Latest news with #JackKerouac
Hans India
03-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Hans India
The new storyteller: How AI is reshaping literature
Once the realm of human imagination alone, literature is now witnessing the entrance of a new kind of storyteller: artificial intelligence. From algorithmically generated poetry to AI-assisted novels, the intersection of technology and literary art raises profound questions about authorship, creativity, and the future of narrative itself. In recent years, AI systems like OpenAI's GPT models have demonstrated a remarkable ability to produce coherent, stylistically diverse writing. These programs have been trained on vast libraries of human-created text, absorbing patterns of language, tone, and structure. As a result, they can now craft short stories, poems, essays, and even full-length novels with surprising fluency. Some projects, like 1 the Road—an AI-written travel novel modeled after Jack Kerouac's On the Road—push the boundaries of what it means to 'write.' Elsewhere, AI tools are being used to co-author books with humans, assisting in world-building, dialogue generation, or sparking ideas when writers face creative blocks. Yet the question persists: if a machine composes a poem, is it truly poetry? Or is it merely an imitation—an echo of human sentiment without the consciousness that traditionally gives literature its soul? AI's foray into literature forces a reevaluation of the concept of creativity. Historically, creativity has been understood as the unique, often ineffable ability of humans to produce something new and meaningful. But when an AI generates a narrative that evokes emotion or thought, it challenges the assumption that creativity requires consciousness or intention. Rather than replacing human writers, AI may be better understood as a collaborator or catalyst. Authors are already using AI to explore hybrid forms of storytelling, where human intuition and machine-generated text interact in unexpected ways. In these cases, the final work becomes a dialogue—a conversation between human and machine, intuition and algorithm. Perhaps one of the most intriguing roles AI plays in literature is as a mirror. The stories AI produces, trained on the vast corpus of human writing, often reveal our cultural obsessions, clichés, and hidden biases. They can expose the undercurrents of language that human writers might miss or take for granted. Moreover, AI-generated literature invites reflection on deeper philosophical questions: What does it mean to tell a story? Is storytelling an act of connection between sentient beings, or can it exist independently of human experience? If literature has historically been a vessel for understanding the human condition, what does it mean when a non-human entity begins to produce it? As AI continues to evolve, its role in literature will likely grow, not as a replacement for human writers, but as a new tool for creative exploration. Already, AI challenges traditional notions of authorship, originality, and the relationship between language and thought. It expands the landscape of possibility, offering writers new ways to think about form, voice, and narrative structure. In the end, the arrival of AI in literature does not necessarily signal the end of human storytelling. If used appropriately, it could mark the beginning of a richer, more complex dialogue—a new chapter where technology and humanity meet, not in competition, but in collaboration.
The Guardian
13-02-2025
- The Guardian
Can AI teach us anything about our subconscious? I offered up my dreams to find out
Some say that talking about your dreams is boring, but personally I think otherworldly nocturnal escapades provide far richer fodder for small talk than the footy season or this unseasonal weather. Sadly, not everyone agrees. That's why, when I hear about an AI dream interpretation app, I'm seduced by the potential for a captive, preternaturally intelligent assistant to help me decipher the more baffling corners of my psyche. AI chatbots such as ChatGPT have a well-known tendency to riff and exaggerate with alarming confidence, but their verbose nature feels well-suited to the free form and highly associative task of dream analysis. Admittedly, trading little understood fragments of our slumbering minds to a tech startup in return for spiritual guidance sounds like the foreboding premise of a terrifying sci-fi horror movie. But the app's fine print promises that dreams are stored 'safely and privately'. Who am I to let an intuitive aversion to welcoming the machine into the last private vestiges of my consciousness get in the way of a good story? I download the app, punch in a recent, seemingly benign dream – I visit the supermarket to complain about a 'defective condiment', an apathetic checkout worker dismisses my concerns, and I brazenly spread stolen peanut butter on a piece of toast – and hit the 'interpret' magic wand. 