Stephen King's next novel

Stephen King: My Books Were Used to Train AI​



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One prominent author responds to the revelation that his writing is being used to coach artificial intelligence.

Fluttering book

Photo-illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Millennium Images / Gallerystock.

August 23, 2023, 9:28 AM ET

Self-driving cars. Saucer-shaped vacuum cleaners that skitter hither and yon (only occasionally getting stuck in corners). Phones that tell you where you are and how to get to the next place. We live with all of these things, and in some cases—the smartphone is the best example—can’t live without them, or so we tell ourselves. But can a machine that reads learn to write?

I have said in one of my few forays into nonfiction (On Writing) that you can’t learn to write unless you’re a reader, and unless you read a lot. AI programmers have apparently taken this advice to heart. Because the capacity of computer memory is so large—everything I ever wrote could fit on one thumb drive, a fact that never ceases to blow my mind—these programmers can dump thousands of books into state-of-the-art digital blenders. Including, it seems, mine. The real question is whether you get a sum that’s greater than the parts, when you pour back out.

Read: The authors whose pirated books are powering generative AI

So far, the answer is no. AI poems in the style of William Blake or William Carlos Williams (I’ve seen both) are a lot like movie money: good at first glance, not so good upon close inspection. I wrote a scene in a forthcoming book that may illustrate this point. A character creeps up on another character and shoots him in the back of the head with a small revolver. When the shooter rolls the dead man over, he sees a small bulge in the man’s forehead. The bullet did not quite come out, you see. When I sat down that day, I knew the murder was going to happen, and I knew it was going to be murder by gun. I did notknow about that bulge, which becomes an image that haunts the shooter going forward. That was a genuine creative moment, one that came from being in the story and seeing what the murderer was seeing. It was a complete surprise.

Could a machine create that bulge? I would argue not, but I must—reluctantly—add this qualifier: Not yet. Creativity can’t happen without sentience, and there are now arguments that some AIs are indeed sentient. If that is true now or in the future, then creativity might be possible. I view this possibility with a certain dreadful fascination. Would I forbid the teaching (if that is the word) of my stories to computers? Not even if I could. I might as well be King Canute, forbidding the tide to come in. Or a Luddite trying to stop industrial progress by hammering a steam loom to pieces.

Does it make me nervous? Do I feel my territory encroached upon? Not yet, probably because I’ve reached a fairly advanced age. But I will tell you that this subject always makes me think of that most prescient novel, Colossus, by D. F. Jones. In it, the world-spanning computer does become sentient and tells its creator, Forbin, that in time, humanity will come to love and respect it. (The way, I suppose, many of us love and respect our phones.) Forbin cries, “Never!” But the narrator has the last word, and a single word is all it takes:

“Never?”
 
 
George Michael's latest release?
 
Great video on Stephen King and science fiction:


“Is The King of Horror also The King of Sci-Fi?”

 
Currently reading Stephen King’s Holly.

This isn’t really a spoiler. The dust jacket does a good job of that. But early on, page 10, after the married couple kidnap Jorge, Jorge says to one of them, and this is verbatim, “What is going on here?”

At that point he’s in their basement locked in a spacious cage. And that is what King thought the guy would say on first seeing his kidnapper? “What is going on here?”???

I’ll keep reading but…
 
Holly is up there with King’s best.

Rodney Harris reminded me of Doctor Moreau. Harris and Moreau; both six letters. Could be intentional. Has to be I feel.

Anyone else read Holly? What did you think of it?
 

“Stephen King’s Carrie and the horror of girlhood​

The triumph of the writer’s debut novel, published 50 years ago, is its understanding of a teenage girl’s destructive anger.”

Excerpt:

Carrie is told through a compelling narrative patchwork of “found” items such as third-party newspaper reports and accounts, third-person description and close thirds from varying perspectives. When I reread the novel a few months ago for the first time in a decade, this formal experimentation was what I noticed first: structural flourishes are somewhat atypical of King’s later major works such as The Shining, Pet Sematary and It, which, although they involve multiple perspectives, are more straightforwardly told. But really what struck me was how King is one of the century’s great genre-benders.”

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