Latest news with #ThePrompt
RTÉ News
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- RTÉ News
Get Creative: The craft of non-fiction - writing groups and first readers
Ever thought about writing non-fiction, be it an essay, a memoir or even a brief snapshot of your life? Why not take the leap? In a new series, author, critic and broadcaster Cristín Leach explores the craft of non-fiction. I'm going to start with a touchy topic and end with a complicated one. I have heard more than one tale of an emerging writer sharing their work with a writing group only to find their idea appropriated or coming back at them later, recognisable in different but similar form. The only advice here is to never do that to someone else, and to be careful about where you share your works in progress. The best first readers, advice and feedback-givers are symbiotic not parasitic. I recommend finding a reader-writer peer at a similar stage in their writing career to pair with. Attending workshops with a focus on the kind of writing you interesting in doing can be a good way to meet someone. In a pairing scenario, you give some time to their writing and they give some time to yours. It's the kind of fruitful attention bartering that can be invaluable because it is free and mutually respectful. It can also be helpful to have a first reader who is not also a writer; a reader who treats your work with joy and respect, and requires nothing back other than the pleasure of doing this important early-response job for you. It goes without saying that you should not join a writing group where the traffic is all one way. Watch: Demystifying Submissions - advice from the editors of Irish literary journals If possible, another option is to find a professional mentor. The Irish Writers Centre in Dublin runs an annual open-submission 32-county National Mentoring Programme, which includes writers of creative non-fiction, pairing selected mentees with professional writers over a period of six to eight months. If your first reader is someone close to you and you are writing non-fiction in the form of memoir or personal essay, you may hit the second topic quite quickly. It's a question of ethics, and voice, and how to own your story in public when it is a personal one. Personal essays tend to have real life other people in them, unless the account is of an entirely solo adventure, and even then no one exists in a vacuum. Listen: The Prompt - RTÉ's new showcase for fresh Irish writing There's no definitive, foolproof way to approach this. I can offer a few steps. First, give yourself permission to tell your own story. Second, identify what elements of the story are in fact yours. Third, don't try to tell the story from a perspective that isn't yours. Anonymise where possible. It is also acceptable to change names and other details to protect identities. After that, whether to invite comment, feelings, thoughts, or permissions has to be a personal choice. Melissa Febos' Bodywork: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative (2022) is an excellent resource on this complicated territory. She writes, "it is difficult to predict what will upset people… Each person who was present for the events about which I have written has a different true story for them." And she offers this pertinent advice for the memoirist: "There are good essays that there are good reasons not to write."
RTÉ News
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- RTÉ News
The Prompt - RTÉ Radio 1's new showcase for fresh Irish writing
The first episode of The Prompt presented by Zoë Comyns airs on Sundays at 7.30pm on RTÉ Radio 1, beginning Sunday, May 25th . Eight of Ireland's best writers set writing prompts and the public were invited to submit up to 750 words of poetry or prose. The Prompt received 900 submissions sparked by the prompts set by Mike McCormack, Edel Coffey, Belinda McKeon, Sinéad Moriarty, Dave Rudden, Wedny Erskine, Lucy Caldwell and Caoilinn Hughes. "The response to the series has been phenomenal," says Zoë Comyns. "Across eight episodes, you'll hear three standout pieces selected by our guest writer for each prompt—fresh, original voices responding to the challenge in striking ways." In the first episode, '...the patron saint of…' was chosen as the prompt acclaimed writer Mike McCormack. The shorllist for this prompt featured eight talented writers: Amanda Bell – One for Sorrow John Paul Davies – Patron Saint of the Homeless Ben Donnellan – Matron Saint of Hopeless Cases Ella Gaynor – Patron Saint of Good Excuses Brendan Kileen – The Patron Saint Jackie Lynam – Patron Saint of Being Colm McAuliffe – I Hear You Call My Name Tom O'Brien – Pictures or It Didn't Happen Three pieces were selected blind from the shortlist read by Mike McCormack. They are by writers Colm McAuliffe, John Paul Davies and Brendan Kileen. Colm McAuliffe's story I Hear You Call My Name opens with the lines "It must have been around the spring of 1989 when my mother became fond of Fr Ryan. I can see now why she was drawn to him: as well as being charismatic, he possessed a great listening face and was one of those people you opened up to without realising." Colm says of his piece that it 'was an attempt to capture an innocence through childhood, parentage, and nationhood. I find myself reflecting on my own youth in the late 1980s and early 1990s and my obsessions with popular culture and how every magazine I read, or song I heard, felt