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Submission + - Ask Slashdot: How do you feel about derivative fiction? (google.com)

shanen writes: Some thoughts on derivative fiction featuring Dreaming Spies by Laurie King with special guest character Sherlock Holmes.

So the first meta-comment is that the subtitle (as in the above paragraph) should have some special attribute, but not an option on today's Slashdot. A larger size is popular, but...

Next meta-comment is that I'm too easily motivated by negative reactions. But maybe that's my own fault for reading so many books and just some kind of entropy law that there are more bad books than good?

Fastest way to deal with this book might be in the way of a suggested solution approach. Using generative AI, of course? From that perspective I think the biggest problem is that Sherlock Holmes is barely present. More of a background character. The story line is also pretty implausible and the Japanese aspects seem mangled, too. On the Japanese problems I'm not the expert to ask, but I noticed a lack of Japanese names in the acknowledgments. So the AI fix would be a prompt like "rewrite this book to make Sherlock Holmes into the hero with the Russell character more in a role like Dr Watson's and shift the writing style to be closer to Arthur Conan Doyle's style.

However I also got to thinking about the more general topic of derivative fiction. There are so many characters who are based on Sherlock Holmes. Some that come to mind as ultimately based on Holmes are Perry Mason, Jules Maigret, Hercule Poirot, Spenser, and Nero Wolfe and I'm sure I'll remember some others before I can finish writing this... However returning to the feature book, there is a lot of stuff about ninja in there, and I think they are mostly just as fictional as Sherlock Holmes with the same tenuous linkage to sources in the real world... So what goes around comes back to the same place?

Next I started thinking about quantifying the derivative works and we're back to stuff the AIs could help with. I feel like running a query something like this:

"What is the total volume of Holmes stuff written by Arthur Conan Doyle, both before and after the death of Holmes? Appropriate units would be tens of thousands of words. How does that compare to the Laurie King novels with Holmes? The comparison should include ratios. Now extend the analysis to other fictional characters that can be compared to Holmes."

The above list of characters could be included in the question, though it might be better to see what the AI comes up with and then add any of my favorites that get missed. Also, the query should be fed to several AIs so as to compare their answers... (I seem to have a talent for writing prompts that push the AIs into hallucinations.)

Closing meta-comment is to note that King has written about 15 of these novels as of 2015... Pretty sure that's well ahead of Doyle.

Comment Re:Sounds like a good problem to have (Score 1) 128

the Mac mini being the rare exception, which was just a little too nerdy (needing your left over keyboard, mouse, and monitor)

If that's a barrier to entry, it's one that is shared by 90% of the (non-laptop) PC market, and it never seemed to bother PC users. It's not like Apple won't happily sell you a keyboard, mouse, and monitor along with your Mac Mini, if that's what you want to do.

Comment Re:Costly status quo? (Score 4, Insightful) 57

it's using horrendous amounts of power and causing untold environmental damage

Comparable to, say, a 787 airliner, whose environmental damage we tolerate without thought or comment simply because we're already used to it.

while maintaining the existing overall parity between the bad guys and the worse guys.

Consider the alternative, then. Anthropic does nothing, and sooner or later OpenAI or some other less responsible company delivers an AI with similar capabilities, but just throws it out to the public without much thought about the consequences. Both the black hats and the white hats start using it, of course, but the black hats have a field day compromising anything and everything before the white hats have a chance to find, fix, and distribute all the necessary patches to defend against all the newfound exploits. Not a great situation to be in, but probably unavoidable at this point unless the white hats are given a head start.

Comment Google's AI does not impress. (Score 1) 99

When I test the different AI systems, Google's AI system loses track of complex problems incredibly quickly. It's great on simple stuff, but for complex stuff, it's useless.

Unfortunately.... advice, overviews, etc, are very very complex problems indeed, which means that you're hitting the weakspot of their system.

Comment Where has Nick Hanauer gone? (Score 1) 117

Citation provided in Subject, but I actually wonder about the answer. Hain't seen his hide nor hair lately.

Should I repeat part of the rant about "might != right"? Might does make a winner sometimes, but "right" is a moral dimension. "Someone had to win" is part of the gambling story elsewhere on Slashdot?

Comment Re:Is it worth it to put a manned crew on the craf (Score 1) 87

Not disagreeing, but mostly feeling a need to clarify an aspect I didn't mention.

As regards your reply, I actually heard that part of the reason Artemis was able to go forward was that the YOB signed another Executive Order. On those occasions when the puppet does something that appears good I remain suspicious, but I suspect most of those lucky breaks could be traced back to that female chief of staff. She seems relatively sane compared to the rest of 'em and I can imagine her appealing to "your legacy, Your Highness" to pull his strings in less harmful directions. Occasionally.

The thing I forgot to mention was that I support the general idea of lunar exploration, but right now I think the best step forward would be remotely operated robots. For the cost of this mission they could have tried to build a major robot base on the moon. I think they should actually be stupid robots, but operated from earth. The round-trip delay is only about 3 seconds, so I think it would be feasible to leave almost all the intelligence on the earth side. (Or am I presuming too much about local intelligence?) I think it might even be just within the scope of current technology to build a robotic factory on the moon, going beyond the pure research aspects.

Comment Re:Billionares Using Our Resources to Replace Peop (Score 1) 47

I've designed a few machines - some rather more insane than others - in meticulous detail using AI. What I have not done, so far, is get an engineer to review the designs to see if any of them can be turned into something that would be usable. My suspicion is that a few might be made workable, but that has to be verified.

Having said that, producing the design probably took a significant amount of compute power and a significant amount of water. If I'd fermented that same quantity of water and provided wine to an engineering team that cost the same as the computing resources consumed, I'd probably have better designs.But, that too, is unverified. As before, it's perfectly verifiable, it just hasn't been so far.

If an engineer looks at the design and dies laughing, then I'm probably liable for funeral costs but at least there would be absolutely no question as to how good AI is at challenging engineering concepts. On the other hand, if they pause and say that there's actually a neat idea in a few of the concepts, then it becomes a question of how much of that was ideas I put in and how much is stuff the AI actually put together. Again, though, we'd have a metric.

That, to me, is the crux. It's all fine and well arguing over whether AI is any good or not (and, tbh, I would say that my feeling is that you're absolutely right), but this should be definitively measured and quantified, not assumed. There may be far better benchmarks than the designs I have - I'm good but I'm not one of the greats, so the odds of someone coming up with better measures seems high. But we're not seeing those, we're just seeing toy tests by journalists and that's not a good measure of real-world usability.

If no such benchmark values actually appear, then I think it's fair to argue that it's because nobody believes any AI out there is going to do well at them.

(I can tell you now, Gemini won't. Gemini is next to useless -- but on the Other Side.)

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