Author Philip Pullman calls on government to act over'wicked' AI scraping Writers whose work has been scraped don't get compensation or recognition, something authors including Kate Mosse and Richard Osman have criticised, saying it could destroy growth in creative fields and amount to theft. Sir Philip, author of the hugely popular novels about Lyra Silvertongue, the heroine of His Dark Materials and The Book of Dust trilogies, thinks writers should be compensated. They can do what they like with my work if they pay me for it, he told the BBC's culture editor Katie Razzall. The Department for Culture, Media and Sport has been contacted for a response to Sir Philip's comments. Sir Philip said: As far as I know everybody's work has been stolen, scraped like a trawler... at the bottom of the sea. You name it, it's all killed.

In the humanities, it is rarely possible to resort to proof. Humanities are not built on the formulation of hypotheses and their proof or refutation. It is a field where different ways of describing its material (e.g., artistic culture) compete [Harpham, 2013]. Therefore, the question of text authorship is so important for humanists; it remains one of the few questions in the humanities that can be formulated as falsifiable and sometimes verifiable hypotheses. This is an area where humanists find themselves in a situation very similar to that in which representatives of the sciences usually exist. Consequently, this is the rhetorical resource that humanists can use in the struggle for resources in science and for symbolic capital in the scientific field.

Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning have considerably advanced Computational Literary Studies. Similarly, the construction of co-occurrence networks of literary characters, and their analysis using methods from social network analysis and network science, have provided insights into the micro- and macro-level structure of literary texts. Combining these perspectives, in this work we study character networks extracted from a text corpus of J.R.R. Tolkien's Legendarium. We show that this perspective helps us to analyse and visualise the narrative style that characterises Tolkien's works. Addressing character classification, embedding and co-occurrence prediction, we further investigate the advantages of state-of-the-art Graph Neural Networks over a popular word embedding method. Our results highlight the large potential of graph learning in Computational Literary Studies.

Over the past several weeks, there has been a wave of reactions to recent developments in the world of Ai and the arts, which seems pretty well typified in this article from the Verge. I'd like to get into why I think this line of thought is asking the wrong questions for the wrong reasons, but you'll have to bear with me a little. Let me start with a little about me. I'm a "multi-hyphenate" artist, which is to say I've done a lot of work in a variety of mediums: music production, visual art, writing. I'm not famous, but I've developed a methodology already, and didn't have much interest in the early Ai apps of yesteryear, until one came along that seemed to present some utility as tool rather than replacement. In talking to several artist friends of mine, I heard that MidJourney had an approach to Licensing that seemed to have artists in mind.

The company that owns the rights to JRR Tolkien's works, including The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, has been bought by the Swedish gaming firm Embracer Group, which has hinted it could make spin-off films based on popular characters such as Gandalf, Aragorn and Gollum. Embracer has acquired Middle-earth Enterprises, the holding company that controls the intellectual property rights to films, video games, board games, merchandise, theme parks and stage productions relating to Tolkien's two most famous literary franchises. The deal also includes "matching rights" in other Middle-earth-related literary works authorised by the Tolkien Estate and HarperCollins – primarily The Silmarillion and The Unfinished Tales of Numenor and Middle-earth – which were published after Tolkien's death in 1973. When the business was put up for sale by the Saul Zaentz Company, which acquired its rights from the heirs and estate of Tolkien and HarperCollins in 1976, it was expected that Amazon would buy it to build its own Middle-earth empire. In 2017, Amazon paid $250m (£208m) for the rights to make a big budget prequel to Lord of the Rings, called Rings of Power, which is to have a global release on its Prime Video service on 2 September.

SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk posted an outlandish tweet on Monday in which he references the novel The Guns of August, a 500-page book about the early stages of World War I. Musk, 50, captioned the tweet with the name of the book, written by Barbara Tuchman in 1962, along with the entire first paragraph of the book. Barbara Tuchman's 1962 novel was centered on the first month of the Great War and the opening events of WWI, along with the decisions that led to it. Tuchman's book was an immediate bestseller and earned her a Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction'The muffled tongue of Big Ben tolled nine by the clock as the cortege left the palace, but on history's clock it was sunset, and the sun of the old world was setting in a dying blaze of splendor never to be seen again,' so ends the paragraph. Tuchman's book, centered on the first month of the Great War, was an immediate bestseller and earned her a Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction. President John F. Kennedy was so impressed with it that he gave a copy to each member of his cabinet and some of his top military advisors and told them to read it.

When Black Lives Matter protests were raging following the death of George Floyd, the publishers of the tabletop role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons, pledged to take concrete steps to make their games more diverse. Wizards of the Coast promised to "share what we've been doing, and what we plan to do in the future to address legacy D&D content that does not reflect who we are today". In addition, it also pulled several racist cards from the card game Magic: The Gathering, such as Invoke Prejudice, Jihad and Pradesh Gypsies. Is it a coincidence that D&D's dishonourable, dark-skinned elves come from a matriarchal society, or that its savage orcs bear uncanny resemblance to a traditionally white, western conceptualisation of barbaric peoples from the "uncivilised" world? Although fantasy affords us every freedom to imagine new worlds and cultures, for the last 200-odd years, humans have mostly managed derivative facsimiles of our own.

Director Peter Jackson on Amazon's "Lord of the Rings" series: "I'd like to try to be of assistance." Amazon has landed a prime franchise on which to build an online game: the Lord of the Rings. Amazon Game Studios will jointly develop the free online game with Hong Kong-headquartered Leyou Technology Holdings, which owns several game studios including Digital Extremes, maker of sci-fi role-playing action game "Warframe." There is no release date for the console and PC game, a massively multiplayer online action title à la "World of Warcraft." Last year, Athlon Games, an L.A.-based Leyou subsidiary announced it had reached a deal with Middle-Earth Enterprises to create a game based in J.R.R. Tolkien's Hobbit-laden universe during the time before the events in the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

In this post I present a Python script that automatically generates suggestions for startup names. You feed it a text corpus with a certain theme, e.g. a Celtic text, and it then outputs similar sounding suggestions. I applied the script to "normal" texts in English, German, and French, and then experimented with corpora of Celtic songs, Pokemon names, and J.R.R. Tolkien's Black Speech, the language of Mordor. I've made a few longer lists of sampled proposals available here. You can find the code, all the text corpora I've used, and some pre-computed models in my GitHub repo: Recently, an associate and I started to found a software company, but most name ideas we came up with were already in use. We wanted a name with a Celtic touch, and we needed a large number of candidates to find one that was still available.

Stephen Colbert kicks up his feet at the Ed Sullivan Theater, where he tapes "The Late Show With Stephen Colbert." Stephen Colbert kicks up his feet at the Ed Sullivan Theater, where he tapes "The Late Show With Stephen Colbert." (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times) Stephen Colbert's desktop computer monitor is ringed with reminders -- Post-it notes ("Joy is the most infallible sign of the presence of God," Pierre Teilhard de Chardin), keepsakes (cards from musicians Regina Spektor and Jack White), directives ("Ask yourself this question: Is my attitude worth catching?"), When not in use, Colbert's computer screen defaults to a live feed of the Earth taken from the International Space Station. Right now, the view has just crossed the Nile, the sun is setting and clouds are casting long shadows across the Red Sea. Colbert looks at these images whenever he's feeling anxious. There's the whole world, he tells himself.