Tag: reading

I fed the opening of Pride and Prejudice to fourteen AI content generators. Here’s what happened.

On By Janni Posted in general, reading, writingTagged , 2 Comments

So there I was, scrolling through social media, when an ad popped up on my feed.

“Write blog posts 10X faster with robots!” it said.

O-kay, I thought. Sure. What could possibly go wrong?

A bit of googling later, I’d fallen down the rabbit hole of AI content generation—sites that promise to take the pesky work of, well, coming up with words out of writing. In exchange for a prompt (and in some cases a subscription fee), these sites will autogenerate text—or rather, content—freeing writers up to do whatever writing is about for them besides stringing words together in meaningful ways.

Some AI sites helpfully offer suggested topics, such as fashion, or banking, or cryptocurrency, or everyone’s deepest passion, search engine optimization. 

But they also all let you enter text of your own. So, I entered this:

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”

Then I sat back and let more than a dozen different AI content generators tell me what, exactly, they would do with the opening line of Jane Austen’s most well-known novel.

Not surprisingly, none of them responded by generating a copy of Pride and Prejudice on the spot. Here’s what they did instead.

Some AI programs played it straight

Faced with that opening line, this AI started to write a paper on the subject.

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. This prevailing wisdom is the impetus for Mrs. Bennet’s obsession with finding husbands for her five daughters. She is convinced that if her girls do not marry well, they will be destitute for the rest of their lives.” –Simplified

More AI programs tried to play it straight, but just lost hold of the narrative along the way

“The novel is about a single man named Mr. Bennet who has five daughters. He is in want of a wife for his daughters and so, he must go to all the trouble of finding them one.”—Rytr

I do appreciate the daughters’ willingness to share.

“It Is A Truth Universally Acknowledged, That A Single Man In Possession Of A Good Fortune, Must Be In Want Of A Wife is a novel about Elizabeth Bennet and the five husbands she does not marry.” –Anyword

Five women who marry one wife, one woman who doesn’t marry five husbands. It’s all good.

“Jane Austen is famous for her novels, like Pride and Prejudice, which are full of beautiful language. They are a must read for anyone who has even a vague interest in English literature. #8: Memebox Blogging Challenge Winners Memebox Blogging Challenge. Memebox is a Korean skincare and beauty eCommerce store that curates high.” –Peppertype.ai

English literature, memebox blogging, skincare. It’s all good.

One AI decided to throw shade on Miss Austen herself

“Contrary to popular belief, love can be found in the most unlikely places. And very often, those places are not to be found in a romantic novel like Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.” –Copymatic

You tell them, Copymatic.

Many AIs just wanted to help those fortune-possessing single men out

“The search for a wife can be a daunting task. There are many factors to consider, from finding someone who is compatible with you on a personal level to making sure that she meets your family’s approval. If you’re starting to feel the pressure to find a wife, don’t despair. With a little bit of effort, you’re sure to find the woman of your dreams.” –Jasper

“A wife can help manage your money and provide financial stability for your family. She can also help take care of the home and children while you’re away on business or vacations. Plus, she can add some much-needed spice to your life! –Scalenut

“Single men have a bad rap. We’re portrayed as sad, lonely and desperate. But the reality is that being single in your 20s and 30s can be liberating and exciting. This chapter of your life gives you the freedom to pursue the things you really want … without worrying about meeting someone or finding an old lady roommate who will judge you for leaving jam out on the counter.” –Writesonic

“Women are natural managers and caretakers. They make great wives because they are able to understand finances, make good decisions, and are great at taking care of others. They also make good mothers because they can be nurturing and have a deep understanding of human emotions.” –HyperWrite

So many AI-generated reasons a man might want a wife, so few AI-generated reasons a wife might want a man.

One AI gave a shoutout to … no, not to women getting married. To the mothers of women getting married

“It is a truth universally acknowledged by mothers of daughters that weddings are an expensive business. Invitations, flowers, dresses, photographers, catering companies—the list goes on.” –Copysmith

Some AIs had their own agendas to pursue

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. But the subject will become clear if we consider how this very circumstance was taken into consideration by Joseph Smith while he endeavored to persuade his brother Hyrum about marriage.” –Zyro

Sure, sure, that was my first thought too.

“We are a community of single men and women who are looking for friendship, dating and more. Join us today and get access to our private forums, where you can post your own profile, send messages and get replies from other members.” –INK

I mean, why are you even on the Internet if you don’t have something to promote?

But a couple AIs actually seemed to get that this was fiction, and they wanted to come out and play

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. But what happens when that man is not so much in possession of a good fortune, as in possession of a bad one? 

