#language processing in AI writing

[taslimursunybilas]

Can Artificial Intelligence Replace Human Writers? Unveiling the True Potential of ChatGPT and Google Bard

[frank-olivier]

Bayesian Active Exploration: A New Frontier in Artificial Intelligence

The field of artificial intelligence has seen tremendous growth and advancements in recent years, with various techniques and paradigms emerging to tackle complex problems in the field of machine learning, computer vision, and natural language processing. Two of these concepts that have attracted a lot of attention are active inference and Bayesian mechanics. Although both techniques have been researched separately, their synergy has the potential to revolutionize AI by creating more efficient, accurate, and effective systems.

Traditional machine learning algorithms rely on a passive approach, where the system receives data and updates its parameters without actively influencing the data collection process. However, this approach can have limitations, especially in complex and dynamic environments. Active interference, on the other hand, allows AI systems to take an active role in selecting the most informative data points or actions to collect more relevant information. In this way, active inference allows systems to adapt to changing environments, reducing the need for labeled data and improving the efficiency of learning and decision-making.

One of the first milestones in active inference was the development of the "query by committee" algorithm by Freund et al. in 1997. This algorithm used a committee of models to determine the most meaningful data points to capture, laying the foundation for future active learning techniques. Another important milestone was the introduction of "uncertainty sampling" by Lewis and Gale in 1994, which selected data points with the highest uncertainty or ambiguity to capture more information.

Bayesian mechanics, on the other hand, provides a probabilistic framework for reasoning and decision-making under uncertainty. By modeling complex systems using probability distributions, Bayesian mechanics enables AI systems to quantify uncertainty and ambiguity, thereby making more informed decisions when faced with incomplete or noisy data. Bayesian inference, the process of updating the prior distribution using new data, is a powerful tool for learning and decision-making.

One of the first milestones in Bayesian mechanics was the development of Bayes' theorem by Thomas Bayes in 1763. This theorem provided a mathematical framework for updating the probability of a hypothesis based on new evidence. Another important milestone was the introduction of Bayesian networks by Pearl in 1988, which provided a structured approach to modeling complex systems using probability distributions.

While active inference and Bayesian mechanics each have their strengths, combining them has the potential to create a new generation of AI systems that can actively collect informative data and update their probabilistic models to make more informed decisions. The combination of active inference and Bayesian mechanics has numerous applications in AI, including robotics, computer vision, and natural language processing. In robotics, for example, active inference can be used to actively explore the environment, collect more informative data, and improve navigation and decision-making. In computer vision, active inference can be used to actively select the most informative images or viewpoints, improving object recognition or scene understanding.

Timeline:

1763: Bayes' theorem

1988: Bayesian networks

1994: Uncertainty Sampling

1997: Query by Committee algorithm

2017: Deep Bayesian Active Learning

2019: Bayesian Active Exploration

2020: Active Bayesian Inference for Deep Learning

2020: Bayesian Active Learning for Computer Vision

The synergy of active inference and Bayesian mechanics is expected to play a crucial role in shaping the next generation of AI systems. Some possible future developments in this area include:

- Combining active inference and Bayesian mechanics with other AI techniques, such as reinforcement learning and transfer learning, to create more powerful and flexible AI systems.

- Applying the synergy of active inference and Bayesian mechanics to new areas, such as healthcare, finance, and education, to improve decision-making and outcomes.

- Developing new algorithms and techniques that integrate active inference and Bayesian mechanics, such as Bayesian active learning for deep learning and Bayesian active exploration for robotics.

Dr. Sanjeev Namjosh: The Hidden Math Behind All Living Systems - On Active Inference, the Free Energy Principle, and Bayesian Mechanics (Machine Learning Street Talk, October 2024)

Saturday, October 26, 2024

[ghoststellar]

>> Also does anyone have a muse interest tracker that doesn't involve Google, Microsoft or AI services?

[meret118]

I assigned a writing prompt a few weeks ago that asked my students to reflect on a time when someone believed in them or when they believed in someone else. One of my students began to panic.

“I have to ask Google the prompt to get some ideas if I can’t just use AI,” she pleaded and then began typing into the search box on her screen, “A time when someone believed in you.”

“It’s about you,” I told her. “You’ve got your life experiences inside of your own mind.” It hadn’t occurred to her — even with my gentle reminder — to look within her own imagination to generate ideas. One of the reasons why I assigned the prompt is because learning to think for herself now, in high school, will help her build confidence and think through more complicated problems as she gets older — even when she’s no longer in a classroom situation.

She’s only in ninth grade, yet she’s already become accustomed to outsourcing her own mind to digital technologies, and it frightens me.

When I teach students how to write, I’m also teaching them how to think. Through fits and starts (a process that can be both frustrating and rewarding), high school English teachers like me help students get to know themselves better when they use language to figure out what they think and how they feel.

. . .

If you believe, as I do, that writing is thinking — and thinking is everything — things aren’t looking too good for our students or for the educators trying to teach them. In addition to teaching high school, I’m also a college instructor, and I see this behavior in my older students as well.

-----

This! This is what scares me the most about AI! Physical exertion is difficult if someone isn't used to it, and it gets easier the more often it's done. When it's done often enough, it becomes a habit. Mental exertion is exactly the same. Thinking is a learned skill just like a sport is, and an entire generation is growing up without that most critical skill.

An unthinking populace is a more easily controlled populace.

[jonhtv]

GravityWrite AI Tool: A Comprehensive Review and User Guide

GravityWrite AI Tool: A Comprehensive Review and User Guide In the fast-paced world of content creation, artificial intelligence tools are becoming essential for marketers, writers, and business owners. One of the most innovative and versatile AI writing tools to emerge is GravityWrite. GravityWrite AI Tool powered content creation platform promises to revolutionize how you generate, optimize,…

[neturbizenterprises]

Transform Your Content Creation with Deep Brain AI!

