Editorial enthusiasm for Catalan fantasy genres It brings to our bookstores authors who have not yet attracted the attention of the Spanish-language publishing industry. Or that not only writers who are absolutely successful are being translated, but also niche writers who are potential gems even if they don’t have major international successes. This situation Ada Hoffman. Canadian, computer scientist, describes himself as: “Speculative fiction writer, autistic and poet”, Chronos publishing house has just been completed The trilogy consisting of ‘L’extern’, ‘Els caiguts’ and ‘L’infinit’ In Anna Llisterri’s translation. Three books in which a Lovecraftian reality emerges in a world where artificial intelligences are worshiped as gods and rule over humanity through their angels (cyborgs).
The ChatGPT phenomenon had not yet exploded when he researched artificial intelligence and its ability to generate poetry.
Between 2013 and 2018, I worked on my doctoral thesis on Computer-Based Creativity. The way a computer and artificial intelligence perform a creative task. I tried to get the computer to generate poetry, but I wasn’t very good at it. It didn’t work, he wrote very, very bad poetry. But what I found really interesting, and which ultimately formed the bulk of my dissertation, was the psychology and philosophy behind such a task. So it was a very theoretical thing. In fact, there were already systems aimed at creating art, but art had always been seen as an intriguing toy. But now everything has changed; We moved from analyzing what interesting mistakes the computer made to creating texts that closely resemble intermediate English text. But, and there’s a tragic beauty to this, everything changed completely after I got my PhD, almost the opposite of what happened when I was in grad school because suddenly the computer went from analyzing how interesting mistakes the computer was making to making mistakes. A very good job of creating texts at an average level of English. The thing about ChatTGP is that everyone from industry to school kids want to use it to do their homework. And those of us who have researched this have found that we haven’t really thought about what would happen if this generalization came true. And we in the research community are quite baffled. We tell ourselves, “Wow, maybe this isn’t so good.”
Maybe poem Be the easiest to emulate in the background. We forgive if it is disjointed or incomprehensible.
Especially types of poetry that invite the reader to make an effort to interpret. Compact poems, such as haiku, in which the reader reads a lot of meaning in a few words. They became even more successful with these poems.
Let’s go to the AI of your book, not the AI of reality. Could there come a singularity moment when AI stops being a tool and becomes an entity different from us, capable of cooperating, competing, or dominating us?
Although I have written about this in my books, I do not think it is very likely that AI will develop into superintelligence in the real world. I did this because I wanted my characters to become immersed in a cosmic or religious conflict. A place where angels maintain order and control and where there is primordial chaos outside. How does one create such a religion of control in a science fiction setting? Now, in the third book, I will delve a little deeper into how these gods originally appeared, how people created them, why they created them, and what happened. Now, not when I started writing the books, what happened is that there are some very good systems for doing things. Tech companies tell us that we should be afraid and careful because their technology will become super smart… But if we see how it works, the only thing it is good at is copying the patterns it sees in the way words come together. It does not have what we call ‘simple grounding’, that is, the ability to relate what words say to physical or sensory experience or to understand what they really mean. Tech companies deliberately exaggerate, seeking attention because it makes them more money, it helps them attract investment from people who truly believe they can take over the world with this technology. But this is not so.
¿ChatGPT More than a search engine’s natural language interface?
ChatGPT 4 four is a neural network trained on incredibly large amounts of text; This includes basically the entire Internet and probably a bunch of copyrighted books you didn’t pay for. And all this network is trained to do is predict the next word in the string of words. Statistical prediction and conversational responses. He’s very good at giving things that seem like a good answer and are true… but not always.
Inside science fiction In fact, there is a long tradition of rebellious robots, conscious and stubborn computers, artificial intelligences; but they are thought of as individuals, replicas of the human mind. What science fiction are we writing, or will we write, given the new vision of artificial intelligence?
I don’t think there is a single trend. There are still many ways to talk about artificial intelligence in science fiction. It’s okay to explore many ideas. One of my favorite current examples of the personal AI you mention is the ‘Murderbot’ books by Martha Welles, a cynical cyborg who is tired of human nonsense. But we are moving towards the type of networked AI that started to emerge on the internet in the 90s. In the coming years, I hope that this will be a fiction that is more committed to explaining how it affects human values today and how this happens. predictable in the future. There are some really interesting issues in the ethics of artificial intelligence as it exists today: how it absorbs biased data, or what happens to people whose jobs are automated. There will be a lot of fiction here in the coming years.
Artificial intelligence has also been used to find a technologically plausible way to talk about immortality.
Actually. After all, I use AI to talk about religion and social control in my books.
He describes himself as non-neurotypical, and so do some of his characters. Can you explain the concept to us?
These are people whose brain development is actually slightly different from what we call the average brain. For example, people with autism, ADHD, or another neurological disorder of that nature, I am not neurotypical. I was diagnosed with autism when I was 13, and I love writing about autistic characters and other non-neurotypical characters. What I’m actually talking about when I write about how my hero confronts the cosmic horror he faces is autistic sensory overload. There are people for whom sounds or colors are very intense, so imagine yourself facing an unknown cosmic horror.
There is cosmic horror in the most general sense of what Lovecraft did. But I’m halfway through the trilogy and no tentacles for now, eschewing its imagery. Other writers of the ‘new weird’, such as Jeff Vandemeer, Tade Thompson, China Mieville, also prefer the explosion of weirdness in the form of distortions of reality…
There are some very interesting ideas about cosmic horror. The idea that the universe is too big for us to truly understand. So what does it feel like to face something directly that you don’t understand? But the most recognizable images have already become kitsch. I really wanted to focus on a more conceptual point, which isn’t necessarily a giant squid. And imagine an infected world as a metaphor for sensory overload. Being in a chaotic and busy world with so much happening at once that it’s difficult to even move in it.
But it descends from the cosmic to the earthly. There’s also a romance component. These two angels are the chief scientist and his engineering partner.
When you talk about something too abstract you can lose perspective; so thinking about characters, their romantic tendencies, or their connections to other characters helps you see what’s at stake in their lives. There are valuable things in normal life, not just the fate of the galaxy.
There are particularly funny parts in the book. Passages or stories in each section of the catechism so that children learn to worship divine AIs.
Yes, I had a lot of fun in those episodes, I was thinking more about Kipling’s stories. And of course they are a means of telling the reader a little more about the world.