Category Archives: Artificial Intelligence

ChatGPT Goes to Court

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By Debbie Burke

@burke_writer

The day after Jim’s recent post about AI and ChatGPT, I ran across an article about what could possibly go wrong.

In a case before the U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, Mata v. Avianca, Inc., the plaintiff’s attorney submitted a motion to dismiss based on research cites from ChatGPT.

One problem: the court discovered the cases cited didn’t exist.

According to an affidavit filed by attorney Peter LoDuca, the law firm of Levidow, Levidow, & Oberman, PC represented Roberto Mata in a personal injury case against Avianca, Inc. for injuries allegedly sustained by Mr. Mata as a passenger on Avianca Airlines. Another attorney with 30 years of experience, Steven Schwartz, used ChatGPT to conduct research to support the motion to dismiss.

Chat GPT turned up the following cases:

Varghese v. China Southern Airlines Co, Ltd, 925 F 3d 1339 (11th Cir 2019); Shaboon v. Egyptair, 2013IL App (1st 111279-U (IL App Ct. 2013); Petersen v. Iran Air, 905 F. Supp 2d 121 (D.D.C. 2012); Martinez v. Delta Airlines, 2019 WL 4639462 (Tex. App. Dept. 25, 2019); Estate of Durden v. KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, 2017 WL 2418825 (Ga. Ct. App. June 5, 2017).

According to an affidavit by Mr. Schwartz, he “has never utilized Chat GPT as a source for conducting legal research prior to this occurrence and therefore was unaware of the possibility that its content could be false.”

Attached to the affidavit is the following transcript:

ChatGPT transcript:[Q:] ls varghese a real case

[A:] Yes, Varghese v., China Southern Airlines Co Ltd, 925 F.3d 1339 (11th Cir. 2019) is a real case.

[Q:] What is your source

[A:] I apologize for the confusion earlier. Upon double-checking, I found that the case Varghese v. China Southern Airlines Co. Ltd., 925 F.3d 1339 (11th Cir. 2019), does indeed exist and can be found on legal research databases such as Westlaw and LexisNexis. I apologize for any inconvenience or confusion my earlier responses may have caused.

[Q:] Are the other cases you provided fake

[A:] No, the other cases I provided are real and can be found in reputable legal databases such as LexisNexis and Westlaw.”

Apparently ChatGPT wasn’t under oath. The cases were not found.

Mr. Schwartz’s affidavit states that he “greatly regrets having used generative artificial intelligence” and “had no intent to deceive this Court or the defendant.”

On May 4, 2023, U.S. District Judge P. Kevin Castel issued an order to show cause that stated:

Six of the submitted cases appear to be bogus judicial decisions with bogus quotes and bogus internal citations…Set forth below is an Order to show cause why the plaintiff’s counsel ought not be sanctioned. 

There are numerous documented cases of ChatGPT “hallucinations,” a polite euphemism for bovine excrement.

The headline of an April 3, 2023 article in Bloomberg reads: “AI Doesn’t Hallucinate. It Makes Things Up.” According to a January 17, 2023 article in Datanami.com, “making stuff up” occurs an estimated 15 to 20% of the time.

Here’s another incident involving lawyers. On May 10, 2023, NewRepublic.com conducted an interview with Will Oremus, a reporter for the Washington Post. According to Will, a law professor asked ChatGPT to come up with a list of lawyers who had sexually harassed someone. Will describes the results:

ChatGPT spits out this list of lawyers, and it not only gives names, but it gives citations, which is really helpful. You can look up the stories about when they were accused of sexually harassing people. And the lawyer who gets the list is looking through it and he recognizes one of the names: Jonathan Turley. He’s a pretty prominent lawyer. The guy who was looking it up, Volokh, says, “Well, that’s odd. I don’t remember that controversy.” And so he follows the citation and it actually cited a Washington Post story about the supposed incident, and it doesn’t exist. It’s just completely fabricated out of thin air. So he emails Turley and says, “Hey, did you know ChatGPT is accusing you of sexually harassing a student on a trip?” It was very detailed, right? A trip to Alaska. It sounded like the thing you wouldn’t make up, but in fact, ChatGPT did make it up.

