Would $50,000 landing in your lap give you the breathing space in terms of time and life admin to clear your head and your diary and finally finish the book you’ve been thinking about for years? James Patterson certainly thinks, or at least hopes, so. Last week he announced that he had chosen 12 authors each to be recipients of a “Go Finish Your Book!” grant of that amount. If there is a repeat offer at some point in the future, I will of course update you.
ALLi News Editor Dan Holloway
Patterson’s Big Bet on Writers
Patterson also discussed the initiative in a video interview and it has sparked reactions across the publishing world, including commentary from Literary Hub. His goal is straightforward: to give writers the freedom to set aside the financial and time pressures that often prevent them from finishing their books.
Is AI Changing How We Talk?
I came across a very interesting and forthright op-ed last week from Mark Williams. It was a response to research from Florida State University that has just been published, suggesting (as per the prevailing internet opinion) that the use of AI is narrowing the use of language and creating homogenized vocabulary and expression patterns—he disagrees, natch. This sent me to the research to see what it actually says.
It starts by giving the context for asking the question of what influence AI has had on language: more than half of under-30s and nearly half of 30-to-39-year-olds use generative AI. The research scoured 22.1 million words that had not been generated by AI and looked at whether certain words had proliferated in use over time. And they found that a wide range of what they call “AI buzzwords” had indeed shown a marked increase in usage. As a control, they noted that synonyms not picked up in AI suggestions did not show such an increase (contrasting the buzzword “underscore” with the non-buzzy “accentuate”).
What this means, they say, is that AI use is seeping into everyday language. Fast Company and FSU News have both covered the findings, while Williams responded in The New Publishing Standard.
As many of you know, my day job is in the Linguistics Faculty at the University of Oxford. And my main observation would be that this is interesting, unsurprising, and hardly novel. If someone suggested that this was anything other than “how language works” to my face, I’d probably just say, “Lol.”
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