My Thoughts on GenAI

by benmweilert Comment Closed
When Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) started becoming popular a few years ago, I stood at the sidelines and eyed it with skepticism. It was a neat trick that used neural networks to create pictures of people who didn’t exist, funny lyrics for songs based on a keyword, and (allegedly) scripts for TV show episodes that bordered on absurdist humor. I incorporated some of these ideas into my writing, like the main character in “The Last Immortal” using something akin to thispersondoesnotexist.com for dating profile pictures, or my month of writing 10 short stories being based on the outputs of a “neural network”—which was just a clever way of saying my own brain (which is a neural network) created these stories. Then there are the more controversial applications of GenAI. Thinking about all the propaganda, misinformation, and damage that can be done with deepfakes was one of the sub-plots in Buried Colony (the novel I wrote in 2017 and published in 2022...
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Saying Goodbye to NaNoWriMo

Saying Goodbye to NaNoWriMo

by benmweilert1 Comment
15 years ago, I didn't consider myself a writer. That all changed after I heard about National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). This annual challenge to write 50,000 words of a first draft of a novel in the 30 days of November showed me that the impossible was indeed within my capabilities. Fast forward to today and I've now published 11 books, written 9 more on top of that, won multiple writing awards, and built an amazing group of fellow writers I consider my friends. I've introduced others to the NaNoWriMo concept, and they also found that they are writers as well. I still have a huge backlog of ideas I plan to write for many years to come. Unfortunately, after this year, I will no longer be doing so using any of the NaNoWriMo events. It is sad the organization has crumbled to this point, but it was probably only a matter of time before something would take it down. As...
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