This started out as an exploration of turning a few related short stories into a novel length work. I have such a story group that dates back to 2016 and has been regularly updated with new tales over the year. They focus primarily on Fitzwilliam Darcy and his sister Georgiana, but others are included. Before supper, this blog post was a well developed short essay on that subject, written in longhand and neatly divided into sub headings. The blog post is now a disjointed series of rants and vents, some nostalgic, some dedicated to Microsoft.
God is My Co-Pilot
When my husband and I were expecting our first child, the year after God was born, we attended what were hopefully called “Expectant Parents’ Classes” at the local hospital. One class featured a Q&A session with a young couple just like us who had recently brought their firstborn into the world. Before the arrival of their own child, the father (I’ll call him Mentor) had experienced what has to be every parent’s nightmare: Their neighbor, with whom they shared a townhouse wall, began screaming and crying while the husband of that couple banged on the wall and yelled for help. Mentor advised his own wife to call 911 and rushed to the neighboring townhouse. He found the couple in the bedroom, the wife in full-blown labor, the husband in a state of total panic. Without quite knowing how or why, Mentor comforted the pair with assurances that help was on the way and that they would be just fine. The birth occurred quickly, but Mentor had recently been to the Expectant Parents’ Classes. By the time the sirens could be heard, New Mom was cuddling pink and perfect New Baby in a blanket, New Dad was looking on adoringly, and Mentor was congratulating them and himself and jonesing for a cigarette or perhaps a drink.
We members of the Expectant Parents’ Class took turns congratulating him. Finally Mentor cast his eyes up at the ceiling and said, with unusual fervor, “God was my co-pilot.”
Microsoft is Not My Co-Pilot
What IS Microsoft Copilot? Well, first of all, they have snuck it into my Office 365 under cover of darkness sometime in the past couple of weeks. Secondly, as you might suspect, pop open the hood and you find a lurking artificial intelligence. Microsoft’s website says:
Copilot in Word ushers in a new era of writing, leveraging the power of AI. It can help you go from a blank page to a complete draft in a fraction of the time it would take to compose text on your own. While it may write exactly what you need, sometimes it may be “usefully wrong” thus giving you some helpful inspiration.
And if you’re looking for something beyond what’s in your draft, you can ask Copilot questions to research, ideate, or iterate on for possible content to add.*
Remember Mr. Clippy from Windows 97? Well, this is an early 21st Century version of Mr. Clippy without the annoying paperclip.
I didn’t spend much time figuring out how it worked. The penalty would have been trying to type my blog post directly into WordPress, where it would have stayed full of typos and blunders of all sorts. I was only in the “environment” long enough to figure out how to escape from it. I did not research, ideate, or iterate. Whew.
That last statement contains an error. I did research. It took me a half-hour to figure out that all the AI generated “how to” articles were referring to Word for Windows, and I use Word for the Mac. If this happens to be your situation, the magic turn-off button is under the Word top level menu and the sub-menu “Options.”
The Further AI Adventures
This wasn’t my first Jane Austen related AI misadventure. About a month ago, BC (Before Copilot), I was working on my “Mr. Darcy, Six Year Old” fic. I needed the name of a parish church somewhere in London, not too far from the Thames, and serving an area of great poverty. Oof. I had maps of the era, and they had churches. There were plenty of people around I could’ve asked. This did not occur to me, and I finally decided to try to find a parish church somewhere near Cheapside but in a poorer neighborhood. My thought was that Lydia and Wickham were married in the Gardiners’ parish church and perhaps they were staying in the Regency version of the No-tell Motel somewhere nearby. So I asked Google. I’ll bet you didn’t know that Lydia and Wickham ran off to Gretna Green and were wed “over the anvil” before returning to Longbourn. I didn’t know that either, but Google’s AI asserted it to be true. Some thoughtless person has put it out on the web, and if we’re not careful, in another two years it will be accepted as Gospel by everybody from college professors to lovestruck teens to romantic devotees of clean romances. Remember the discreet/discrete debacle in Google Docs. It could happen.
Any Advice? Well, Yeah
I’m in process of following my admired Mychal Threets in becoming an official Library Grown-Up. I’m talking about the actual bricks and mortar library with all the physical books. Haven’t been a regular since they started sending us the Book Mobile. I just bought a bag big enough to hold my laptop and a big whack of note cards. I’m also hoping to cultivate the friendship of someone who knows of a good parish church in one of the poorer areas of London. Somebody out there knows the answer, and I need to ask them. I’m also going to look for BBEdit or some other text editor for the Mac. I somehow don’t trust Word any more, and I haven’t trusted Docs since the discreet/discrete disaster. And speaking to my Gentle Readers, I say: You have a perfectly good intelligence that is natural. You’ve been developing it since you first saw the light of day. Don’t forget that!
*This citation is directly quoted from the Microsoft website.
**The dad and baby is an ai generated image. I have an account at Adobe which is suddenly overburdened with them. Since the subject is of no consequence, I decided to let it stay with this warning.
**For years, Google Docs’ spelling checker did not allow the word “discreet,” as in “Darcy warned FitzWilliam to be discreet, but word got out eventually.” The only word they would allow was “discrete,” as in, “Collins divided the food on his plate into discrete portions. Meat, potatoes, and vegetable were not allowed to touch.”
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