“This is the story of [name], who was not quite as rich as he thought he was. He had recently inherited his father’s estate and was now feeling the pressure to find himself a wife before it all ran out. So he went on an adventure with his friend [friend name] to find love, but instead found fame!” –Copy.ai

With a hook like that, who wouldn’t hit refresh for another round?

“This is the story of [name], who wasn’t ashamed to admit that he was a little bit of a gold digger. Though, in this fairy tale there are no evil queens, but instead a group of misfit girls who befriend [name] and help him with his flirting. With the help of his new friends, he finds his prince charming.” –Copy.ai

Even better!

And finally:

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

“But what if that single man is too busy being a vampire hunter to think about getting married?

“Enter Jane Austen, who will turn the vampire hunter’s world upside down with her wit, intelligence, and charm.

“Austen is the perfect match for the vampire hunter, and not just because she is a formidable opponent to the undead. Austen is also a woman who knows her own mind, and is unwilling to compromise on what she wants in life.

“The vampire hunter may think he is in control of his destiny, but Austen is about to show him that he is not the only one who can be a hunter.” –Smart Copy

I have no idea where you pulled this from, Smart Copy, but I’m here for it. I’m here for it.

Conclusions?

Read line by line, AI generated prose was more coherent than I expected, except for the places where it wasn’t. The actual content behind all that prose was less coherent, though, except for the places where it made sense after all.

Seeing the male gaze so strongly at work in the world of AI content generation was a bit startling, though it shouldn’t have been. Everything an AI generates ultimately comes from us humans, after all.

There’s probably a lot more AI generated content out there than most of us realize, or more than I realized, anyway. That’s useful knowledge to add to the informed skepticism we need to bring to all the things we find online. 

Finally, if we are going to have robots churning out copy for us, it’s better to credit them and poke fun at them than to quietly cut and paste and claim that copy as our own.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go auto-generate the rest of that vampire story.

Or maybe not

In the end, sadly (happily), AI content generation just couldn’t bring the story of Jane Austen and the vampire hunter home. 

“… The vampire hunter may think he is in control of his destiny, but Austen is about to show him that he is not the only one who can be a hunter. What starts as a battle of wills, quickly turns into something more, as the two realize that they have more in common than they first thought.

“The vampire hunter and Jane Austen may seem like an unlikely pairing, but they just might be the perfect match. What do you think about the vampire hunter and Jane Austen as a couple? Do you think they would be able to overcome their differences, or would they ultimately end up driving each other crazy? Post your thoughts in the comments below!”— Smart Copy

So no, AI content generation isn’t going to replace living breathing writers quite yet.

But if you do have thoughts, feel free to do as the AI says, and share them in the comments below.

Had motherhood ruined my favorite childhood stories?

On By Janni Posted in generalTagged , Leave a comment

My essay, “Had motherhood ruined my favorite childhood stories?” is featured in Modern Parent this week.

As I snuggled in with my husband and my then-first-grader to watch Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, I looked forward to sharing my childhood memories of Rankin and Bass’ claymation classic.

Within five minutes of pressing play, though, all I could think was, “Why is everyone being so mean?”

Read more here.

Love and Perfection

On By Janni Posted in reading, writingTagged , Leave a comment

“We love the things we love for what they are.”

That’s from Robert Frost’s “Hyla Brook.”

Variations on the line had been bouncing around in my head for a while before my husband and fellow writer, Larry Hammer, reminded me where it came from.

I’d been thinking about Frost (without knowing it was Frost I was thinking about) because I’d been thinking about how once we reach a certain basic level of craft, writing is no longer about avoiding mistakes or carefully not doing anything wrong.

It’s about the things we do right.

No one ever loved a book, after all, simply for not making any mistakes, for all that there are (varied, individual) things that can throw each of us out of a story. But we don’t love a story just because we aren’t thrown out of it, either.

We love books for what they do, not for what they manage not to do. We love them for the thing or things that hit each of our particular story buttons, that reach out to bridge the gap between story and reader, that pull on us and make us want to or need to read on. A flawed book that does the things it does very right is far more powerful than an unflawed book that doesn’t.

None of my favorite books—the books I imprinted on as a child and teen, the books that have remained touchstones for me throughout my life—is perfect. I can see that clearly enough when I look at those books as a writer focused on craft—and that has never once stopped me from returning to those books, from treasuring them. 

We don’t love books for the things they aren’t, but for the things they are.

My bookshelves—filled with imperfect books that I adore.

But there’s more to it than that. A while back, in a stray moment when I thought I was thinking about a manuscript-in-progress, I found myself thinking instead: And the same thing is true for people.