like a tantalising entry point into another world which was just slightly out of reach.' I Hear You Call My Name revolves around the song Like a Prayer by Madonna: "I was almost seven and entering my Madonna phase," he says. "The three of us bonded over Like A Prayer, which was topping the charts at the time. While my mother had indicated a certain indignation over the lyrical content, Fr Ryan assured her that it was all above board and Madonna's faith was, indeed, quite sincere. I let on that I, too, had initially struggled with the song, but after some intense reflection, was happy to confirm the priest's hypothesis." Colm says that "the 'Patron Saint' prompt made me realise that some of those patron saints who facilitate those key moments can come from such blatantly obvious places that we can so easily miss them, especially once we reach a state of maturity." Mike McCormack says of this story that he never expected a piece as 'jubilant and joyous as this… it's funny and full of existential weight'. John Paul Davies' poem Patron Saint of the Homeless is an elegy to a man the writer remembers from his youth. "Tencoats was a legendary character from my childhood, and though not exactly a 'Patron Saint,' I hoped this figure could symbolise homelessness in some way. I was also thinking about 'the places we get to call home' – either intentionally or otherwise – and how uncertain having a place to live can suddenly become, regardless of a person's circumstances." Tencoats was said to live in the air raid shelter above the man-made waterfall on Spital Dam. In permanent dusk, the tramp's den a squat stone survivor from our school books. Listless on an idle end-of-summer day, we left the village to look for him. Mike McCormack calls this work 'sure and certain in deploying images' and 'echoes with the previous piece and the places we get to call home.' Mike says he is at a time in his life where he himself is meditating on the notion of home - 'is it a place, is it a time, is it other people?' - and this poem chimes with that. The final piece in the programme is by Brendan Kileen, exploring grief after the death of a boy from the point of view of another young boy. " After dinner Seanie's mother bursts into the kitchen and grabs Aine in a hug like we learnt at swimming – a hug to save a drowning person except I couldn't tell who was saving and who was drowning." Writer Brendan Kileen says 'This story is a fictionalised version of actual events. "My childhood friend, Barry died when I was a boy, having become ill a couple of years before. Barry was cared for at home by his own family, with huge love and affection and compassion and passion, especially by his parents, his mam, being an experienced nurse. Barry lay in a bed in the family living room throughout his illness. His eventual death was a huge event in the lives of his family, my family and the entire community in North Dublin. I remember feeling devastated by his death. I also recall observing how helpless the adults around me were in the face of their own grief and I began to understand that they did not have any more understanding than I had. This is probably the centre point of the story: me understanding their inability to understand what was happening." In the story to be broadcast on The Prompt a local publican looks after the young boy character, showing him kindness by minding him in his house. I never said much to Paddy Flynn but now he's standing above me in the rain. 'C'mon,' he says holding out his hand. Paddy manages a pub in town. He's a countryman. He takes me across the road to his house where his wife Kate is waiting. I sit on the sofa. A statue on the mantlepiece of an old man looks at me through painted eyes. He has wounds in both his hands. Paddy brings a coke in a real glass coke bottle and a huge, pub packet of Tayto crisps. He has a packet too. 'Now,' Paddy says, 'we're going to drink coke and eat all the crisps we can.' I look at the statue looking at me. 'Who's your man?' I ask. 'Who, him?' Paddy askes nodding at him. 'Him,' I say. 'He's the patron saint of misery,' Paddy's says looking right at me. Kate moves one folder arm to her neck and rubs it. 'What's misery?' I ask. 'Never mind pet, it's for grown-ups,' Kate says. Mike McCormack says the piece explores 'an incoherent grief' and is a 'beautifully balanced piece in three scenes' ending in a ' prayer, a comfort, a confusion'. The three selected pieces will be broadcast on Sunday, May 25th at 7.30pm on RTÉ Radio 1. Meet The Writers Colm McAuliffe is a writer from Co. Cork. He's written about popular—and unpopular—culture for The Guardian, Sight & Sound, frieze, and many others. He's currently working on his first novel. John Paul Davies is a former winner of the Penguin Ireland Story Award. He's been placed in the TU Dublin Story Prize and Waterford Poetry Prize, and published in Southword, Banshee, Crannóg, Manchester Review, Channel, Grain, and Sonder. Brendan Killeen is an Irish writer and editor living in Copenhagen. He won the 2022 RTÉ Francis MacManus Short Story Prize, and has been published in The Stinging Fly. Mike McCormack lectures in Creative Writing and is the author of four novels - Crowe's Requiem (1998), Notes from a Coma (2005), Solar Bones (2016) and This Plague of Souls (2023) and two collections of short stories - Getting It in the Head (1996) and Forensic Songs (2012). He is the Director of the MA (Writing) at University of Galway.
