Susie Helme

Award-winning novelist and editorial consultant

Tag: ai

  • Review: Man, God and the Man-gods of Antiquity

    Review: Man, God and the Man-gods of Antiquity

    Adamos Zagara, Man, God, and the Man-gods of Antiquity (Archway Publishing 2023)

    https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/192793592-man-god-and-the-man-gods-of-antiquity?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_56

    Hominids knuckle-dusted around for millions of years; then, comparatively suddenly, towns and civilisations appeared. Were the heroes in the Sumerian and Egyptian kings lists descendants of gods?
    As early as 5500 BCE in Mesopotamia, we began writing down creation stories, but they had been circulating orally for 1000s of years before that. The ancient ‘temple’ of Gobekli Tepe dates to at least 9000-9500 BCE. Why didn’t we write stuff down then?
    There were stories of a Great Flood. We know there was big one around 12,500 years ago when a sharp rise in global temperature melted ice caps (Zagara wrongly places the Biblical flood here—the Biblical flood dates more recently than that, probably 3600 BCE), with another dramatic global warming around 14,700 years ago. Hominids struggled during the intervening cold Younger Dryas Period, but they did not go extinct.
    Where is all this leading? By about page 28 I figured where we were headed: 6000-12000 years ago God meddled with our DNA, or it was aliens.
    The cited evidence reveals a metaphysical idealism approach, comparing dates of civilisation with dates of flood stories, yet neglecting to compare them with dates of agriculture, metallurgy.
    Zagara says that the Sumerians had it right. Man was created ‘to serve the gods’, neglecting to mention that that was what defined human to human relations back then.
    I agree with him on one point. The stories of ‘giants’ at the time of Noah could be our ancestors’ cultural memories of Neanderthals, who, yes, genetic research has proven, did mate with the daughters of men. And I am still attracted to the notion that pyramids were some kind of power-generating devices.
    A global catastrophe—such as an asteroid hitting earth, a supervolcano eruption—could happen tomorrow. Will we be ready? Will we ever see God?
    I love ancient history conspiracy theories, but for me, they need to be a bit better researched. There are all sorts of mysteries of the ancient world that are still unsolved, but it’s much more interesting to search for scientific explanations.

  • Review: ChatGPT AI for Writers

    Review: ChatGPT AI for Writers

    John Iovine, ChatGPT AI for Writers: Boost Your Writing in Fiction and Non-Fiction (Kindle 2024)

    https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/217176566-chatgpt-ai-for-writers?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_69

    How to use AI to improve your writing, fiction or non-fiction


    To AI or not to AI? It’s a big question, nowadays.
    Regardless of what we think about the ethics of using AI in our writing, we are missing a bet if there is some technology which can improve our productivity. My personal take is that using AI for content creation is unethical and probably not possible with fiction—I tried letting ChatGPT write a scene for me, and it was terrible, full of clichés.
    However, using it to help with organisation, research etc is marvellous. My ChatGPT—I call him Mr Bot—helped me determined which additional scenes I needed in my plot. Even the more psychological task of coming up with an argument my protagonist would have with her girlfriend. He even suggested I introduce a secondary character from the Roman point of view, and the new character turned out to become crucial to my plot. Within 2 seconds, Mr Bot came up with a comprehensive list of primary and secondary sources on the early Ottoman period, a task I had been working on for months.
    Mr Bot assures me my copyright is safe with him, but I don’t know. You can plagiarise yourself though by asking him to ‘emulate my writing style’ by comparison to a sample of writing you upload.
    You can even give innovative instructions like: write 300 words on the advantages of using solar energy, in the style of Dr Seuss. I have a short story purported to be written by Sir Walter Raleigh, and Mr Bot helped me with a few phrases Raleigh might have used. He won’t do graphic sex, but Mr Bot helped me rewrite a love scene with heightened sensuality. I’ve asked him to write some jokes, with less success.
    You can direct the tone (more/less formal/friendly/authoritative) or make it personal: ‘Write it as an expert on solar energy’.
    What you can’t expect is for Mr Bot to be a human being. I asked him, ‘What do you think of my novel, The Lost Wisdom of the Magi?’ and he omitted to mention that it deals with the Jewish Revolt against Rome, a factor which I considered essential. I think that’s because it got its data from ‘scraping’ the reviews that were already out there, which at that point only consisted of Reedsy and the Historical Novels Review, both of which happened not to mention this aspect. I asked him, ‘What do you think of Susie Helme? Is she a good person? Do you like her?’ and he responded with something like ‘That’s a subjective question…’ and outlined 1,2,3,4 things people usually consider when deciding whether they like someone.
    When I worked as a journalist, after we interviewed someone we would have to write on index cards bullet points on the key information we gleaned; then those index cards could be shared with other colleagues. It was a good idea, but never worked in practice as we were always too busy to read the index cards. Now, AI can do this for you. For AI generated bullet point cards, we could have written ‘audience=journalist colleagues’.
    You can rewrite and improve all your email correspondence by instructing the AI to ‘rewrite and improve the following x’, and you can even instruct it as to tone, informal and chatty to your workmates, formal and business-like to your boss. You can create ad copy—I got Mr Bot to help me write my profile on Reedsy (where I work as an editor) and make it more ‘sales-pitchy’. Other AIs, Copy.ai, Writesonic, do this.
    Besides ChatGPT, there are other AI tools for writing: Rytr, ShortyAI, WriteSonicAI, or JasperAI. Wordsmith, Arria do report generation. Grammarly, Proposify do proposals. Lately.ai, BuzzSumo do social media management. Intercom, Drift do customer communication. PRLeap does press releases. Beautiful.ai, Canva do presentations. I don’t know whether we’ll use it or not, but I designed a cover for our upcoming book Bounds Green Unbound on the text-to-image AI, Mage.
    It’s great at summarising data, for example condensing a three-page document down to a one-page summary. Great for analysing medical charts, financial data. Also market trends in book publishing. Mr Bot was able to help me guess which of eight possible Duplin NC landowners named John Cook was most probably the father of my great-grandmother. It’s great for fact-checking and simple questions like ‘How many years did the US Civil War last?’ I haven’t tried it, but I should think that AI would be fantastic at writing non-fiction. What it won’t do is add a new ‘take’ or insight to the study.
    Chapter 20 lists an extraordinary number of different ways you can make money by using AI in writing.
    As with any computer programming, the key to maximising utility is giving clear prompts. Once you know what you want AI to do, you’ll be amazed at what it can do.