"Par ma foi ! il y a plus de quarante ans que je dis de la prose sans que j'en susse rien"

~ Monsieur Jourdain, Act II, Scene 4 of Molière’s Le Bourgeois gentilhomme Act II, Scene 4

Keen-eyed followers of this site will have noticed the recent addition of the Human Authored logo alongside CITY OF RAIN. This is a scheme run by the Society of Authors in the UK (see https://humanauthored.co.uk/) which is intended to help readers find works which are free of generative 'AI' (a term which I use advisedly, in much the same way you might hold a dirty diaper).

As a longtime SF fan, I have to say I find it incredibly sad that most obvious application of large-language models to date seems to be the intentional debasement of creative works, including writing, visual art, cinema and music. It's not as though plagiarism or hollow-eyed lack of imagination are anything new but it's shameful the extent to which new technologies have been weaponised - and normalised! - against human creativity. Just a few years ago, nobody would have had to aver that their work wasn't actually written by a machine. Everything in your life that you've read up to now was 'human authored'. Now you need a label.

Just to be clear, and as an addendum to the declaration on the Human Authored website, I don't use, have never used and will never use GenAI of any sort in my writing (or editing or artwork). I write using Word and publish using Vellum for Mac and it was a major headache when Microsoft started pushing their Copilot slop into Word but I'm pleased to declare that, after a lot of hassle, my version of Word is 100% Copilot free. The same goes for any other software I use or people I work with. It's sad that I have to clarify what should be implicit but it's the world we live in now; a world with plenty of problems and this is just one of them.

To end things on a more hopeful note, the writing of THE BRIGHT VALE continues to go well. I'd love to say more but I don't want to jinx it.