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…

6 Degrees of Separation  -Friendaholic by Elizabeth Day…

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This is a post in the 6 Degrees of Separation run by Kate W. over at books are my favourite and best in which she gives the starting point of a particular book and invites you to take a journey through 6 other books of your choice, all connecting in some way and perhaps ending up back at the beginning…

As will often be the case in this challenge, I have not read this book, a non-fiction exploration of just what it is that makes friendship so important to Elizabeth Day. Ubiquitous as Amazon is, other booksellers are available  so here is part of what the Waterstones’ blurb says about Friendaholic. “Friendaholic: Confessions of a Friendship Addict tells the story of one woman’s journey to understand why she’s addicted to friendship. […] In Friendaholic, Elizabeth unpacks the significance and evolution of friendship. From exploring her own personal friendships and the distinct importance of each of them in her life, to the unique and powerful insights of others across the globe, Elizabeth asks why there isn’t a language that can express its crucial influence on our world.
From ghosting to frenemies, to social media and communication styles, to the impact of seismic life events, Elizabeth leaves no stone untouched. Friendaholic is the book you buy for the people you love but it’s also the book you read to become a better friend to yourself.”

So everything you wanted to know about friendship but never dared to ask – well hardly because there are as many types of friendship as there are fish in the sea and as a prodigious reader of books growing up in a rather claustrophobic childhood, I suspect that the friendships depicted in books have been a great influence on me so all these books have personal significance for me beyond the mere reading…

Will and Tom by Mathew Plamplin – my first choice-  was a recent read but what drew me to it, was that it concerns two painters well known to me and is set in one of England’s great country house not far from where I now reside – Harewood House. My last year at school was an extra year to resit Geography which I had ambitiously paired with Physics and English A-levels in an attempt to straddle education from Art to Science and Geography, which I wanted to study at university got squeezed in the middle. So now I added Geology and Atr A-levels, and, since my friends had all left and I only had 11 hours timetabled lessons, I was allowed to roam the streets of Oxford, sketching and visiting art galleries and museums. At the Ashmolean Museum, I was allowed to handle and peruse, FIVE boxes of Turner watercolours and for good measure, the staff suggested I compare his work with that of his contemporary and friend – Thomas Girtin. Girtin is as unknown to most people as Turner is famous, and that is in part because he died tragically young, but this book brings their life and friendship not to mention the times and the place. Below is one of Thomas’ paintings.

If I hadn’t used it in last months 6 Degrees, I could now have gone to This Thing of Darkness telling the tale of the Friendship between Charles Darwin and Fitzroy the Captain of the Beagle but instead I choose another voyage of biological discovery and friendship – The Log from the Sea of Cortes by John Steinbeck. I am going to cheat here and give you a Two-fer since this book is inextricably linked to Cannery Row also by Steinbeck in which we meet Doc – in real life – Ed Ricketts a marine biologist who became a great friend and influence on Steinbeck. Steinbeck was fascinated by marine biology and having achieved initial success with The Grapes of Wrath, as Ricketts had done with his seminal Between Pacific Tides, the pair were looking for new inspiration and eventually settled on a specimen collecting trip up the Gulf of California, or Sea of Cortez as it is more poetically titled. The co-authored book as well as the fictionalised Doc in Cannery Row, paint a portrait of close friendship between two men and Steinbeck was devastated when Ricketts was killed on the railway crossing at Monterey…
A recurring comedic theme throughout the log, is the fractious relationship with the outboard motor of their tender “Our Hansen Sea-Cow was not only a living thing but a mean, irritable, contemptible, vengeful, mischievous, hateful living thing…. [it] loved to ride on the back of a boat, trailing its propeller daintily in the water while we rowed… when attacked with a screwdriver [it] fell apart in simulated death… It loved no one, trusted no one, it had no friends.”

On a journey of my own in the 70’s, by Transalpino, I would have passed through Naples, the seaside location of my third linked book the first in Elena Ferrante’s autobiographical trilogy detailing her growing up in a Naples suburb “My Brilliant Friend”. The picture of Lila and Elena and Naples includes memorable characters from their own families to the more sinister family of the Cosa Nostra and we see the roots of later series such as Gommorah. I first watched My Brilliant Friend as a TV drama but I have since acquired the books to read ( since the read experience is so different) and they  are on my Tsundoku (TBR) list…

With no more link than that they are also set in Italy and I vastly enjoyed them as a teenager, I now choose the The Little World of Don Camillo by Giovannino Guareschi. A collection of eight books of short stories, only three of which were published in his lifetime,, Guareschi tells of the amusing but touching conflict between A parish priest in a small town in northern Italy’s Po Valley, and the Communist Mayor. You might be forgiven for thinking that the constant strife between these two protagonists (with many conversations with God on the side) describe enemies rather than friends, but what they share and recognise in each other, even if they wouldn’t openly admit it, is that they both strive ceaselessly in their own ways, for the good of the town and if that doesn’t qualify as friendship…

