It seems that someone didn't curate the training sets used for text-to-image AI bots as well as they should have. Disturbing images of child sexual abuse have been found in one of the most frequently used training sets for this system. And not just one or two that might've slipped in via documentation of a legal case or a psychological study. ( Read more... )

I've been watching the increasing polarization of the art and writing world on the subject of generative AI (Large Language Models). In particular, I'm uneasy about the rapid disappearance of any sort of middle ground and the growing demand of the extremes for their position to be treated as the only legitimate one ( Read more... )

An educator looks at how teachers may use AI systems such as ChatGPT productively in the classroom, as well as how to delineate the boundary between the legitimate use and abuse (especially plagiarism and cheating). The author recognizes that there need to be appropriate limits to ensure that students don't use AI tools as a substitute for learning ( Read more... )

Here's an interesting panel discussion from Capricon. Heroes and villains are easy to write, but morally gray characters offer us more complexity ( Read more... )

Here's another interesting panel discussion from Chicon 8Sometimes works that were once popular don't age well. It can be elements that are now dated -- a major part of the plot hangs on a character being able to find a payphone, or a character dies dramatically of something that is easily curable today, etc. But all too often, something is handled ( Read more... )

Here's an old chestnut that we see revisited on a regular basis, both in the literature and in convention panel discussion ( Read more... )

This week's Odd Prompts writing challenge at More Odds than Ends was from Cedar Sanderson: It wasn’t really a love potionMy first thought was the old Searchers song "Love Potion #9," although that's more a case of "unclear on the concept," in the character administers it on himself thinking it'll make him more lovable, rather than administering it ( Read more... )

We're hearing a lot about cheating of late -- but it's not just elections that attract fraud. Sometimes people will stoop to cheat when the stakes are astonishingly low, as witness the recurrent problem of people who cheat on a marathon. Some of them cut across the area between loops of the race course, while others hop on buses, bikes and other ( Read more... )

Over at a blog that I'd prefer not to link to because I really don't like giving its owner any more publicity than I need to, there's been some discussion about the problem of people who are upset about Tolkien's always-evil orcs and want to forcibly rewrite the legendarium to change this. The original writer (who is quoted by The Man With The ( Read more... )

If you've studied psychology, ethics, or several other branches of the social sciences, you've probably come across the Lifeboat Problem and the Trolley Problem. Both of them challenge students to look at how we respond to situations in which it's simply not possible to save everyone, and in particular, to look at the unconscious assumptions that ( Read more... )