Created by Humans for Humans

Every so often, when our bookshelves are full, and we're faced with a choice between making more space or giving up buying books, I sell the odd few volumes at Ebay. I hadn't done it for a while, and when I went back, at the end of last year, I discovered that the site has a new feature. It lets sellers use AI to create the description of the item they are listing. So, I tried it. I filled in all the basic information—title, author, publisher, condition, special features, all that sort of stuff—so the bot had all of that to work with.

Here's the human-made description I wrote myself:

John Silence by Algernon Blackwood, published by Eveleigh Nash in 1916 (originally published in 1908).

From the library of the distinguished writer of science fiction, fantasy and weird fiction, Donald Wandrei (1908-1987).

Original blue cloth with original dust jacket. Binding firm, endpapers toned, a very small amount of spotting here and there. The dust jacket has a small tear near the spine, a few nicks and chips, and a pink stain at the front bottom edge. An attractive, very good copy.

Please do inspect the photographs as they form part of this description (and they'll give you a much better picture, if you'll pardon the pun, of the book's condition).

Comes from a smoke-free and pet-free home.

All books listed are from my own personal collection. I am selling to create space (to buy more books!). All books have been cared for in a damp-free, smell-free environment. If you would like more photos, I'm happy to take more. Need more details? Just drop me a line; I'm always happy to be of assistance.

And here's the Ebay bot's effort:

This is a hardback book titled "John Silence" by Algernon Blackwood, featuring the occult detective character. 

The hardcover binding and English language make it a valuable addition to any literature collection. The author's unique perspective on the topic of literature and fiction makes it a must-read for any book lover. 

This edition is part of the library of Donald Wandrei.

The book was listed for £270. So, keeping in mind the fact that the bot is supposed to help you sell a rare book—and not a cheap one that you can pick up at any railway bookstall—what do you notice?

1. It's as dull as dishwater and has no personality.
2. It includes hardly any of the information it had to work with and absolutely nothing about the book's condition or the date it was published.
3. It incorrectly states that the 'edition' is part of the Donald Wandrei library.
4. Look at that bit I've highlighted in red. According to the first part, being a hardcover book in English is enough to make it valuable. According to the second part... Well, say what now?

Using my human-made description, I sold the book within two hours of listing it. The bot's description would most likely have resulted in prospective buyers sending me messages to request information that should have been in the listing to begin with. I'd have ended up writing responses that shouldn't have been necessary, spending more time on doing that than I would have done in producing my own human description to begin with. Or buyers might just have passed the book by, and I'd have lost that sale; after all, if I couldn't be bothered to put in some effort, or didn't have the knowledge to put together a proper description, why should they buy from me?

Of course, not all AI is created equal, and some bots are better than others. But at what? In my experience, some are better than others at producing writing that isn't so dull that it makes you want to pull your own eyes out, but that writing always contains a certain (or possible a large) amount of utter nonsense. As time goes by, they may get better at forming a sentence, but it's looking like the nonsense is here to stay. If we're lucky, they'll end up just like your old Uncle George, who knows everything about quantum mechanics without ever having actually studied the subject; he's so confident, so sure of everything he says, and so capable of boring all and sundry at Christmas parties with what we all know is complete tripe. If we're unlucky, the better AI gets at sounding like it knows what it's talking about, the more difficult it will be for us to separate information from misinformation. Neither outcome is desirable.

The BBC recently undertook research into four AI assistants: OpenAI’s ChatGPT; Microsoft’s Copilot; Google’s Gemini; and Perplexity. They wanted to find out whether these assistants 'provided accurate responses to questions about the news; and if their answers faithfully represented BBC news stories used as sources'. The bots were given access to the BBC website and asked to use BBC stories when putting together answers. The BBC found that: 91% of AI answers had 'some issues'; 51% had 'significant issues' of some form; 19% of AI answers that cited BBC content contained factual errors, including incorrect numbers and dates; 13% of the quotes supposedly taken directly from BBC articles 'were either altered from the original source or not present in the article cited'. 

That bit in red is very important. It is something I've encountered every time I've experimented with an AI bot; they alter what should be a direct quote, they make stuff up, and they attribute information to the wrong person/organisation. And, as the BBC rightly points out, 'inaccuracy and distortion can lead to real harm'. The BBC concluded that 'AI assistants cannot currently be relied upon to provide accurate news and they risk misleading the audience'.

I can't help thinking that, as more and more people cotton on to the fact that AI bots get a lot of things wrong and make stuff up, they'll begin to avoid interacting with AI-produced content. A bot assured me that bots cannot lie, but an unintentional untruth is capable of doing exactly the same damage as an intentional lie. So why rely on AI and risk being misinformed? And if you think people won't be able to tell the difference between AI content and human content as these bots 'improve', I have two answers for you:

1. Human beings are already becoming familiar with the tone of AI-produced content and will become better able to spot and avoid it as time goes by. They learn and evolve in a way that chatbots simply can't.
2. If AI bots get better at seeming human, and humans are duped into believing they're reading things created by humans, will that be a good thing, considering their tendency to hallucinate? And no, there's no sign that those hallucinations are going to go away.

Going back to that Ebay bot, my own response to encountering AI-generated descriptions at that site is generally one of the following:

1. Laugh and move on.
2. Try to find actual information, get frustrated, then move on.
3. Assume that the seller doesn't know what they're selling and move on.

