Asking 'what number comes next in the sequence?'

Artificial intelligence

Deep learning

Neural networks

Random forests

But here's my definition:

The numbers might represent different things

We might express the output in different ways

2

4

6

8

10

Input data

Output prediction

2

4

6

8

'probably between 9 and 11'

'A dog'

'A dog'

'A dog'

'A dog'

More important than the fine details of the method or galactic amounts of computing power

'Hickory dickory...

'Artificial intelligence' was quite different 1960-2010s (although taxonomy isn't very important)

Made possible by: 1)accessible computing power, and 2)oodles of 'free' metadata-tagged information

But profound questions of attribution, bias, provenance and consequences remain

...but these tools are oriented toward business writing

...but I've set to see actionable insights at the story level (why? I think I know...)

'dog' using DALL-E 2

'A dog'

'A dog'

'A dog'

'beast romance fantasy photorealistic'

'man chest black and white'

fantasy castle, book cover, illustration, artstation

LAION/Common Crawl

MSCOCO

YFCC100M

ImageNet

Text

Related image

Related image

Image

Prolific fantasy artist who has a large portfolio online

Carefully added metadata to his portfolio

Result > 50x more frequently used as a prompt than Michaelangelo/Picasso/da Vinci

...he's not making a cent off it

'a CEO seated at a desk'

Stable Diffusion

(via Accomplice)

DALL-E 2

If you want anything outside the norm for a cover/other illustration, it may not be easy to produce

It will be much more likely to bear a close resemblance to the input data -> increased commercial risk

Publishing outside the Anglosphere requires quite different stylistic elements in cover design (cf. Cozy Mysteries)

'Musical dice games' were popular in the 18th century

'Plotto', a book from 1928, generates (quite involved) plots from a systematic process

I made a (simple) generator for 5K short romance stories!  It was...not the money-printing machine I had hoped for

I

am

a

fireman

lamp-post

0.5

0.5

Haiku:

The sea darkens; 
the daffodil
bending at a post

This first snow
falls from the water jar  
   on the year ending rain

Wine reviews (a favourite!):

Who never smiled as he walked.

And his smile always looked to be

A frown, and his eyes were cold.

He didn't laugh or grin,

Just glared at the world around him.

as I did so a thought occurred to me. It was a logical thought, but it took some time before I realised that I had never seen myself as being part of the logic.

'You're going to have to kill me,' I said.

'BooksCorpus'

Text

Text (sentence/

paragraph) completions

Distributions of words and phrases

Why?

Plot arc(s)

Character arc(s)

Themes

Motifs

Don't panic

Creative work will change its toolset, but it will remain creative

Example: 'AI prompt generator' is now a job!

Familiarise yourself with the major generative tools in your area

Work out how they were trained

Use your nous+experience to perceive their consequent biases and act accordingly

An upside: generative technologies may help with work-for-hire

There may be value in positioning your client's work relative to others

Consider 'visualisation' tools to explain to clients what you are doing - a fascinating area

Help me make an editing tool which provides actionable insights at the whole story level!

Positioning relative to other titles may become more precise/fine-grained

Rapidly generating variations may allow for targeting to specific audiences (e.g. audio)

New channels are coming out all the time - stay alert to the possibility of generative content for them (= Tiktok!)

'Success' metrics should be treated with suspicion

Don't rely on your legal team to safeguard you against copyright/plagiarism exposure

Support your team to learn about new technologies - they will see the specifics where you may not