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What We Write in the Shadows…

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Writing is more popular than ever – on computers, on phones and still some of us do at least some of our writing on paper! Emails and letters, books, blogs, op-eds, texts and the opinions formerly known as Tweets, replies, comments and critiques – many are the forms of the things we write.

I remember when I got my first PC back in 1999 when the internet was young, how my first impression was of wonder and joy at the democracy of it all – thousands of people all over the world were posting stuff about their passions populating the web with information in a thousand silos. Businesses had not yet learned the importance of having a website or how to do that in a really useful and appealing way – but never fear – an army of people was developing to create and fill jobs that had not existed before – coders, web designers, SEO experts, and writing on the web was the same. Writing groups – formerly exclusively in-person, moved online, breaking the limitations of time and geography – I live in Yorkshire, England, but I belong to a writing group on the East Coast of America, five hours difference and an ocean apart and as for cultural differences – well that is an added spice… The army that services writers now includes editors, writing coaches, publishing gurus, writing groups, critique groups and even silent writing groups who write in collective silence in Zoom meetings for the shared and mutual support of conducting an otherwise solitary activity – together!

The stars of “What We Do in the Shadows”
(Russ Martin/FX)

You may recognise the title of this piece as a reference to the TV series “What We Do in the Shadows” based on a New Zealand film – a mocumentary, comedy-horror drama about vampires living in Staten Island and attempting to match the nature of their lives to the lifestyle of modern America. This seems an apt metaphor for the life of a writer. Recently I have been reading “On Writers and Writing” by Margaret Atwood and one of the early chapters riffs on the dualistic idea of “the writer who writes and the writer who lives”. The difference between the writer in the act or process of writing, and the person who lives, eats, breathes and is seen about town. Atwood then goes on to consider the need to actually make a living if one wants to be a full-time writer, for although the truism is that “A writer is someone who writes!”, many of us are therefore writers but few make a living by writing. Many of us do other jobs – lead other lives and writing is only a part of that life – how big a part depends on our circumstances and our choices, how much time we are prepared to “sacrifice” to the words…

Margaret Atwood, author of “On Writers and Writing“

If you aspire to write a book, fiction or non-fiction, then it can take years as a part-timer to pass through the process of, research, writing a first draft, finding critique readers or partners, re-writing second or third drafts and all that before you decide on whatever monumentally difficult path you will select to attempt to get your book published. For a vampire, this might be the equivalent of feasting once in a blue moon, assuming you can even find a suitable victim when the appetite is upon you. Meantime, many people select to write more bite-sized portions – poems or blog posts. Substack is one of the latest forums for trying to make these smaller bites feed the writer sustainably. Launched with great fanfare about how it will make writers, if not rich, then at least not starving, and accompanied by helpful articles aplenty on how to drive readers to your site and convert them to Subscribers – Substack is really just a monetised blog with a subscription rather than an advertising models. And why not – how annoying is it when reading a poem on someone’s blog, to have the flow of poesy interrupted by an ad. for “Unsold Holiday Packages Selling Cheap”! And how much do those bloggers who have succumbed to the temptation in fact make from such monetisation – not much I am guessing?

But to return to the writer – whatever he or she might be writing – what drives them if it is not the elusive pot of gold at the ever-shifting rainbow’s end? Is it as George Mallory, on being asked why he wanted to climb Mount Everest, replied “Because it is there!” and, in the event, it was to be the death of him… However, climbing Everest and succeeding as a writer, two things that may feel the same, is not just about attaining the summit, it surely has to be about the travelling hopefully, the moment-by-moment achievement of each stage, step by step, word by word. Summiting might be the dream, but there are rewards along the way and one of those, for all writers other than book authors, one of the rewards is feedback – the comment! Indeed, even aspiring writers of books nowadays reveal their journeys online, one chapter at a time, and like Dickens, who admittedly was getting paid to publish his books in serial form, the feedback obtained from fans, friends and followers of one’s blog, can help to shape and steer the course of one’s writing, or for the strictly amateur, merely be the source of gratification that means one is not writing alone and unheard in the shadows but enjoyed and appreciated – hopefully…

The art of getting more comments does not depend solely on the quality of a person’s writing but on how much work they spend publicising it, in the main by visiting other people’s writing and leaving comments with links back to their own sites and this fosters a sense of community in the wilderness that can be the World Wide Web. On the downside, reading lots of other people’s work can be disheartening as well as inspirational, informative and misleading – you need to have a strong sense of self and direction to find and tune your own voice and little wonder that there is a site called The Insecure Writers Support Group! Sometimes, a blog site itself can be small enough to grow a fellowship of friends – the first site I blogged on with a site called “Ripple”, was called Mo’time – a testbed for the ideas of a man who ran a larger Italian blog site and although thousands were signed up, as people do, like gym memberships, the number who followed through and kept up their writing, was much smaller and so a core of connected writers developed online friendship and appreciation in the comments section. Eventually, tragically, Mo’time, and its parent blog, were sold, and the new owners soon terminated the affair. Some of us tried to create and stay connected with new homes but the magic was gone although I still see some of the Mo’timers on Facebook to this day.

Image by Midjourney from a prompt by Andrew Wilson

A few years ago, just as the pandemic was getting into its stride, I discovered, on April 1st, the A to Z Challenge in which bloggers post 26 alphabetically named post on whatever subject they care to choose for the month of April. Not having had time to prepare anything in advance, as old hands do, I wrote about aspects of the unfolding Covid crisis and I have now completed the challenge four times on my latest blog incarnation How Would You Know – that is if you disagree with my characterisation of Substack as a Blog… I revived a name that I had briefly tried on Blogger – Of Cabbages and Kings – a line from the Walrus and the Carpenter in Lewis Carrol’s Alice and Wonderland “The time has come” the Walrus said “ to talk of many things – Of cabbages and Kings…” I have to admit, that so far, I have not put the work in to draw readers to this new venture and I am still posting in the parallel world of WordPress and How Would You Know in part because I have hit a certain wall – to borrow a running metaphor. What I like about the A to Z Challenge, is the enormous breadth of writers and subject matter that coalesces each year and to jump into that pool is like an annual swim and sauna from which I emerge refreshed, invigorated and inspired.

