Tara Maya's Tales

  I worked out this "Four Block" method of writing a scene for my AI for Authors Fiction Writing Guide . Then I discovered, hey, you don't need to work with an AI for this method to be useful.  So I present it here as a writing tip on its own.  First, let's review what constitutes a scene. Bear with me if you know this already. It's a short review. There are two kinds of scenes, and, confusingly one kind of scene is called Scene and the other kind of scene is called Summary. Think of them as Show and Tell. I know, you've heard it a million times to Show Not Tell. Mostly, that's right. The fact that Steve the AI tends to Tell rather than Show is one of the reasons purely Steve-generated stories sound more like a synopsis than a real story.  A Show scene is a detailed and immersive portrayal of a moment in the story that focuses on action, dialogue, and sensory details. Scenes usually involve characters interacting in a specific time and place and move the p...

  “In this video, we explore the exciting potential of GPT-5 and how it could transform the world we live in. As the next generation of AI language models, GPT-5 has the ability to understand and generate language at an unprecedented level of sophistication. From revolutionizing customer service to advancing medical research, we discuss the many ways in which GPT-5 could be applied to solve some of the world's most pressing challenges. Don't miss this opportunity to learn about the cutting edge of AI technology - leave a comment below with your thoughts on GPT-5 and subscribe to our channel for more updates on the latest developments in the world of AI! ” 0:27 app users 3:45 debate 4:15 experiments 5:08 v5 features 5:15 robot Halodi 7:42 plugins 9:53 balloons 10:02 waitlist 10:15 gloves, piranhas * I'm still waiting for my Housekeeping Robot.  Will ChatGPT-5 make it possible? This video is pretty excited, but I notice something odd about Robot Intellectual ...

  According to the computational theory of mind, the conscious state must be identified not with any particular physical manifestation (body), but rather, with some abstract informational/computational pattern. At first glance, this seems like a trivial distinction, but on a deeper inspection we see that it yields many properties which religions typically ascribe to souls: It has no definitive physical location, no associated mass or energy. In a sense, it is  immaterial . Moreover, none of the states of an abstract computation bear any dependence on physical properties, so in this sense it might also be called  non-physical . It can survive the death of the body (just as a story can survive the death of a book containing it), and be  resurrected into new bodies via a transfer of this "immaterial" pattern, e.g. mind uploading. By replicating the pattern of one's mind, we recover the consciousness (the imagined teletransporters of science fiction exploi...

How we relate to AI ethically and morally depends on the true nature of AI. Right now, the nature of AI is more hotly debated than it has been in decades.   The reason is obvious. Although I’m not sure at all that ChatGPT is the most intelligent AI humans have crafted, it and its kind, other Large Language Models, trigger our human mind-detection tendencies.   We have two kinds of errors we, as humans, are prone to make when detecting something with a mind (human), or without a mind (rock). One error is overdetection. The other error is underdetection.   The Perils of Overdetection   In general, nature has built us to overdetect rather than underdetect. It’s better to assume that the bear will plot revenge if you kill her cub than to risk an any mother bear. It’s better even to assume the river will “hate” you if you pollute it. As you can see from these examples, bad things will happen to you if you mess with a mama bear or pollute your environment, even if a mama b...

  Italy leaped like a frog in a jumping contest to find a pretext to ban ChatGPT. https://wamu.org/story/23/03/31/chatgpt-is-temporarily-banned-in-italy-amid-an-investigation-into-data-collection/ Now there are rumors that Germany may follow suit. https://sg.news.yahoo.com/germany-chatgpt-considers-following-italy-banning-chatgpt-openai-ai-artificial-intelligence-101058703.html Based on feedback I have from Draft2Digital, which has sales sites in the EU and other parts of the world, I suspect many countries are thinking of jumping on the techno-panic. This would make me laugh it weren't so stupid. It immediately put me in mind of the Inquistion's five hundred year war agains the invention of the printing press and book burnings that followed.  Yes, it is that stupid, and it will work exactly as well. In short, it will drag behind any country or region that attempts, while the countries that embrace the technology will surge into the cultural lead. When I started looking up de...

Will novelists become obsolete now that computer programs can write? Some people see tools like ChatGPI as competition instead of what it really is: a new form of the Extended Mind.  By extended mind, I mean the way that humans use tools and architecture to "supersize" our minds , to extend our "bodies" through adjacent materials, which we fashion for that purpose. People who were angry about using programs to write see it as a human as delegating the task to someone else, like a boss who tells his secretary to write a love letter to his wife. If instead, people look at a program like ChatGPT as just another tool, they wouldn't be any more offended by someone using than if the letter were composed on a computer using Microsoft Word instead of handwritten with a quill. As a science fiction and fantasy author who is very pro-technology, I was eager to see if ChatGPT could help me with a huge problem: I have way more ideas than I have time to write. I picked up t...

AI generated art. An English teacher, Natalie Kay, wrote about the rising difficulty to “ The College Essay is Dead ” posed by ChatGPT and like programs. (Natalie Kay   Dec 9, 2022, https://medium.com/predict/ai-is-here-and-its-harming-future-generations-and-the-present-ones-cf40985b9bbf) This time last year, I was in the middle of my one-year stint as a high school English teacher. There were many reasons I left the job (the teacher shortage exists for a reason, it turns out), but undoubtedly one of the most significant ongoing issues I had was plagiarism. I tried it myself using ChatGPT, the AI program he discusses in the article. I used a prompt that I had given to my own students when I asked them to write essays on Romeo and Juliet. The quality and level of detail was similar to that of my students. Even if I had been suspicious of plagiarism, I never would have found a way to prove that a student didn’t write the essay. It passed in every way I know to look for...