Day: February 24, 2023

Are You Tired of Talking About AI?

Fandango7 Comments

Maggie, over at From Cave Walls, wants to know if you’re tired of talking about AI. I have written at least half a dozen posts this year about Artificial Intelligence-generated text and text-to-art generated by AI chatbots. In fact, three of my posts were actually written by AI chatbots, which I pointed out to the readers, so I wasn’t trying to get away with anything.

Anyway, Maggie has posted a few relevant questions.

Would you buy a book authored or co-authored by AI?

Probably not. At least not right now, given the state of the art. Much I’ve what I’ve read that has been generated by chatbots is grammatically perfect, has perfect spelling and punctuation. And, the stories these chatbots create often aren’t bad. But the writing lacks wit, personality, humanity, and soul. Where are the twists and turns? Where are the surprises? Maybe, as the state of the art improves, AI-generated text will start to sound more human, but in my opinion, it’s got a way to go.

Would you ever publish a book written by AI just to generate income?

I’ve never published a book written by me, a human being, just to generate income.

Would you ever use AI for any portion of a book you would write? If so, would you disclose it?

No, not unless the subject matter of the book I was writing was about AI-generated content, in which case I would definitely identify any parts that were created using AI technology.

Any further thoughts or comments?

I think AI-generated text and art technology is here to stay and will improve significantly within a very few years. In much the same way as social media was a paradigm shifter, so will AI be. Unfortunately, as with social media, there will be those who will abuse the technology.

Fibbing Friday — Handy Dandy Definitions

Fandango11 Comments

Di (aka Pensitivity101) hosts Fibbing Friday, a silly little exercise where we are to write a post with our answers to the ten questions below. But as the title suggests, truth is not an option. The idea is to fib a little, a lot, tell whoppers, be inventive, silly, or even outrageous, in our responses. For this week’s Fibbing Friday, Di wants to know what these words mean.

1. Silicone — an ice cream cone made from edible Silly Putty.
2. Fluff — the little threads and stuff you pull out of your bellybutton.
3. Loofah — a type of head covering worn by tribe elders in certain tribes at some islands in the South Pacific.
4. Caddy — a mean, nasty, hurtful person who speaks ill of others.
5. Pedantic — a pedal assist setting on an electric bicycle.
6. Tangent — a sun worshiping man who has a deep, bronze, year round tan.
7. Muffler — a gag tied around someone’s mouth to keep them from making any sounds.
8. Calamity — a type of mollusk found in the cold waters around Alaska that is served as a delicacy at finer restaurants around the world. If not properly prepared, however, they can be poisonous and eating them would be calamitous.
9. Archive — a beehive in the shape of an arc that is unique to a breed of bees known as the Noah bee.
10. Fortify — the name for the number halfway between 40 and 50 (i.e., 45).

Fandango’s Flashback Friday — February 24th

Fandango17 Comments

Wouldn’t you like to expose your newer readers to some of your earlier posts that they might never have seen? Or remind your long term followers of posts that they might not remember? Each Friday I will publish a post I wrote on this exact date in a previous year.

How about you? Why don’t you reach back into your own archives and highlight a post that you wrote on this very date in a previous year? You can repost your Flashback Friday post on your blog and pingback to this post. Or you can just write a comment below with a link to the post you selected.

If you’ve been blogging for less than a year, go ahead and choose a post that you previously published on this day (the 24th) of any month within the past year and link to that post in a comment.

This was originally posted on February 24, 2018. Sadly, not much as changed over the past five years.

The Dickey Amendment

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Did you know that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is prohibited by federal law from studying firearm violence even though the American Medical Association calls gun violence in America an epidemic and has dubbed it as “a public health crisis”?

It’s true. In 1996, the Republican-majority Congress threatened to strip all funding from the CDC, which the National Rifle Association accused of promoting gun control, unless it stopped funding research into firearm injuries and death.

And in 1997, with strong backing from the NRA, the “Dickey Amendment,” named for Republican Congressman Jay Dickey of Arkansas, was passed by Congress. The Dickey Amendment to the federal congressional appropriations bill stipulated that “none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the CDC may be used to advocate or promote gun control.” As a result, the CDC stopped funding gun control research.

Although gun violence is one of the leading causes of death in America, it is also one of the most poorly researched. In relation to US mortality rates, gun violence research is the least-researched cause of death and the second-least-funded cause of death, after falls.

Critics of the restrictions argue that the government should not try to limit the collection of scientific information, which is by nature apolitical. Facts are facts, and public health researchers do not have a vested interest in politicizing the outcome of such studies.

Non-partisan research could uncover any number of constructive actions that might help stem the tide of gun violence that don’t necessarily include limiting access to guns. But with these gun violence research restrictions, policymakers have very little up-to-date data about what causes gun violence or how it can be prevented or reduced.

So just why are the NRA and congressional Republicans so determined to prevent research into gun violence? My guess: follow the money.

Maybe now might be a good time to contact your senators and representatives and encourage them to consider allowing funding for gun violence research.

After all, before he died last year, none other than the man behind the Dickey Amendment, Jay Dickey, expressed a desire to turn gun violence research “over to science and take it away from politics.”

FOWC with Fandango — Name

Fandango20 Comments
FOWC

It’s February 24, 2023. Welcome to Fandango’s One-Word Challenge (aka, FOWC). I will be posting each day’s word just after midnight Pacific Time (U.S.).

Today’s word is “name.”

Write a post using that word. It can be prose, poetry, fiction, non-fiction. It can be any length. It can be just a picture or a drawing if you want. No holds barred, so to speak.

Once you are done, tag your post with #FOWC and create a pingback to this post if you are on WordPress. Please check to confirm that your pingback is there. If not, please manually add your link in the comments.

And be sure to read the posts of other bloggers who respond to this prompt. Show them some love.