Guareschi was also a cartoonist and illustrated the books with these charming cartoons – Don Camillo talking to God…

I read in some pre-internet article, that a survey had discovered that men, asked about their favourite books, will often quote titles they read as teenagers whilst women will cite their most recent reads. The question was posed, tongue in cheek, as to whether this is because men stop reading after puberty whilst women don’t stop… I will acknowledge that half the books mentioned so far were read in my teenage years and with David Copperfield – read in a wrist wearying hardback (particularly when reading on the pillow) by Charles Dickens. I read a few Dickens books from my parents hardback set and formed an early critical notion of his work as being like a tapestry, all the threads are presented near the beginning, a few are lost along the way and a few new ones introduced, but most make it to the last chapter in which things a re resolved with satisfaction for the good and justice for the bad.
David Copperfield is a partly autobiographical account of Dickens life and it is notable for the friends that save young Copperfield from the worst vicissitudes to which he is subject, Peggotty, Steerforth (initially at school) and Barkis, not to mention the unusual friendship between Aunty Betsy Trotwood and Mr Dick.
The thing about these books read as a teenager, is that they have formative influence on the developing mind and I sometimes wonder whether how much of these characters, especially Steinbeck’s Doc, are not in me…

The Surgeon of Crowthorne by Simon Winchester, is the story not only of the monumental task of creating The Oxford English Dictionary, but of the friendship that developed between the chief editor of the dictionary and it’s most prolific, volunteer contributor. Started seven years after Dickens published David Copperfield, the OED took a new approach to dictionary entries by seeking for examples of usage to accompany definitions of meaning and this required an army of volunteers. James Murray, the Chief Editor appointed by The Philological Society, received tens of thousands of examples from one – William Chester Minor – so many that when the first volume was finally published after eight years gruelling work, Murray invited his volunteers to a party. Surprised not to hear from or see his most prolific volunteer, Murray eventually went to Crowthorne Hospital where he assumed Minor worked, only to discover that he was an inmate in what is now the secure psychiatric hospital Broadmoor. Minor, who had had a colourful life, was suffering from what we would now diagnose as Schizophrenia and had stabbed a man. Murray and Minor became firm friends and eventually, Murray petitioned for Minor’s release since his troubled mind had eventually relaxed.


This true tale of friendship brings us back to Elizabeth Day’s exploration of the nature of friendship and why it is so vital! I hope you have enjoyed the journey through books which feel like old friends to me and which have almost certainly styled my notion of friendship…

Pearl Diving…

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There’s a skylight right over my head
But the darkness pools, here in my bed
And I’m diving deep – searching for pearls
But I just keep on coming up empty.


I lay and wait for your key in the lock
For your ship to come into my dock
But the hours drift away and I’m down in the depths
Fruitlessly searching for pearls


Next I’m down on my knees
And I’m begging him, please!
Don’t go, just don’t sail away!
But my lifeline is cut, and I sink to the depths –
Chasing my scattering pearls…


Yet it should be him who is down on his knees
Thanking God for the moments with me
For a pearl diver comes only once in your life
So I turn and I swim for the light.


There are people who live
Up there in the light
But I’ve gradually lost my connections –
They stretched and they broke
As the pearl diver sank ever deeper.


Then he comes and the sunlight bursts inwards
And my world is complete for a while
And I thread one more pearl on my necklace
One more notch on the bedpost of life…

© Andrew Wilson, 2023

It’s Open Link night over at dVerse Poets Pub but as it is late here in England, I have dug out a previously unshown piece.
Written about a friend who was in an abusive relationship some years ago…

A Challenge from the Poets Pub…

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Duelling Badgers

Stop horsing around
you’re beginning to bug me!

Horse – that’s big of you
but bug! So reductive!

You won’t weasel your way
back into my affections
by being
smart as a whippet

Now you’re
calling me a dog?
I’ll take that
I ain’t nothing but
a hound dog
crying for your love…

And you can stop
parroting Elvis.
You’ll have to do
more than that
To worm your way
back into my affections
this time
you pig
you pig-dog!

A worm is it?
You wound me
but I will hound you
nevertheless
a truffle-hound
rooting around
for your affections…

Well you can’t have them
I’ve squirreled them away
and anyway
you never savour them
you just wolf them down.

Still, I will
beetle around
until I ferret them out…

Now who’s
aping me with
mixed metaphors?

They’re not
yours to hog
my darling rabbit
or are you going to
keep haring
this way and that
because you know
I will catch you in the end…

Oh alright!
Just stop larking around
you silly goose

I’ll goose you
as much as you want
beloved

Better than a ferret
down the trousers
I suppose

You should be so lucky!

