aleks pointed me to this sort-of ARG involving authors in London. Could be good fun.