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Joseph,

btw - I have tons of restrictions and criticisms about ChatGPT.

So forgive me for not going into your last post. Turns out, in terms of reality, it's not about me. And now that I know you were talking about ChatGPT, my own comments about what you wrote will need revision.

Ah hell... Let's just leave all this up as is.

It happened. It's cute...

We don't need to fake reality, but we can laugh.

Everybody reading this, just discount all of that shit...

:) 

 

I am going to open an AI section here on OL so that mistakes like this are less likely to occur.

AI is turning out to be too big a deal to leave as a tangent to other discussions.

:) 

Michael

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Now that the detour on this thread into artificial intelligence has been identified and put into a pigeonhole, I do want to put something here for the reader.

As you all know, I am moving into fiction writing.

That's one of the reasons the idea of questions is so important to me, even going back to 2009 and before.

In the post where I thought we were discussing questions (instead of AI), I wrote the following.

21 hours ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

Someday if you are interested in looking at Ayn Rand's Journal, you will see it peppered with lists of questions she asked herself in order to write, and that includes both fiction and nonfiction. Now that I have studied a lot of books on writing, I know for sure that writing out questions was a writing technique widely taught at the time and in the places Rand learned and polished her craft.

I can give you books and sources where this was taught at the time of Ayn Rand (for example, Jack Woodford, who's works on the craft of writing were studied by writer after writer after writer after famous writer. His most famous one was Trial and Error. I don't know if Rand ever read his works, but I am certain writers she knew, especially in Hollywood, knew about him and talked a lot about using questions as a writing tool.

 

For a more modern day version, but it is essentially old wine in a new bottle, I came across a gem on YouTube. Glenn Gers was a practicing screenwriter who decided to call it quits in order to write novels and other things. Since his career had been good to him, he even won an Emmy, he decided to leave a body of tutorial work for writers--for free! :)--that teaches most everything he figured out on his own about writing. Much of this includes books he has read and his opinions of this or that in them.

 

(btw - To tie this to the AI detour, Glenn thinks AI bot writers are a waste of time for creative people who want to write. I, personally, have played with OpenAI and ChatGPT and some other AI writing programs and have not found them useful except for brainstorming, becoming familiar with a topic in a beginning-like manner, and for a writing technique using lists that I will deal sometime when I talk about writing techniques. I tried several ways to use questions to draw out information from these AI bots, but I found no improvement from just saying what you want it to tell you about. More on this later and elsewhere.)

 

Getting back to Glenn Gers, one of his short videos is devoted to the question technique. In many of his videos, he discusses this question technique along with the topic he is addressing.

Enjoy.

 

I highly recommend you take this stuff to heart if you want to write.

It works.

Ask Ayn Rand...

Oops... That was a bit tasteless since she is deceased...

Read her Journal instead...

:)

Michael

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11 hours ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

This thread, and my opening post (which I wrote in 2009), is not about ChatGPT.

Dayamm.

I just keep making mistakes.

In the post Joseph Norris quoted me, I did mention OpenAI and how I used it to dig out some information about questions and neurochemicals. I guess it was not clear in the way I wrote, but I was still talking about questions, not about AI per se. I was using AI as a new source of information about questions like I would use a dictionary, or encyclopedia, or scan of old newspapers, or YouTube video, or any other source.

For example, when I wrote this:

On 1/11/2023 at 9:50 AM, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

Will you feel uncomfortable when you start to ask more questions than you normally do? Hell yes you will. It feels awkward.

Does it feel fake? Yup.

But here's the thing. It works.

I was talking about the feeling of when you ask questions of yourself, and when you ask questions in your messaging and writing, not when you use ChatGPT.

Here in O-Land, too many people adopt a preaching tone for their writing and make one declaration after another. News flash. That gets boring and tiresome real fast. Those are the people who will find peppering their writing and expression with questions uncomfortable.

(As an aside, I have a post I will make at some time talking about different nonfiction tones for writing that I came up with. Incidentally, I came up with it back at the time of writing that post. This declamation tone is what I call the mentor tone. Here is the list if you are interested: 1. Mentor or writing voice. 2. Witness voice. 3. Deep voice. 4. Blurting voice. 5. Serendipity voice.)

In that post where I revived this thread, I was talking about developing the skill of using questions to query your own subconscious and improve your message style, both to yourself and to others. The neurochemical and AI stuff was merely a deepening of that idea.

 

What a mess...

Well, that's why forum writing is not the same as writing a book.

Here is where we make our goofs. get feedback, and it's all good.

At least I'm fine with it.

:) 

Michael

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On 2/24/2023 at 12:18 PM, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

Joseph,

btw - I have tons of restrictions and criticisms about ChatGPT.

So forgive me for not going into your last post. Turns out, in terms of reality, it's not about me. And now that I know you were talking about ChatGPT, my own comments about what you wrote will need revision.

Ah hell... Let's just leave all this up as is.

It happened. It's cute...

Yep there was a lot of misunderstanding there. I think I might have messed up too.

Never mind.

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