Category: Ramblings

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ChatGPT is here to stay, but so am I

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?

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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Goal Setting with a Theme

When setting goals, we are told to use SMART goals: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Timely. We are encouraged to define our goals with clearly defined constraints and requirements to achieve the goals (specific), using something that we can measure our progress against (measurable). While it's important to dream big, we should never set ourselves up to fail by shooting for the stars from word go when there are a lot of little steps that we need to take along the way (attainable and realistic), and we need to put time limits on those goals (timely).

While I strongly believe in the ethos behind using SMART goals, it's the R in SMART that I believe is a little troublesome.

Commonly, I'll see R as Realistic, but I think Relevant is a better word to use. We might set a goal based on a certain task, but does that task have a purpose that is in service to our long-term hopes and dreams? For example, building that active Twitter following probably won't be of any help to the writer whose target audience is filled with young readers.

Today, I want to talk about shifting our SMART goals into something that has a stronger relevance to not only our hopes and dreams, but with our subconscious motivations too.

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Daylight Savings… Curse you!

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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Are we dumbing down language?

Recently, I took a grammar refresher course to help with some aspects of my editing. I took the course because often enough I encounter something in ProWritingAid or in conversations with other editors that I don't understand. The terminology occasionally goes over my head. So, I thought that perhaps a refresher course would help with some of the terminology confusion.

The course certainly did do that, and I was glad I took the course. However, there were a few comments that actually irritated me—and they all revolved around this philosophy that we're dumbing down language.

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