The LAST Word

    Everywhere you look, people are told to embrace technology to make our lives more efficient, help with marketing and automate mundane tasks. While I agree that writers do need to embrace technology, there should be caution. Here are some pitfalls that technology can cause. E-mail Marketing -- Due to changes in policy at Google and Yahoo, e-mail marketing software companies are having to change their system to be in line with Google and Yahoo's rules. Unfortunately, writers , such as myself, do not know how to update their websites or e-mail addresses to add in the special coding that is required to authenticate my website domain. When I added coding to where I thought it was supposed to go, I no longer can send simple e-mails from Thunderbird. I use Thunderbird because I have many e-mail accounts that I need to track. Thunderbird puts them all in one place. It's annoying that I can't use louise@lastresearchandediting.com to send via Thunderbird because of changes I ma

My daughter was working on her computer. She came across artificial intelligence that is writing books for people. She told me about it and said to research it. AI is entering the world of books. Savvy writers should take advantage of it because it could be the future. Also, it could make writing books that much easier. Here is what I learned. Text Sounds Human In the past, machines would collate tweets and articles and compile into a semblance of a book. However, today, new machine-learning models trained on billions of words have given AI the ability to produce text that sounds human. They use human speech patterns and basic structures of grammar. They can generate sentences and paragraphs that are readable. They still don't create intentional meaning in the paragraphs. OpenAI GPT2 was released. It allows users to create specific styles, such as New Yorker or Georgic poetry. More to Come While, at the moment, it can't write a novel, the technol