Years ago, when this website/blog was mainly dedicated to higher ed marketing/PR/branding/etc. and I read mainly non-fiction books, I would occasionally post, around Memorial Day, a Friday Five about some of the books I planned to read over the summer. Now that I’m attempting to carve out a “career” (*cough, cough*) of sorts in the creative writing arena, I thought it would make sense to share some of the books I plan to read this summer. Note that not all of my selections are current or even new-ish, as I am a notoriously slow reader and always am behind on my reading of the latest trendy or anti-trendy thing, so if you’re looking for recommendations on the latest summer reads, I suggest you look at LitHub’s “19 Novels You Need to Read This Summer” or The New York Times’ hyperbolically headlined list of “The Novels Everyone Will Be Reading This Summer” (gift link).
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Crossing the AI Rubicon
What one top literary magazine’s award to a (likely) AI-generated story means for the literary world
In 49 BCE, following a seven-year campaign to expand the Roman Empire into Gaul (much of Western Europe), Junius Caesar, then a general of the Roman army, approached a river that signified an important boundary between Rome and the rest of the world. According to Roman law, if anyone crossed that river–the Rubicon–it would be considered an act of war.
As we know from history, Caesar crossed that line, uttering the words alea iacta est (“the die is cast”), a phrase that has come to mean, “no turning back.”
Earlier this week, a prestigious literary magazine, Granta, crossed a metaphorical Rubicon of its own when it published a prize-winning short story that, evidence strongly suggests, was written not by a human, but by artificial intelligence.
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Andrew Careaga 