Tag: internet

‘Information’ Overload

On By Mick CanningIn AI, artificial intelligence, books, comment, communication, internet, misinformation21 Comments

I’ve had this post in mind for a while without actually getting around to writing any of it. But I felt it would fit in well here, following on from my last post.

We are supposedly better informed today than we were twenty, fifty, a hundred years ago. I’m not sure I agree, though. Certainly, there is no lack of information available, and access to it couldn’t be any easier. In fact whatever you want to know, you can find it online. Anything. Whether it be true or false, it’s there online. And because all this information is easily available, and because billions of people have access to the internet, it can be spread incredibly far and wide in a tiny amount of time. It is certainly not just AI that has led to this. The internet was full of misinformation long before AI was an issue.

I heard a few years ago that university students were forbidden to use Wikipedia as a source for essays and research. The people who add information to Wikipedia do not have to be any kind of expert. There is a certain amount of checking, but I don’t know how rigorous it is. Certainly, it is not unknown for mistakes and deliberate falsehoods to be added. This is why I have never used it as an information source. At best I have found what I might be looking for on there, but then gone to a reliable site to check it. For medical information, for example, I would use the UK’s NHS site. For historical information, I might use a top university website, or a large museum’s. A site where the information will have been uploaded by experts and specialists.

YouTube seems to be ridiculously popular with huge numbers of people as an information source. There are, of course, YouTube channels by very reputable people and institutions, but also a huge number of ones which exist solely to spread misinformation and total lies. And while it may be easy to tell some of the bad ones from the good, that still leaves large numbers that might or might not be reputable.

The same is true of social media. Countless sites run by Holocaust deniers, Nazi sympathisers, and every sort of conspiracy theorist from Flat Earthers to those who believe the world is run by paedophile alien lizard people. Again, while most of these are obviously what they are, many are less so.

Why so many sites spreading disinformation? The first reason is that there are many people who believe the crazy conspiracy theories. I’m not getting into the hows and whys of this, but the psychology is interesting. But the second reason is money. Many of these sites are monetised, so that the more clicks they get, the more views, the more money the site owner ‘earns’. Probably a feeling of power, too.

And to return to AI briefly, if anyone is in any doubt that it will make things up or provide misinformation, should you ask an AI program for examples of misinformation from an AI program, it will provide them. Whichever way you look at that, it is proof.

The advent of physical self-publishing, too, has contributed to this, albeit less seriously. The vast majority of self-published books are fiction, but who is there to check the accuracy of the supposedly factual ones?

As difficult as it is to separate fact from fiction now, how will it be in five, ten, or twenty years down the line? Or a hundred? We already treat historical records with a certain amount of suspicion, aware that many of them will be biased or fabricated. I suspect that generations to come will decide it is impossible to be certain of anything that happened in these times.

In a way, they will be the new Dark Ages.

A Justification of Theft

On By Mick CanningIn AI, artificial intelligence, comment, communication, internet50 Comments

Clickbait? Perhaps, but I have a point to make.

There is a blog I follow which regularly posts about good people. People who make a difference to their world. Kindness. They change lives. And it makes for a refreshing read in a world which often appears to be so full of shit we could be drowning in the stuff. I also see now on social media – at least on Facebook, which is the only one I follow other than Instagram – AI generated posts on good people. I know they’re AI generated, because the signs are all there. I don’t intend to list the signs, as most people are aware of them already. These AI generated posts seem to fall into the same few categories. There is the rough biker with the heart of gold adopting a defenceless little girl. The retiree who’s lost his wife and finds meaning in life through spreading love through his community. There’re one or two others, but they all seem to fall into a few predictable categories. And you read these long tear-jerkers and reach the end and you go ‘Ah, isn’t that lovely.’ Or you’re meant to, anyway. But they are AI generated, the people don’t exist (although the original ones may have been based on real people), and these things did not really happen. But does this matter?

