Tag: artificial intelligence

An rare Wednesday entry, but I couldn’t let this lie. You might have read yesterday’s entry The Story That Went Out of Date, which includes a short story at the end.

It has become apparent that the formatting only appears correctly on https://gavincameron.co.uk. The first line of each paragraph was supposed to be indented like a novel; instead, anyone viewing on the Reading page or the Jetpack app would have seen a wall of text, and nobody likes a wall of text.

It seems I haven’t quite yet cracked the coding on this site. As such, I’ve gone back and edited it, so the formatting should show correctly everywhere.

Thank you for your co-operation.

There’s a lot of talk at the moment about the challenges facing writing with the advent of generative text software. Much of the discourse has become dull and repetitive, and what I haven’t seen discussed much is how new technology can quickly make an existing story obsolete or dated.

Pick up any novel from the 19th century or before, and the characters will travel by horse or on a ship with sails and rigging. Enter the 20th century and characters will use home phones or call boxes to speak to each other. Readers are quick to make allowances for the age of the text. But what happens when the piece is more recent?

I was reminded this week of a story I wrote in 2015 called Film Star Reanimation Ltd., where the plot revolves around resurrecting two dead actors for a feature-length film.

It’s something that was possible at the time, but involved a lot of manual input and guesswork. It was inspired by, and makes reference to, an advert for Galaxy from 2013 which starred an electronic replica of Audrey Hepburn. Here’s an article from 2014 about how this was achieved.

Now, 13 years on, this sci-fi idea is edging closer to reality, rendering the plot less outlandish than it appeared on its first outing. As such, I can’t foresee this being published professionally now, unless I wait a few decades and present it as a historical piece.

I can find three versions in my files: two from February 2015 and one from December 2015. The last one is the version I’ve included under the cut.

It’s only 1,352 words and I’d like to edit it properly because there are enough plot points in there to unpack it to twice that length. Nonetheless, I’ve left the words unchanged, only the formatting to make it appear correctly on WordPress.

For anyone keeping tabs on my WordPress awards, by the way, the site today awarded me two badges while fixing that formatting:

• CSS Sorcerer. You’re a developer now. Basically.
• Perfectionist. Edit a single post over and over again. It’s still not right, is it?

Film Star Reanimation Ltd.

Continue reading “The Story That Went Out of Date” →