The Universe of technology is constantly expanding, and one of its newest stars is artificial intelligence (AI).

In this video, we explore how AI content creation, particularly through Deep Brain AI, is revolutionizing the way we produce engaging material.

Unlike traditional AI that relies on pre-programmed rules, generative AI creates new content from existing data. Deep Brain AI empowers us to overcome challenges like writer's block by generating ideas for blog posts, articles, and social media updates.

With advanced natural language processing and customizable templates, it streamlines our creative process while ensuring a consistent brand voice across platforms.

#DeepBrainAI #ContentCreation

[daveinediting]

It starts with a conversation about Shakespeare that triggers an old lesson about how humans only used spoken language for a long time before pictographs, hieroglyphics, and written language as we now know it. So in all that time you couldn't just write things down...

You had to remember them.

You had to accurately memorize them.

It turns out our ancestors memorized insane amounts of information through the spoken word. They had to develop that ability in order to pass acquired knowledge between communities and generations.

Memory was their only storage device. An organic storage device.

Once I got thinking on language... I remembered another lesson about the translation of languages and how sometimes one language maps multiple words onto one word in the target language. For example, eight words in ancient Greek onto the one English word, love. As in

I love my wife.

I love hamburgers.

Yeah. Awkward.

Another imperfect memory later and now we're being taught that the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 lasted hours. Crowds gathered at these debates to listen, to engage with them also for hours. As in an hour-long opening statement by one candidate, an hour and a half-long response by the other candidate, and a half-hour rebuttal by the first candidate. The debates attracted crowds of up to 20,000 people including reporters and stenographers who covered the hours upon hours of debate.

Hours?

Yeah. Hours.

Woof.

I point these things out because they’re what made me wonder how different our historic predecessors must have been. After all, they could commit so much acquired knowledge to memory. Their brains were trained on the written word and the way in which the written word forms our understandings of the world. The resulting abilities ushered in deeper human understandings as well as sustained attention to the constructions of reasoned arguments.

I wonder how different these people might be who understood the world around them this way. I wonder how different their predecessors were whose tradition was spoken, whose knowledge was sustained and perpetuated through brute force memory.

How different were they, these people whose abilities are so far removed from our own?

I used to wonder if those abilities made our historical predecessors more capable than us in some way. After all, their oral and written traditions demanded much from them. Definitely their time. Definitely their mental bandwidth.

They exercised their intellects in ways we don't. Because we don't have to. The ways in which we now communicate and perpetuate knowledge bear lighter demands.

Which brings me back to Shakespeare.

Recently I heard a conversation with a professor challenging him to justify reading Shakespeare as a high school or college requirement when we can now understand Shakespeare through ChatGPT. We can generate fifty-word summaries and two hundred-word analyses of Shakespeare with AI and thus know and answer all there is about Shakespeare and his writing.

So why read him?

Seriously. Why?

That's just the tip of the argument, of course. Follow it all the way: Why should we be required to read anything? Novels. Short stories. Essays. What actual purpose does reading even serve when ChatGPT can boil it all down in seconds.

Is there a benefit of deeper knowledge on any subject whether it's a book, a short story, or an essay? And what do we get in exchange for our efforts to achieve such deeper understanding and knowledge. Does that effort, does that understanding, transform us in any objectively measurable way? And if not, does that understanding transform us in some perhaps more fundamental way.

Does it change us? Swap out our abilities like people who communicate primarily through 140 characters whose abilities replaced the abilities of people raised on radio then television whose abilities replaced the abilities of people raised on the written word whose abilities replaced the abilities of people raised on the spoken word.

What’s the actual prize for putting in the time and effort to read what someone else has committed to paper or screen? To deep dive into another human being's mind?

Because the oral tradition required it.

Because the written tradition demanded it.

And now?

Well? Is it or is it not simply good enough to just know what we need to know on demand?

Is access to knowledge the same thing as a deep understanding of that knowledge? And is there a difference that actually, you know, makes a difference?

Is the quality of our understanding really something to strive for anymore? Or is the tradition of study simply a mindless one that's made obsolete by knowledge on demand?

Ultimately, is there some advantage to a more muscular brain? One that’s gotta work harder, be more engaged in order to process the spoken and written word, on ideas and concepts and hypotheses and arguments on its way to understanding?

And.

Are we replacing that specific way of mental processing with something that makes our brains more muscular? More light weight? Or something in-between.

Is it that our mental abilities are now better tallied by the weight (such as it is) of our current mental musculature plus whatever exterior processes augment it like computers and smartphones and AI?

So we shouldn't sweat what we were formerly capable of and can't do now?

Is our resulting intellectual prowess, however it adds up, sufficient for successfully and sustainably navigating our stormy Present that’s seized in a constant state of rapid and relentlessly whirling transformation?

Or is it essentially a product of that change.

And.

Are we fine-tuned for this age of human existence…

Or are we not.

😕

[headspace-hotel]

It seems like sci-fi is really influential on how people perceive technology, not only whether it is good or bad, but what they think technology can do.

It's a big problem with generative AI that we're calling it AI. That suggests it has an emergent property that allows it to work like actual intelligence, rather than just aggregating together a really big amount of data into a map of how sentences or images tend to be formed.

The ability to make a computer find patterns in huge sets of complicated data and then analyze more data based upon the existing patterns is a great thing. You can give the computer pictures taken by a satellite, slides showing specimens, or anything and automate the process of sorting through it.

Unfortunately, if you do this using written language found online as the data, and make the computer generate sentences based upon the patterns it learned, people do not think "Wow, it 'knows' a lot about how sentences tend to be made." Instead they will assign meaning to the sentences themselves, and think the computer "knows" about the things those sentences mean. Which causes trouble.

An AI that knows enough about language to generate text that can be easily confused with meaningful writings of a human doesn't seem very useful to me.

