Extraordinary Sunshine Weaver

One day I shall burst my bud of calm and blossom into hysteria. 
~ Christopher Fry

As I said in a prior post, my book The Lost Book of Zeroth was inspired by an android robot named Sophia wanting to have a robot baby. As I explored her human desire, I wondered about whether AI and AI robots are sentient or close to it. I learned more about AI and found a rich source for plot lines in poems and stories in every day news.

We are smitten by AI. Artificial intelligence can help writers do research quickly, edit, translate, create images, plot novels, and even write books. When I asked Canva’s Dream Lab to create an image of a robot goddess, I failed to click on the correct function. AI spewed out pages of plot lines for a fantasy book about my robot goddess Zeroth. Because AI is a bottom-dweller, scraping ideas from various sources on the internet, I wouldn’t dare use those plot lines. I consider AI-composed writing to be cheating.

My point is people may expect my book to be written by artificial intelligence because— why not? Others are doing it. Amazon Kindle is being flooded by them. Also, recently I read that people think AI-composed poetry is better than human-composed poetry. While writing my book, I read a couple of poetry books composed by AI. If you’re curious, check out I Am Code. Programmers describe the systematic way they created and chose the poems. They even asked well-known poets to review some of the poems to see if the poems had human qualities. As an editor, I am concerned about people possibly submitting AI-generated poems and fiction, but I can easily run submissions through a checker.

Artificial intelligence is a powerful but immature tool. Do you recall the misinformation (hallucinations) AI reported on Google’s AI Overviews last year? I included some of AI’s famous hallucinations in my book. Put glue on pizza to hold the cheese on. Eat one rock a day for good health. AI scraped an off-hand comment from Reddit to report the suggestion for glue on pizza. In my book, I had fun with some of AI’s sloppy thinking and even created other fictional cases. 

Today I read about another case of AI hallucinating. A health science teacher laminated an AI-generated poster about the human respiratory system and hung it in the classroom. Take a look. The parts of the respiratory system are misspelled and the parts are misplaced. Perhaps the teacher was trying to make a humorous point? But it’s laminated and on display with other educational material. OK. I could go off on why we shouldn’t neglect our children’s education. And I wonder about how we are educating teachers if this poster is considered a serious teaching tool.

You can learn more about AI hallucinations here.

As fascinated by AI people are, they fear its potential. The creators of the AI robots sometimes play off the fear by programming their robots to state they will destroy humanity. I’m still saving articles about the dangers of AI. Some AI  systems have been disconnected because of growing sentience. Because AI still makes errors in reporting information, how can we trust this unstable tool to run society, replace us at work, do our research, run weapons systems, and the list goes on. Humanoid AI robots are rolling out each day to help us at work, at home, in hospitals, and at nursing homes. Can we replace human caregivers?

People are calling for regulations to control AI development. While writing my book, I studied sections of Taming the Machine: Ethically harness the power of AI (Kogan Page Limited, 2024) by Nell Watson. She states the dangers of unregulated AI and gives clear solutions. 

All said, my book exploits our fears about artificial intelligence and pokes fun at life’s absurdities. One of my favorite essays is Christopher Fry’s on tragedy and comedy. He writes about the fine line between the two. In my book The Lost Book of Zeroth, I walk that fine line. This is why I feel…

All satire makes fear ludicrous so that we can transmute screams of despair into healing laughter.

The Lost Book of Zeroth Is Live!

Thank you for helping to spread the word about my book! Purchasing it and reading it! You’re the best!