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The ocean looks so peaceful until it’s not

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Right now I am thinking of all those trying to sort out the damage left in the wake of Idalia. The name is so pretty, but the destruction she’s leaving behind her is not.

Here are three things I never knew, but have picked from the various reports on the hurricane. The first is the exact location of the ‘Big Bend’. It’s an undeveloped natural area, in the wide indent near the top edge of the west coast of Florida. Maps will explain it better than me, but the main point is that it’s not usually where hurricanes make landfall.

The second piece of information is that the reason some of the most dangerous hurricanes begin with the letter ‘I’ is that by the mid-point of hurricane season – June to November – the storms are usually at their most deadly, and the naming tends to have reached the middle of the alphabet.

The final piece of new knowledge for me, is that storm surges can often cause more destruction than high wind strengths due to the weight and volume of water. In Idalia’s case the situation could be made worse by the large tidal range in the area combined with the gravitational pull of this week’s super moon.

It looks a hazardous combination. I just hope that Idalia will prove gentler than expected. Thinking of everyone.

Copyright Georgie Knaggs & The Phraser 2023

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Artificial intelligence – feels like it’s closing in

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I’ve just sat in on a fascinating talk hosted by the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain (WGGB) looking at how writers might get along in future with ChatGPT and all its cousins. Not sure there were any answers, but it made me think.

These are a rough outline of the main points that I took away from the talk:

  1. Many of the artificial intelligence tools are being created in America.
  2. The capability of these tools (whether intelligent or not) is improving rapidly.
  3. They mine open source data voraciously, without being particularly mindful of copyright.
  4. Their appeal to ‘bottom line’ enthusiasts is enormous.
  5. They require considerable resources to run, both human and environmental, which jeopardises both their ‘ethical’ and their ‘sustainability’ credentials.

How should the creative industries respond? We all pondered this, not quite sure about the answer, but cheered by news that apparently an American court had ruled that content created solely by artificial intelligence could not be copyrighted. This should link to a piece in The Guardian giving more context to this ruling.

So how then to value the work created by humans? Perhaps one way forward might be for individual writers to apply for something equivalent to a trademark to provide assurance that work carrying the mark has been created by an idientifiable individual, and that no ChatGPT or its like have been used. Use of such tools would disqualify use of trademarks. In other words we would be certifying ourselves and our work as ‘organically human’ (and, ideally, sustainable, ethical, and perhaps listed as originating from a particular region).

I may be a bit late with this idea but I thought I’d put it out there.

Copyright Georgie Knaggs & The Phraser 2023

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A thought on Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

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I have had the great good fortune of being lent a hardback copy of this novel. It is a big book – some 550 pages in this edition – and I am a little over halfway through, the reason being that I only manage a few pages a day.

Why so slow? Lack of time is the main reason, plus the distractions drawing me otherwards. However, I treasure the few daily pages I have with Demon Copperhead, and have no desire to leave him to his fate unread. His resiliance and his voice draw me behind him, as he navigates his way into and through worlds I know little about.

Today, I sneaked a few extra pages, and opened the book at the end of the chapter where I had left it. As I turned to the start of the next I read these opening lines:

“Where does the road to ruin start? That’s the point of getting all this down, I’m told. To get the handle on some choice you made. Or was made for you. By the bullies that curdled your heart’s milk and honey, or the ones that went before and curdled theirs.”

Demon Copperhead, by Barbara Kingsolver – opening lines of Chapter 41 – (Faber and Faber)

I’m looking forward to finding out the remainder of the story. I fear it may not end well for Demon Copperhead.

Copyright Georgie Knaggs & The Phraser 2023