Text Ghost

Better Text Generators

David Chapman | Better Without AI | 27th December 2023

Text generators like ChatGPT are “genre imitation engines, not knowledge bases;” they are more omniscient than intelligent. Their performance has improved with scale so far, but largely as a side-effect of (indirectly, unreliably) storing facts. Could a better approach be to “separate language ability from knowledge” by building fluent but ignorant systems that retrieve human-crafted text from a database? (4,600 words)

The Ghost Did What?!

Ada Palmer | Strange Horizon | 27th November 2023

Stories from other cultures offer extra suspense because even their “narrative formulae and assumptions” surprise us. Western tales are Providential, so “good and bad people generally get what they deserve.” By contrast, in Japanese horrors, “personal purity does not protect you” and survival depends more on taking the threat seriously. Hence Western viewers’ genuine shock during movies like Ring (3,800 words)