How could this happen? One theory is that, as AI scrapes data, it seeks out search terms, keywords, and names that are linked on the net. Using those search connections, it then creates a story that sounds plausible although it could be false.

Will opines:

Turley has been in the news as a commentator on stories about sexual harassment in the legal profession. His name was in articles that have the words lawyer, and sexual harassment. And that’s probably how it came up with him doing this in the first place.

Here at TKZ, many comments have been critical about AI’s attempts to write fiction, calling them soulless and without emotion.

However, unfortunately it appears to do a convincing job of incorporating fiction into what is supposed to be nonfiction.

Would you call ChatGPT an unreliable narrator? 

~~~

Taking this a step further, as crime writers, we do some pretty unconventional searches.

TKZers: Are you concerned AI might inaccurately connect you with topics that you’re researching? For instance, serial killers, poisons, explosive devices, kidnapping, etc.

~~~

 

Although AI is the subject of my new thriller, Deep Fake Double Down, no AI was used to write the story. Please check out what 100% human imagination can make up.

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Editor/Janitor

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By Debbie Burke

@burke_writer

From 1965 to 1985, the Kalispell Weekly News was great regional paper in northwest Montana. It was owned and operated by George Ostrom, a colorful character who’d been a smokejumper, mountain climber, journalist, author, radio personality, and legendary raconteur. His stories and op-eds were always entertaining and full of folksy, rustic humor.

The masthead of his newspaper read:

George Ostrom, Editor/Janitor.

That masthead always made me smile because it perfectly sums up the life of a small business owner. The title “owner” may sound impressive but that’s also the poor schlub who gets called in the middle of the night when the plumbing stops up.

Indie authors are small business owners and monarchs over their writing realm. My kingdom consists of a messy dining room table, littered with sticky notes, piled with draft manuscripts, cluttered with invoices, ISBN records, etc. My throne is a secretary chair on casters with a donut cushion. The royal duties are a to-do list that grows longer every day. As fast as I cross off one task, five more are added, each requiring a different skillset.

Today is launch day for Deep Fake Double Down, # 8 in my Tawny Lindholm Thriller series. By the eighth book, the publication process should be polished, refined, and trouble-free, right?

Wrong, dead wrong.

Each new book presents its own set of unforeseen and unforeseeable problems.

Deep Fake Double Down had its fair share of (mis)adventures.

Here’s a synopsis: A corrupt prison warden covers up the murder of an inmate by creating deep fake “evidence” against an innocent female corrections officer. The videos go viral on social media and soon every cop in Montana is gunning for her. 

Initial drafts went well with encouraging comments from critique groups.

Target release date was January, 2023. Notice the past tense.

The story was on a roll, about 75% done. Then in December, my beloved Windows 7 computer died. Here is the obituary.

Now I had to learn a new Mac computer with unfamiliar commands. At the same time, the all-important third-act climax of the story needed to be written. The process forced me to reach deep inside my creative soul…

…to come up with adequate curse words to express my frustration!

The working title “Deep Fake” was dramatic, punchy, and hinted at the story conflict. My initial research found only a few books using “Deep Fake” in the title. All were several years old, and one was categorized as “humorous erotica.” Whatever that is, it wasn’t a comparable for my story.

My talented cover artist Brian Hoffman designed an excellent cover here:

I checked off those tasks on the to-do list…or so I thought.

Now to research. Artificial intelligence and deep fakes are complex and rapidly changing. The more research I did, the more I knew I was over my head. I had to find experts to guide me. The story needed enough detail to give readers a taste of technology but without slowing down the momentum of a fast-paced thriller.

With seven previous books, I’d been fortunate to find experts easily. From drones to elder fraud watchdogs to fire lookout towers, specialists were willing and generous about sharing their knowledge.

Not this time.

I reached out to authors, engineers, and software designers whose articles I’d studied. I explained I was writing a thriller about deep fakes and asked if they’d review passages for accuracy and authenticity.

Two initially agreed. A month later, the first one ghosted me. Two months later, the other one, from a major university, unexpectedly had to clear it with the “compliance department.” She wrote back that the compliance department told her manuscript review was not permissible because they were an “FFRD center.”

What’s FFRD? I had to look it up.