If you are writing a novel, you can sit in your garret writing away, the time for reaching out to readers, way off on the horizon, but once you sit down at the Table of Feedback in the Dining Room of Blogs, then your daily output is reduced by the amount of time you spend promoting your posts by reading and commenting on others, just as the published author’s hours are eaten into by promotional tours and there comes a point, which I feel I have reached, where you must pick and choose carefully, which challenges you are going to respond to or else fall into a bubbling vat of writing for comments and commenting for followers and feedback at the cost of your writing enough of your own, of writing spontaneously, prompt-less and fancy-free…

If a person writes something and does not put it out into the world – does that mean that it has no meaning? That it wasn’t worth doing? Is it only when posthumously discovered that it suddenly acquires worth and meaning? Because at the end of the day, a writer must ask themselves “Why do I write?” is it for art’s sake, for the glory of publishing and acclaim and the money that may follow? Be it as humble as a blog post or as grand as a novel, is it to entertain, inform, to fight injustice, to philosophize through non-fiction or fiction – but I say that if you feel the compulsion to write, if you enjoy doing it, you are on the right track wherever it leads…

So if you are reading this on WordPress, you may visit me at Substack here, and if you are on Substack then How Would You Know is here and you can see the edifice I have constructed over the last years – a mind palace with many rooms if you will, and if you like what you find, write a comment in either place and I promise I will respond to it…

© Andrew Wilson, 2023

Six Degrees of Separation – Wifedom…

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Six Degrees of Separation is an excuse to peruse six favourite books linked to an initial offering by our host KateW and eventually link them back to the beginning. Kate W offers us big themes in her choices and since I have been participating, these have included – being adrift in Time, Friendship, Memory, and Romance. This month we have the biographical Wifedom and the theme for me will be that of wives albeit mainly fictional examples – also, three of the books have been adapted for screen…

I have not read Wifedom (as is usually the case with Kate W’s suggestions) but I would like to after reading what Amazon has to say about the book. – At the end of summer 2017, Anna Funder found herself at a moment of peak overload. Family obligations and household responsibilities were crushing her soul and taking her away from her writing deadlines. She needed help, and George Orwell came to her rescue.

“I’ve always loved Orwell,” Funder writes, “his self-deprecating humour, his laser vision about how power works, and who it works on.” So after rereading and savoring books Orwell had written, she devoured six major biographies tracing his life and work. But then she read about his forgotten wife, and it was a revelation.

Eileen O’Shaughnessy married Orwell in 1936. O’Shaughnessy was a writer herself, and her literary brilliance not only shaped Orwell’s work, but her practical common sense saved his life. But why and how, Funder wondered, was she written out of their story? Using newly discovered letters from Eileen to her best friend, Funder re-creates the Orwells’ marriage, through the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War in London. As she peeks behind the curtain of Orwell’s private life she is led to question what it takes to be a writer—and what it is to be a wife.

A breathtakingly intimate view of one of the most important literary marriages of the twentieth century, Wifedom speaks to our present moment as much as it illuminates the past. Genre-bending and utterly original, it is an ode to the unsung work of women everywhere.

The Aubrey–Maturin series of novels by Patrick O’Brian have been compared to the works of Jane Austen – exhaustively researched plots drawn from the annals of the British Royal Navy and transplanted into Patrick O’Brian’s fictional Master and Commander series, these books are as equally character-driven as they are portrayals of the events of life in the navy during the years of the Napoleonic wars and I urge anyone who fears such books to be too technical or militaristic, to try them. No better example – beyond the two main protagonists Aubrey and Maturin, than the portrait of the eventual wife of Captain Aubrey – Sophie. The life of any sailor’s wife would be hard and full of fear of her husband never returning, long periods of absence, varying financial fortune and many other forms of uncertainty, but in Sophie we have a wife of heroic qualities to match the vicissitudes heaped upon her – a wife who takes charge of Aubrey’s home life every bit as much as he is captain of his ship at sea! The rather battered cover below depicts Sophie’s first appearance in the series of books alongside her future husband…

Another wife heaped with vicissitudes along with her husband, is Raynor Winn in her autobiographical account of how she and her husband, having lost their house and business due to a treacherous friend and having simultaneous with their homelessness, receive a diagnosis of her husband’s terminal illness. They decide that with nowhere else to go and nothing to be done, they will spend the summer walking the coastal path from Somerset to Dorset around Devon and Cornwall. No spoilers but their endurance trial brings unexpected rewards and Raynors’s support of her husband is exemplary… Below is the very beautiful cover designed by Angela Harding.

If the three wives portrayed so far have been long-suffering, among other things, Cathy in East of Eden, by John Steinbeck, is the one dishing out the suffering, beginning by running away after burning her parents to death – she is a character of pure evil – described as having a “malformed soul”. Steinbeck regarded East of Eden as his magnum opus even though other books are more famous, Cannery Row (previously covered by me), The Grapes of Wrath and that much studied in school – Of Mice and Men. Despite being made into an iconic film featuring James Dean, I venture to suggest that not so many people have read the epic family saga East of Eden. Indeed the film only deals with part of the story and I wonder if Steinbeck would be disappointed that his magnum opus is not the one that time has accorded that accolade to.

The title East of Eden comes from the fourth chapter of Genesis, verses one through sixteen, which recounts the story of Cain and Abel and the whole book – accused by some of being “moralistic” certainly deals with big themes – good and evil, brotherly rivalry, love and depravity and as always with Steinbeck we are treated to a portrait of the life and times in the Salinas Valley, California. There is a saying about writing that “big themes are dead weights” and whilst this is undoubtedly a weighty novel, it is still a great read from a master, even if not his master work…
The cover below makes as sensational a view as it can of the central drama of two brothers torn apart by the inexplicably evil Cathy.

Another painful marriage is depicted in On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan – an author not renowned for being the most cheerful in his writings, the unfolding of this depiction of a virginal couple on honeymoon in an as yet sexually unliberated 1962, is excruciating in the extreme and yet, such is the quality of the writing – you cannot look away… on Chesil Beach has been turned into a film.

Many of the writers I have covered in my 6 Degrees are writers I read long ago but Nicola Griffiths is a new favourite whose canon I am working through in order, from Ammonite (Lesbian science fiction) to her current amazing historical novels featuring Hild, a powerful woman from Britain’s pre-medieval history. Between these wildly divergent books linked only by their themes of strong women and excellent writing, comes the Aud Torvingen series of which Stay is the second book. Aud is not exactly your typical P.I. as she is a woman of independent wealth but in each of the three books she conducts investigations, willingly or unwillingly and (spoiler alert) – she also falls in love in book one and in book two has to deal with the loss and the grief over her lover. Although Aud does not find the happiness of marriage until book three, Stay is a portrait of a wife thwarted and her response by throwing herself into “a series of physical, moral, and emotional challenges that she has been dodging for weeks, months, and years – none of her choices are easy.” What more can we ask from a book…

My last link, slightly tenuously back to Wifedom, is The Fourth Hand by John Irving. It is a tale of a wife who is so dedicated to her husband that – well here is what the Penguin blurb says:- While reporting a story from India, a New York television journalist has his left hand eaten by a lion; millions of TV viewers witness the accident. In Boston, a renowned hand surgeon awaits the opportunity to perform the nation’s first hand transplant. A married woman in Wisconsin wants to give the one-handed reporter her husband’s left hand, that is, after her husband dies. But the husband is alive, relatively young, and healthy…
The widow supplies permission for the transplant but then demands visitation rights with the hand – a typical thought experiment of a plot from the masterful John Irving. This is the first of John Irving’s books that I have included in 6 Degeees but once discovered, I devoured his early books such as The World According to Garp and several of his books have been turned into films. I recommend some of his later books too, such as Till I Find You about tattoos and tattoo artists. Irving has repeated elements that crop up in many of his books – bears, hotels, wrestling but however far-fetched some of the things Irving writes about may seem to be, they make you think about life in a clever and enjoyable way – no wonder he occupies half a bookshelf of mine!
The link back to Wifedom – the extraordinary connection between and support/dedication of a wife…

Time Shelter

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I try to ration myself for prompts, perturbed by the idea that I will be swallowed in an endless cycle of call and response, but one that I will not miss each month, is 6 Degrees of Separation. Starting from a given title, each reader of books – no matter when they read them, summons six links to form a chain that finally links from and back to the beginning book.

