Professor and Co-Director of the Center for Digital Narrative at the University of Bergen
Professor and Co-Director of the Center for Digital Narrative at the University of Bergen
When William Gibson is writing (or “stuck”, he adds) he looks at photos of objects on ebay. “EBay as shamanic induction device.” I know this because I read his blog, which is what I do when I’m stuck. I read writers’ blogs, searching for evidence of their humanity, which I always find and which reassures me. Sometimes I do other things too. Like climbing Ulriken. What do you do?
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My colleague Jessica Witte has just shared a preprint where she compared the emotional arcs of the stories we generated using gpt-4o-mini to those of human-authored (pre-2022) stories from the subreddit r/WritingPrompts, conveniently gathered in this dataset. She found a distinct difference in the endings of the LLM-generated stories: both […]
Dorothy Bishop, a psychologist, wrote a useful list of what reviewers need to look out now that so many papers are bad science that looks good thanks to LLMs. Read her whole blog post, she explains it well, but here’s a brief version because I’m pretty sure we’ll be needing […]
I recently read a good article on the different kinds of truth a language model operates with by Luke Mann, Liam Magee and Vanicka Arora, Truth Machines: Synthesizing Veracity in AI Language Models, but despite its lovely typology of truths (consensus, correspondence, coherence and pragmatic) it doesn’t help me with […]
I have this hunch that sparkles and glow and shimmer are somehow a point in the latent spaces of LLMs that have more connections than you would expect. Perhaps their connotation to magic and to the unknown matches some of the mystique of genAI? Or perhaps these words are used […]
This LLM-generated paper demonstrates how LLMs fail to cite core scholarship on a topic but generate misaligned citations systematically.
This paper is a great example of why you probably shouldn’t use a systematic literature review for a theoretical and conceptual research question like “How does artificial intelligence affect the perception of authenticity and aura in art?” However, if you’re looking for an annotated list of 48 recent articles about […]
Torill
I don’t have to use an email-address any more? YAY. Anyway, I commented on this post in my blog – you made me realise that writer’s block isn’t all about writing.
Cassandra
If it ever happens, I’ll let you know.
Eirik
Whenever I get stuck (as most writers will do from time to time) I take a page from one of the most prolific writers of all time, Isaac Asimov. He usually had many different texts to write, and simply switched to a different text for a while. This is why I find having a blog so helpful, BTW.
mcb
Walking definitely helps, I think. But talking with wise friends can often help unstick a stuck mind.
Christian
I blame it on someone else, it might not be right, but it really helps. 🙂
pericat
Another method, related to Eirik’s approach, useful if you are pressed for time and simply must break out of your block, is to write, well, nonsense. The first word that comes to mind, write it down. Then the next, and the next. Don’t be concerned if they form sentences or even have any sensible relation. Some minutes of that, and you may find yourself back on track.
If that doesn’t do it, pick another page and write a letter to your mom. She’ll be glad to hear from you whether or not the exercise of writing her does the trick. 🙂
Jill
I like the nonsense approach – it often works for me.
Though actually, since I’ve been blogging, I don’t have writer’s block. Which is quite useful actually: I’ve proved to myself that I can always write, and I always find something that’s interesting enough to me that I want to think about it and write about it, ‘cos I do in my blog – but sometimes I don’t WANT to write, at anyrate not a serious academic essay or thesis or whatever.
Seeing the difffernece is very useful.