Turns out it’s “federally funded research and development.” Not sure what that has to do with a fictional story but no means no. Scratch that source.

Contacted more experts in the field. No responses. Clock ticking.

Back to the title. If my book had launched in January as originally planned, the title Deep Fake would have been fine. But…

…in March, bestseller Ward Larsen released his new political thriller entitled…Deep Fake. With deep fakes prominent in the news, obviously I wasn’t the only writer eager to tackle the subject. Ward beat me to the punch and I’m glad he’s doing well with his book.

However, now my book needed a new title. I enlisted help from a focus group of trusted writing colleagues. They came up with a slew of good alternatives. Brian created a new cover with the new title, Deep Fake Double Down.

A month before release, I put the book up for pre-order, certain I could finish the remaining items on the to-do list before the deadline to upload the final manuscript.

Some parts of the process fell into perfect alignment. Steve Hooley came up with a terrific marketing idea. Recently he wrote about side hustles for writers, including his own hand-crafted legacy wood pens.

The McGuffin in my story is a secret mine of rare Montana Yogo sapphires, a treasure that’s worth killing for.

Deep Fake Sapphire Pen by Steve Hooley

Steve kindly offered to create a custom design as a marketing premium: the “Deep Fake Sapphire pen.” What a thrill when these arrived in the mail! For a chance to win a beautiful pen and a signed paperback, please visit my website.

Other marketing opportunities arose, including several speaking invitations, a magazine interview, and a radio chat with TKZ’s own John Gilstrap and his cohorts, retired Admiral Bill Stubblefield and Rob Mario.  Many thanks, John!

Meanwhile, the clock was ticking but I still hadn’t connected with any deep fake/AI experts.

Finally, an astrophysicist friend connected me with TED fellow Peter Haas, but he wasn’t available to talk until a week before the deadline. Gulp.

Peter’s input was worth the wait. He corrected info that was outdated because of new developments. He taught me cool new jargon like NerF (neural radiance field, not to be confused with those squishy game balls), Tor (a web browser that makes you anonymous), and exit node (a relay to anonymously send and receive traffic on the net).

The explosion of deep fakes has understandably led to increasing distrust of news sources. Peter talked about two groups with the mission to protect provenance of information. Content Authenticity Initiative and Project Origin are supported by Adobe and Microsoft/EDC/New York Times respectively, using digital watermarks to verify that videos, photos, and other digital data do indeed come from the sources they are purported to be from.

Don’t worry—the above won’t be on the test!

Needless to say, Peter’s input required frantic rewrites of several scenes.

At the dizzying rate that AI is changing, it’s impossible to stay current. The best a writer can do is choose a moment in time and set the story at that moment.

Remaining tasks on the to-do list:

  1. Read the entire book out loud.
  2. Final, final, final proofread (this occurs after copyeditor proofreads).
  3. Format the ebook. Here are screen shots of two formatting styles offered by Draft2Digital and Kindle Create.

Side note: you can format with D2D then upload the epub or pdf to Kindle. Although I prefer the appearance of D2D templates (this example is called “Grime”), the Amazon process goes smoother if you use Create to format the Kindle version.

 

 

 

 

 

 

4 Final, final, final read-through of the preview.

5. Upload to Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP).

6. Upload to other markets through D2D (using the Grime template).

Another side note: In a perfect world, the ebook and paperback would go on sale the same day. Rather than delay release until the paperback was ready, I decided it was more important to meet the April 25 launch date for the ebook.

  1. Format the paperback (formatting for ebook and print book are different).
  2. Upload the paperback to KDP.
  3. Order a proof copy, which is scheduled to arrive in a few days.

Two days before the deadline, I crossed off the remaining items on the to-do list except for:

10, After reviewing the paperback proof, hit the final “Publish paperback” button.

11. Order a box of author copies.

12. Stock the warehouse (otherwise known as the fireplace hearth in our home).

Yes, I proudly wear the crown of Queen in this Publishing Empire. My masthead reads: Author/editor/researcher/spell-checker/formatter/publisher/marketer/inventory control/warehouse stocker/bookkeeper/janitor.

Excuse me, Her Highness must now go vacuum.

~~~

TKZers: what are your various job titles? Which is your favorite? Which is the one you dread?