I confess I do not make enough time for reading books, words bound between covers on paper as opposed to screens, though I always have one novel and at least one non-fiction on the go – however slow. I confess that the Poets Pub is often the guilty party in keeping me from the books though I do not blame or object because beautiful, moving or informative as books are, the pleasure of company and connection are better still.

I’m afraid my To Be Read list rarely coincides with the 6 Degrees prompt and only sometimes am I moved to purchase the recommendation, but recently I fell hook line and sinker for Time Shelter. The book is a metaphorical creation of memory clinics where sufferers from certain kinds of memory loss may steep themselves – full-immersion – in a room recreating an era from their past and get the backroads to their lost memories cleared of debris. A few weeks or months in which a loved one comes to life again is worth so much to relatives grieving the loss of someone who is still alive…

Dear Readers – I bought the book! I have no regrets and I recommend it even to poets – no! especially to poets so they may dive into a novel length metaphorical fiction that explores memory and loss, health and sickness and if that sounds depressing, I assure you that Time Shelter, by Georgi Gospodinov is most entertainingly told – and now your turn to confess – when is the last time you read a fiction by a Bulgarian?

My Six degrees of Separation chain…

This Prose Poem was written for Laura Bloomsbury‘s prompt for  National Buy a Book day over at dVerse Poets Pub…

© Andrew Wilson, 2023

Spies

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What is a spy if not a cursed liar
Who for love puts hand in fiercest fire
But not the love given to a sweet woman
The love of country is inhuman.

We watched a French, great tragedy conclude
Where agents of The Bureau were deluded
Believing they could steer their star-crossed fate
Clinging to the happy ending till too late.

For once your life is built on falsehood complex
The web you weave the fates will always vex
And you must pay for secrets stolen, finally
No matter how handlers and bosses rally

The cause of saving hapless agents’ lives
Is hard on lovers, colleagues, friends and wives
All pawns in what is known as the Great Game
The spy is destined for a life without fame

And if their life of infamy be revealed
Be sure the fates no happiness will deal.

© Andrew Wilson, 2023

This poem was written in response to a challenge from Posted by Björn Rudberg (brudberg) in Poetry Forms on dVerse – The Poet’s Pub, to write a Heroic Sonnet in iambic pentameter – you can read about it here.

My partner and I have been binge-watching a five-series drama made by the French company Canal called The Bureau. Since the French are famed for their interest in love, this drama, whilst being a cracking, edge-of-your-seat tale of the life of spies, also examines the philosophical implications for the loves of those who make their living by living a lie – can they find happiness? Since the poem might be spoiler enough, I will say no more…

This is the first time I have attempted a Sonnet in Iambic Pentameter – something I vaguely remember being taught in school but had to resort to Wikpedia for the finer points, including all the exceptions to the rules which make lines memorable – I hope I have done it justice. I guess that we many of us have this poetry form flowing through our veins with so many great poets and playwrights having embraced the form.

Exploring and Evaluating Generative AI Number Four – Working with AI and the Women’s Issue…

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During the month of April this year, whilst participating in the A to Z Challenge, I was privileged to encounter the work of Misky whose blog It’s Still Life, showcases two distinct things, poetry written by Misky and illustrated using Generative Artwork created by Misky using the Midjourney AI app. So amazing were these images to someone who is in part, a visual artist, that it inspired me to make an exploration of Generative AI for myself. At the same time, AI has been hitting the headlines big time and mainly for its use in text generation and the impact it might have on jobs and since writing is another thing that I do in my day job, I was also intrigued to see whether AI might be of any use in a company such as I work for. (I am the gradually retiring General Manager of a food manufacturing company). It has been a fascinating voyage of discovery and to cap it all, lying awake at 4 o’clock this morning, I found myself listening to “The Conversation” on the BBC World Service and what should be the topic, but AI with special reference to the involvement of women. So – mind on fire, I am going to draw this series together, although I freely acknowledge I have but dipped my toe in the waters of AI and I may return to the topic in the future…

To recap the three articles I have already written:- In the first one, I tried out ChatGPT to see what it research and write about one of the topics from my A to Z and immediately encountered the phenomena of AI hallucination – the ability, in fact tendency of AI to make things up. I also “showcased” my first attempts at visual collaboration with the Midjourney bot .
In the second report, I compared ChatGPT to Writesonic which produces more lengthy articles – testing them against a typical (for me) work assignment.
In the third report, I looked at the most controversial assertion about AI – that AI might in the future, eliminate human beings – Terminator-style and referenced articles that thoroughly refute the need to worry about that particular outcome – go re-assure yourselves! However, there are many things about our present and future use of AI that do bear looking at and these were raised in the episode of “The Conversation” that woke me up this morning. The programme, presented by a woman, featured two women working in the field of AI, one a philosopher and one an expert in data analysis and as well as the general concerns that need addressing about AI, they highlighted the general lack of representation of women in the field of AI – only one CEO, qualifying women failing to get jobs in the industry and so on. They did however point out that one of the changes to AI itself in recent times, has been the accessibility of use – no longer do you need to have a degree in computer programming – you could make your first interaction with ChatGPT in the same time it would take you to query something on Google. Which brings me back to Misky…

Misky was not only the inspiration for my (deepish?) dive into AI, but was extremely helpful and encouraging to me at the outset, itself a reflection of how women tend to be more collaborative, good team players – a fact which the contributors to “The Conversation” suggested is a good reason for women to me more involved in AI companies, in reviewing the implications and in forming the regulation which is undoubtedly necessary around AI. A few days ago, I was delighted to meet Misky face-to-face on a Zoom call after many text interactions online and one of the things that she shared in our too-brief call, was that she had had some push-back from certain readers of her blog, about the use of AI images. I would like to talk to her more about these issues, but the participants in “The Conversation” raised the issue of how artists, whose work has been studied by AI to create new images “in the style of”, are being short-changed. You may have been wondering about the image at the top of this post – I created in Midjourney by prompting it to “imagine” Knaresborough railway viaduct “in the style of Hokusai” – a master of Japanese woodblock prints. I have used this subject as my test piece for exploring what Midjourney can do as you will see in the previous post. Now Hokusai is long dead and so the issue of compensation is hardly an issue, but another group of more recent artists might object. I am working on a spoof post – “How to Make a Body” a tale of human reproduction in the style of an Internet recipe ad although, like Misky, the writing is all my own, I wanted an illustration to fit with the tone of the piece and prompted Midjourney to “imagine” a woman in a hospital bed, holding her newborn baby and with her husband leaning in “in the style of a Ladybird book cover”. For those of you who may not be familiar with Ladybird books, they were written for children starting in the 1940’s and running until the 1980’s and they feature a distinct style of illustration.

