Author: Southerly Guest Blogger

Un/telling y/our story, part two

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Amelia Walker Acknowledgement: I live and write on the lands of the Kaurna people. I pay respect to Kaurna Elders, and to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Sovereignty was never ceded. This always was, always will be Aboriginal land. I’m still on the bus. That’s a lie. Or is it? As I commit these words, it is later, many laters. I’m curled on a couch, notebook on knees, its pages filling with blue scrawlings I cross out, rewrite, cross out, rewrite, letters smudging as my frantic hand drags across not-yet-dry ink. Now I’m at a desk, squinting as…

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Un/telling y/our story, part one

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Amelia Walker Acknowledgement: I live and write on the lands of the Kaurna people. I pay respect to Kaurna Elders, and to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Sovereignty was never ceded. This always was, always will be Aboriginal land. “I have never known how to tell a story” (Derrida 3). So Jacques Derrida declares in March 1984 as he fronts the crowd gathered at Yale University for his first of three lectures honouring the recently deceased Paul de Man, Derrida’s colleague and close friend. Least I’m not the only one, I think, my gaze floating from page to…

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Archival bots: My mother, my model for language

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Jenny Hedley   During two stages in my life—at age seven and again in my twenties—I acted as surrogate speaker when head-and-neck cancer muted my mother’s voice. In the years between, we collaborated on so many creative projects that our voices often became enmeshed. I have perpetuated this mother–daughter entanglement eighteen years after her death by training a small language model (SLM) on a dataset of personal writing which includes her voice. Specifically, my JenAI language model’s ‘memoir’-tagged voice trained upon my unpublished manuscript ‘Hermit Crab Diary’ which weaves together my mother’s and my 2005–2007 diary entries with my contemporaneous…

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Generative AI model training: Why do you sound like me? Because I am you

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Jenny Hedley   My first fine-tuned small language model (SLM) was a boring failure who sounded didactic, encyclopaedic. JenAI v1 had trained on approximately 280,000 words of my creative writing and yet still had the (un)distinctive (non)voice of a bot trained on textbook-quality data.[1] I had tagged each of my training datasets with <author>, <genre>, and <subgenre> so that the model could learn that Jenny Hedley’s nonfiction writing—in memoir, academic, or poetic form—should read a particular way. My Python training scripts needed adjusting to make my self-miming language model more faithful to my voice, tone, and the themes of my…

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To each author, a mimetic AI model

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Jenny Hedley  Imagine a future where writers control their own small language models (SLMs) trained on select high-quality data including their creative works. Unlike resource-guzzling, copyright-be-damned large language models (LLMs), compact models can be run locally on minimal hardware[1], keeping privacy intact while conserving resources. That future is already here for the tech-curious who are willing to accept coding assistance from LLMs. While suggesting such purposeful use of LLMs, I feel reproached by my dear colleague Beau Windon who wrote ‘Is it Time to Bully Generative AI Users?’. Am I the LLM user/‘slopsucker’/‘botlicker’ who, according to Windon, treats ‘the water-guzzling,…

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Down with copyright-infringing LLMs—long live the small language model

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Jenny Hedley At my final PhD milestone conference, one of my writer friends whispered conspiratorially about how ‘we all hate AI’, sweeping me into the prevailing category of Writers Against Machine Learning. I did not then reveal my position, which is more complex than love or hate. If my (non-existent) published novel had been cannibalised by large language models (LLMs) via pirated databases as my friend’s had, my curiosity about the possible benefits of AI might similarly be quashed. For years now my interest in digital writing has been guided by the ethos of the Ouvrior de Littérature Potentielle (Oulipo)…

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Barribugu mirana yiyura (The future is First Peoples)

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Anissa Jones Guwiyady’u gulbanga Gayan gayan Colin Gale, Dharug warunggad, ngayiridyi Native Title. (I’d like to dedicate this to Uncle Colin Gale, our Senior Dharug Elder and Native Title claimant.) Warami. Budyari Nhaady’unya. Yanyiminga muday Ngurrawa. (Welcome. Good to see you. Walk softly on Country with me.) When I see the word barribugu (future), I think of my grandchildren and their children. It is a place where I may just be a memory to them, someone special who makes them smile as they remember me, but it is also a place where I can dream that it will be better…

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