On one level, I’d always known this. On another I hadn’t, or had forgotten, or needed to relearn it on that particular day in that particular way. People no more need to be perfect than stories do.

As writers who spend much of our time looking inward that we can become as critical of ourselves as of our stories, this is worth remembering, too. I doubt many people hold their friends and loved ones dear simply because they never make mistakes. Lack of mistakes is not the place love comes from.

We love one another for the same reason we love stories: not for what we aren’t, but for what we are.

As I dig deep to put words on the page, I find that a comforting thought.

Love and Perfection first appeared as a guest post on Cynthia Leitich Smith’s Cynsations. I find I return to it every year or two as a reminder to myself.

“Do you believe that spring will come?”

On By Janni Posted in general, reading, writingTagged , Leave a comment

Bones of Faerie, the first book of my Bones of Faerie trilogy, is about uncontrolled growth: plants that bloom in every season, crops that fight their harvesters, trees that seek human blood and bone to root in.

[Faerie Winter Cover]

Faerie Winter, the second book of the trilogy, tells the opposite story. It’s about endless winter, failure to grow, and the fear that spring might never come.

During our current physical and psychological winter, Faerie Winter is the book I’ve been thinking about.

The story’s protagonist, Liza, is surrounded by adults who remember countless other winters, followed by countless other springs. Liza was born after the war between faeries and humans banished winter from her world, though. She’s never known anything but deadly, unbounded growth. When that growth stops at last, Liza’s first thought is about how much safer the forests have become. Later, when she realizes that those forests have also stopped producing the things humans need to survive, she has no mental roadmap for what might happen next.

When Jayce, a member of Liza’s town’s council, talks about preparing for spring planting, Liza wonders at the fact.

If he feared that the spring crops wouldn’t grow, he gave no sign. Adults believed, somewhere deep inside, that spring would come, for all that they were careful of our rations. Some part of them couldn’t imagine that green wouldn’t return to the world, as if green was something we were born to. I did not understand it. Deep inside I felt as if this gray had surely gone on forever and the forests I’d fought all my life had been merely illusions.

Not all the adults in Liza’s world share Jayce’s certainty, though. As the story progresses, Liza flees a danger that comes from beyond the dying forest with Karin, a fey survivor of the War. Karin is a plant mage, keenly aware of the changes winter has brought to the world, and she asks aloud the question that human adults have not.

The grasses sighed wearily and retreated back into the snow. “They’re not dead,” I said. “Not completely, not around you.”

“They are not dead.” Karin sounded as tired as the grasses had. “But they are dying. Tell me, Liza, do you believe that spring will come?”

Why ask me? I was no plant mage. “The adults in my town believe it.” They believed in spite of the gray trees and the gray skies, the failed crops and the too-long winter.

“So it is with the human adults in my town as well.” Karin held a hand out to the falling snow as we walked on. Snowflakes melted against her skin. “Yet I have never heard the trees so quiet. They yearn for darkness, and some have given way to it. Others slip into sleep, accepting that they may never wake. I am told this is the way of your world. It is not the way of mine. I have never known a forest that was not green. What do you believe?”

Do you believe that spring will come? It’s a question I’ve returned to many times since I wrote Faerie Winter. It’s a question I was asking before I wrote that book, too, before fiction led me, as it so often does, to put into words the things I was already saying.

Because Faerie Winter is fantasy, the question of spring’s return is not merely metaphoric. It turns out the danger of endless winter is real, and so Liza’s inner crisis is echoed by the world’s outer one. Fantasy does that, sometimes—lets us transform internal struggles into external realities so that we can face those struggles head on and in a more concrete way than other types of stories allow.

Do you believe that spring will come? Things have changed so much already—in Liza’s world, in our world. There’s no changing them back. Do we believe that forward change will continue instead, leading us on to someplace new, someplace viable, someplace where things can grow once more?

Do you believe that spring will come? There’s a strange comfort simply in putting the question into words.

On one level, I know the answer, always have known it. If I didn’t believe, deep down, that spring—that the future—would come, writing a book where spring was called into question would have been too much to bear.

On another level, I need, just as deeply, to hear the question asked, and I need to travel the hard path toward its answer, again and again, not just in the books that I’ve written but also in the countless books that I’ve read through the years, ever since I knew how to read. Stories were the thing, after all, that got me trough childhood and adolescence and all that came after. Every misunderstood kid who had adventures and saved the world and found their place in that world was, in their way, another needed answer.

An answer, and also a map—the map Liza lacks—for what the journey might look like. Spring comes. Not always easily, not always painlessly, not always as quickly as we want or as we need, but in the end and at the last. Spring comes. Deep down, I know that.

After all, I’ve taken this journey before.