A typical Ladybird book cover

In recent years, a series of spoof books in the Ladybird style and aimed at those who had grown up with the original series, have been vert successful, for example…

A cracking spoof…

I had no idea whether Midjourney would be able to fulfil my prompt, there are lists of artists’ styles you can use with Midjourney but I hadn’t seen this one – I was not disappointed!

I am keeping my powder dry as to the final image I chose but this first set of four (Midjourney shows off by producing not one, but four attempts in under sixty seconds) – which was done to the prompt of “A new mother in a hospital bed with her husband leaning in as she holds their new baby in the style of a Ladybird Book Cover” has misunderstood my intention and the mother is holding a magazine rather than a baby – though the graphic style is very Ladybird book-like. I acknowledge that I am still only a beginner in my use of prompts with all the forms of AI I have tried so far and there is undoubtedly an “art” to getting it right which is why I said “I created in Midjourney”. Although I am a competent watercolourist, screen-printer and other forms of illustrative art, I could not produce images such as the above and certainly not in sixty seconds. So, how much of this creation is my prompt, how much is the brilliant programming behind Midjourney and how much is owed to the various artists who could produce the illustrations of the Ladybird books? I cannot begin to answer that question but it does raise an issue which needs considering in formulating regulation around the use of AI. Meanwhile, like Misky and I, jump in and have a go and get a feel for yourself of the answer to the god-like feeling of creating with an AI tool…

Much of the debate around the consequences of the rise of AI, is around its impact on jobs and the potential losses and gains. As I described in my first report, the development of computer spreadsheets swept away the lowly positions in Accountancy but opened up many more jobs at the high end of the profession and although this might be the hope for AI, that it liberates us from the menial and allows us to create new roles – roles which might be beyond the capability of AI to imagine, at present, it is not just the menial tasks that are being threatened by bots like ChatGPT, but some roles higher up in various industries. Having said that, given the tendency of AI’s to hallucinate, I wouldn’t trust an AI’s writing without an experienced human checking the output of any writing before sending it out! Also, when you are a creative individual yourself, then trying to get AIs to produce exactly what you have in mind is tricky. In my 2021 A to Z challenge, I was trying to complete a science-fiction novel and the exercise gave me enough momentum to indeed finish it a few months later. Then I set about creating a book cover for it – to feature the final denouement – a tense scene set in a space-elevator on the edge of space. I prepared the background view by Photoshopping some NASA photographs looking the length of the Red Sea towards Palestine, painted in a great river estuary as per my planet, and then superimposed some 3D elements which I drew up in AutoCAD and finally added the title and my name. You can see this below, however, I felt that the result was not quite up to the standard of artwork commissioned by big sci-fi publishers and imagined that in the unlikely event of the novel being published, an improved version of the cover would be substituted for my “sketch”.

© Andrew Wilson 2022

Back to today, and naturally, I thought it would be a good test of Midjourney to see whether it could be used to produce a better version of my cover. Well, the first attempts were brilliant style-wise, but nothing like the image I wanted and many attempts followed to no avail…

My prompt read “space lift arriving at 300 miles above Earth like planet over Sahara like region array of cargo containers spread out in one layer small spaceship approaching“Midjourney couldn’t understand Space lift and I had to change lift to elevator, it couldn’t understand “array of cargo containers” but it did have all the sci-fi style I wanted. So then I decided to create a space view background without the lift and substitute it into my own cover illustration. Bingo!

© Andrew Wilson 2023

Still I hanker for the crisply detailed images of the elevator that Midjourney is capable of if only I could prompt it correctly – so a work in progress… What this exercise does show, is that it is possible to use AI for the things it can do better in combination with human talent.

In Conclusion…

This exploration of AI has felt like a marathon and it is just one person’s experience and I am really only at the beginning of my exploration, I’m sure I will find both text and image-generative bots to be of use in my future work and play. I urge you all to experiment for yourselves, form your own judgements (and please share your results by linking in the comments), join the debate over the regulation of AI, and explore other artists, in particular, Misky, who began this journey…

Roadtrip Review No. 5

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Lady in Read – such a great pun – and it truly reflects Vidya’s approach to her blog – it might be described as Fusion – “Lady in Red” is a western song by Chris de Burgh and it has featured in several films and both Vidya’s avatar and blog banner show her in a red dress but in the content she goes further. For example, in this year’s A to Z (she is a veteran participant), she wrote poems about people and places from India and particularly Karnatka where she grew up. However, Vidya writes prompted by many blogging challenges including NaPoWriMo which was also running in April and rather than do two separate posts, Vidya gives us a mash-up or fusion. so in My Heart Beats for Harihar, her H post, Vidya writes a poem celebrating the town she grew up in as a Sea Shanty – the NaPoWriMo prompt! To have followed Vidya’s A to Z is to take a deep dive into Indian/Karnatka culture but served up with a fusion twist seasoned with a great deal of humour…

Vidya also explored using AI for both images to illustrate some posts and also to generate ideas for post titles and you can read about her assessment of her experiments in her Reflections Post.

Six Degrees of Separation – Debut Post…

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This was supposed to be an A to Z Roadtrip Review of LADY IN READ WRITES and I will get to that but on looking around her blog, I found this intriguing way of reviewing books and once I had sussed out that this was a regular challenge, I got back to the source of the Six Degrees of Separation Bookish Meme – here! And I had to take up Lady in Reads’ challenge and think of six linked books myself – so late it is, but here goes…

Now I haven’t read Hydra, by Adriane Howell, so I have had to go and look at the review on Amazon to find out what it is about and here is some of what it says – “Anja is a young, ambitious antiquarian, passionate for the clean and balanced lines of mid-century furniture. She is intent on classifying objects based on emotional response and when her career goes awry, Anja finds herself adrift. Like a close friend, she confesses her intimacies and rage to us with candour, tenderness, and humour. […] Hydra is a novel of dark suspense and mental disquiet, struck through with black humour., Adriane Howell beguilingly explores notions of moral culpability, revenge, memory, and narrative – all through the female lens of freedom and constraint. […] From the treacherous auction houses of Melbourne to the sun-struck islands of Greece, Hydra took me places I never expected to go.”

So a Greek island named after a tiny water creature named for the many-headed monster of Greek myth and the setting for a dark psychological drama…

This led me to This Thing of Darkness by Harry Thompson
Link:- A psychological drama about a man who probably was bi-polar.

