AI-generated Short Stories

The technology philosopher and writer Oliver Bendel published the book “ARTIFACTS WITH HANDICAPS” on 24 September 2023. The information about the author reads: “Oliver Bendel featuring Ideogram and GPT-4”. In fact, the entire work was created with the help of generative AI. It consists of 11 images, each followed by a short story. This one deals with the imperfection of representation. Once a hand looks like that of a mummy, once a skateboard floats in the air above the wheels. But there is also one or another representation that looks perfect. In this case, the story explains what is different about the person, their history, or their behavior. Ultimately, it is about the otherness and the fact that this is in fact a special feature. The book is freely available and can be distributed and used as desired, with credit given to the authors, i.e. the artist and the AI systems. Oliver Bendel has been writing experimental literature, including digital literature, for 40 years. As of 2007, he was one of the best-known cell phone novelists in Europe. In 2010, he attracted attention with a volume of haiku – “handyhaiku” – in which the poems were printed in the form of QR codes. In 2020, the volume “Die Astronautin” was published, in which the poems are printed in the form of 3D codes. The standard work “Die Struktur der modernen Literatur” (“The Structure of Modern Literature”) by Mario Andreotti devotes two pages to the writer’s work.

CONVERSATIONS 2023 in Oslo

The CONVERSATIONS 2023, a two-day workshop on chatbot research, applications, and design, will take place at the University of Oslo, Norway. According to the CfP, contributions concerning applications of large language models such as the GPT family are warmly welcome, as are contributions on applications combining information retrieval approaches and large language model approaches. Building on the results from previous six CONVERSATIONS workshops, the following topics are of particular interest: 1. Chatbot users and implications, 2. Chatbot user experience, design, and evaluation, 3. Chatbot frameworks and platforms, 4. Chatbots for collaboration, 5. Democratizing chatbots – chatbots for all, 6. Ethics and safety implications of chatbots and large language models, 7. Leveraging advances in AI technology and large language models. More information via 2023.conversations.ws.