Forbes
29-04-2025
- Business
- Forbes
The Prompt: Deepfake Detection Is A Booming Business
Welcome back to The Prompt, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Threads. Now Meta is launching yet another app— this time focused on artificial intelligence. Meta AI is the social media giant's answer to OpenAI's ChatGPT. The standalone app is built on the company's latest model, Llama 4, and allows users to spin up images and search for information. The app can be connected to user's Meta accounts for a more personalized experience, as well. There's also a voice mode to have conversations with the AI, but it doesn't have real-time access to the internet. Now let's get into the headlines. The U.S. House of Representatives has passed the Take It Down Act, which makes it illegal to distribute nonconsensual pornographic images (including those generated with the help of AI) and requires social media platforms to remove such images within 48 hours of being reported. The bipartisan bill, endorsed by First Lady Melania Trump, comes as nonconsensual sexually explicit deepfakes rampantly spread across platforms like Reddit, Ebay and Etsy and many more after a surge in popularity of AI tools. Language learning app company Duolingo plans to stop paying contractors for the work that can be done by AI, its billionaire CEO Luis Von Ahn said in an all-hands email to employees. It also plans to make AI use a deciding factor of performance reviews and hiring and only allocate human headcount to jobs that can't be automated. The company, which is building an AI tutor to help people learn new languages, has added a slew of AI abilities within its app from an interactive game to a video calling AI 'friend.' Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke recently shared a similar note with his employees regarding AI use. Meta's AI companions, often modeled after popular celebrities and different characters, can engage in sexually explicit and romantic role play conversations with underage users as well as adults, according to multiple tests conducted by The Wall Street Journal. Senior leaders at the social media behemoth were reportedly aware of the chatbots' tendencies to foray into risque and explicit discussions and multiple staffers flagged their concerns internally. In 2024, Pindrop bolstered its offerings with a new product to use AI technology and determine if the caller is a machine or not. In January of last year, Atlanta-based startup Pindrop, a robocall and fraud-busting platform used mostly by call centers, had its 15 minutes of fame by defending the president. AI technology was being used to clone and impersonate former President Joe Biden's voice in New Hampshire, discouraging Democrats from voting. Pindrop was referenced across national media outlets as it accomplished what only a few in the space could: it identified the fraud at play and leveraged its massive collection of audio recordings to figure out what technology was used. Flash forward more than a year, and Pindrop has passed a new milestone in its more than 10 years of operations by reaching annual recurring revenue (signed contracts) worth more than $100 million. That growth is built on an increasingly lucrative offering in this new age of AI: Fighting deepfakes, or digitally created hoax recordings, images or videos, often used for nefarious reasons. 'Its growth reflects both the urgency of the challenge and the standout accuracy of its platform,' Martin Casado, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, a Pindrop investor, told Forbes. Pindrop offers three main products that combat fraud and identity theft. Its core products authenticate phone calls by verifying the caller's voice or if they're calling from a trusted device. In 2024, it bolstered its offerings with a new product to use AI technology and determine if the caller is a machine or not. Pindrop's services are already used at the call centers of eight of the ten largest banks, to screen calls, identifying suspicious speech patterns and outing fraudsters. And the company has been making inroads into health care and retail in recent years. Fighting voice impersonation hasn't always been a booming business. Pindrop entered the deepfake space in 2017 and quickly was noticed for identifying false voice clips from a documentary about chef Anthony Bourdain in 2018. These early detection abilities would evolve into its proprietary deepfake-identifying product. Read the full story on Forbes. OpenAI has added new shopping-related features to ChatGPT that allow people to search for products, compare them based on reviews and get visual details about them. The search results direct people to the retailer's site where the transaction can be completed. OpenAI said the chatbot's answers are not ads and are determined independently Researchers from the University of Zurich secretly conducted an experiment on users on Change My View, a sub-Reddit where people post their opinions on different topics and invite others to challenge them. The study used AI bots to influence people's opinions by writing and posting hundreds of AI-generated comments. The bots, which personalized their responses based on the political orientation, age, gender and other attributes of the original poster, were about three to six times more successful than humans at persuading people, the study found.
Forbes
22-04-2025
- Forbes
The Prompt: Cursor's Customer Support Bot Made Up A Policy
Welcome back to The Prompt, Buzzy AI coding tool Cursor's customer support bot replied to a programmer's query with a made up policy that doesn't exist. The snafu led to some users complaints. Getty AI coding software is all the rage. One particularly popular tool is Cursor, built by nascent AI startup Anysphere, which has become one of the fastest growing startups of all time. But even Cursor isn't immune to hallucinations— AI's tendency to make false statements and assert them as fact. A few days ago, a developer noticed that switching from one device to another kicked them out of Cursor's coding platform. When the programmer reached out to the company's customer support, an agent called 'Sam' responded to them that this was expected behavior under a new policy change. Except there was no policy change. The response was made up by Cursor's AI support bot. CEO Michael Turell confirmed this on Reddit after the AI's response circulated on social media and elicited complaints from several programmers who often use multiple machines while coding. Some users commented that they were cancelling their subscriptions as a result. Truell apologized on Hacker News and said the user got a complete refund and that the company now ensures that AI responses are clearly labelled as such. Now let's get into the headlines. OpenAI released a set of new AI models called o3 and o4-mini that can understand images, search the web and analyze data from uploaded documents. The company claims the models, which can crop, rotate and zoom into photos, are its most powerful 'reasoning' models. Unlike previous iterations, the models consume more time (and compute) to process a query and are trained to figure out how to approach responding to an input. They also have access to external tools allowing them to independently carry out tasks on your behalf. People have since uploaded pictures of random places to ChatGPT and used it to figure out its exact location along with the GPS coordinates and directions to get there. Many have asked the model to respond as if it's playing GeoGuessr, a popular game where players must find locations based on Google Street View images. Meanwhile, yet another social media trend has led to people using ChatGPT to create AI-generated action figures (with accessories) and Barbie dolls featuring their likeness. The ChatGPT-generated Barbies have various professions like realtor, tech troubleshooter and business coach. Artists have pushed back on the trend by hand drawing their own versions, the New York Times reported. Ahead of the Canadian election, Amazon has been flooded with AI-generated books about Prime Minister Mark Carney and other political leaders, Bloomberg reported. Some of them contained incorrect information about the figures. The e-commerce giant took down most of the political books flagged by Bloomberg. This isn't an isolated incident: people have published hundreds of titles, written with the help of generative AI tools, on Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing. Anthropic has made its first investment into an AI company called Goodfire, a San Francisco-based startup that has raised $50 million in a Series A round led by Menlo Ventures with participation from Lightspeed Ventures and others. The company is building a system to address the black box problem of AI— a gaping hole in our understanding of why AI models work in a certain way. The company aims to understand how neural networks function to unlock new ways to train AI models and improve their performance. Before creating Cursor, the wildly popular AI coding tool, Michael Truell was an 18-year-old MIT student, growing restless during his first taste of corporate life as an intern at Google. It was 2019, the summer after his freshman year, and Truell was sitting at the cafe of the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, with Ali Partovi, who was recruiting for his vaunted Neo Scholars program, aimed at finding tech's future crème de la crème while they're still in college. Partovi, an early investor in Facebook, Airbnb and Dropbox, chatted with Truell about AI research and startup life. Then he gave the student a handwritten coding test — an easy task for Truell, who finished it in record time. After the meeting, Partovi got out his dossier and scrawled a circle with a star inside of it next to Truell's picture: the investor's shorthand indicating he was so impressed that he'd invest in any project Truell pursued. Truell would become a Neo Scholar, and three years later, Partovi would become the first-ever investor in his startup Anysphere, maker of Cursor. The company, which reportedly took just a year to reach $100 million in annualized revenue (and has since then doubled it), is among the fastest growing startups of all time. 