This Thing of Darkness tells the story of the friendship between Captain Fitzroy (after whom the weather area is named) and the illustrious Charles Darwin and their voyage of discovery on HMS Beagle. Fitzroy had hoped that the trainee Parson and amateur naturalist appointed to the voyage, would scotch the ideas gaining traction from geology, that the story of the Earth was not as written in the bible but rather that written in the fossil record. Alas, Darwin formulated the bones of his Theory of Natural Selection after their voyage to the Galapagos Islands but it is thought that it was partly out of respect for his friend Fitzroy, that he held off publishing his theory until forced to by the possibility of rival scientists publishing ahead of him. In the course of the voyage of the Beagle, it becomes clear that Fitzroy was probably suffering from what we today would diagnose as Bi-polar disorder.

This led me to Ammonite by Nicola Griffith
The link:- Fossils

Four out of my six linked books are or contain elements of science-fiction and those four are some of my favourite books ever – not that I only read that genre only, any more than Nicola Griffith only writes sci-fi, but Ammonite was, brilliantly, her first novel. set on a planet where a virus kills all men and the indigenous women have found a way to reproduce without the opposite sex. The titular ammonite plays a very small part, but a link is a link…

This led me to The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula le Guin
Link:- A planet of humankind with a unique form of sexuality…

Ursuala le Guin is perhaps the pre-eminent female writer of science-fiction and it is hard to imagine that her sex was not a factor in writing The Left Hand of Darkness. In a universe where a long vanished race have applied pan-spermia to many planets, seeding each with variations on the human theme – this planet has a people who only come into their sexual phase at a certain time of the month. Ursula le Guin explores the implications of such a thought experiment, no monogamous birth couples, no rape, sex as a cloistered activity etc. There is much more to the book, friendship, diplomacy, political intrigue, but the sexuality was the link both to and from…

This led me to Orlando by Virginia Woolf
Link:- A sex changing nobleman whose lives span 300 years.

I have not read Orlando myself, but have heard it dramatised and so it is on my Tsundoku list… It is a satirical fiction dedicated to Virginia Woolf’s lover, and author – Vita Sackville-West and who had a mutual fascination with the more literary author that was Virgina – the latter has made the literary grade whilst the work of Vita has sunk into comparative obscurity. However she was the inspiration for Orlando and so has achieved a form of immortality…

This led me to the breakthrough work of one of my favourite authors – Kurt Vonnegut and Slaughterhouse Five
Link:- a hero who has become, in the author’s words – unstuck in time.

Kurt Vonnegut – an American of German origin, joined up to fight the Germans in World War 2, was captured by the Germans, locked up with his work party on the outskirts of Dreden on the night of the fire-bombing of Dresden in which he nearly lost his life to being bombed by his Allies. This had a profound effect on Vonnegut and although this was not his first book, when Slaughtrehouse Five was finally birthed, it was Vonnegut’s breakthrough masterpiece. Vonnegut projects his PTSD onto his character Billy Pilgrim who flashes back and forth on his time-line…

This lead to The Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
Link:- A nested series of stories going from the past to the future and back

This highly successful book and the probably more widely viewed film that was made of it, shows how what can work in a novel may need to be changed in a movie. The Cloud Atlas starts in the 18th century, tells half a story – moves on in time, tells half of another story and carries on into a post-apocalyptic future which is somehow linked to each of the stories. I then concludes each story working backwards in time. The movie, and we tend to think, mistakenly, of flashbacks (and flashes forward) to be a movie invention, and The Cloud Atlas darts unforgivingly between the various strands of the story and I found, that even having read the book previously, it has taken several viewings to grasp all the connections which were amplified by the visual rendering of the book. Which is best? Read then watch and weigh in for yourselves…

Which brings us full circle, because The Cloud Atlas (book) begins on a beach like the setting for Hydra and the movie ends on another beach in another galaxy far, far away and like all the books mentioned, they all take the reader on a journey which cannot leave the reader unmoved or unchanged…

Exploring and Evaluating Generative Artificial Intelligence Number Three

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I decided to make a Header Image (above) for this little series of posts and have retrofitted it to the two previous posts here and here. So I asked the Midjourney app on Discord, to depict a silver-skinned Android, firstly, standing at an easel painting, and then at a computer typing. I am fairly sure that the AI known as Midjourney had no sense of the irony of asking it to anthropomorphise an Android doing these activities, because current forms of AI are so far from having the sentience required to appreciate concepts as subtle as irony. Spoiler alert, I approached this evaluative exploration with certain preconceptions about the likely conclusion although I didn’t know for sure, how those conclusions might be reached because I didn’t know how AI’s work, in detail. What I am going to show you today is what I have learned, but I am also going to link you to a very erudite analysis of why we should not be worried about AI taking over the world – in a piece called “Why the AI Doomers Are Wrong“, Nafeez Ahmed explains why the direction of travel of AI development, simply can’t lead to a human-brain-like sentience. I will quote from his article later.

First of all, look at the left-hand side of the header picture, in particular, the easel. On close inspection, you can see that the easel is the wrong way round and that the painter/android, is standing behind the easel. Midjourney produces four images by default, in the remarkable time of about 60 seconds which is almost like magic – indeed, in 1962, Arthur C. Clarke, a science fiction writer, stated in his book “Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible” that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. So despite the apparent magic of creating these images so quickly, the AI has made a fundamental mistake that reveals that it doesn’t really understand what an easel is or how it should be used. Nafeez Ahmed is mostly talking about text generative interactions with AI – ChatGPT and the like, but what he says below, is equally applicable to images generated by AI…

The stunning capabilities of the new chatbots and their uncanny ability to engage in human-like conversations has sparked speculation about sentience. Yet there is zero tangible evidence of this beyond a sense of amazement.
What many miss is that the amazing nature of these conversations is not a function of an internal subjective ‘understanding’ by an identifiable entity, but rather the operation of algorithms made-up of hundreds of billions of parameters trained on massive datasets of human text to predict words that should follow given strings of text. {…} This is not a breakthrough in intelligence, although it is, certainly, a breakthrough in being able to synthesise human responses to similar questions and thereby mimic patterns in human interaction. This model of AI, therefore, cannot, in itself, generate fundamentally new knowledge or understanding – let alone sentience.

Nafeez Ahmed

Nafeez goes into great detail about how the research is headed in the wrong direction and indeed, how it is unlikely it is that it will ever succeed in equating to human sentience, so if you want to put your mind at rest about a Terminator-style future in which humans are subjugated by machines – nip on over and read the full article. Meanwhile I am going to show you some more examples of how Midjourney gets things “wrong” and how to get the “right” results and what that says about how useful such a programme can be.