© Andrew Wilson, 2023

This is written in response to a challenge from the dVerse – the Poets Pub -posted by sarahsouthwest in Poetics.

Roadtrip Review No. 6 – a self-review…

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Borne up and drawn in
by fast becoming friends’
web of writing prompts

Writing is a unique space for me and increasingly so. My dear departed sister encouraged me to go to a writing group in Sligo, Ireland – a place full of writers and artists and all in the shadow of the poet WB Yeats. Indeed, when I first moved there in 1995, one of my early commissions as a signwriter and, it turns out, a muralist, was to paint a mural of WB Yeats on a new secondhand bookshop – The Winding Stair – named for the title poem of one of Yeats’ books of poetry – you can see me painting it here. I had studied Yeatss at school in English (Literature) which replaces the English (Creative) of earlier school years – why do they do that? I also painted a little but didn’t want to go down the road of fine art because I perceived that artists are so often groomed by galleries encouraging them to produce more of what sells rather than following their own creative wanderings. And so I became a signwriter (painted not computer-cut vinyl) where the creative input is much smaller and constrained by a brief but, I felt, more honest and more sure as a means of making a living. Moving to Ireland gave me a new burst of creative freedom as a signwriter – especially after doing the Yeats mural although some years later, The Winding Stair closed down and the subsequent occupiers of the shop painted over my “masterwork” – a lesson in the zen of attachment to earthly achievement…

Going back to the writing group, it was such a pleasure to rediscover the joy of putting words on the blank canvas of the page – I produced a slim volume of the group’s writings including a CD of the members reading their pieces – and then I discovered blogging… By now it was 2005 and my partner and I moved back to England to see more of our growing grandchildren, and as we waited to complete our stable-to-house conversion, there was no time to make friends in the community and so blogging remained my virtual circle of friendship. I belonged to a blog -site called Mo’time run by an American living in Italy, who created Mo’time as a test bed for ideas for the larger site which was his job. Sadly, the larger site was sold and Mo’time terminated and though we made several attempts to kindle a new space – it was never the same – however I still see quite a few Mo’timers on Facebook.

Then in 2020, on April 1st – I stumbled across the A to ZX Challenge and as the pandemic was taking hold, I plunged in! Each year has been differently themed and I have encountered new fellow writers as well as old friends. This year, however, writing was even more central – my theme was on the etymology of phrases and so was like honey to writing bees and I have joined another writing group – not in the flesh, but by Zoom and our facilitator is also an A to Z-er. What has been different though, is that through the new writing friends I have made (and reviewed here on my Roadtrip) I have encountered a world of other blogging challenges, written, photographic and especially poetry. Since my writing group is prompted by poems and much of what I have written has been (Free) Verse, it was like an alignment of the planets – instead of tailing off into silence after the A to Z finished, I am being tempted and indeed succumbing to all sorts of new challenges as well as writing in my group. I created the picture at the top of this post using Midjourney – another takeaway from this year’s A to Z (thanks to Misky and Vidya) to convey the sense of both support and crazy fear of falling out of control and spending my whole time writing challenge posts! So far I have engaged with Six Degrees of Separation, the Poet’s Pub and Sadje’s WDYS (What Do You See) and in the interests of Life/Work/life balance, I think that may be enough for now – things should be a pleasure and not a pressure… And then there are two novels to get back to, one finished to first draft and the other, a more serious work, with a lot of writing to go! And I used to spend a lot of time keeping abreast of the news! And then there’s the allotment – water and weed it or lose it! And then there is my partner, children and grandchildren not to mention two and a half days at work…

Here’s the thing though, within reason, the more you do, the more you fit in because what goes is the dross, the stuff that didn’t really matter, write poetry not protest seems to be where I am right now…

P. S. I have been told that I am not great at communicating, say, enthusiastic responses, that I may even be on the spectrum, but when I write, even though I may not feel the feelings whilst in the act of writing, be it poetry, prose or fiction, when I read back emotional content, I emote with the best of them, tear up – the works. So I guess writing is my medium of expression…

Spring Draws Her Veil of Greening…

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As Spring draws her veil of greening…

As Spring draws her veil of greening
Across the winter bare landscape
Hiding the naked trees as her
Veil cloaks her virginal body

Buds waiting for the gentle touch
As spring draws her veil of greening
The trees turning to subtle mauve
In eager anticipation

April showers have quickened the
Rising sap that swells the tree pulse
As Spring draws her veil of greening
And May sunshine smiles down on her

In a scant week the tints of mauves
Are lost to each tree’s special shade.
Confetti of blossom sprinkled
As Spring draws her veil of greening.

© Andrew Wilson, 2023

This Quatern poem is written in response to dVerse ~ Poets Pub, 25th May 2023, posted by Grace, Poetry Form: Quatern
Image derived using Midjourney AI

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

humanist55

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…