I think it does, for several reasons. AI invents stuff. If this is not the intention of the user, these are known as ‘AI Hallucinations’. If it can’t find what it’s been asked to find, it will sometimes make something up instead. Equally, it may draw data from untrustworthy sources. Then there are AI programs which are designed to make up stuff. If we understand that, then when we read something we understand is AI generated, we don’t necessarily believe it. And since we don’t believe the characters or the narrative, then the message it is designed to deliver is rejected. We all know that kindness is a good thing, but being told that by a computer program that has clearly fabricated the vehicle of delivery diminishes the message.

It is the exact opposite of ‘Don’t shoot the messenger’, because in this case the message is rejected because the messenger is flawed.

And the more we read these posts, knowing they are AI generated but if we’re still happy to take them completely at face value, the more we help to normalise the things. The more we accept AI into our lives and accept these fabrications.

So there are more than one type of AI program. Many of those that are really good at inventing stuff, and there are quite a few, are designed specifically to write books. They advertise themselves as producing books ‘in minutes, not months’. A few clicks on the button and hey presto! I’ve written a book! I’ll get back to this at some point, but are these people authors? No. They’re not. They’re frauds. But this brings me back to those original posts, which someone has created using an AI program similar to the book writer programs to deliberately invent the contents.

And to the more important point, the point where both the hallucinations, but even more importantly the deliberately fabricated material, really matter.

AI is, as we’ve seen, designed to invent stuff. Okay, that’s a simplification, but the point is that it’s designed to give the user exactly what they ask for. If someone requests it to write a piece justifying theft, or infanticide, for example, (not to ask it if it can be justified, but telling it to actually do so) it will do that, citing either nasty stuff it’s dug up from some remote hole on the internet, or, more likely, completely inventing stuff because the real justifications don’t exist. And it will look reasonably believable, perhaps writing something along the lines of ‘the Cornel University experiments of 1983 – 1984 by Taylor and Whickham et al demonstrate that…’ etc etc. And the casual reader will think ‘oh, I never realised that. So perhaps there’s something in it after all.’ But these citations will be made up.

And to go slightly off topic for a moment, there are the illustrations. AI generated photos are still usually recognisable as such, but they’re getting much better. Ones that have been subtly manipulated are now very hard to detect. The implications there should be obvious, can we now believe anything we see or are told?

This is not to suggest AI is an unmitigated evil. Its champions will point out advances in, for example, medicine and material sciences, which are very real and extremely important. But the issues of misinformation and, as frequently cited, intellectual property theft, to say nothing of the potential to completely destroy careers in the literary and artistic worlds, are also very real.

So how do we fight this? I’m afraid I’ve no idea. The genie is out of the bottle and I see no way it’s going back in again. Other than burning down the internet we are stuck with it and over the next year or so (or less – who knows?) it’s going to get harder and harder to tell truth from complete (and possibly dangerous) crap. While the programs are becoming better at presenting the genuine data they are requested to present, the ones inventing stuff are getting better at making this appear real. All we can do is be aware of this, be cautious and critical. And perhaps we could go back to getting our facts from books which, although not infallible, are far more likely to be accurate. Publishers are still the gatekeepers there, and they tend to do a pretty good job. Research stuff properly. Rather than accepting important medical information, for example, from Joe Bloggs on Facebook, look it up on a respectable site, like the NHS (in UK).

Maybe just stay off the internet more.

Which is probably a good idea anyway.

Excerpts From The Book of Meh

On By Mick CanningIn cats, humour, Religion, satire26 Comments

From Chapter one:

In the beginning there was lots of very dark darkness and very cold cold stuff, which wasn’t at all nice and although no one existed yet, they were all really miserable.

And Meh, the god of this world, thought ‘Well, this isn’t much fun’ and so He created the universe, with the Milky Way above and the Place of Torment below. And the Milky Way is a beauteous place of flowing streams of milk and cream and comfortable sofas beside cosy fires, while the Place of Torment is a cold and frozen place of hard floors and empty food bowls. And that was the first day, and a jolly good first day’s work it was too.

On the second day, Meh created the earth by vomiting up a giant hairball, and then sat back as life rapidly evolved without any further input from Meh, which was how He liked it, so He could curl up and take a little nap…

From Chapter three:

‘And thou shalt make images of Meh, and cause them to be distributed, yeah, all over the internet and into the world even unto the furthest corners. There shall be infinitely more of these images than those of dogs, for I, Meh, am a jealous god.

