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The Emperor’s New Clothes and The Problem of Experience

September 4, 2023

experience, ignorance, nonconformity, programming, society

You likely know the story of the Emperor’s new clothes: An arrogant emperor is fooled by some fast-talkers into marching through the streets naked, because he was convinced he was wearing magic clothes – magic because stupid people couldn’t see them, which assured nobody dared to talk about the obvious. It took a kid shouting “Why, the Emperor is naked!” for others to gradually dare to agree. We ignore beginners and rely on experience. But the problem of experience – and this is clearly one of the lessons in “The Emperor’s New Clothes” – is that sometimes beginners can help you.

The story of the Emperor’s new clothes is one of my favorite classical fables. It’s deceptively simple (in that it contains several levels of interpretation) and ever-relevant. Indeed, it seems to have become even more relevant in our times, where the internet has facilitated a phenomenon of bandwagon fallacy on steroids.

All these are thoughts I’ve been having a lot lately, as a result of a… traumatic programming experience I’ve had. The topic of this post is first and foremost about society, so I’ll keep programming jargon to a minimum. Regardless of your background – programmer or not – being aware of the repercussions involved in the Emperor’s new clothes and what it is about is crucial.

In short, the way we use appeal to authority, glorify similarity, and ignore beginners is deeply problematic.

“The Emperor’s New Clothes” is an extremely popular metaphor because it’s extremely **powerful**. Graffiti from Tallinn. Photo by Ivo Kruusamägi, CC BY-SA 4.0

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Literary Genre Detector: a Simple AI model in Python

July 17, 2023

Literature, Programming

genre, literature, programming

2 comments

My knowledge in Python is scant compared to JavaScript, though some years ago I did play with it a bit. Still, lately I’ve been interested in AI models, so I decided to give Python another go. As it turns out, it’s trivial to train some simple AI models with it. In today’s post, I’ll show you how I made a very simple literary genre detector.

AI models of this kind work in a very simple manner, conceptually speaking. They simply take as input a list of data the programmer has supplied in the form of [("love","positive"), ("care","positive"), ("hate","negative"), ("rage", "negative")] and then return guesses for a supplied string. For example, a sentence like “love, care, and blah blah” (in this extremely simple example) would be classified as positive.

As you can appreciate, it all boils down to the quality of the data – garbage in, garbage out, and all that. So, with this important caveat in mind, let’s see what a literary genre detector looks like!

Literary Genre Detector — A literary genre detector doesn’t have much to do with cookies and cat-shaped mugs, but reading does 😉

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AI Tools for Writers: Make Your Life Easier, Keep Your Art Intact

May 29, 2023

Writing

affect, art, creativity, fiction, literature, programming, society, writing

2 comments

The popularization of artificial intelligence (AI) tools is arguably one of the most important things to have happened in terms of the internet and IT in recent years. We’ve already seen how AI can help programmers, and we’ve also seen the pitfalls of improper AI use. So let’s make it specific for writers and see what kinds of AI tools writers can use – and this will be a case of “it’s not what you think”.

You might recall a post where I explained how AI can write really well but it’s utterly lousy at producing art. This is a crucial detail to keep in mind here: AI can’t do your job for you. AI can’t produce art; currently it can barely produce something emulating it (though this might change in the near future).

In any case, if your goal is to write fiction that actually has something to express, completely eradicate from your mind the idea that you can delegate this job to AI. You can’t rely on AI for anything that is “client-facing”. In other words, you can’t rely on AI for writing.

Instead, I will focus on ways and AI tools writers can use to make their life easier, tickle their imagination, and produce literature that is affective.

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