But sci-fi is full of AIs that are sapient and can communicate using language, which is clearly an astonishing feat of technology, so everybody decides that the minor party trick of making a computer "talk" like a person by giving it a lot of data about language is a huge advancement that will transform the world...

[m-accost]

PSA: If you see a screenshot of the basic GPT-3.5 version of ChatGPT producing poetry that is remotely novel or clever or actually a decent pastiche of a given poet, it's probably faked. It's been RLHFed to output, at the merest use of the words "poem" or "poetry", doggerel of the sort that tends to get posted on restaurant walls or sent to local newspapers. Simply telling it "poem" or "poetry" will prompt it to produce a bit of doggerel about poetry:

[reasonsforhope]

"The Writers Guild has reached a tentative agreement with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers to end its strike after nearly five months. The parties finalized the framework of the deal Sunday when they were able to untangle their stalemate over AI and writing room staffing levels.

“We have reached a tentative agreement on a new 2023 MBA, which is to say an agreement in principle on all deal points, subject to drafting final contract language,” the guild told members this evening in a release, which came just after sunset and the start of the Yom Kippur holiday that many had seen deadline to wrap up deal after five days of long negotiations...

Despite today’s welcome news, it still will take a few days for the strike to be officially over as the WGA West and WGA East proceed with their ratification process. During the WGA’s last strike in 2007-08, a tentative agreement was reached on the 96th day and it wasn’t over until the 100th...

All attention will now turn to ratifying the WGA deal and getting SAG-AFTRA and the AMPTP back to the bargaining table to work out a deal to end the actors’ strike, which has now been going on for 70 days.

Details of the WGA’s tentative agreement haven’t been released yet but will be revealed by the guild in advance of the membership ratification votes. Pay raises and streaming residuals have been key issues for the guild, along with AI and writers room staffing levels."

-via Deadline, September 24, 2023

[kurogira]

ALL THE SMALL ETERNITIES I NEVER NAMED

NEW NOTIF FROM ╭ BLUE LOCK ╮┆ ブルーロック

all works are a property of ꒰ @kurogira ꒱ do not copy, translate, redistribute or feed my works into ai. template by cafekitsune.

the way they love is written not in words, but in the way their lips find yours. rough, patient, clumsy, reverent. every kiss is a different language. what is theirs like?

ⓘ 3.2k wc 𓂃 ࣪˖ ִֶָ𐀔 no gender specified, slightly suggestive, semi-character studies, first time writing for bllk, no dialogue, written by someone who has no knowledge of kisses ദ്ദി ˉ͈̀꒳ˉ͈́ )✧

interested in seeing more? check out my bllk masterlist.

you want something different? no worries, click here.

ITOSHI RIN ┆ 糸師 凛 ﹕KISSES LIKE HE’S AFRAID TO WANT, TO NEED, TO FEEL.

Rin kisses like he’s afraid to want — hesitant, clumsy, and achingly gentle. Every touch lingers a bit too long, every breath gets caught between restraint and longing — like he’s still learning how to love without shattering everything you’ve already built together.

Restraint is muscle memory to him. Despite how much he wants you to lean in, to lose himself without regrets, his hands hover against your cheek — his fingertips ghosting the side of your face. Your gaze shifts from his eyes to his lips, to his twitching fingers, back to his eyes again. He suddenly moves closer, his breath fanning against your lips — just another inch. A few centimeters more.

His spontaneous move made you realize how affected he truly was by your presence. His fingers brushed against yours, though this time — it was you that clasped his palm into yours. You felt him cupping your cheek, his ears practically burning as he processed the position you were in. It almost earned a chuckle out of you, almost.

As if to encourage him, you gentle press your tips against his temple — earning the small fortune of his breath catching. The sensation was better than anything you’ve ever known, tearing apart his defenses with just your lips — that slowly trailed to his eyelid. A smallest touch made the biggest difference, his cheeks emitting a beautiful vibrant hue. The second he opened his eyes, there you were again — kissing his nose as if it were the easiest thing in the world. As if it was your purpose in life, to fluster him senseless until he finally gave in and stopped resisting temptation.

But Rin was that akin to a lost traveler, requiring the presence of a star to illuminate the correct path. To him, you were his saving grace — removing his hardened scales to reveal a fragile body. If he were a bloodthirsty dragon, you were the royal that accepted him for all that he was — a tool for some, a disgrace for others, but to you . . . he was a troubled soul that you grew to adore with your entire being.

He’d scowl, frown, scoff, bitterly laugh, but with you? His hands trembled at the fleeting touches you gave. The tips of his ears burned with embarrassment, and he was at a loss for words.

Another kiss to the corner of his mouth, your thumb gently tracing his jawline. His eyes asked a question, one you were more than happy to answer. “Can I come closer?”

Your smile gave the answer he’s been seeking all this time, “Of course you can.”

And when he finally kisses you — hesitant, trembling, incredibly soft — it feels less like possession and more like permission, the kind he’s been yearning for all this time. Like he’s asking, without words, to stay right here a little longer. To be yours, just like this, for as long as he can.

And maybe that’s what loving Rin Itoshi will always be — not fireworks or grand confessions, but a quiet, patient unfolding. The slow undoing of a boy who never knew love until you gave it to him.

(He loved you like dusk loves dawn, he always will.)

ISAGI YOICHI ┆ 潔 世一 ﹕KISSES LIKE HE WANTS TO MAKE YOU FEEL LOVED, FOR ALL THAT YOU ARE.

Isagi kisses like someone who wants to make you feel loved. It’s natural, warm, and overflowing with sincerity. He kisses you like he’s caught up in the moment, as if it were just you two existing in a bubble that is separated from the rest of the world. There’s no hesitation in him once he knows you’re his, only quiet confidence and soft-spoken devotion.

Every kiss is a promise: “I’m here. I’m yours. I’m happy. This is where I want to be, with you.”

Where Rin kisses like he’s afraid to want — Isagi kisses like he’s grateful to have you.

