Tags : Writing

A story.

Petra figured a story would hearten them, take their minds off their resentments.

Though it was almost noon, godshade had brought a night-thick darkness. Snow hissed on the school tent’s roof. Inside, one small lamp produced too little light for lessons. Anyway, the teacher had left Petra in charge.

With the young kin cross-legged around her, she told a favorite story of Kastra, of that far off time when the legendary scout tracked juggers in the wastelands. Without the teacher present, she could embellish as she pleased. While she spoke, the youngest listened enrapt, the oldest with their heads turned sideways, only pretending to whisper mean jokes.

“Though weak from hunger, Kastra followed the juggers to the Pan of Drood, not so far from here,” said Petra, her voice ominous. “At dusk she looked across that fearful bog, where the blood of thousands soaked the peat, and afterward the bodies of the slain sank and rotted where they fell, and none received …

This is the first of some (planned) occasional posts on writers’ cafes. Writers’ cafe has a personal meaning. It means that I found the place quiet enough and agreeable enough that I got some writing done there, and nobody gave me dirty looks or threw me out to free up a table. Hassle-free, with drinkable coffee. Cafe Boheme, on Old Compton Street in Soho, London, is one of those.

It opened in 1995, and I found it by chance when visiting London on business in the late 90s, a time when a good cup of coffee was a lot harder to find in London than it is now. Then, the coffee at Cafe Boheme was refreshing to a New Yorker suffering from the scarcity. Now, the Cafe Boheme coffee is … tolerable, I would say. A bit thin, perhaps. But likely the standard for coffee has risen in London. Now, there’s a Caffè Nero or a Costa Coffee on every corner.

Intended ambience: 1950s Parisian bistro-brasserie, and Nick Jones—the restauranteur who owns it—manages to …

AI’s can’t copyright their own work, nor can their human (ab)users, according to a recent ruling by the US Copyright Office (USCO). The ruling applies to both artwork and text. It expands on an earlier one that revoked a copyright registration granted to Kristina Kashtanova for her and Midjourney’s collab on a comic book called Zarya of the Dawn. For this posting, I asked two AIs for their opinions.

The ruling is interesting because the USCO is already receiving lots of applications for copyright on AI-generated works, just as online bookstores are seeing the start of a likely deluge of AI-generated books and comics. The ruling states that the human author can be granted copyright for the entire work, but the copyright only applies to the human contribution such as composition of elements, not to elements that are AI-generated.

According to established precedent and law, only a human can be an ‘author’. But it isn’t always clear where human …

I’m not the first to play with ChatGPT, maybe not the millionth, judging by all the awe-struck articles and the red warnings: “We’re experiencing exceptionally high demand” and “Request timed out.” But I did want to see ChatGPT try its hand at space pirates.

And I wanted to see how good a student it could be. Here we go!

Gil: Tell me a story about a space pirate who unexpectedly encounters an alien spaceship.

As Captain Jack sailed through the vast expanse of space, he never expected to come across anything other than the usual asteroid fields and drifting debris. But as he rounded a cluster of dense celestial bodies, a strange shape caught his eye.

At first, he thought it was just a trick of the light, but as he drew closer, he realized it was an alien spaceship. Its sleek, curved lines and unfamiliar markings were unlike anything he had ever seen before.

Captain Jack’s pulse raced as he realized the potential of what he had stumbled upon. A …