'Dreaming ties all mankind together,' the app responds, spouting Jack Kerouac like a bad Tinder date, before proposing that my dream might allude to feelings of dissatisfaction and powerlessness, as well as a desire to assert myself. It's convincing, if uninspired. A clear-eyed analysis of my dream scenario with none of the hallucinatory fervour I came here for. Hoping to elicit deeper revelations, I goad the AI with some more troubling vignettes. In one, I'm ostensibly helping the police to catch a murderer, while secretly sending him flirtatious texts, seemingly playing them both. The app sees an inner conflict between morality and an attraction to danger. In another, I'm lost, manically careening through a hotel in search of my husband and baby; I pass a heaving dancefloor, a woman making strange, guttural noises, and an idyllic beach that, upon closer inspection, is just a mirage. Apparently, all this rich imagery amounts to a potential conflict between my own desires and societal expectations. Gentle food for thought, but hardly illuminating. To the developers' credit, the AI is annoyingly even-keeled: it avoids absolutes, reminds me that dreams have multiple meanings and recommends therapy should my dreams begin to get the better of me. The only thing that catches me off guard are the strange, AI-generated visuals; the hotel quest conjures a pair of dancing potatoes and the inexplicable phrase 'PLE8T PABET'. In contrast, when I share this dream with an in-person community of dream enthusiasts, their insights are genuinely surprising, from noting my strong sense of purpose throughout the quest to observing how unease in a hotel setting evokes films such as The Shining and Lost in Translation. While the app doesn't exactly shatter and rebuild my sense of self, it has some handy functionalities, such as the ability to identify and search recurring symbols in your dreams. (Try filtering years of handwritten journals for 'mother'.) And it's certainly convenient to grasp for my phone to catch fleeting, early-morning dream fragments, though I still find myself transcribing these digitised dreams back into my diary. Part of the pleasure of traversing my dreamscape is the ritual element of morning pages over a coffee. The warm glow of the screen kills the romance, especially as I invariably end up on another corner of my phone, spiritually further away from any potential revelations. Perhaps my dream practice is meant to be tactile and reflective, rather than efficient and gamified. Days later, while I'm pondering what might be lost to humanity should we collectively opt to train algorithms on these sacred messages from our psyches (and wondering what I might inadvertently reveal about myself in writing this article), I have a vivid, alarming dream. I'm standing in front of an audience, preparing to do a presentation on dreams, when a figure from my past interrupts and threatens to read from the dream journal I've carelessly left on my seat. Filled with rage, I force him to recite from his own dream diary, which he does in a silly goblin voice. 'Don't you like me any more? I thought you once loved me?' he presses. The AI interpretation confirms what I already know: my dreams are shy, demure and resolute that at least some of my private interior landscape should remain that way. In the coming days, my dreams cease entirely, giving the eerie sense that my subconscious is on strike, refusing to clock back on until I promise not to sell it out to AI. Unable to conceive of the drudgery of a life without dreams, I delete the app and any trace of my dream data with it. I uploaded my dreams to AI and all I got was the revelation that my subconscious is a tech-averse luddite. Tara Kenny is an arts and culture writer based in Naarm/Melbourne
CBS News
27-01-2025
- Entertainment
- CBS News
San Francisco's famed Sam Wo Restaurant may have closed for good
A venerable San Francisco Chinese restaurant with an extensive history has officially closed its doors for the foreseeable future. The Sam Wo Restaurant is believed to have served its first meal soon after the 1906 earthquake at its original location at 816 Washington St. The Chinatown institution has been run by the same family for generations and was reportedly a late-night hangout during the 1950s frequented by such Beat generation poets as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. Known for its late hours, no-frills food and surly service, the restaurant gained fame in the '60s as the home of Edsel Ford Fong, who earned a reputation as the "world's rudest waiter." The Sam Wo Restaurant has been featured in numerous San Francisco guidebooks and during its history hosted such notable visitors as China's president, David Letterman and a host of other celebrities. The restaurant's original Washington St. location was shut down due to health code violations and fire safety issues in 2012. It eventually reopened in 2015 on nearby Clay Street. According to reports last fall, the restaurant's lease was set to end in January of 2025. With no buyers stepping up to acquire the business and main chef and part owner David Ho retired, it appears that the establishment had its last day in operation on Sunday. So far, there is no word on the restaurant continuing at the 713 Clay location or elsewhere.