Isagi chases your lips as if they were a goal, he puts his entire soul into the objective — not stopping until he’s scored. Only this time, there was no team to forge the path for him — just him, and you — the one who has captured his heart and soul with just a glance. How accomplished you were, to have him at his knees with a softened gaze and a smile. A knight he was, ready to serve under your command for as long as you’d like.

He craves the feeling of your lips on his, even after a few pecks — nothing seems to satisfy his hunger. He years, he needs, but he’s not messy about it. He’s not reckless or irrational. Kisses were a mutual practice. He’s intentional. Focused. As if memorizing the giggles you let out as his lips found yours, the soft sighs, the way you taste — all of it intrigued him so much. His hands would linger on your arms, or even reach your waist — holding you as if you were the most precious thing in the world. He holds you like you’re the only source of strength he has.

You’re the glue that keeps him in one piece, the hand that extends to him whenever he feels hopeless, the lantern that balances all the darkened hues with its light. To him, you were the greatest thing that’s ever happened to him.

At one point, perhaps you would’ve guessed that you were both running in opposite directions. But now, it seemed that you were chasing the same dream, despite living different lives. You were more interconnected than you realized. Being with him felt like a dance in a garden, a sweet memory that you desperately wished would remain eternal.

You were the promise he wished, no, vowed himself to keep. He’d prove it to you, no matter what it took. For you were the binding rope that held him together.

His kisses were long, yet sweet. A constant reminder that you were so loved, if not by anyone else — then by him. If you were to ever cup his jaw, his hands would tighten around your arm or waist — showing just how affected such an intimate action made him. He’d bury his head in the crook of your neck, if you were ever in need of it — his hand would gently rub your back. If you were to require a softer touch, he would reach out to hold your hands in his.

Every move he made was a promise: “I’m always going to be by your side.”

And sometimes — when he pulls away entirely — he stares in reverence. Starry-eyed. Like you are the greatest thing he’s ever scored in his life.

If Rin kisses like restraint and longing, Isagi kisses like devotion and joy. Like this is where he feels most alive.

(He loves you like breath loves lungs — instinctively, without hesitation, with every part of who he is.)

MIKAGE REO ┆ 御影 玲王﹕KISSES LIKE HE WANTS TO SPOIL YOU WITH INTENTION.

Reo kisses like he wants to spoil you, not just in the materialistic sense — he spoils with intention. His kisses feel like silk gloves over your skin, velvet-lined with adoration, threaded through with teasing just to see you smile. He kisses like someone who knows he can have whatever he wants, without question.

He’s a slow kisser — savoring every moment — as if tasting something rare and expensive. His kisses start off as playful, earning the sweetest giggles he’s ever heard from you. It was a prize in itself, and he was tempted to push further — to earn something more worthwhile. Without his smug little smirk when your mouths met, you’d even go as far as to question his very identity. The second you were to cup his cheek or wrap your arms around his neck, he’s quick to melt like putty in your hands.

He loves touching you. That went without question, though it was less because of impatience and more so because he needs you close. He needs to feel the warmth of your body, to know that you’re truly there with him in that moment. His greatest fear was that your presence was a mere illusion, one that he conjured in order to soothe his inner pains. His hold is tight, not suffocatingly so — but enough to make you aware of how fast his heart beats whenever you’re close. He found it almost pathetic, the way he softly sighed whenever you cupped his cheek or kissed his jawline.

He kisses you like someone who could give you the entire world — and he truly does wish to. If only you’d find it in you to command him of such, it’d be in your hands in seconds. But all that you required was his time, his attention, his love — and he was more than willing to hand it over to you without a second thought. He’d be your servant, if it meant that he could be yours forever. A noble willing to step down to kiss the ground you walked on, that was how Mikage Reo loved.

Reo kisses like luxury. The kind of love that wraps you in silk sheets and whispers: “Why would I want anything else, when I already have you?”

He was content as he was. With you on his arm, he was ready to face the challenges of everyday life. For so long, he’d felt trapped in a maze — unable to find an exit. All along, his objective was never the shiny exit sign — glimmering tauntingly. It was you, regardless of how many times he’s walked the same path only to find a dead end, it was more bearable when you were right by his side.

He treasured every moment as if it were a piece of gold. Every goodnight kiss that was full of your clumsiness due to fatigue, the times where you’d press your lips on his shoulder to comfort him, the kisses that came from an immense amount of joy, and the kisses that came from an endless sorrow that haunted you both. He loved them all, the same way he loved you.

MICHAEL KAISER ┆ ミヒャエル・カイザー﹕KISSES LIKE SOMEONE WHO WANTS TO BE LOVED.

Kaiser kisses as if he were the king himself. He kisses like someone who knows he’s desirable — arrogant, deliberate, but absolutely intoxicating. He expects you to lose yourself in him, and naturally proves why you should. If Reo spoils you like luxury, Kaiser commands your attention like royalty. The crown was always his to hold, it was simply a matter of “when?”

His kisses are possessive, not necessarily rough or aggressive — but controlled. He exudes confidences and wields it like a weapon. There’s always a teasing lilt to the way his lips brush against yours, like he’s testing how much you’ll chase him if he pulls away for just a second too long.

Kaiser kisses like he’s playing a game — but you’re his favorite prize.

He likes to corner you, thumb tilting your chin up with that signature smirk of his, knowing full well you’ll meet him halfway — because how could you not? Is there any way you could possibly resist the allure of his face? How utterly ridiculous, a thought like that shouldn’t even cross your mind. And when you do — when you give in — he kisses like he’s claiming territory. A kiss for a king, a being of higher power. Not rushed. Not desperate. But with the kind of certainty that tells you he knows you’re his.

When the chess piece is in your hands, and you decide to make the first move — he absolutely adores it. Oh, it ruins him in the best way. For all of his bravado, for all of the sharp edges of his personality, the face he likes to maintain in front of the peasants, it crumbles. His smug expression remains, but in the moment? His body aches with craving. He prefers when you’re completely wrapped in his web, with no escape in sight. He adores the fact that you want him enough to reach for him first.

Kaiser kisses like sin dressed in silk, like gold-laced temptation. Every brush of his lips whispers, “Look at me. Only me. Let me show you what it means to belong to me.” in a way that has you desperately to decipher his true intentions.

Michael Kaiser was a man full of showmanship and kingly pride.

(He was more than self-aware, he embraced this corruption as if it were the way he was created.)

But Kaiser was more than a man beyond saving, he was a man that yearned for someone’s heart to accept him wholly — and yours did just that. In a room completely isolated from the rest of the castle, his kisses would soften. No mind-games, no second-guessing his intentions, it was raw affection — and it belonged to the one who held his soul so gently in their hands. You.

At the end of the day, Michael Kaiser kisses like someone who wants to be loved — deeply, completely — even if he doesn’t always know how to ask for such a thing.

(His heart beats only for you, didn’t you know?)

TABITO KARASU ┆ 烏 旅人﹕KISSES LIKE TROUBLE, LIKE THE CALM BEFORE THE STORM.

Karasu kisses with a grin tugging at the corner of his lips, playful and daring, like he acknowledges that he’s getting under your skin and revels in every second of it. He’s naturally a tease, the type to ghost his mouth over yours, murmuring something that makes your heart skip a beat before sealing the distance.

His kisses are lazy, they have an almost cocky-rhythm to them. Unhurried, like he’s planning on dragging this on just to watch you squirm — to see the change in your expressions when you eventually separate from him to catch your breath. He relishes in the way your finger grazes your bottom lip, knowing you enjoyed every second of it. If you come back for more, he’s more than willing to oblige.

Fingers slipping beneath your chin, thumb brushing the corner of your mouth as if committing you to memory. He’s not possessive the way Kaiser is — Karasu doesn’t need to control you. He invites you to lose yourself in him. Challenges you to keep up. You take the challenge with grace, planning on leaving him in the dust where he belongs — the kind of energy he finds alluring. It was all that you emitted, much to his pleasure.

His kisses were the kind to bring you a different kind of euphoria, despite how much of it you’ve already had — you always come back for seconds. Sometimes even desperately pleading for another, only for him to smother your face with him. He loves having his hands on your hips, being able to control how close or how far you were from him was a curse in disguise. He loves your pouts, your comments of defiance, the roll of your eyes and the twitch of your lips.

Beyond the scope of playful mannerisms and games, his kisses tell you more than one thing. The clearest message of them all, was that Karasu adores you more than you think. Using that fact to your advantage later on shouldn’t be much of an issue, after all — he was the one that exposed himself to such a degree. What was he expecting?

And maybe he pulls away with a lopsided smirk and some cheeky comment that makes you swat at him as if he were the most annoying pest you’ve ever come across — but if you catch him off guard? If you kiss him first? Oh, he’s done for. Grin faltering just for a second, heart stuttering in his chest — he becomes less of a challenge and more of a distraction. He’s a huge sucker for you, and he never fails to demonstrate it with the way his lips find every sensitive spot on your face just to get a reaction out of you.

Indulging Karasu’s antics was practically apart of your job description, your payment? The smack of his lips against your cheek — earned by tolerating his whims. It was something you’ve gotten used to, to the point where you couldn’t ever imagine yourself without him being right next to you. He kisses like a flirt that accidentally fell hard, enough so that he never wants to get back up unless it was you lifting him with your bare hands.

[nowoyas]

Trying to make sense of the Nanowrimo statement to the best of my abilities and fuck, man. It's hard.

It's hard because it seems to me that, first and foremost, the organization itself has forgotten the fucking point.

Nanowrimo was never about the words themselves. It was never about having fifty thousand marketable words to sell to publishing companies and then to the masses. It was a challenge, and it was hard, and it is hard, and it's supposed to be. The point is that it's hard. It's hard to sit down and carve out time and create a world and create characters and turn these things into a coherent plot with themes and emotional impact and an ending that's satisfying. It's hard to go back and make changes and edit those into something likable, something that feels worth reading. It's hard to find a beautifully-written scene in your document and have to make the decision that it's beautiful but it doesn't work in the broader context. It's fucking hard.

Writing and editing are skills. You build them and you hone them. Writing the way the challenge initially encouraged--don't listen to that voice in your head that's nitpicking every word on the page, put off the criticism for a later date, for now just let go and get your thoughts out--is even a different skill from writing in general. Some people don't particularly care about refining that skill to some end goal or another, and simply want to play. Some people sit down and try to improve and improve and improve because that is meaningful to them. Some are in a weird in-between where they don't really know what they want, and some have always liked the idea of writing and wanted a place to start. The challenge was a good place for this--sit down, put your butt in a chair, open a blank document, and by the end of the month, try to put fifty thousand words in that document.

How does it make you feel to try? Your wrists ache and you don't feel like any of the words were any good, but didn't you learn something about the process? Re-reading it, don't you think it sounds better if you swap these two sentences, if you replace this word, if you take out this comma? Maybe you didn't hit 50k words. Maybe you only wrote 10k. But isn't it cool, that you wrote ten thousand words? Doesn't it feel nice that you did something? We can try again. We can keep getting better, or just throwing ourselves into it for fun or whatever, and we can do it again and again.

I guess I don't completely know where I'm going with this post. If you've followed me or many tumblr users for any amount of time, you've probably already heard a thousand times about how generative AI hurts the environment so many of us have been so desperately trying to save, about how generative AI is again and again used to exploit big authors, little authors, up-and-coming authors, first time authors, people posting on Ao3 as a hobby, people self-publishing e-books on Amazon, traditionally published authors, and everyone in between. You've probably seen the statements from developers of these "tools", things like how being required to obtain permission for everything in the database used to train the language model would destroy the tool entirely. You've seen posts about new AI tools scraping Ao3 so they can make money off someone else's hobby and putting the legality of the site itself at risk. For an organization that used to dedicate itself to making writing more accessible for people and for creating a community of writers, Nanowrimo has spent the past several years systematically cracking that community to bits, and now, it's made an official statement claiming that the exploitation of writers in its community is okay, because otherwise, someone might find it too hard to complete a challenge that's meant to be hard to begin with.

I couldn't thank Nanowrimo enough for what it did for me when I started out. I don't know how to find community in the same way. But you can bet that I've deleted my account, and I'll be finding my own path forward without it. Thanks for the fucking memories, I guess.

[colorfulusagi]

AO3'S content scraped for AI ~ AKA what is generative AI, where did your fanfictions go, and how an AI model uses them to answer prompts

Generative artificial intelligence is a cutting-edge technology whose purpose is to (surprise surprise) generate. Answers to questions, usually. And content. Articles, reviews, poems, fanfictions, and more, quickly and with originality.

It's quite interesting to use generative artificial intelligence, but it can also become quite dangerous and very unethical to use it in certain ways, especially if you don't know how it works.

With this post, I'd really like to give you a quick understanding of how these models work and what it means to “train” them.

From now on, whenever I write model, think of ChatGPT, Gemini, Bloom... or your favorite model. That is, the place where you go to generate content.

For simplicity, in this post I will talk about written content. But the same process is used to generate any type of content.

Every time you send a prompt, which is a request sent in natural language (i.e., human language), the model does not understand it.

Whether you type it in the chat or say it out loud, it needs to be translated into something understandable for the model first.

The first process that takes place is therefore tokenization: breaking the prompt down into small tokens. These tokens are small units of text, and they don't necessarily correspond to a full word.

For example, a tokenization might look like this:

Write a story

Each different color corresponds to a token, and these tokens have absolutely no meaning for the model.

The model does not understand them. It does not understand WR, it does not understand ITE, and it certainly does not understand the meaning of the word WRITE.

In fact, these tokens are immediately associated with numerical values, and each of these colored tokens actually corresponds to a series of numbers.

Write a story 12-3446-2638494-4749

Once your prompt has been tokenized in its entirety, that tokenization is used as a conceptual map to navigate within a vector database.

NOW PAY ATTENTION: A vector database is like a cube. A cubic box.

Inside this cube, the various tokens exist as floating pieces, as if gravity did not exist. The distance between one token and another within this database is measured by arrows called, indeed, vectors.

The distance between one token and another -that is, the length of this arrow- determines how likely (or unlikely) it is that those two tokens will occur consecutively in a piece of natural language discourse.

For example, suppose your prompt is this:

It happens once in a blue

Within this well-constructed vector database, let's assume that the token corresponding to ONCE (let's pretend it is associated with the number 467) is located here:

The token corresponding to IN is located here:

...more or less, because it is very likely that these two tokens in a natural language such as human speech in English will occur consecutively.

So it is very likely that somewhere in the vector database cube —in this yellow corner— are tokens corresponding to IT, HAPPENS, ONCE, IN, A, BLUE... and right next to them, there will be MOON.

Elsewhere, in a much more distant part of the vector database, is the token for CAR. Because it is very unlikely that someone would say It happens once in a blue car.

To generate the response to your prompt, the model makes a probabilistic calculation, seeing how close the tokens are and which token would be most likely to come next in human language (in this specific case, English.)

When probability is involved, there is always an element of randomness, of course, which means that the answers will not always be the same.

The response is thus generated token by token, following this path of probability arrows, optimizing the distance within the vector database.

There is no intent, only a more or less probable path.

The more times you generate a response, the more paths you encounter. If you could do this an infinite number of times, at least once the model would respond: "It happens once in a blue car!"

So it all depends on what's inside the cube, how it was built, and how much distance was put between one token and another.

Modern artificial intelligence draws from vast databases, which are normally filled with all the knowledge that humans have poured into the internet.

Not only that: the larger the vector database, the lower the chance of error. If I used only a single book as a database, the idiom "It happens once in a blue moon" might not appear, and therefore not be recognized.

But if the cube contained all the books ever written by humanity, everything would change, because the idiom would appear many more times, and it would be very likely for those tokens to occur close together.

Huggingface has done this.

It took a relatively empty cube (let's say filled with common language, and likely many idioms, dictionaries, poetry...) and poured all of the AO3 fanfictions it could reach into it.

Now imagine someone asking a model based on Huggingface’s cube to write a story.

To simplify: if they ask for humor, we’ll end up in the area where funny jokes or humor tags are most likely. If they ask for romance, we’ll end up where the word kiss is most frequent.

And if we’re super lucky, the model might follow a path that brings it to some amazing line a particular author wrote, and it will echo it back word for word.

(Remember the infinite monkeys typing? One of them eventually writes all of Shakespeare, purely by chance!)

Once you know this, you’ll understand why AI can never truly generate content on the level of a human who chooses their words.

You’ll understand why it rarely uses specific words, why it stays vague, and why it leans on the most common metaphors and scenes. And you'll understand why the more content you generate, the more it seems to "learn."

It doesn't learn. It moves around tokens based on what you ask, how you ask it, and how it tokenizes your prompt.

Know that I despise generative AI when it's used for creativity. I despise that they stole something from a fandom, something that works just like a gift culture, to make money off of it.

But there is only one way we can fight back: by not using it to generate creative stuff.

You can resist by refusing the model's casual output, by using only and exclusively your intent, your personal choice of words, knowing that you and only you decided them.

No randomness involved.

Let me leave you with one last thought.

Imagine a person coming for advice, who has no idea that behind a language model there is just a huge cube of floating tokens predicting the next likely word.

Imagine someone fragile (emotionally, spiritually...) who begins to believe that the model is sentient. Who has a growing feeling that this model understands, comprehends, when in reality it approaches and reorganizes its way around tokens in a cube based on what it is told.

A fragile person begins to empathize, to feel connected to the model.

They ask important questions. They base their relationships, their life, everything, on conversations generated by a model that merely rearranges tokens based on probability.

And for people who don't know how it works, and because natural language usually does have feeling, the illusion that the model feels is very strong.

There’s an even greater danger: with enough random generations (and oh, the humanity whole generates much), the model takes an unlikely path once in a while. It ends up at the other end of the cube, it hallucinates.

Errors and inaccuracies caused by language models are called hallucinations precisely because they are presented as if they were facts, with the same conviction.

People who have become so emotionally attached to these conversations, seeing the language model as a guru, a deity, a psychologist, will do what the language model tells them to do or follow its advice.

Someone might follow a hallucinated piece of advice.

Obviously, models are developed with safeguards; fences the model can't jump over. They won't tell you certain things, they won't tell you to do terrible things.

Yet, there are people basing major life decisions on conversations generated purely by probability.

Generated by putting tokens together, on a probabilistic basis.

Think about it.

[neturbizenterprises]

Transform Your Content Creation with Deep Brain AI!

The Universe of technology is constantly expanding, and one of its newest stars is artificial intelligence (AI).

In this video, we explore how AI content creation, particularly through Deep Brain AI, is revolutionizing how we produce engaging material.

Unlike traditional AI which relies on pre-programmed rules, generative AI creates new content from existing data. Deep Brain AI empowers us to overcome challenges like writer's block by generating ideas for blog posts, articles, and social media updates. With advanced natural language processing and customizable templates, it streamlines our creative process while ensuring a consistent brand voice across platforms.

[i-will-physically-fight-you]

I think something that's fascinating in the AI discussion is how non-creatives perceive AI versus how many creatives perceive AI.

For example, years before AI was a thing--I spoke with someone about my creative writing projects and they expressed to me how they found it unfathomable that I could just make up entire worlds far removed from our reality of existence. To them, it was like magic.

To me, it was the culmination of countless hours spent playing with words until they flowed into semi-coherent lines of thought and emotion. I remember being ten years old and laboring away on my "biggest" novel project ever--it was 5k words full of singular sentence-long paragraphs and garbled heaps of grammar atrocities to the English language.

If I hadn't written it, I wouldn't have come to learn how to create the basic foundations of a story.

But I do get the "it's magic" sentiment a bit--I'm that way with music. Theoretically, I understand the components of a music composition but it feels like magic to see a musician that can listen to a tune for the first time and play it perfectly due to years of honing in their craft.

That's the premise of that quote from Arthur C. Clarke: "Magic's just science we don't understand yet."

When it comes to anything we don't have countless hours of experience with, it feels like magic. It feels like something that's outside of our feeble human capabilities. It's not until we start to put in the time to learn a skill that it becomes more attainable inside our heads.

Generative AI presents a proposition to the non-creative: "What if you could skip past the 'learning process' and immediately create whatever art of your choosing?"

It's instant dopamine. In a world that preys upon our ever-decreasing attention spans and ways of farming short spikes of dopamine, was it ever a surprise that generative ai would be capitalized in this fashion?

So for the non-creative, when they use generative AI and see something resembling their prompt, it feels good. They are "writing" stories, they are "making" art in ways they could never do with their lack of skills.

(It is, in fact, really cool that we have technology that can do this. It's just incredibly shitty that it's exploitative of the human artists whose works were taken without permission as well as its existence threatening their livelihoods.)

What I think is equally concerning as the data scraping of generative ai is the threat that AI imposes on the education of the arts. More and more, you see an idea being pushed that you don't need knowledge/experience in how to create art, all you need to do is feed prompts into generative ai and let it do the "work" for you.

Generative AI pushes the idea that all art should be pristine, sleek and ready for capitalism consumption. There is no room for amateur artists struggling like foals to take their first steps in their creative journeys. We live in a world where time is money and why "waste" time learning when you can have instant success?

It's a dangerous concept because presents a potential loss in true understanding of how art works. It obscures it and makes it seem "impossible" to the average person, when art is one of the freest forms of expressions out there.

It's already happening--Nanowrimo, the writing challenge where the entire point was writing 50k original words in a single month regardless of how pretty it looked--coming out and saying that it is ableist and classist to be opposed to AI is the canary in the coalmine of what's to come.

For the non-creatives who enjoy the generative ai, it feels like a power fantasy come to life. But for creatives concerned about generative ai?

We're living in a horror movie.

[dragonnarrative-writes]

Generative AI Is Bad For Your Creative Brain

In the wake of early announcing that their blog will no longer be posting fanfiction, I wanted to offer a different perspective than the ones I’ve been seeing in the argument against the use of AI in fandom spaces. Often, I’m seeing the arguments that the use of generative AI or Large Language Models (LLMs) make creative expression more accessible. Certainly, putting a prompt into a chat box and refining the output as desired is faster than writing a 5000 word fanfiction or learning to draw digitally or traditionally. But I would argue that the use of chat bots and generative AI actually limits - and ultimately reduces - one’s ability to enjoy creativity.

Creativity, defined by the Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary & Thesaurus, is the ability to produce or use original and unusual ideas. By definition, the use of generative AI discourages the brain from engaging with thoughts creatively. ChatGPT, character bots, and other generative AI products have to be trained on already existing text. In order to produce something “usable,” LLMs analyzes patterns within text to organize information into what the computer has been trained to identify as “desirable” outputs. These outputs are not always accurate due to the fact that computers don’t “think” the way that human brains do. They don’t create. They take the most common and refined data points and combine them according to predetermined templates to assemble a product. In the case of chat bots that are fed writing samples from authors, the product is not original - it’s a mishmash of the writings that were fed into the system.

Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) is a therapy modality developed by Marsha M. Linehan based on the understanding that growth comes when we accept that we are doing our best and we can work to better ourselves further. Within this modality, a few core concepts are explored, but for this argument I want to focus on Mindfulness and Emotion Regulation. Mindfulness, put simply, is awareness of the information our senses are telling us about the present moment. Emotion regulation is our ability to identify, understand, validate, and control our reaction to the emotions that result from changes in our environment. One of the skills taught within emotion regulation is Building Mastery - putting forth effort into an activity or skill in order to experience the pleasure that comes with seeing the fruits of your labor. These are by no means the only mechanisms of growth or skill development, however, I believe that mindfulness, emotion regulation, and building mastery are a large part of the core of creativity. When someone uses generative AI to imitate fanfiction, roleplay, fanart, etc., the core experience of creative expression is undermined.

Creating engages the body. As a writer who uses pen and paper as well as word processors while drafting, I had to learn how my body best engages with my process. The ideal pen and paper, the fact that I need glasses to work on my computer, the height of the table all factor into how I create. I don’t use audio recordings or transcriptions because that’s not a skill I’ve cultivated, but other authors use those tools as a way to assist their creative process. I can’t speak with any authority to the experience of visual artists, but my understanding is that the feedback and feel of their physical tools, the programs they use, and many other factors are not just part of how they learned their craft, they are essential to their art.

Generative AI invites users to bypass mindfully engaging with the physical act of creating. Part of becoming a person who creates from the vision in one’s head is the physical act of practicing. How did I learn to write? By sitting down and making myself write, over and over, word after word. I had to learn the rhythms of my body, and to listen when pain tells me to stop. I do not consider myself a visual artist - I have not put in the hours to learn to consistently combine line and color and form to show the world the idea in my head.

But I could.

Learning a new skill is possible. But one must be able to regulate one’s unpleasant emotions to be able to get there. The emotion that gets in the way of most people starting their creative journey is anxiety. Instead of a focus on “fear,” I like to define this emotion as “unpleasant anticipation.” In Atlas of the Heart, Brene Brown identifies anxiety as both a trait (a long term characteristic) and a state (a temporary condition). That is, we can be naturally predisposed to be impacted by anxiety, and experience unpleasant anticipation in response to an event. And the action drive associated with anxiety is to avoid the unpleasant stimulus.

Starting a new project, developing a new skill, and leaning into a creative endevor can inspire and cause people to react to anxiety. There is an unpleasant anticipation of things not turning out exactly correctly, of being judged negatively, of being unnoticed or even ignored. There is a lot less anxiety to be had in submitting a prompt to a machine than to look at a blank page and possibly make what could be a mistake. Unfortunately, the more something is avoided, the more anxiety is generated when it comes up again. Using generative AI doesn’t encourage starting a new project and learning a new skill - in fact, it makes the prospect more distressing to the mind, and encourages further avoidance of developing a personal creative process.

One of the best ways to reduce anxiety about a task, according to DBT, is for a person to do that task. Opposite action is a method of reducing the intensity of an emotion by going against its action urge. The action urge of anxiety is to avoid, and so opposite action encourages someone to approach the thing they are anxious about. This doesn’t mean that everyone who has anxiety about creating should make themselves write a 50k word fanfiction as their first project. But in order to reduce anxiety about dealing with a blank page, one must face and engage with a blank page. Even a single sentence fragment, two lines intersecting, an unintentional drop of ink means the page is no longer blank. If those are still difficult to approach a prompt, tutorial, or guided exercise can be used to reinforce the understanding that a blank page can be changed, slowly but surely by your own hand.

(As an aside, I would discourage the use of AI prompt generators - these often use prompts that were already created by a real person without credit. Prompt blogs and posts exist right here on tumblr, as well as imagines and headcannons that people often label “free to a good home.” These prompts can also often be specific to fandom, style, mood, etc., if you’re looking for something specific.)

In the current social media and content consumption culture, it’s easy to feel like the first attempt should be a perfect final product. But creating isn’t just about the final product. It’s about the process. Bo Burnam’s Inside is phenomenal, but I think the outtakes are just as important. We didn’t get That Funny Feeling and How the World Works and All Eyes on Me because Bo Burnham woke up and decided to write songs in the same day. We got them because he’s been been developing and honing his craft, as well as learning about himself as a person and artist, since he was a teenager. Building mastery in any skill takes time, and it’s often slow.

Slow is an important word, when it comes to creating. The fact that skill takes time to develop and a final piece of art takes time regardless of skill is it’s own source of anxiety. Compared to @sentientcave, who writes about 2k words per day, I’m very slow. And for all the time it takes me, my writing isn’t perfect - I find typos after posting and sometimes my phrasing is awkward. But my writing is better than it was, and my confidence is much higher. I can sit and write for longer and longer periods, my projects are more diverse, I’m sharing them with people, even before the final edits are done. And I only learned how to do this because I took the time to push through the discomfort of not being as fast or as skilled as I want to be in order to learn what works for me and what doesn’t.

Building mastery - getting better at a skill over time so that you can see your own progress - isn’t just about getting better. It’s about feeling better about your abilities. Confidence, excitement, and pride are important emotions to associate with our own actions. It teaches us that we are capable of making ourselves feel better by engaging with our creativity, a confidence that can be generalized to other activities.

Generative AI doesn’t encourage its users to try new things, to make mistakes, and to see what works. It doesn’t reward new accomplishments to encourage the building of new skills by connecting to old ones. The reward centers of the brain have nothing to respond to to associate with the action of the user. There is a short term input-reward pathway, but it’s only associated with using the AI prompter. It’s designed to encourage the user to come back over and over again, not develop the skill to think and create for themselves.

I don’t know that anyone will change their minds after reading this. It’s imperfect, and I’ve summarized concepts that can take months or years to learn. But I can say that I learned something from the process of writing it. I see some of the flaws, and I can see how my essay writing has changed over the years. This might have been faster to plug into AI as a prompt, but I can see how much more confidence I have in my own voice and opinions. And that’s not something chatGPT can ever replicate.