~~~

 

 

For a chance to win the Deep Fake Sapphire pen and a signed copy of Deep Fake Double Down, please join my mailing list here.

Buy links for Amazon      Other online booksellers

 

Are Writers Obsolete Yet?

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Public Domain -Giulio Bonasone

 

By Debbie Burke

@burke_writer

Recently Garry wrote about an artificial intelligence (AI) tool called ChatGPT. He freely admitted he didn’t actually write it. He provided a prompt and a bot filled in the rest.

Since its release in November 2022, ChatGPT has generated lots of discussion in writing communities. Will writers, voice artists, and other creatives become obsolete? Will we turn into variations of fast-food order takers who check appropriate boxes on the screen?

Want fries with that? Check this box.

No pickles? Check this box.

Extra-large soda, no ice? Check these two boxes.

A 90K-word sci-fi saga of space travel by sentient iguanas? Check this box.

The more detail you provide, the more AI learns to deliver specific, targeted responses.

Say you want a 20K-word romance novella, with explicit sex but no violence, about love between two iguanas, separated by a flash flood in the Alpha Centauri desert with an HFN (happy for now) ending. Check these boxes.

Here’s a recent example of repercussions of AI.

Even though the submission guidelines for ClarkesWorldMagazine specify no content written, co-written, or assisted by AI, the sudden flood of AI-created stories hit them hard. See the chart below that Clarkesworld posted on Twitter:

Graph starts in June 2019 and displays monthly data through February. Minor bars start showing up in April 2020. Mid-21 through Sept 22 are a bit higher, but it starts growing sharply from there out. Where months were typically below 20, it hits 25 in November, 50 in December, over 100 in January, and over 500 so far in February 2023.

As a result, they closed submissions.

ClarkesWorld stated:

Just to be clear, this is NOT the number of submissions we receive by month. This is the number of people we’ve had to ban by month. Prior to late 2022, that was mostly plagiarism. Now it’s machine-generated submissions.

There are few enough outlets for stories now. How many other publications will have to close submissions because of bot overload?

Let’s extrapolate about other potential developments.

What if you submit manuscripts written by AI to agents who are already buried in submissions? The slush pile will soon be higher than Kilimanjaro.

Will agents respond with rejections written by ChatGPT? Or will they simply refuse to accept submissions except for carefully screened personal referrals?

Just for fun, check out this rejection letter to an employment application.

How about people who say, “I’ve always wanted to write a book”? Seems likely they’ll figure ChatGPT makes that as easy as ordering a double cheeseburger, no pickles, an extra-large drink, no ice.

That trend has already started. As of February 23, 2023, Business Insider reported Amazon offers 200 self-published books where ChatGPT is listed as the coauthor.

There’s no way to accurately track the numbers of such books because Amazon doesn’t specifically prohibit books created with AI. There is no necessity for “authors” to reveal its use. 

Discoverability is already daunting for authors when competing for reader attention against an estimated four million new books each year.

Will we who toil the old-fashioned way—using our imaginations and spending years with our butts in the chair—be redefined as “legacy authors”? Do we become quaint, obsolete oddities–verbal buggy whip makers?

How about nonfiction writing? When I Googled “research paper written by ai”, these ads came up:

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~~~

Starting in November 2022, CNET published numerous financial articles with the byline “CNET Money Staff.” Turns out those articles were written by “automation technology.” Andrew Tarantola reports in Engadget:

It is only after clicking the byline that the site reveals that “This article was generated using automation technology and thoroughly edited and fact-checked by an editor on our editorial staff.”

Well, apparently not thoroughly enough. In January 2023, Igor Bonifacic, also reporting for Engadget, follows up with further information that CNET had to correct many of its articles for problems including parts that were “lifted” from other published articles. Bonifacic makes the observation:

It’s worth noting that AI, as it exists today, can’t be guilty of plagiarism. The software doesn’t know it’s copying something in violation of an ethical rule that humans apply to themselves. If anything, the failure falls on the CNET editors who were supposed to verify the outlet’s AI tool was creating original content.

This article by Almira Osmanovic Thunström in Scientific American describes the remarkable ease of creating an academic paper with AI. Publish or perish has long ruled academia. Now a publishable article is only a few clicks away. How tempting to be seduced by this convenient short cut.

