Short because I've been sick in bed--only with norovirus, thank goodness.
Books
Never doubt this, Lincoln Brown: Despite this web site's commitment to finding and encouraging good new writers, and despite the obvious need to diagnose male-supremacist bias as a mental disorder that flawed the works of otherwise good authors in the past, I still buy and sell classics. Make an offer on that volume of Horace in Latin, printed some time in the 1810s, why don't you? Most footnotes are also in Latin (some individual words are translated first into French and then into English, in the footnotes). Bidding starts at only $200 due to damage to the binding--you'd want to have it rebound.
Image
Picture-thinkers who wanted to know what I look like have had this image for a few years...
But now that some correspondents are using the mock photos Craiyon.com generates to go with their screen names...well, they never look like photos of living humans, but this one's about as close to the right color as the cartoon version.
That's not what anyone I know actually looks like, nor is it the kind of thing anyone I know wears, but it does look like a middle-aged woman who's getting close to her annual haircut.
Is Craiyon reaching a stage where its "photo" style graphics can be mistaken for real photos? Why not visit craiyon.com and find out what it offers for the screen names of people you know? (No real names on the Internet!) For some e-friends it generated quite flattering images or at least puns on their name--for "Pbird Refusenik" it ignored the rest of the name and displayed images of songbirds, not species found on Earth. Meh. For at least one man's screen name, which I've always read as a male name though I don't know whether it's been used by any man or woman in real life, Craiyon generated only female images.
The thing about AI's offerings is that they're patched together from selected pools of graphics and writing done by real people. If Craiyon's impression of me looks like a real womn, that's because it's a mash-up of photos of real women, which is why Craiyon so rarely generates "photos" of believable human hands and eyes. If ChatGPT generates a readable, though boring, essay on the topic your teacher has assigned, that's because it's a mash-up of real articles written on the subject.
Should anyone ever use ChatGPT to do school assignments, or even generate blog posts? I vote no. Its results will not sound like you or like anyone whose writing anyone would want to read. They're usually grammatically correct for the desired language, which can make them appealing to people who need to write something in a language that's not their first one. But don't. It may be correct English or German or whatever language you need, but to native speakers of that language it will still look like "Blah blah blah de blah...is this person trying not to say anything other people haven't said before?"
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