You interact with the Midjourney app by sending it a message (just as if it was really an intelligent entity) containing a prompt, and once you receive your four images, you can choose one to enlarge, if you are satisfied with it, or run variations on one or all of them. Here is the prompt that produced the above set of images. “Silver android painting at an easel by Roy Lichtenstenstein” – the AI places most importance on the object at the beginning of the prompt, then on the activity described and lastly, it attempts to produce the images, in this case, in the style of the Pop Artist Roy Lichtenstein – famous for painting s in the style of close-ups of comic book pictures. These close-ups show the dot screens that were used to shade the illustrations of the comic book plus the hard black outlining and Midjourney has picked up well on these style features, particularly the top right and bottom left pictures. The top-left shows a sculpture vaguely resembling an up-cycled easel made of silver and the bottom right shows a silver-skinned figure with dot-screen effect, holding a brush and painting a picture but with no easel. In the [op-right picture, the top of the easel is just showing in the bottom corner and the android “artist” is holding a small blank canvas in her hand and drawing on it. Having seen the header image at top, and these pictures were as near as I could get to what I wanted, from multiple attempts, you can see that what I wanted was an all-over silver-skinned android and in the images above, top-right has a human face although “her” body is robotic – perhaps cyborg is a better description, whilst the other pictures show a sculpture, a woman and a totally abstract figure. So I decided to change the prompts to “Robot” rather than “Android” which produced better results. The reason I had started with “Andriod” was because robots range from automatic hoovers that move around your rooms looking like little miniature flying saucers sucking up dirt to more anthropomorphic devices – which is what I wanted.

“standing silver robot painting at an easel by Roy Lichtenstein” produced(among others) the above image in which the robot, possibly standing, is grasping what looks like the top of an easel but the “painting” does not appear to be on the easel. So I tried “Robot standing painting at an easel” and got this rather cute robot who looks like he is sitting on an invisible chair – “Hey Midjourney” just because you don’t show the chair, doesn’t make it standing!” Notice that with the style reference to Roy Lictensten gone, this image is very different. I would like to show you more of the iterations but Midjourney froze and when I reinstalled it, it had lost the entire session of work – you just can’t get the staff…

Another thing that I have discovered in my experiments, is that both Midjourney and ChatGPT, like to add unspecified embellishments – remember in my first report, how ChatGPT found the correct explanation for the phrase “Cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey” but then added a totally made up explanation? Well Midjourney does the same thing too. Here is a picture of the railway viaduct at Knaresborough in West Yorkshire , an hours drive from where I live.

https://www.visitharrogate.co.uk/explore/knaresborough

I wanted to see if Midjourney could produce a collage image using fragments of maps which it tried but didn’t really understand the concept – although I am not saying that it can’t, but at the very least, my prompt wasn’t sufficient (one of the oldest sayings amongst computer programmers is “Garbage in – garbage out!”) Here is Midjourneys best effort…

There are some map elements and the whole scene has been chopped up and rearranged but not in a way that makes sense – this one is closer to the real view…

But my first attempt, before I added the collage style, was simply to see how Midjourney would find and represent the viaduct and it generated the four images below. The top left image, Midjourney has added another railway running beneath the viaduct, likewise, lower-left it has added a canal and in the images on the right, Midjourney has transported us into a past sans Knaresborough and a post apocalyptic future where vegetation is growing over the viaduct.

Enough with all the pretty pictures – what does all this reveal about the way that the AI Midjourney works! Referring to the work – Erik J. Larson in his book, The Myth of Artificial Intelligence, Nafeez Ahmed cites a summary of the work by Ben Chugg, lead research analyst at Stanford University (Iknow – quotes within quotes) as follows:-

“Larson points out that current machine learning models are built on the principle of induction: inferring patterns from specific observations or, more generally, acquiring knowledge from experience. This partially explains the current focus on ‘big-data’ — the more observations, the better the model. We feed an algorithm thousands of labelled pictures of cats, or have it play millions of games of chess, and it correlates which relationships among the input result in the best prediction accuracy. Some models are faster than others, or more sophisticated in their pattern recognition, but at bottom they’re all doing the same thing: statistical generalization from observations.
This inductive approach is useful for building tools for specific tasks on well-defined inputs; analyzing satellite imagery, recommending movies, and detecting cancerous cells, for example. But induction is incapable of the general-purpose knowledge creation exemplified by the human mind.”

https://towardsdatascience.com/the-false-philosophy-plaguing-ai-bdcfd4872c45

Nafeez goes on:-

Current AI has become proficient at both deductive and inductive inference, with the latter becoming a primary focus.
Larson points out that human intelligence is based on a far more creative approach to generating knowledge called ‘abduction’. Abductive inference allows us to creatively select and test hypotheses, quickly eliminate the ones which are proven wrong, and create new ones as we go along before reaching a reliable conclusion. “We guess, out of a background of effectively infinite possibilities, which hypotheses seem likely or plausible,” writes Larson in The Myth of Artificial Intelligence. {…}
And here is Larson’s killer diagnosis: We don’t have a good theory of how abductive inference works in the human mind, and we have no idea how to recreate abductive inference for AI: “We are unlikely to get innovation if we choose to ignore a core mystery rather than face it up,” he writes with reference to the mystery of human intelligence.
Before we can generate genuine artificial intelligence that approaches human capabilities, we need a philosophical and scientific revolution that explains abductive inference. “As long as we keep relying on induction, AI programs will be forever prediction machines hopelessly limited by what data they are fed”, explains Chugg

https://www.bylinesupplement.com/p/why-the-ai-doomers-are-wrong?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

To relate this back to my experiments with Midjourney, the AI could identify what an easel looked like and include it in an image but it didn’t really know what it was or how it was used. Easels are probably present in thousands of pictures of artist’s studios as well as adverts but I bet there isn’t a Painters 101 that “First you will need an easel and this is how you use it” because when a human artist goes into a studio and sees canvasses fixed into easels, even if he has never seen one before, he is there to paint canvasses and it is obvious what they are and what they are for. It might be obvious to a human being with our ability to use inference, deduction and abductive capabilities, but an AI might identify an easel, but without finding a clear description of the usage, it cannot fully fathom how to use it…

As for the the tendency to add extraneous details, well the algorithms that govern Generative AI’s, are designed to mimic human conversational style, so when it has found a relevant answer to the requested information or task, it looks to extend the conversation in what it has learned might possibly follow – it doesn’t know whether it is true or not, because that is way above it’s paygrade ( a metaphor which it probably wouldn’t understand either). This phenomena of AI’s making things up is called hallucination – a very anthropocentric term…

I will make one more report on my attempts to get exactly what I wanted from Midjourney and how I found a compromise to be able to work with the results…

Exploring and Evaluating Generative Artificial Intelligence, Number Two…

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ChatGPT is not the only flavour…

ChatGPT is the AI offering from OpenAI and is probably the most talked about Bot since its launch last year – however it is not the only one so today I am going to compare it with Writesonic and see how they handle a piece of promotional writing. I still work 2.5 days as a manager at a gelato and pudding factory – sounds great unless you are diabetic like me. Anyway, we are trialling some new gelato flavours and I thought it a good moment to see how an AI generative writer might handle promoting this.

ChatGPT

Having no idea what might emerge, I started by putting a very simple prompt in “Promote a new gelato flavour – Caramel Popcorn Gelato” and this is what emerged a minute or so later.

