Writing Exercise, Chinese Translation, and Other Challenges

I got another writing exercise posted this week. Then I finished my Chinese translation of “After You’re Gone.” A couple people challenged me to do a couple more projects.

“The Offensive Restaurateur and the Bellicose Connoisseur”

At the script group this week we did an exercise on the title “The Offensive Restaurateur and the Bellicose Connoisseur.” I was a little more prompt getting it recorded and posted this time.

Description: Two unpleasant people in a restaurant do not get along well. https://soundcloud.com/dynamiclethargy/the-offensive-restaurateur-and-the-bellicose-connoisseur

I used a new trick when I did the recording. One of the lines in the story is in French. After I recorded the line, I used Voice.ai to alter my voice. I wasn’t happy with the pronunciation after the conversion. Since I was going to convert the voice anyway, I recorded Google’s translate program to get the proper French pronunciation, and then converted that. I felt it worked well. Because the voice gets converted, I don’t think most people will realize that the line was created differently from the rest.

“After You’re Gone”

I finally got the Chinese translation of “After You’re Gone” to a point where I felt it was OK to share with my niece and brother-in-law. I sent it off and they got the file. I haven’t heard what they think of it yet.

Shut Up and Write

At my last Shut Up and Write session I talked about recording my writing exercises. One of the people in group suggested I do a training video for the less technically inclined. Maybe I should do that.

Writing Challenge

At the script group I talked about a radio play I heard on CKUA (some time in the early 90s) where they had a scene where the line “The grounds are excellent” is used five time by five different characters and had five different meanings. Once is by a lawyer talking about a lawsuit. Once by a guy working on a radio in the room. Once by someone tasting some coffee. Once by a guy who had been out inspecting the property around the house. I forget what the other meaning was.

In response, someone challenged the group to write a story where the word nice shows up in every line of dialogue. I had a look at the different meanings. I wish he’s picked a different word. The word originally had a negative connotation suggesting that the “nice” person was not all that clever. I found out that the French City of Nice has a different origin. It comes from the Greek word for victory.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog

Artificial Intelligence (AI): John Lennon, Bias, and Translation

An article about a “new” Beatles song sparked some memories this week. Both about one of my old story ideas, and about the problems of AI more generally. I also used an AI program this week to help me translate a story into Chinese.

 

Virtual John

I came across a BBC article about Paul McCartney using an AI system to produce a new “Beatles” song with “John Lennon” singing parts of the song.

https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-65881813

Paul does express some concerns about how some people could abuse AI.

Many years ago, I had an idea about a Beatles reunion with an AI John Lennon. Although, back then, I would not have used the term AI. I have any notes I wrote at the time, but I wrote about it in a blog post a few years ago.

http://dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/joi-and-virtual-john/

Talk and speculation about AI is all the rage these days because of ChatGPT and other AI systems. I had some of the same ideas that people are talking about now.

For example, one video I watched described AI systems as “Cliché Machines”, that could only write unoriginal content. This was a core part of my story. If an AI John Lennon could never come up with any original ideas, was it really a John Lennon. How would people react to it? How would an AI John Lennon feel if people rejected it?

 

AI, Bias, and The Limitations of Human Thought

Sometime during the 1990s, I took a night class on expert systems and neural networks. Neural networks are the technology underlying modern AI systems. They were developed as an analogy to the structure of the brain. The systems we played with in the class had about 7 orders of magnitude than a system like ChatGPT. A system like ChatGPT has about 10 orders of magnitude fewer neurons than the human brain.

Nevertheless, I think understanding AI does give us some insight to the limitations of human thought.

The person teaching the course emphasized that you need to be very careful when you select the training data for your neural net. Any error or bias in that data would be built into the net. In my work in transportation modelling, this was also an issue in developing statistical models.

One of the big criticisms of AI models is that they can be biased against certain groups of people. This is not so much a problem with the AI, as it is with the people who developed the AI not taking the time to clean the training data of biases and errors.

One example I read about was an AI trained to catch pornographic material on a social site. Because of an issue with the training data, it would flag images of sand dunes as pornography. There are other examples of this kind of problem.

When I heard this in the course, it immediately struck me that this would be a problem in human brains as well. Bias and prejudice are all too common in people. I felt that it is the same problem as bias in AI systems.

With an AI that is biased, you could wipe it clean and start over with unbiased training data. That is something that you can’t do with a human brain. Even if technically possible, it would be unethical.

 

“After You’re Gone”

I’m still wondering if I should continue to work on my script “After You’re Gone.” It is based on a conversation I had with my wife before she died. People who have read it have urged me to get it made into a movie.

However, my wife was someone who valued her privacy and I feel she might not approve of my sharing. I want to ask her brother for his opinion. Since his can’t read English, I need to translate it to Chinese for him.

I thought that a screenplay format would be difficult to read, so I reformatted it as a story. I started to do a translation during the Shut up and Write session this week.

I can’t speak or read Chinese, so I used Google translate. I do it one line at a time. I translate from English to Chinese, then translate the Chinese back to English to check the translation. It often takes several attempts to get it to come back the way I want it. I got about a quarter of the story done.

Once I have that done, I plan to ask some of my friends who can read Chinese to review what I have.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog