Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.
The Most Interesting AI-Generated Story Yet
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, touted a story “written” by their LLM is response to the prompt: “Please write a metafictional literary short story about AI and grief.” The resulting story is, I think it is fair to say, the most interesting “creative writing” product I have seen, and not because it is necessarily good, but because it is interestingly messy, plausible, and not without some virtues. Lincoln Michel goes sentence-level deep here, and I found myself nodding along to most of his analysis. For my part, it fall into a literary uncanny valley, neither bad enough to be laughable nor good enough to be “lifelike.” The strangeness of it is then all the more compelling and disturbing.
Disney Greenlights Percy Jackson Season Three Before Season Two Wraps Filming
Pretty surprised to see this news. In the middle-school world that I know through my daughter, this series is a hit, so in a way I am not shocked, but in this age of streaming and data and wild misses, I wonder what the urgency was to announce this. And I can confirm that excitement about a new character this announcement portends is real.
The Best Villain in Literature Is…..
I wonder if this same selection is made six months ago. That is not a critique, but rather the very understandable (and…right?) move to define villainy in terms of what is in the culture and politics of the moment would seem to in play here. I will also say this, if you beat out actual Satan to be the worst bad guy, you are indeed quite bad. Also, is Satan now…underrated?
Library Funding Targeted in New Trump Executive Order: What It Means & What To Do Now
Kelly Jensen covers a new Executive Order aimed at money for libraries and museums. Read her full write-up, which includes the following things you yourself can do RIGHT NOW:
Here’s how you can speak up in support of the IMLS and libraries right now:
- Sign the petition at EveryLibrary to stop Trump’s Executive Order seeking to gut the IMLS then share it with your networks.
- Write a letter to each of your Senators and to your Representative at the federal level. You can find your Senators here and your Representative here. All you need to say in this letter is that you, a resident of their district, demand they speak up and defend the budget of IMLS. Include a short statement of where and how you value the library, as well as its importance in your community. This can be as short as “I use the library to find trusted sources of information, and every time I am in there, the public computers are being used by a variety of community members doing everything from applying for jobs to writing school papers. Cutting the funds for libraries will further harm those who lack stable internet, who cannot afford a home library, and who seek the opportunities to engage in programming, learning, enrichment, and entertainment in their own community. Public libraries help strengthen reading and critical thinking skills for all ages.” In those letters, consider noting that the return on investment on libraries is astronomical. You can use data from EveryLibrary.
- Call the offices of each of your Senators and Representatives in Congress. Yes, they’ll be busy. Yes, the voice mails will be full. KEEP CALLING. Get your name on the record against IMLS cuts. Do this in addition to writing a letter. If making a call creates anxiety, use a tool like 5 Calls to create a script you can read when you reach a person or voice mail.