We were, several of us together, lamenting laundry chores on Discord, so I asked Suno to write lyrics and music to a country western song about laundry.
Category: LLMs
Weird Wednesday: The Sorceries of Python and AI combined
So, I first became aware of Whisper, an LLM designed for transcription, translation, and subtitles, a couple of years back when I was writing Wolf’s Trail. Whisper was then the “backend” of a free website where I could upload my audio files and get a text transcription back. Then the free website went sideways around the time I started work on the sequel, Undead Flight, so although I did a little dictation on that book (speech to text in Word, cleanup by Claude AI, additional reworking by me), I wasn’t able to dictate on the road very much. So I found out that I could run whisper on my own computer through python, downloaded pytorch, downloaded whisper, and then realized I had no idea how to work with python. I abandoned the idea for 7 or 8 months, then took an online course in python on a whim, fiddled around trying to install some other stuff whisper depended on that I didn’t have, and then, after visiting about half a dozen “whisper in python” tutorials and asking Claude AI for help on the “write to text file” part, I came up with the following. Lines following a # sign are comments rather than part of the code.
Continue reading “Weird Wednesday: The Sorceries of Python and AI combined”
Midjourney Monday
There’s a passing reference in Undead Flight to “the new mooring tower in Upper Haupstadt,” and I was trying to visualize what that might look like for the current work in progress. Here’s Midjourney’s best shot at it:
State of the Author, Start of 2025
My plans for the New Year are always kind of vague, because “Mann tracht un Gott lacht” (Man plans, and God laughs).
Continue reading “State of the Author, Start of 2025”Time to Laugh and Point at the Superstitious Midwits
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/11/anthropic-hires-its-first-ai-welfare-researcher/
Disclaimer: I think Claude AI is pretty good at what it does and I am grateful to Anthropic for making it useable for free. But seriously, it and the other LLMs are basically random word and code generators powered by complicated algorithms. They have no concept of visual or written art, or the logic behind coding, merely a concept of “these things go together” based on the datasets used to train their algorithms. They have no bodies, so no concept of physical pain, and no algorithms designed to understand emotional pain. They can probably simulate pain if prompted, in the same way that they can be used to simulate characters in a roleplay context, but that’s all it is. The people hiring an “Ai Welfare Researcher” at Anthropic are either approaching Adeptus Mechanicus levels of superstition, scammers trying to psyche out the rivals’ investors, or they are, hypothetically, dealing with some kind of entity (call it a noncorporeal alien or whatever you like) which is masquerading as an LLM, and which should be automatically suspect because of it’s dishonesty.
Weird Wednesday: Using AIs to Write Blurbs
I’ve told before of how I used Google’s AI, then called Bard, to brainstorm a blurb for Wolf’s Trail, so it seems only fitting to talk about my use of AI for the blurb to Undead Flight, the upcoming sequel to Wolf’s Trail
Continue reading “Weird Wednesday: Using AIs to Write Blurbs”State of the Author, 4Q2024
-First off, I think my books are all in Kindle Unlimited now, free to anyone with a subscription to KU. If you see any sign that they are not in KU, please let me know in the comments.
–Undead Flight (Hunter Healer King Book 2) is now in the hands of my proofreaders. Barring complications, should be ready to publish by Christmas time. Ebook cover is done; blurb is done with AI help (stay tuned, my post on the blurbing process will be out tomorrow. Print cover is dependent on my final cleanup of the manuscript to determine page length.
-Also started Hunter Healer King Book 3 by writing a fairly dark and distressing scene from the last third of the book. This is kind of suboptimal, because stitching together scenes written out of order tends to add (wo)manhours to the first draft process, but I hadn’t figured out the opening scene at that point. I don’t know when it will be released but I know that I am aiming for Christmas of 2025.
-I have had a sci-fi Pride and Prejudice retelling in development for a long time; finally got the first scene down. No projected completion date at this time. My main inspiration for this concept was, weirdly enough, Star Wars: A New Hope. If you dig deep enough into the filmographies of the supporting cast, you will find one with a Pride and Prejudice connection in his earlier career. Regrettably, the catchy working title explicitly references Star Wars, so the official title will probably be something rather sedate of the “Pride and…” format.
-New ebook covers using AI art for Shadow Captain and Spider Star are done; still need to do new paperback covers for them, and ebook/hardcover for the 2 in 1 volume for the duology. Projected release date for the 2 in 1 is first/second quarter of 2025.
-Early stages of AI art covers for the Jaiya Series and Ancestors of Jaiya series. No text layout yet. A four in one of Ancestors might come out in third quarter of 2025; a seven in one of the full metaseries might be sometime in 2026 but a lot could go sideways between now and then.
Monday Music by Suno: Thou Shalt Not Kill
By G. K. Chesterton, collected in The Wild Knight. (Note: contains dark humor about murder and suicide.)
How to Use Claude.ai for Cleaning Up Transcriptions
This article is primarily about the Claude.ai feature called “projects,” but his example project is about using Claude to cleanup the nasty, incoherent speech-to-text output that Word and similar programs spit out. I’ve tested the commands involved in the free version of Claude, and they work reasonably well. I still went back and reworded and expanded a bunch of stuff after I used it, but it was nice having something that would reliably cut out the nonsense words and repetitions and add some kind of punctuation. Here are the commands; just copy and paste into Claude’s chat window, and upload a short document with your latest chunk of dictation. As always with AI, check the company’s privacy and training policies before feeding it anything of a personal or sensitive nature.
Continue reading “How to Use Claude.ai for Cleaning Up Transcriptions”Monday Music by Suno: Boot and Saddle
Based on the poem by Robert Browning.
I strongly advise anyone signing up for Suno to use their Discord accounts, if they have one. This allows them to bypass Suno’s rather intrusive demands for personal information.
Jaglion Press 