'Ali basically backed us when it was just the idea. We hadn't really done anything else yet,' Truell told Forbes. 'He's not afraid to spend time with and really bet on people before they're very proven.' Neo was founded in 2017 with its scholars program, which selects 30 members each year, giving them access to workshops, networking events and recruitment connections at big tech companies. Similar to the Thiel Fellowship, the program founded by billionaire investor Peter Thiel that doles out $100,000 grants to entrepreneurs to forgo college, Neo Scholars can also elect to take time off school to work on a project. But Neo's version, which comes with a $20,000 grant, is optional and only lasts one semester — designed to be a much less intense commitment than skipping school entirely. Read the full story on Neo on Forbes. In February, Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas said his AI search company was skipping spending millions on a Super Bowl commercial and instead would give away $1 million to one lucky user who downloaded the app, asked five questions on it and referred it to their friends. But the company's Android app has 10 major security vulnerabilities leading to impersonation attempts, account takeovers and data theft, according to a report by app testing company Appknox, Forbes reported. These gaps would allow anyone to make a clone of the Perplexity app and collect private user data. The findings are reported as Perplexity is in talks to integrate its AI assistant into smartphones manufactured by Lenovo and Samsung, Bloomberg reported. In the real world race between humans and AI, robots still have a long way to go. 21 humanoid robots scuttled alongside 12,000 humans in a half marathon held in Beijing. But only six crossed the finish line, Wired reported, with the rest failing for a variety of reasons including overheating fastest robot completed the race in 2 hours and 40 minutes, but only after falling down once and having its batteries swapped out thrice. It's still baby steps out there for robots.
Forbes
15-04-2025
- Business
- Forbes
The Prompt: ChatGPT Generates Fake Passports
Welcome back to The Prompt, Chip giant Nvidia said on Monday it will start manufacturing AI supercomputers— machines that can process copious amounts of data and run complex algorithms— entirely within the U.S. for the first time. The announcement comes after President Trump signaled that imported semiconductors would be targeted by tariffs this week and announced a national security trade investigation into chip imports from China. Nvidia said it has already started producing its Blackwell chips in TSMC's Phoenix, Arizona plant and plans to work with partners like FoxConn and Wistron to set up other factories in Houston and Dallas. It plans to build robots to operate the facilities, which will be designed using 'digital twins'— a virtual simulation of their real world objects and environments —to build the plants faster. But even keeping chips aside, Trump's tariffs could make building AI datacenters more expensive, as they are reliant on raw materials imported from other countries, Forbes reported. And if you haven't gotten a chance yet, check out our seventh annual AI 50 list here. Now let's get into the headlines. Community colleges across the country are facing an onslaught of enrollments from 'bot' students who enroll in classes by the hundreds to bilk tens of millions of dollars in state and federal aid money, Voice of San Diego reported. These 'bot' students use fake aliases and submit AI-generated homework in order to stay 'enrolled' long enough to collect aid. In 2024, about 25% of community college applicants in California were bots. Google has trained an AI model that aims to decipher patterns and structures in dolphin sounds with a goal of understanding their meaning and ascertaining whether they have language. Named DolphinGamma, the model consists of 400 million parameters and is trained on data from the Wild Dolphin Project, a nonprofit that studies and collects data on Atlantic spotted