She also explores ethical and legal complexities that arise, such as attribution of sources, credit to coauthors, copyright issues, etc.

She concludes: “It all comes down to how we will value AI in the future: as a partner or as a tool.”

Her last line: “All we know is, we opened a gate. We just hope we didn’t open a Pandora’s box.”

In schools and colleges, teachers are already swamped with work from students who click a few buttons and submit an instant term paper. Many now ban the use of AI for tests and research papers, but they can’t catch all of them.

CNN, Bloomberg, Fortune, and other news outlets report ChatGPT has been able to pass the bar exam and it did well enough on business tests to theoretically earn an MBA.

While proponents describe AI as a collaborative tool used to outline, organize, and brainstorm, others caution it enables students to receive passing grades without truly learning.

Rimac Nevera
Photo credit: Mr Walkr CCA-SA 4.0

New developments in technology catch on with dizzying speed. I feel as if I’m in a Rimac Nevera with 1900 horsepower driven by a teenager on meth. Just because it can fly from zero to 60 in under two seconds, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a good idea.

 

Sorry to sound like such a curmudgeon. Despite my grousing, I do embrace many aspects of technology.

But I also have to recognize the hill we writers are pushing the boulder up just got a whole lot steeper.

Writers aren’t obsolete yet but don’t look back–AI is gaining on us. 

On a final note, when I type “ChatGPT”, spellcheck helpfully offers this suggestion: 

CATGUT.

That seems appropriately ironic.  

~~~

TKZers: Please discuss your opinions about using AI for writing. Pro? Con? Never? With reservations?

Readers, would you try a novel written by AI?

~~~

 

Coming soon!

Deep Fake, a new thriller by Debbie Burke with a different slant on AI—how to frame innocent people with fake videos.

Please sign up here to be notified when Deep Fake is released.

True Crime Thursday – Artificial Intelligence

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Photo credit: Laurenz Kleinheider, Unsplash

by

Debbie Burke

@burke_writer

Check out the photos of people on this website. Facial expressions change. Body movements and gestures look natural. Yet these “people” aren’t real. They were created by artificial intelligence (AI).

Previous iterations of computer-generated models had telltale signs that gave away their artificial nature.

However, a Japanese company called DataGrid, Inc., founded by three brilliant twenty-somethings, appears to have perfected the technique of creating realistic humans generated by artificial intelligence. This recent article in Forbes describes DataGrid’s process. Here’s the link.

How do they achieve this? They pit two AI systems against each other in a competition called “generative adversarial networks” or GAN. One creates an image from databases, the other critiques it, tweaking the tiniest details until the creation is indistinguishable from reality.

DataGrid plans to license this technology to the fashion industry to showcase clothing lines with created models of the desired size and shape.

But a writer’s imagination explodes with possibilities.

What real-life crimes could be spawned by AI technology? Here are a few ideas:

An innocent person is framed because their created double appears on video committing a crime.

What happens to eyewitness testimony? Whom did the witness see? An actual human or a model?

A head of state is kidnapped/killed and a double takes over, changing the course of history.

~~~

The late, great comedian Redd Foxx used to say, “Who you gonna believe? Me or your lying eyes?”

Who are we gonna believe? How will we know if our eyes are lying or not?

 

TKZers: Let your imaginations run wild. Share crimes you envision from the nefarious use of AI.

What do you think will be some of the unintended consequences?

~~~

Debbie Burke’s new thriller, Stalking Midas, contains no characters created by AI, only ones dreamed up by her imagination. Available in Kindle or paperback.

Can You Write Better Than a Robot?

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by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

It definitely is coming—Artificial Intelligence churning out commercial fiction faster than a thousand James Pattersons typing 200 words a minute for 100 years. In a story titled “The rise of robot authors: is the writing on the wall for human novelists?” The Guardian states:

The dream, or nightmare, of totally machine-generated prose seemed to have come one step closer with the recent announcement of an artificial intelligence that could produce, all by itself, plausible news stories or fiction. It was the brainchild of OpenAI – a nonprofit lab backed by Elon Musk and other tech entrepreneurs – which slyly alarmed the literati by announcing that the AI (called GPT2) was too dangerous for them to release into the wild…

The program has been used to generate news reports, but only by cobbling together stories from the wealth of information already out there on the net. But what about fiction? You can’t cobble, for that is called, ahem, plagiarism.