You'll notice that bit about moving on. It is so boring to read the same dull, droning nonsense over, and over, and over. No, thank you... I'm outa here!

Bots cannot think, feel, empathise, or care. They cannot reproduce accurate information when it's handed to them on a plate or determine when it is outdated or out of context. They make stuff up. They often produce lots of words while saying very little of substance. In short, they are the world's worst writers, the people who are fired after a week because they bore people, mislead people, and damage company reputations.

The only way to connect with your human audience is to reach out to them with human-produced content. Ultimately, life for us humans is too short for us to be forced to spend a lot of it interacting with unthinking, unfeeling, uncaring machines.

You can read the full BBC findings by clicking here.

Why Do We Specialise in Writing for the Life Sciences Industry?

In January 2007, I almost died. 

I don't remember which I noticed first, the nausea or the red blotches. Or the heat. It's possible that they all arrived together. I remember feeling extremely lightheaded, and I have a vague recollection of being carried out of the house and bundled into the back of the car by my husband, Ryoma. I remember that my skin puffed up and began to hurt. Then nothing... until I woke up in a bed in the local hospital's Intensive Therapy Unit. For the next few days I was unconscious most of the time. 

I wasn't always sure about where I was. And I hadn't a clue what was wrong with me. Unfortunately, my doctors were equally baffled. Drugs were pumped into me. Tests were run. Bacterial meningitis was considered, then rejected. Septicemia was suggested. An allergic reaction was thought likely, until it wasn't. My heart rate was too fast, my temperature was too high. I couldn't eat, walk, or string enough words together to create a sentence. I may have been out of it most of the time, but I was aware—as was my family—that death wasn't out of the question. Later, when I was back home, Ryoma told me that he'd been informed, when we first arrived at the hospital, that a delay of just a few minutes could have resulted in me not surviving.

The hospital doctors shook their heads and sighed, then decided to throw everything at me; thankfully, eventually something stuck. A week later, the blotches had disappeared, along with the pain I'd been feeling, my heart rate was almost back to normal, and I was eating again. My release was delayed by a stubbornly high temperature, but eventually I was back home. By the time I was released, it was suggested that a virus and subsequent infection had caused the trouble. But the last doctor to speak to me confirmed that she and her colleagues didn't really know what had made me so ill. 'Keep on taking the pills,' she said; 'we don't know which ones worked, so take them all, in case... well, just keep on taking them.'

I was released, but I wasn't what you'd call recovered. Recovery took another eighteen months. When I first returned home, I couldn't walk a few steps without getting out of breath. I slept on and off all day, and I suffered constant headaches. At some point—funnily enough, I can't remember when—it was discovered that I'd lost quite a bit of my memory. 

Eventually, I did get back to 'normal'. Well, that's not strictly true; I never returned to being the me that I had been before my illness. Is it possible to get so up close and personal with Death and remain unchanged? I don't think so. My view of the world, of what matters, and of the direction I wanted to take in life all changed. Once I had recovered sufficiently, Ryoma made the decision to move into working with the Life Sciences Industry; it was his way of giving back.

A lot has happened since then, but one thing has remained the same: I am always grateful for the medicines that saved my life—whichever ones did the trick—and the doctors and nurses who pumped me full of them. We're all just a hop, skip and a jump away from illness or injury, and where would we be without our hospitals, doctors, nurses, researchers, medical device manufacturers,  laboratories, and so on? 

Not so very long ago, we were all oblivious to the future existence of Covid 19, and then... well, you know the rest. Is there a sensible person alive now who isn't more aware of the fragility of human life as a result?

Why the Life Sciences? Well, it's a natural consequence of benefitting from their existence.

Book News: The Other End ~ R. Ellis Roberts

I am extremely pleased to announce that on 14 February Nezu Press will release a lovely new hardback edition of The Other End by R. Ellis Roberts. 

In his day, R. Ellis Roberts was a well-known literary critic and writer. He contributed reviews and articles to a number of periodicals, including the Daily News, Observer, Empire Review, London Mercury, Bookman, Saturday Review, and Guardian. He was literary editor for the New Statesman and Time and Tide, and he hosted a book review programme for BBC Radio. In 1923, his only collection of uncanny short stories, The Other End, was published by Cecil Palmer and received glowing reviews. The critic for the Bookman declared the author ‘as well able to write stories of his own as to criticise those of others’, having achieved a mastery of his subject that at times ‘challenges comparison with Poe and Hawthorne’. And Gerald Gould, in the Saturday Review, suggested that no nervous person should read the book when ‘alone at night in a remote cottage on a lonely moor’. This new edition of The Other End includes four reviews written by R. Ellis Roberts about the work of Arthur Machen, of whom he was an admirer—for the Bookman, Daily News, and Sewanee Review—and a biographical essay by Gina R. Collia, ‘R. Ellis Roberts: The Critic Who Read for Pleasure’.

You can pre-order it directly from Nezu Press (Publisher shop: Click here). Or you can do so from the usual online retailers; the book will be showing up in all the usual places soon.

Nezu Press, 14 February 2024.
978-1-7393921-7-8.
Hardback with dust jacket, 258 pages.