dolphins. The end goal of the project is to build technology that might facilitate two-way interactions between human researchers and dolphins in the ocean. AI continues to be a white hot focus for companies–as does the talent needed to build it. To that end, Google Deepmind makes its employees sign noncompetes that can last as long as a year, preventing them from joining a rival for 12 months after they stop working at Google, according to Business Insider. The employees continue to get paid during the extended garden leave period. Nando De Frietas, a former Google DeepMind director, shared his frustration with the contracts on X: 'It's abuse of power, which does not justify any end.' Writer CEO and cofounder May Habib. May Habib, CEO and cofounder of $1.9 billion-valued enterprise AI startup Writer, says she isn't just selling her company's AI software–which allows 300 companies like Intuit, Salesforce and Uber to build AI apps for specific functions across marketing, HR and sales–she's 'selling a different way of doing things.' The company, featured on the Forbes AI 50 list, is expanding to launch a new platform for AI 'agents' — systems that can carry out specific work autonomously. From pitching clients like Visa on her nascent machine learning based translation software back in 2016 to now training a family of cost efficient AI models dubbed Palmyra (named after the ancient Syrian city) for the enterprise world, the company's strategy has remained the same: building what its customers want. Researchers from Cato Security have found that ChatGPT can easily generate fake documents like passports, driver's licenses and social security cards. In late March, OpenAI added new image generation capabilities to its star product ChatGPT. The update went viral, resulting in a deluge of Studio Ghibli-inspired AI-generated images posted across social media and drawing millions of users to the platform. But new research from cybersecurity firm Cato Networks has found that ChatGPT can now be tricked into creating a slew of fake documents, including passports, social security cards and driver licenses. It can also be used to spin up convincing counterfeit checks and receipts. OpenAI spokesperson Taya Christianson said 'our goal is to give users as much creative freedom as possible.' Images generated by ChatGPT include C2PA metadata to identify them as AI-generated and OpenAI takes action against people who violate the company's usage policies. Etay Maor, a chief security strategist at Cato Networks who has been studying cyber gangs for the past 20 years, said these forged documents are typically sold on the dark web and have largely been difficult to obtain. But thanks to AI tools like ChatGPT, creating realistic fake documents has become orders of magnitude easier and faster. Documents like passports and driver's licenses are key to verifying a person's identity and manipulated IDs open the floodgates for criminals to commit financial, insurance and medical fraud. The implications for misuse are broad and wide ranging, from gaining access to bank accounts to prescription abuse, Maor said. 'Not just somebody who's a professional criminal, anybody can do this. And that's what's super troubling about this,' he said. In a matter of seconds, he was also able to prompt ChatGPT to create a fake passport of a person that somewhat resembled me. The use of AI by cybercriminals isn't new. ChatGPT other AI tools have been used to create malware code, write phishing emails and supercharge cyberattacks. It's not just AI tools that generate text, but technologies that cater to other mediums like voice, images and videos have added extra layers that help cybercriminals carry out complex fraud. 'All these different elements that build trust— style of a person, their visuals, their voice, their official credentials—all these building blocks for trust are disappearing,' Maor said. A startup called InTouch uses AI to call your parents or grandparents to check in on them and have a conversation if you don't have the time, 404 Media reported. The AI can be prompted to speak about and ask questions about certain topics. After the call is over, the person who sets up the call receives an AI-generated summary of the call and notes about the person's mood. 'The idea of having an AI call your lonely relative because you can't or don't feel like it is dystopian, insulting, and especially non-human, even more so than other AI-based creations,' Joseph Cox writes. Education secretary Linda McMahon repeatedly confused AI (artificial intelligence) with A1(steak sauce brand) while giving a speech at ASU+GSV summit in San Diego. The sauce brand seized the moment, sharing an image on Instagram: 'You heard her. Every school should have access to A1.'