“Introducing the newest addition to the world of gelato: Caramel Popcorn Gelato! This delectable treat is the perfect blend of sweet and savoury, with creamy caramel gelato swirled with crunchy popcorn pieces.
One spoonful of this delicious gelato and you’ll be transported to your favourite movie theatre, with the aroma of freshly popped popcorn and the indulgent taste of caramel. The creamy texture of the gelato perfectly complements the crispy texture of the popcorn, making for a truly delightful dessert experience.
Whether you’re looking for a sweet treat to enjoy on a warm summer day or a cosy dessert for a movie night in, Caramel Popcorn Gelato is sure to satisfy your cravings. So go ahead and indulge in this delicious new flavour – you won’t be disappointed!”

I have changed the spelling of Flavor to Flavour but otherwise, this is straight from the horse’s mouth and for so little guidance, is a pretty remarkable effort in just 128 words. As a marketing piece it leads straight to the movie/popcorn evocation as well as describing the mouthfeel and flavour.

Writesonic

The process of specifying and even joining the bot service was much more complicated – it assumed that I was a business user and gave me 10,00 free words to trial the product. Then it asked for a Subject for the piece and offered to search for Keywords if I did not supply them, which I did – the name of the flavour, it asked d what sort of Tone the piece should have of which I picked Excited, and it then generated Ideas for the article followed by a default three Outlines for an Article. I could have had more outlines but reading through the three that was quite sufficient and I then had a chance to add or remove the ten or so points that the article would consist of and I narrowed it down to five points – the rest would be useful further along in the promotion. Finally I pressed Generate and in short order got my article. I had tried to indicate a length of 130 words to be compatible with ChatGPT but Writesonic did its own thing – 465 words which together with the preliminary stages, reduced my 10,000 words to 9,271. Here it is, complete with photo and in the style of a blog post article:

A Delicious Breakthrough: New Caramel Popcorn Flavour Gelato

This was the image that Writesonic sourced from the internet which it merely credited to Unsplash – I have reverse-searched and added the full credit link –
Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash

As a gelato lover, I’m always on the lookout for exciting and unique flavours to try. So, when I heard about the new caramel popcorn flavour gelato, I couldn’t wait to give it a taste. As soon as I took my first spoonful, I knew that this flavour was going to be a game-changer. In this blog post, I’m going to share my thoughts on this delicious breakthrough.

The Inspiration Behind the Creation of the Flavour

What inspired the gelato makers to create a caramel popcorn flavour? The answer is simple: the love of movies. Think about it, what’s a movie without a tub of popcorn? And what’s better than caramel popcorn? That’s right, a caramel popcorn flavour gelato!

The gelato makers wanted to create a flavour that would bring the movie theatre experience to your taste buds. They experimented with different combinations of caramel and popcorn, trying to find the perfect balance. They wanted to create a flavour that was sweet and buttery, with a hint of saltiness. After many attempts, they finally found the perfect recipe.

How to Pair the Caramel Popcorn Flavour Gelato

Now that we know the story behind the creation of the flavour, let’s talk about how to pair it. The caramel popcorn flavour gelato is perfect for those who love sweet and salty combinations. It’s a great flavour to enjoy on its own, but it can also be paired with other flavours to create a delicious dessert.

One of my favourite ways to enjoy the caramel popcorn flavour gelato is to pair it with a chocolate flavour. The richness of the chocolate complements the sweetness of the caramel, while the saltiness of the popcorn adds a nice contrast. Another great pairing is with a fruit flavour, such as raspberry or strawberry. The tartness of the fruit provides a nice balance to the sweetness of the caramel popcorn.

Conclusion and Final Thoughts on the New Flavour

In conclusion, the new caramel popcorn flavour gelato is a delicious breakthrough that’s perfect for movie lovers and gelato enthusiasts alike. The gelato makers behind this flavour deserve a round of applause for their creativity and dedication to bringing new and exciting flavours to the table.

If you haven’t tried the caramel popcorn flavour gelato yet, I highly recommend giving it a taste. It’s a flavour that will take your taste buds on a journey and leave you wanting more. So, go ahead and indulge in this sweet and salty treat – you won’t regret it!

CTA: Head to your nearest gelato shop and try the new caramel popcorn flavour gelato today!

Which was best?

ChatGPT did an amazing job for such a skinny prompt, but I can see that Writesonic would deliver a much more refined article with a lot more options to craft the result, which was fully SEO optimised, for those of you with a nerdy disposition.

A Midjourney image generated by the prompt –
“salted caramel popcorn flavour gelato in the style of a Baskin-Robbins ad“

To conclude, I am going to show you another gorgeous image generated by Midjourney AI bot from the prompt “Wild Rose and Lonicera in the style of Tenniel –version 5 –tile”…

Exploring and Evaluating Generative Artificial Intelligence, Number One…

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AI or Artificial Intelligence, is a hot topic at present with governments weighing up how to invest in the sector, insiders from the industry warning of the potential dangers and the media stoking fears from job losses to the eradication of the human race. During the recent A to Z Challenge 2023, I was highly impressed by the images selected by Misky in her blog IT’S STILL LIFE – A.I. ART & POETRY and decided to investigate the whole subject of AI for myself. I also wanted to know about Generative Text AI because my work demands various forms of word creation and I had heard that this might be one of the first areas to suffer job losses to AI.

This tile design was designed by Midjourney 5 with a prompt of no more than Passion Flower –tile. It lines up perfectly on every edge, a task which is difficult to do by hand…
Using a third-party software, you can turn Midjourney’s tile into wallpaper and appreciate the seamless matching of edges.

But first, a little thought about where I understand us to be right now. There is Soft AI (think Alexa) and then there is the dreaded Hard AI (think Terminator). Soft AI is already in use all around us, Grammarly, Predictive Text on your smartphone, Alexa, Google and other search engines but the reason people are not running around screaming “The terminators are coming!” as a result of all this Soft AI action, is because the intelligence quotient of this sort of AI is pretty low. For example, say to your “smart” speaker Alexa “Alexa! Tell me a joke!” and Alexa will oblige with a joke of variable humour, but then say “Alexa! Tell me another!” and Alexa will not know what you want – unless you specify “joke” in which case you could leave the “another” out since it is irrelevant to Alexa that she has just told you a joke. This means that Alexa is hardly conducting a conversation. On the other hand, she can sort through literally millions of bits of data to find and play you the song you want to hear. So this sort of AI is doing exactly what we want -conducting the repetitive, boring, difficult (because of the magnitude of data) tasks which we none of us really enjoy doing, or given the scale of data today, could even do! I was reading how when the sea-change brought about in Accountancy when computers could sit on every desk and more particularly, when those computers could run spreadsheets, there were fears of mass redundancies in accounting firms. And so there were at the clerk level of the business, but on the other hand, amongst the higher level accountants, jobs boomed like never before, because the things they could do with spreadsheets, the new things they could offer their clients had been undreamable before – so let us take the tales of mass unemployment with a pinch of salt – after all, I wouldn’t mind betting that some of the accounting clerks were able to upgrade their skills and move up the ladder with the help of a computer…

Above is an example of a tricky task for any graphic designer to do manually – to design a seamless tile repeat and I will come back to this particular task in the future, but to say that this task was accomplished in under sixty seconds, is for now simply amazing!

