How can authors use AI writing tools like GPT-3? What's the best way to prompt the models to output usable text? Are there copyright issues with this approach? Author Paul Bellow explains how he is using the tools and how authors need to embrace the possibilities rather than reject them.

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Useful Resources for F&SF; Writers: Awards Posts for F&SF; Writers Book Recommendations for F&SF; Writers: Craft Essays for F&SF; Writers Career-focused Essays for F&SF; Writers Story Prompts for F&SF; Writers #sfwapro

In this feature essay, Ninna Meier reflects on the materiality of the writing – and re-writing – process in academic research.

By T.C. Sottek and Thomas Houston Humans have always lived singularly in the present moment; the internet has only accelerated the pace that we leap from one lily pad of existence to the next.

“The tool isn’t separate from you. It’s part of you.” #Heidegger #technology #perception #tools

In the last decade, human vanity has taken a major hit. Traits once thought to be uniquely, even definingly human have turned up in the repertoire of animal behaviors: tool use, for example, is widespread among non-human primates, at least if a stick counts as a tool. We share moral qualities, such as a capacity for altruism with dolphins, elephants and others; our ability to undertake cooperative ventures, such as hunting, can also be found among lions, chimpanzees and sharks. Chimps are also capable of “culture,” in the sense of socially transmitted skills and behaviors peculiar to a particular group or band. Creatures as unrelated as sea gulls and bonobos indulge in homosexuality and other nonreproductive sexual activities. There are even animal artists: male bowerbirds, who construct complex, obsessively decorated structures to attract females; dolphins who draw dolphin audiences to their elaborately blown sequences of bubbles. 

Offsets images automatically to create simple, but effective glitches

Shanzai is the name used for a huge black market industry that (currently) specialises in making fake mobile phones in small factories. Basements. We’re not talking about a few phones either. The volume is terrifying. According to CCID Consulting in 2007 an estimated 150 million phones - 20% of the 750 million devices produced in China - were counterfeit or off brand.

Initially carbon copies of the genuine article, more recent shanzai phones sometimes add eccentric new features to meet the demands of the market and can produce them far quicker than the genuine manufacturers can adapt (apparently 28-30 days to market). It’s probably because they have access to the components, tools, skilled factory workers and they’re not held back by corporate bureaucracy, legal issues, manufacturing schedules and overheads - or safety. For example shanzai Nokia phones had dual SIM slots before the genuine ones did -

Is our species, Homo sapiens sapiens, the first cyborg species? Gizmodo/New Scientist has a fascinating article up about how humans evolved as a result of technology. Timothy Taylor, an anthropologist and archaeologist at the University of Bradford in the United Kingdom, submits a theory I am very inclined to believe: that humans evolved from tool-using proto-human primates. This evolutionary path resulted in a “survival of the weakest,” which Taylor explains:

Technology allows us to accumulate biological deficits: we lost our sharp fingernails because we had cutting tools, we lost our heavy jaw musculature thanks to stone tools. These changes reduced our basic aggression, increased manual dexterity and made males and females more similar. Biological deficits continue today. For example, modern human eyesight is on average worse than that of humans 10,000 years ago.

Unlike other animals, we don’t adapt to environments – we adapt environments to us. We just passed a point wher

Extract from 'Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes', page 46

It’s not too often that legacy media learns a new mass communication tool along with its audience. But that’s exactly what’s going on now because of Google Wave. Although it’s still invitation only and in preview, the real-time wiki collaboration platform is being used by some media companies for community building, real-time discussion, crowdsourcing, collaboration both inside and outside the newsroom, and for cross publishing content.

Google Wave (Google Wave) may seem familiar to older users of the Internet, who have been using the parts that make up the whole of the platform for years. Wave, however, brings those pieces together cohesively to allow users to share photos, embed videos, and converge other Google (Google) applications such as Google Maps (Google Maps) and Google Calendar to create customized blocks of user-editable content on the fly. Here are four ways that newsrooms are using Wave.

Though you’ll still have to do your writing using the old fashioned method — one word at a time — web applications and social media have made the process of writing a novel considerably easier and arguably more enjoyable. Here is a toolkit for using the web to write a book. If you know of any other great applications useful to aspiring writers, please leave them in the comments.

Imagine a cube-shaped building, with ten cube-shaped rooms along each side (10 rooms long, 10 high & 10 deep). Each cubular room has 4 walls, 1 ceiling and 1 floor. Each of the 6 interior surfaces in all 1000 cubular rooms is decorated with a different pi