‘And be it known my chosen ones, whom I love and have created in my own image, shall be afforded a privileged place in thine homes, otherwise I shall visit plagues upon thy households, yeah, even unto the seventh generation of thy accursed species.

‘But those who treat my beloved offspring well shall have their eternal reward, most especially in the Milky Way, while those who mistreat them shall be condemned to be pounced upon and bitten for all eternity, and great will be the wailing and gnashing of teeth.’

From Chapter seven:

And know that this is the truth, for it is written herein and thou shalt believe it for it is the word of Meh.

It is told there was a Man of Meh, and he came unto the land of Babylon to preach to the people there tolerance and goodwill to all those that walk upon four legs and are furry and purr when pleased, yet the people received him with hostility and drove him out into the desert.

And thus Meh said ‘Lo, I shall send plagues to irritate and annoy these godless people until they learn the error of their ways.’ There was first, then, a plague of fleas, which certainly irritated them, although it was insufficient to cause them to mend their ways. So Meh then turned the milk sour, and this annoyed the people, but they still denied Meh and said ‘We don’t want to listen to some preacher spouting a load of old bollox’ and so Meh then caused all the fish in the fish market to be a bit off, and not really smell all that good. And the people said ‘Oh, leave it out. We’ll make our own rules and laws.’

So Meh did withdraw from the world, and he did sulk a goodly while.

Some Diary Extracts

On By Mick CanningIn Covid-19, diary, internet, Painting, poetry, Wood Carving, writing17 Comments

April 10th 2022:

A few days ago I dug out all the pastel paintings I have hanging around and put them to one side, the intention being to chuck them all out. As part of managing to get my creative side working properly again, I feel I need to clear out the majority of my old work. I think it is simply preventing me from getting going again – as well as taking up space we don’t really have spare. I’ve always been a little reluctant to just destroy a painting I think I might be able to sell at some point, but that’s something that doesn’t matter to me in the same way any longer.

It’s much the same with writing. Nice if someone buys it and nice, of course, if someone reads it and likes it and, hopefully, gets something from it. But not important in the same way as it used to be. I’ve never wanted to be famous, or sell millions of books (much the same thing, of course), and perhaps this is part of that. If the poetry I’m currently writing is any good, I would like someone to publish it, and if a small audience appreciated it and thought it worthwhile, well, I’d be tickled pink. But it’s not that important.

If I paint again, or carve wood, it will be entirely for me. If someone likes a painting, then perhaps I’ll simply give it to them. I appreciate this isn’t a philosophy that most creatives could adopt, but it’s what I feel I should like to do at the moment.

Wall painting in Amberley Church, Sussex. It dates from around 1300AD, was whitewashed over around 1550, and restored in 1967.

April 11th 2022:

We’re off to Amberley for a couple of days. We should have been walking the South Downs Way at the moment, but Covid has left us too tired for that, so we cancelled our various bookings. But to give ourselves a short break, we kept the Amberley one and booked an extra night.

Yesterday I contemplated completely coming off the internet for a matter of all of about half a second. I find it a huge distraction and much of it incredibly annoying, but like most folk I’m in too deep to extricate myself. We’ve arranged our lives around it over the past twenty years especially, and in my own case I keep in touch with many people that way, I have my blog, which I don’t think I’m ready to give up yet, rely upon it for booking trains and finding train and bus timetables, use it for family research, writing research, and to find and order books and music. None of these would be insurmountable problems, but cumulatively it would just be too much hassle to do without.

But even when I’m using my laptop for writing, I get too easily distracted by the internet and I feel a little like those people who walk through lovely scenery staring down at their mobile phones.

April 15th 2022:

Sunny and clear this morning and the forecast is that the day will be warm and bright. Having had quite a busy day yesterday, I felt quite run down in the evening and this morning feel very tired despite having slept well. It is four weeks until we go to Coll and I hope I’ve got some energy back by then.

It is sunny and, dare I say it, warm all day and despite this being Easter Bank Holiday weekend, the forecast is that it will continue this way.

Strange powers are at work.

Lockdown Stream of Consciousness

On By Mick CanningIn blogging, Corona Virus, Covid-19, lockdown, writing35 Comments

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Here we are in week whatever it is of Lockdown, and I have to say I’m finding it ever so difficult to dream up a new blog post. It’s not that I’m having any difficulty writing, as I’m making good progress with one of my novels. I timetable my day so I write in the morning and don’t allow myself to look at the internet until after lunch. I go out and walk each day, I’m eating well. And I don’t mind the idea of Lockdown as such, since I’m quite a solitary person at the best of times; fond of my own company and never at my best with groups of people.

When it comes to writing a new post, though, I just seem to dry up. I think one reason for this is the major change to everyone’s lifestyles that this crisis has demanded. Not so much the changes to mine, strangely enough, but those of other people. I look at some of the posts I have partly written and think they seem somehow too trite for today. Some others are about journeys or visits to places I love, and I don’t seem to have the heart to finish them. Perhaps it’s all a bit too raw, too painful. I rarely write political pieces, and have even less enthusiasm at the moment than usual. Again, the politics are either too trite, or just incredibly infuriating. And there are more than enough bloggers covering the infuriating stuff, even if I wanted to.

Write a parody? I do, occasionally. But a parody of the Coronavirus Crisis seems tasteless, and both our inept government and the unpleasant fool in the White House are already parodies of themselves. I could do a humorous one later, I suppose. I might go and see what Bob is up to…

But I don’t feel I’ve anything original to offer at the moment, and I’m generally a subscriber to the school of thought that states if you have nothing to say, then it’s best not to say it.

So I thought today I’d pick a random photograph I haven’t posted before and put that up, and just go with a stream of consciousness, and see where it led me.

It turns out it led me here.

Welcome to my Crisis!

On By Mick CanningIn blogging, internet, Making Friends with the Crocodile, promoting, Short story, social media, writing49 Comments

I’ve been hiding from the internet.

No, I didn’t go away, unfortunately, although a holiday was what I both have been and am still craving. I made a rash promise some weeks ago to put up a Facebook Author page, to do a minor relaunch of my novel, and to serialise a bawdy Elizabethan detective story. Really, I should know myself better than that.

dawn panorama

I think it was the short story that finally broke me.

Writing, for me, is a pleasure, comparable to painting. It is all about crafting the finished product, taking my time and eventually producing the best I can. When all goes well, the process is immensely satisfying from beginning to end.

Within that process, of course, there are times of writer’s block, false starts and finishes, wrong turnings, and many other things to go wrong. And the editing can be an infuriating process. But overall, there needs to be a flow.

Making Friends with the Crocodile worked for me at the length it was (45,000 words), since I wrote it almost as a stream of consciousness as the story unfolded in my mind. It came out in a rush partly because of its importance to me, and partly because I found I could visualise the characters, the story and the setting clearly. Once I had reached the end, I knew that was the end.

Obviously, many stories take a lot more coaxing to get down on paper. I’ve struggled with ones that need to be forced, certainly in places, partly because at that point they are not ‘me’ at the heart of them; I have lost that flow. But sometimes because of the length.

One reason I stopped entering short story competitions is I write a lot of long short stories. I am perfectly aware of the dictum that whatever you write can be edited down to the required length and that, indeed, they should be edited down.

But I also strongly believe that when a story presents itself to be written, that story has an internal length that needs to be respected, even after editing. Some require a few hundred words, some a lot more. But to attempt to turn Making Friends with the Crocodile into a 120,000 word novel or a 5.000 word short story, I am sure would have meant a lesser read. It would have been padded out for the sake of it, or stripped down to bare bones that would have meant that the characters could not have been drawn as strongly as I wanted them to be, and therefore encouraged less empathy from the reader.

Where is all this leading?

I began the short story / serial. It was working quite well, and I had a good few chuckles to myself as I was writing it and then, suddenly, it was almost 10,000 words long and nowhere near finished.

Oh dear.

So I attempted to cram and trim and edit and get it down to a suitable length for serialisation, but I was not happy with the result. Oh no. And I had one of my minor panic-I-can’t-cope-stress attacks and decided the only way to deal with it was to hide.

