Arguing With Yeats

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I was working on an essay about a character from Irish/Scottish/Manx myth, the “Leanan-sidhe,” translated as “Fairy Mistress,” “Fairy Lover,” and sometimes “Fairy Wife.” It wasn’t just academic to me because I’ve written stories from both sides of the issue, which was: “Did she really exist (in folklore) or did William Butler Yeats” make her up? I think I know the correct answer now, though research is ongoing. Regardless, I thought the script would make a decent YouTube video, so that’s where I went with it.

Here’s the opening.

“There’s a line between folklore and simply making things up. William Butler Yates likely crossed it.”

For anyone interested the title is, as above, “The Deadliest Muse,” the link is here.

Ugly Puppies

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I’ve been pretty scarce here, so an update is in order. As I mentioned before, I started a YouTube channel. Totally new thing for me. And one of the reasons I did this was I’d been working in a (for me) completely new storytelling form.

Soon after I moved to New York State I joined a local writer’s group that specialized in flash fiction. To be honest, I had never played much with flash before then. I think the shortest story I’d ever written previously came in at about 1200 words. Here, the max was 500 words. It was a new discipline, almost like attempting poetry. Get in, get out, and no word retained that isn’t pulling its weight. Shifting gears between my usual mode and this form was a stretch, but a good one.

Anyway, this left me with a bunch of flash stories and no good idea what to do with them. I did publish a few in a couple of small collections, but the form seemed suitable for something else. Thus, the YouTube channel. It lets me play with video and animation, something I’d never touched before. Flash stories play out to about three minutes of video, and I’m learning to adapt my own work. No idea how its going to play out, but right now I’m making all the mistakes and having fun. Every now and then we all need to try something new.

Which brings me to the title above, “Ugly Puppies.” It’s a meditation on the nature of secrets. If you want to try it out, here’s the link.

Somewhere Around the Rainbow

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It has belatedly occurred to me that I should mention this here. I have a YouTube channel now. Mostly I’ve been creating short videos of some of my flash fiction which, except for a collection or two, don’t appear anywhere else. The videos are fairly primitive, both for animation and editing, but I’m working on it. If anyone wants to amuse themselves at my expense, the link is: Richard Parks-YouTube.

And before anyone asks, no, this hasn’t been at the expense of The Seventh Law of Power. I’m in the final third of the book and pushing toward the end. I don’t write as fast as I once did, but I’m getting there.

To AI or Not to AI? No One Asked

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Photo by cottonbro on Pexels.com

There’s been a lot of sturm und drang on Facebo*k and elsewhere about an article in the Atlantic about the data used to train M*ta and other Large Language Models (LLMs). First in the artists’ pages and now the writers’ as well. AI art and AI stories already clogging up submissions at the magazines and such. Curiosity and ego got the better of me and I did the DB search thing and came up with this:

Yamada Monogatari: Demon Hunter, Yamada Monogatari: To Break the Demon Gate, Yamada Monogatari: The War God’s Son, and Yamada Monogatari: The Emperor in Shadow.

All present. The only one they missed was Yamada Monogatari: Troubled Spirits, the final collection.

The online outrage has been pretty intense, and on one level I understand completely. I do have a dog in this fight. No one asked our permission, and the fact that the text (albeit tokenized beyond human recognition) is there at all can be interpreted as an unauthorized publication. Stephen King and other prominent writers have already filed suit and the courts will have to deal with it. Of course I’m curious to see how that all shakes out, since we’re in mostly uncharted territory here with AI in general and this instance in particular. Can the ones assembling the material argue “fair use” or will the courts decide the writers’ IP rights were violated? Some legal clarity here would be nice, however it shakes out.

At this stage I confess to being too ambivalent to share the outrage. Concern, yes. On the one hand, we should have been asked. On the other, is it really publication? As the data is fed into the LLM it’s barely recognizable as words. On the other other hand, will plagiarism result? Here I’ve seen with my own experiments with ChatGPT to know it can happen, and sometimes the AI puts out work purporting to be original which is an almost word for word copy of something it was trained on. That needs to be addressed. Can that be prevented? Too many questions unanswered.

What I mostly want at this point is some answers to all the above. I’m willing to wait, assuming I have the option. This may take a while.