Text AI

So first of all, I want to look at my first encounter with ChatGPT which was developed by OpenAI and which they describe as a Large Language Model Generative pre-trained transformer Chatbot. What that means is that an AI computer programme has been fed a huge amount of written material, novels, adverts, and non-fiction from the World Wide Web and not only does the AI have access to all this material, but it can stitch information together according to very clever algorithms to write “original” material. So I thought I would test it out by asking it to write a piece about one of the more colourful phrases from my recent A to Z Challenge – phrases we mostly know the meaning of but have forgotten the origins of. First, here is my explanation:

“Cold Enough to Freeze the Balls Off a Brass Monkey!” – you may be beginning to see the “lost in translation” aspect of sayings overheard from sailors by landsmen in which case, you will not be surprised to learn that this expression has nothing to do with statues of simians cast in brass losing their genitalia!

A “monkey” on a wooden ship, especially a warship, was a (usually) wooden tray with rounded depressions in which cannon balls were stacked in preparation for the battle – the last thing you wanted was heavy cannon balls rolling around the deck of a pitching deck – let alone a “loose cannon” – so cannons were secured (against recoil on firing) by strong ropes and cannon balls were kept on a monkey. I said that monkeys were usually made of wood, but admirals or very lucky captains, who had made a lot of money from their share of “prizes” (captured ships, evaluated and paid for by the Navy) – were allowed to prettify their ships with gold leaf, dress their crews in custom, fancy uniforms, and purchase brass monkeys rather than the standard issue wooden ones. Now here’s the thing, a monkey was carefully designed so that you could pile the cannon balls up in a pyramid to maximise your supply of cannon balls in as small a space as possible but the thermal coefficient of expansion of brass (the monkey) and iron (the cannon balls) is different – the brass monkey shrinks more than iron in very cold conditions. Now, the carefully spaced second and subsequent layers of the pyramid are too big for their positions and can roll off the monkey hence “Cold Enough to Freeze the Balls Off a Brass Monkey!” – Simples! Not!

Now here is ChatGPT’s first attempt:
“The expression “cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey” is a well-known phrase that means that it is extremely cold outside. Although it is a common phrase, its origin and accuracy are often disputed.
One theory suggests that the phrase originates from the age of sailing ships when cannonballs were stored on the deck of the ship in a brass frame called a “monkey.” The frame consisted of several round holes where the cannonballs were stacked. During cold weather, the brass frame would contract more quickly than the iron cannonballs, causing them to fall out of the frame. Hence, the phrase “cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey.”
However, there is little historical evidence to support this theory. The phrase “brass monkey” itself is not found in any nautical dictionaries or records, and the idea that brass contracts more quickly than iron is also questionable.
Another theory is that the phrase originated from a Victorian-era pub game called “brass monkey,” which involved placing brass balls on a tray and attempting to knock them off with a ball bearing. The game was typically played in cold weather, and if the temperature dropped low enough, the brass balls could freeze to the tray, making it impossible to play. Hence, the phrase “cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey” may have originated from this game.
However, like the previous theory, there is little concrete evidence to support this theory.
Overall, the origin of the phrase “cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey” remains uncertain. It is likely that the phrase has evolved over time, and its origins may be lost to history.”

So what do we think of this? Well firstly, the “the idea that brass contracts more quickly than iron is also questionable ” is simply not true – science tells us that brass both expands and contracts more than iron – so there is a lie right there! Secondly, Chat GPT says that there is no evidence of the phrase in “nautical dictionaries or records. Whether or not such dictionaries even exist, there are plenty of references to this particular phrase and it’s origin in many places on the web and in literature – I first heard of it in the books of Patrick O’Brien who spent much of his life carrying out research for his books in the Admiralty records and I would trust him implicitly. You have to find as many references as you can when researching a subject like this. There are, of course, always people who will dispute the origins of various phrases and so perhaps ChatGPT gave undue credence to these doubters. Still, then ChatGPT goes even further and completely fabricates an alternative theory! The idea of a “Victorian -era pub game called ‘brass monkey’…'” does not show up in any search of the internet whatsoever, so ChatGPT has not only dissed the correct explanation, but suggested a completely fictitious alternative – all done with a convincingly authoritative tone. Luckily, there is a Regenerate button and on dressing this, without any refining the prompt or critiquing the first result, ChatGPT came clean and produced a correct version of the explanation:
“The expression “cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey” is a colloquial phrase used to describe extremely cold weather.
There are a few different theories about the origin of this expression, but the most widely accepted one is that it comes from the era of sailing ships.
In the days of sail, cannons were an important part of a ship’s armament. The cannonballs were made of iron and were stored on deck in piles or pyramids. To prevent them from rolling around in rough seas, the cannonballs were often stacked on a flat brass plate called a monkey.
When the temperature dropped below freezing, the brass monkey would contract more than the iron cannonballs, causing them to fall off. Hence, it was said to be “cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey.”
However, it’s worth noting that there is no definitive proof for this theory, and other explanations have been proposed as well. Nonetheless, the phrase has become a part of English language and culture, and it is still used today to describe extremely cold weather.”

The second iteration is both factually more correct and more concise, but for a first encounter with ChatGPT to throw up such a blatant fabrication is worrying. It suggests that however miraculous the task of researching and collating this story might be, it definitely needs checking by a human being because otherwise, another false news item might find its way onto the Internet and go echoing around and around… Just such a story of defamation by a ChatGPT “news” story, happened to an Australian Mayor who rather than being portrayed as the whistleblower he actually was, he was reported to have gone to jail for corruption – he is suing ChatGPT‘s developers, OpenAI.

Not that I am fishing for compliments but what do you think of my explanation of the phrase compared to ChatGPT’s? After all, you might think I was too verbose and ChatGPT more concise…

Image AI

So far, I have only tried out the Midjourney bot (short for Robot, which I discussed in my “R” post in April) but I will be trying and comparing them and reporting back to you Dear Reader, but for now, I just want to share some images that I have created which were successful, although sometimes after several attempts to refine the prompts – more of that next time…

Each submission or message to the Midjourney Bot, produces not one, but four variations for you to choose from. You may then ask for an enlargement of one (see below) or to take one as a starting point for variation and another four will be developed. The prompt for this group was “flower_fairies_playing_amongst_blackberry_stems_and_fruit”
Here is the enlargement of the top left image.

I then decided to turn this into a tiled image (below).

The prompt for this image was “Village_beside_lake_style_of_Charles_Rennie_Mackintosh_pallette knife_oil_painting. I think the syntax should have been “in the style of” so I’m not sure that this owes much to Mackintosh but it is great – I think…

So we (if you want to come along with me) are on our way to investigating AI – so far Text AI dodgy, and ImageAI – amazing!