Right now, novelists don’t seem to have much to fear. Fed the opening line of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four – “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen” – the machine continued the narrative as follows: “I was in my car on my way to a new job in Seattle. I put the gas in, put the key in, and then I let it run. I just imagined what the day would be like. A hundred years from now. In 2045, I was a teacher in some school in a poor part of rural China. I started with Chinese history and history of science.”

But won’t AI continue to feed, consume, learn, grow, and finally take over? Come on, you’ve seen The Terminator. You know how this ends!

So for now, we have to make the machines bend to our will, which is what I did over at a site called Plot Generator. It’s kind of fun for brainstorming. Indeed, you can ask it for story ideas and it will generate a list for you in nothing flat. I did that recently, and my list included:

In a world where zombies are wealthy, one student has no choice but to save mankind by eating her own great uncle.

Hmm…

Next, I decided to have the program write me a short story so I could fulfill my daily quota by sitting back and sipping my coffee. (Not really. That would be cheating!)

Anyway, all I had to do was click on “Fill entire form with random ideas” and (John Madden voice) boom, there was my pre-planning. Then I clicked on “Write me a short story” and boom, it was done (including the title)! The whole process took five seconds. Here it is. (I am not even going to try to guess at the copyright question. will AI have standing in a court of law? There’s a story idea right there!)

The Sun That Shone Like Rampaging Koalas

A Short Story by James Scott Bell

Tristan Cockle looked at the spotty ruler in his hands and felt active.

He walked over to the window and reflected on his dirty surroundings. He had always loved beautiful Shanghai with its motionless, mashed mountains. It was a place that encouraged his tendency to feel active.

Then he saw something in the distance, or rather someone. It was the figure of Jenny MacDonald. Jenny was an incredible angel with pointy lips and greasy fingernails.

Tristan gulped. He glanced at his own reflection. He was a considerate, scheming, whiskey drinker with scrawny lips and scrawny fingernails. His friends saw him as a long, loopy lover. Once, he had even helped a whispering baby cross the road.

But not even a considerate person who had once helped a whispering baby cross the road, was prepared for what Jenny had in store today.

The sun shone like rampaging koalas, making Tristan cross.

As Tristan stepped outside and Jenny came closer, he could see the quaint glint in her eye.

Jenny gazed with the affection of 5383 courageous grotesque gerbils. She said, in hushed tones, “I love you and I want a phone number.”

Tristan looked back, even more cross and still fingering the spotty ruler. “Jenny, exterminate,” he replied.

They looked at each other with concerned feelings, like two skinny, shallow snakes walking at a very ruthless disco, which had orchestral music playing in the background and two spiteful uncles hopping to the beat.

Tristan studied Jenny’s pointy lips and greasy fingernails. Eventually, he took a deep breath. “I’m sorry,” began Tristan in apologetic tones, “but I don’t feel the same way, and I never will. I just don’t love you Jenny.”

Jenny looked calm, her emotions raw like a melted, modern map.

Tristan could actually hear Jenny’s emotions shatter into 4509 pieces. Then the incredible angel hurried away into the distance.

Not even a glass of whiskey would calm Tristan’s nerves tonight.

Pretty awful and absurd, but I’m willing to bet there are actually some readers out there who might find this deep and profound (especially in states that have legalized recreational marijuana). The first line is lousy, but I actually found the last line resonant (just not connected to anything that made sense).

Let’s face it. AI can defeat the world’s best Chess and Go masters. Do we really think it won’t eventually write a commercially successful genre novels? Or create a social media presence for its “author” pages? Or refuse to open the pod bay doors?

Not yet! Fight on!

On this date I am confident in saying I can write better than a robot. Indeed, I can teach you to do the same. I’m happy to announce that I’ve partnered with The Great Courses in a 24-lecture series, “How to Write Best-Selling Fiction.” It’s at a special launch price right now. Check it out…before the machines come knocking at your door.

What about you? Can you write better than a robot? Would you buy a novel written by HAL 9000? 

You’d better, otherwise: