"Her fans are legion – among them Ali Smith, Colm Tóibín and Dave Eggers – and she has won many honours, including the International Booker prize." But you'll never find her work at the behemoth online. - The Guardian (UK)
Yambo Ouologuem insisted he had done nothing wrong in writing his 1968 novel Le Devoir de violence (Bound to Violence). But he refused to explain why and stalked away from Paris back home to Mali to stew in his fury. Were his borrowings actually a literary technique? - The New York Times
A string of job postings from high-profile training data companies, such as Scale AI and Appen, are recruiting poets, novelists, playwrights, or writers with a PhD or master’s degree. - Rest of World
This comes after the not-for-profit journal’s applications for funding were rejected by Arts Council England for three consecutive years. The charity relied on this funding for “a substantial portion of its annual budget” between 2011-2021, read the statement. - The Guardian
"In the U.S., bringing a heritage language back into a family usually comes down to the efforts of individuals. The parents I spoke with who taught their children a heritage language that they themselves didn’t speak fluently had essentially organized their own lives around the effort." - MSN (The Atlantic)
Perhaps chopping prose into tokens is not how I would like to be read. But then, who am I to say what my work is good for, how it might benefit someone—even a near-trillion-dollar company? - The Atlantic
Fred Kaplan, defense columnist for Slate: "When pressed with an even mildly confounding question, the machine just makes stuff up. Which makes me wonder: how will it learn how to write good literature, useful technical manuals, entertaining joke books, or anything else that anyone might want to read?" - MSN (Slate)
Alex Reisner has put together a searchable database of the volumes that Mark Zuckerberg's tech colossus used, without permission, to train LLaMA, its generative AI program — the subject of three different copyright lawsuits (so far) by authors. - MSN (The Atlantic)
Much of the landscape of North America was new to the English, so many early word inventions applied to the natural world. Often these simply combined a noun with an adjective: backcountry, backwoods (and backwoodsman), back settlement, pine barrens, canebrake, salt lick, foothill, underbrush, bottomland, cold snap. - Lapham's Quarterly
