Links of the week September 25 2023 (39)

Growing up, I devoured Agatha Christie novels. My school library had several shelves full of her books, and I worked my way through them as fast as I could. It was the 1990s, and I didn't notice that there weren't many characters in Christie's novels who looked like me, because that was the norm. There weren't many novels of any genre, and certainly not by British writers, who featured people of colour in roles that weren't subsidiary or there to shine a light onto the characterisation of a white character (having a racist act committed by a bad guy or having a white character "save" a person of colour to show their purity of heart). And, I'll be honest, these stereotypes are still blindsiding me in bestselling books today.

As I was writing it, my focus began to change from our relationship with technology to the ethics of the people developing and using it, and the moral dilemma we all face. As political theorist Langdon Winner put it in his 1977 paper on autonomous technologies: "Their (the tech prophets'] notion of active vital use is more accurately seen as a passive utilisation - a totally accepting, unquestioning relationship with technologies over which they have no real power".

This notion has haunted me: that when it comes to technology, and AI specifically, we operate with the illusion of power, when in fact we could easily become (if we're not already) passive consumers. That we will be cowed by convenience and give in to a consumption of AI, with an outsourcing of effort, coupled with a handing over of autonomy as the logical conclusion. As large AI models rehash words, images and voices based on human input, we become both consumer and consumed.

This cascade of angst was triggered by the launch of ChatGPT by OpenAI in November 2022. Among its wiles, the bot is best known for its prowess at churning out prose. On an existential level, does it matter if AI writes for us? For a non-kneejerk answer, we need to make a serious stab at understanding how writing affects us as people.

Most fundamentally, it changes our minds and brains. The classicist Eric Havelock argued in Preface to Plato that development of writing and concomitant spread of literacy in Archaic Greece, even in limited circles, enabled the flowering of Greek philosophical thought. Writing facilitated reflection, logical thinking, and production of tangible texts to foster rethinking.

Rachel Geman, a partner with Lieff Cabraser and co-counsel for the plaintiffs and the proposed class, stated: "Without the plaintiffs' and the proposed class' copyrighted works, the defendants would have a vastly different commercial product. The defendants' decision to copy authors' works, done without offering any choices or providing any compensation, threatens the role and livelihood of writers as a whole."

Scott Sholder, a partner with Cowan, DeBaets, Abrahams & Sheppard and co-counsel for the plaintiffs and the proposed class, added: "The plaintiffs don't object to the development of generative AI, but the defendants had no right to develop their AI technologies with unpermitted use of the authors' copyrighted works. The defendants could have ‘trained' their large language models on works in the public domain or paid a reasonable licensing fee to use copyrighted works."

 

Every experience I had during those years as a defence attorney bleeds into my writing. The men and women I defended, most of whom weren't horrible people but simply people who had made a horrible choice. The system that is so blatantly stacked against defendants. The understanding that even people who have committed crimes often still have something worth contributing to the world.

When i began writing I Did It For You, there was one lesson I'd learned from my time as a defence attorney that I wanted to bring to the story. In particular, the ways in which violent crime impacts not only the family of the victim, but also the family of the perpetrator.

The encounter revealed not just Glass's own biases, but also the tip of the hidden networks and forces running through society. It is an experience she has channelled into writing spy fiction: her debut thriller, The Chase, was published in February to praise from leaders of the genre James Patterson and Anthony Horowitz. It was shortlisted for the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger award by the Crime Writers' AssociationA networking society for some 400 British crime writers (widely defined) and links to their sites. Membership for published writers only, but award a Debut Dagger for the best unpublished crime novel. Some articles from their magazine Red Herrings are posted on the site and there are links to many individual crime writers' websites., while a television adaptation is in the works from the production company behind the BBC series The Night Manager. The Traitor, the follow-up in the same Alias Emma series, is published this month.

My agent, Joe, had guided me through endless rewrites and three rounds of submissions to publishers in New York and producers in Hollywood. We had some serious nibbles-big name editors took me to lunch, and over one weekend in April 1998, 26 producers read the manuscript in advance of an anticipated auction of the movie rights-but we never got an offer. Joe was willing to work with me on one last rewrite, believing we still had a chance of getting a million-dollar payday. But I had reached my limit. I was flat broke and my wife and children had had more than enough. My dream of literary stardom had cost them plenty.

I formatted the book, got an ISBN number, designed a cover, and somehow convinced a local printer to print 5,000 copies on credit. The printer released a few hundred books to me and locked away the remainder in their warehouse. The deal was that as I sold those books and paid down the bill, the printer would release the rest-in increments.