Is AI-Generated Writing Truly AI-Generated or Just Plagiarized?

Here's an "AI-generated" piece of writing people are sharing online: "In the theater of the absurd called life, we are both the puppet and the puppeteer, dancing to a tune we can neither hear nor understand."

Parts of it sounded familiar, so I Googled them. 

A 5-word phrase here — "can neither hear nor understand" — was plagiarized from "Only You" by Sting.

Another 8-word phrase – "we are both the puppet and the puppeteer" — is the title of an opinion piece by Charlie Grosso. 

"Theater of the Absurd' is the name of a genre of performance art. That's another 4 words. 

So far, I've found 17/26 words that were plagiarized from humans, and I'm hardly even trying. 

This is what AI does. It plagiarizes, plagiarizes, plagiarizes. That's why writers are putting together a lawsuit to get it to stop using our work as sources. Our words belong to US. They are not for computer programs to steal, manipulate, and take credit for. 

How do I end this? Wrapping your story up when you don't have an ending

I'm not a pantser, but if you are, here's a tip from an extreme outliner to help you figure out how to end your story. (By the way, my favorite ending type is 3. 1 is too linear, and the kind of thing I wrote when I was 10. I can do way better than that. 2 is sad, and I hate sad endings. 3 is just right.)

Okay, here's your basic plot with your three basic options for ending a story: character wants something. Character encounters obstacles to achieving goal. Obstacles, obstacles, obstacles. Conflict comes to a peak. 

Now your ending options: 

1) Character overcomes obstacles and gets what they want. 

2) Obstacles prove to be too overwhelming. Character either gives up, accepting the status quo, or dies. 

3) Character gives up original goal after discovering something else matters more to them. Character gets new goal, and very often the original goal also comes to the character as a side effect of switching goals. 

Hope this helps.

Didn't get Everything Everywhere All at Once? Maybe I can help.

I normally try to keep my blog PG-rated, but I want to talk this once about an R-rated movie since it won so many awards, and so many people are talking about it. This post is still PG, or even G. I just went to make it clear the movie isn't.

Some of my friends are saying they didn't get Everything Everywhere All at Once.

I'm about to get boring and sciencey, but here's my (over-simplified) explanation. 

According the the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, every choice creates a new world. We can access any possible world that stems from a choice, but only until that choice is made. After that, we're stuck with the world created by our choice - but that doesn't stop the other worlds from existing. They continue to exist. We just can't access them. 

This means that there are worlds where you are a martial arts expert, worlds where you are a famous actress, and worlds where you are a chef. There are worlds with every possible version of you.

Many science-fiction stories ask What If? and EEAAO is no different. It asks, "What if you could access those infinite other versions of you by making insanely unlikely choices?" And the beautiful moral of the story is that given every possible version of herself in every possible world, the mom would still choose to be in the world where she is her daughter's mother.  

I don't know if that makes things any clearer, but I hope it helps.

TIP: My Email Was Hacked, So I Changed the Password. So Why Did I Stop Getting Email?

TIP: Think the only thing you have to do when your email gets hacked is change the password? It's not. 

What most people don't know is that you should also click on the three dots at the top of your page on a computer and check to see if the hacker added any rules to your account. After running anti-virus software, changing your password, and adding 2-step verification (if you don't already have it), delete the hacker's rules. 

Sorry to anyone who got a spam email from my account while a hacker controlled it. Thankfully, they weren't able to change the password, so I was able to get it back. I did the first steps, but wasn't aware of how hackers use rules until I looked up what to do if you haven't received any emails since your account was hacked. The rule they set up forwarded all my email to their account and stored it in my archive. After deleting it, I'm once again able to receive email in that account. 

I'm usually VERY careful and suspect my new (or possibly old) phone was vulnerable when I was switching them over. I hope you never get hacked, but if you do, I hope this helps. 

Please feel free to share. Thanks!

Five Graphic Novels

I read five graphic novels this Shabbat. 

Marshmallow and Jordan is a beautiful book about a girl from Indonesia who loves basketball but can't play on her school's team anymore after an accident leaves her paralyzed from the waist down. She befriends a young white elephant, who is more than what he seems. I was a little annoyed that the big reveal was left to the end of the book and told instead of shown, but it's still a delightful graphic novel. 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟

Allergic was my favorite of the graphic novels I read this Shabbat. It's about a girl who loves animals more then anything, until she gets a puppy for her tenth birthday and discovers she's very allergic to anything with fur or feathers. Still, she never gives up on her dream. She just has to tweak it a little. This is a great slice-of-life middle-grade graphic novel, similar in style to Sisters and Smile by Raina Telgemeier, and it teaches kids about how allergies should be taken seriously. Highly recommended 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟

The other three books were the last three in the 5 Worlds series. This is a beautifully drawn sci-fi series about a young sand-dancer who needs to light the five beacons on the five worlds in her planetary system to save from it multi-planet global warming. Oona makes friends along the way, and together they set out to accomplish the impossible.

While the plot was fun and exciting, and the art beautiful, I do feel that some things were missing. Some of the science is wrong. (I hope kids who read the series don't come away thinking it's possible to live inside a star.) And Oona doesn't feel authentically female. In the past, I might have been okay with that, but not today when there are so many women writing terrific graphic novels starring authentic girls. The main characters are also impetuous sometimes, which I feel is kind of an insult to kids, and sometimes the characters are just too lucky, finding exactly what they need in the unlikeliest of places. It's still a delightful series, though. 🌟🌟🌟🌟

And that's it for this week!