Category Archives: Random

ChatGPT might be here to stay, but so am I

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The publishing industry has been in a big, confused mess about the emergence of ChatGPT, a freely accessible artificial intelligence (AI) program designed to write creative works based on a series of prompts. [1] While the technology could significantly improve things for some people, writers everywhere are uncertain about the full impacts that the technology will have on the publishing industry.

The ChatGPT program can write any story of any length in almost any style. And therein lies the problem.

At the moment, it is reasonably easy to tell when a piece of writing has been generated by ChatGPT, but as the algorithm learns—and I really mean "learns"—it will get harder and harder to tell. The market was already overwhelmed by the scam writers out to make a quick buck, but when ChatGPT came online, the saturation became worse.

Literary magazines like Clarkesworld became inundated with AI-generated stories, and they closed their submissions portal as a result, while they figure out how to handle this miss. [2] Amazon has seen a sudden increase in self-published books on the platform. [3] And there is now great concern about the future of professional ghostwriters, knowing that businesses no longer need to hire a ghostwriter when they can get an AI program to write their material for free.

Exactly where this is all going and how the industry will ultimately respond to AI-generated stories is still unknown.

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Confused Mother

Do titles like Mr and Ms still have a place?

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When I was young, as in still in elementary school, I was taught that you addressed your elders by their title and their last name. Mr. Fisher. Mrs. Wentworth. Mr. Irvine. Ms. Goodman. (And yes, these were all teachers that I had at some point during my education.) If I didn't know the person's last name, I was to address them as sir or ma'am.

And I wasn't the only one who was raised with these ideas. I remember when I was 12, a friend and I went to the beach and we forgot to take a watch with us. We approached an older gentleman and asked, "Excuse me, sir, but do you have the time?" I remember this clearly, because I remember the state of shock on his face.

To this day, I don't know if he was shocked because we were two youths showing him that level of respect, or if it was because two youths had approached a complete stranger to ask for the time.

I will be the first to admit that the world from my childhood has long ago disappeared. But there are elements of the past that have eroded to the point that I'm now wondering if titles and salutations like sir and ma'am even have a place anymore.

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Daylight Savings… Curse you!

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Every six months, the clocks change by an hour. And every six months, I go mental as I try to reconcile the clock changes on my daily and business life.

It might be only an hour, but that's only if you focus on the one time zone. If you are like me, you live your life based on multiple time zone (having an international business), so it's not just one hour that changes. Nope. It's one hour one month as Daylight Savings starts in one time zone, but it's another hour the next month as Daylight Savings ends the next month. And by the end of it, the clocks have moved two hours and you lose total track of everything.

Every six months, I face this two-hour shift, and sometimes the results are me grumpy because I'm up at all godly hours in the morning.

Let me tell you of my crazy when the clocks shifted in New Zealand earlier this month.

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Living in a Near-Cashless Society

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Conversations within my various editors' groups occasionally turn to ways of accepting payments from clients. You get the conversations about using PayPal and similar services. There are the conversations about payments in cash. You get those hilarious conversations about clients wanting to pay via a royalty share, complete with boasted claims that the royalty share would be worth millions.

But whenever the conversation turns to clients paying by check, the group is often amazed by my response.

As much as checks might be nice for some people, I can never accept payment via check. No bank within New Zealand will allow you to deposit checks anymore. Even cashier's checks are now a thing of the past.

There is normally one person who asks how we pay our bills if checks are no longer accepted, likely assuming that we pay for everything via cash. But my answer to this question tends to shock them even more.

New Zealand has become a near-cashless society. Everything is paid for by way of electronic transactions, most of which occur via internet banking.

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Understanding My Strengths

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For as long as I can remember, I have always tried to understand who I am and what I'm good at. And I've always tried to learn more about the things that interest me so I can be good at those things. My pursuit of knowledge was just one of the things that made me me. So much so that my mother called me her professional student when I had enrolled for a PhD.

The word overachiever is no doubt blinking in spiritual neon lights above my head. And I was obsessed with getting straight A. Totally obsessed. I was the kid who wasn't allowed to do homework when I got home from school. Nope, I had to go out and play first. And come a certain time at night, those school books were taken away from me. I wasn't allowed to study anymore.

My husband is constantly reminding me of how I would totally freak out before a university exam, stressing about this formula or that, only to walk out of the exam with top marks. (We were in the same graduating class for engineering. That was how we met.)

But my obsession with learning and striving for the best I can achieve is not something that I like doing by myself. I prefer it when I'm able to encourage others to join me on my journey—and sometimes, I drag people along kicking and screaming.

But I have another talent that I have exploited my adult life in every job that I've ever had. I have this innate ability to explain complex ideas in a way that everyone can understand. It's something that comes from my days in university, when my mother would be the sounding board I needed to wrap my head around some of the more complex physics concepts. If I could explain it to her, then I understood it. And when I was stuck, she would often say something completely bizarre that would unlock the thing that was confusing me.

I say this all jokingly because I know exactly who I am. I know my little quirks and my family love me for them. So, when I decided to take a CliftonStrengths® test, I laughed at when I saw what my top five strengths were:

  1. Learner
  2. Individualization
  3. Achiever
  4. Activator
  5. Relator

But perhaps I should take a step back and explain what all of that means.

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