So, I’m not going to serialise it after all. I will finish it, but the attempt to condense it into a few instalments simply wasn’t working, and what I ended up with felt completely wrong. I will return to it at some point in the future, and finish it as the novella that it clearly is.

There is another strand to all this:

I made the Facebook Author page. That was the easy bit, and I’ll show you where it is next time. And I put together the re-launch promotion piece by the simple expedient of gathering together extracts from lots of the kind reviews the book has had.

But I am in a state of recurring panic, once again, over this huge need to self-promote to sell books. Of course, we all want to, but we are forever urged to use this or that platform, accept this or that offer, etc. Now, we are told that we ‘must’ have a YouTube channel. Really? And a presence on all sorts of social media. Are we not ‘serious’ writers if we are not prepared to move heaven and earth to sell a couple of extra books? That we should ‘invest’ a hundred or five hundred dollars here and there to advertise ourselves?

I have sold a few, and what is really important to me is the tremendous feedback that I’ve had.

Blowing my own trumpet is anathema to me, as I have written in the past. I just can’t do the selling and marketing the way that seems to be presented as essential. It’s an aspect of life that I hate, and a reason I have never gone into ‘business’. Everything around the promotion and marketing just seems relentless and is something that I cannot cope with.

Fortunately, I am not interested in fame. The idea frightens me.

And I really struggle with social media. I have had two goes at being on Facebook, and cope with it at the moment by not going on it very much. I spent ages trying to see the use of Linkedin, and have solved that one by closing my account last week. I really see no use for it.

And I am not doing Twatter.

So here I am back on WordPress, which is a platform I do enjoy. I’ll dip in and out of it a bit over the next few weeks or months, I suspect, since I still feel a bit panicky, but I will be there.

Thank you for your patience!

Let’s Rid the Internet of Kittens

On By Mick CanningIn blogging, Painting, research, writing52 Comments

What is it about the internet and kittens, for goodness’ sake? There are far too many pictures of them.

Okay, that’s too provocative. Let’s move on.

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She Who Dislikes Being Referred To This Way has been away for a few days. I had presumed that I would sleep better without the snoring, and the duvet being constantly pulled off me, but I was wrong.

For some reason, I’ve not slept particularly well at all.

Perhaps it was the wild parties I’ve no idea why not.

I had intended to begin a painting, maybe even get it finished, but although I carefully planned said painting, even finding a few resource pictures to use, once I sat down in front of the paper, it just refused to happen. My mind went completely blank and my enthusiasm kicked the wall sulkily for a few moments and then ran out of the house sobbing.

Oh well, back to the writing.

I did have a few ideas for short stories and, because I know how to use my time both productively and wisely, immediately started writing two of them, as well as continuing with both the novels I’m writing. That’s what you’re meant to do, right? Isn’t it?

Oh, and a poem.

And, of course, I need to do research for all the various Tales In Process. Isn’t it amazing what a little bit of research throws up?

Here are just a couple of little snippets, a few gobbets of curiosity, that I have come across recently while researching topics in medieval Persia and India, for use in my #1 Novel In Progress, The Assassin’s Garden.

All of the prostitutes in Fatephur Sikri, India, during the short time that it was Akhbar’s capital, were kept in an area just outside the city called ‘The Devil’s Quarter’.

You do get sidetracked, of course, but perhaps that will be an integral part of the plot? Possible spoiler alert?

I wouldn’t like to say.

And at one point, there is a long journey undertaken in my book, by caravan.

‘Caravan’ is a Persian word, I discover. That seems appropriate. In some parts of Persia they would travel by day and rest by night.

In others, the reverse was true. Something to do with the temperature, I expect.

In the nineteenth century, there were caravans that existed just to transfer corpses to holy cities for burial. These disappeared in the early twentieth century, largely due to better understanding of how diseases spread!

And, obviously, I mean the caravans that are chock full of camels and traders and an ill-assorted collection of ne’er-do-wells, not the wretched giant metal boxes blocking ninety percent of our roads as soon as the weather shows even the faintest promise of a few hours of sunshine.

But enough of caravans, for now, I’ve got some words to beat into shape.

Oh, and there are still people who would prefer pictures of kittens?