Angela Booth

Author, keen blogger (since 1998), writing teacher.

[Justine Bateman @JustineBateman]

To clear it up for some who seem confused: I’m not “fighting generative AI.” Go ahead and use it; it makes no difference to me and my own life and work. But I and other filmmakers will be over here going through the tunnel to the other side with human filmmaking. If you’re one of those filmmakers, we’re here for you at @_CREDO23_.

[G. F. Allen @AuthorGFAllen]

Make books great again!

[Tai Lopez @tailopez]

Seneca was right when he said to be happy you must eliminate 2 things: the fear of a bad future and the memory of a bad past.

[Shreyash Shukla @shreyashhtwt]

Ray Bradbury's timeless advice on rebuilding your attention span

[Megha @megha_lilly]

Your best fight against AI is not to start finger wagging at other people using AI. But rather to become more human yourself. Your thoughts, ideas, the things you create, how you treat people, are they human or are they programmed by some ideology? If the virtue of man is truth, goodness and beauty then any time you behave outside of these virtues, you are no better than the machines you protest against.

[Unfiltered @quotesdaily100]

Short Novels Worth Reading on Your Travels:

1. The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka (55 pages)
2. The Pearl by John Steinbeck (90 pages)
3. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway (130 pages)
4. The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (96 pages)
5. On the Shortness of Life by Seneca (80 pages)
6. The Art of War by Sun Tzu (68 pages)
7. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (96 pages)
8. The Turn of the Screw by Henry James (119 pages)
9. Night by Elie Wiesel (120 pages)
10. Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (120 pages)
11. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck (112 pages)
12. Animal Farm by George Orwell (112 pages)
13. The Stranger by Albert Camus (123 pages)
14. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by R.L. Stevenson (141 pages)
15. Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse (152 pages)
16. Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin (159 pages)
17. Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote (160 pages)
18. The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells (160 pages)
19. Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl (165 pages)
20. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (180 pages)
21. Cannery Row by John Steinbeck (196 pages)
22. Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger (201 pages)
23. The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison (206 pages)
24. The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho (208 pages)
25. Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes (216 pages)
26. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck (224 pages)
27. Lord of the Flies by William Golding (224 pages)
28. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (254 pages)
29. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (256 pages)
30. The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro (258 pages)
31. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston (286 pages)
32. The Road by Cormac McCarthy (287 pages)
33. The Chosen by Chaim Potok (284 pages)
34. Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton (195 pages)
35. The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson (246 pages)

[Angela Booth @angee]

@avidseries Sometime in the 1980s journalism (TV, then print) became entertainment. Then "journalism" became marketing and propaganda (after the rise of the web).

[Valerio Capraro @ValerioCapraro]

Also the Pope is talking about Epistemia. AI can “weaken personal judgment.”

This is exactly the point we make in our paper on the epistemological fault lines between human and artificial intelligence.

LLMs and humans do not merely differ in performance.

They differ in their epistemic pipelines.

We identify seven fault lines:

Grounding.
Parsing.
Experience.
Motivation.
Causality.
Metacognition.
Value.

At each step, human intelligence and artificial intelligence process the world in structurally different ways.

And yet, LLM outputs are so fluent and confident that we often treat them as true.

This is how we enter Epistemia: a regime in which epistemic verification is replaced by linguistic plausibility.

A world full of knowledge that we are not able to judge.

A world in which we will be totally lost.

*
Full paper in the first reply.

[helen warlow @HWarlow]

Made me smile
Speedbump cartoon

[Angela Booth @angee]

@staidindoors For anyone writing fiction; start with honesty. What do YOU feel (as the character)? Fiction isn’t stringing together a bunch of words, even if they sound OK. Be honest; be yourself.

[Angela Booth @angee]

@ChristopherHale Sadly, AI developers don’t seem to comprehend anything. “These systems can discuss”. So what? A label isn’t an emotion. You can label, without comprehending. The mind boggles that they get away with this rubbish.

[Rachel Christine @RachelXReads]

I'm a PhD student studying the sociopolitical ideals in early novels by British women, and part of my research has involved revising existing scholarship because many modern scholars have little knowledge of the Bible – a text that the novelists they study knew well and frequently incorporated into their works. That gap is incorrectly reshaping how literature is interpreted and received today. It's a real problem.

[Amanda Fortini @amandafortini]

Just saw this on Substack. The metaphor is spot on.

[Angela Booth @angee]

@parshalltalk God, the creator of the heavens and earth, the stars and galaxies, is "nonbinary"? This man (moron) needs to pray for mercy. Proverbs 9:10: "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom."

[John Mauldin @JohnFMauldin]

Seems more pertinent to today more than in 1941. CS Lewis had great insights into human nature. And a marvelous talent for writing and storytelling.

[Bianca Keeley @SafirBlueHawk]

Students do not need AI if they know how to write.

How do you teach students to write?

You use a centuries-old program, called Progymnasmata, the steps of which have been left to us by Aphtonius, a Greek rhetorician of the fourth century AD. This program follows the principle of mimesis (imitation) before poiesis (creativity). Starting with simple exercises of retelling, restructuring, summarizing, imitating, the exercises described in the Progymnasmata advance slowly as the students learn to manipulate the narrative components in order to create complex argumentations, improve their style, and invent their own stories worth telling.

The program emphasizes moral education and eloquence; it gives students a pattern of writing as well as an appreciation of perennial ideas. Students who follow Progymnasmata will write literary analysis essays with ease and virtue, if this👇approach is observed.

[Liam Nissan™ @theliamnissan]

💯

[Jonathan Gunson. Writer @JonathanGunson]

The Family Of Writers

[David Perell Clips @PerellClips]

Maria Popova on the soul, the self, and what AI will never have:

"AI will never have feeling. AI will have the simulacrum of feeling. AI will never write the great American poem, the great French poem, because it hasn't suffered. AI doesn't have the capacity to suffer.

Even if you try to make it suffer, meaning write a command that is to execute failure, it'll already be succeeding at executing failure. AI can only ever succeed. And without suffering, what kind of true art can there be?

All writing that is truly moving is born of feeling and time. AI has neither; it's an instantaneous, unfeeling delivery of pure information.

The function of what we call the soul is real. Whatever it's made of, where it is. And the part that I worry about is that today, most people live on the level of the self and not the level of the soul. Just the costume of personality over the soul."

The value of persons does not rest on our "costume of personality," but on the soul beneath it.