AI-generated Short Stories

The technology philosopher and writer Oliver Bendel published the book “ARTIFACTS WITH HANDICAPS” on 24 September 2023. The information about the author reads: “Oliver Bendel featuring Ideogram and GPT-4”. In fact, the entire work was created with the help of generative AI. It consists of 11 images, each followed by a short story. This one deals with the imperfection of representation. Once a hand looks like that of a mummy, once a skateboard floats in the air above the wheels. But there is also one or another representation that looks perfect. In this case, the story explains what is different about the person, their history, or their behavior. Ultimately, it is about the otherness and the fact that this is in fact a special feature. The book is freely available and can be distributed and used as desired, with credit given to the authors, i.e. the artist and the AI systems. Oliver Bendel has been writing experimental literature, including digital literature, for 40 years. As of 2007, he was one of the best-known cell phone novelists in Europe. In 2010, he attracted attention with a volume of haiku – “handyhaiku” – in which the poems were printed in the form of QR codes. In 2020, the volume “Die Astronautin” was published, in which the poems are printed in the form of 3D codes. The standard work “Die Struktur der modernen Literatur” (“The Structure of Modern Literature”) by Mario Andreotti devotes two pages to the writer’s work.

Opportunities and Risks of Facial Recognition

The book chapter “The BESTBOT Project” by Oliver Bendel, David Studer and Bradley Richards was published on 31 December 2019. It is part of the 2nd edition of the “Handbuch Maschinenethik”, edited by Oliver Bendel. From the abstract: “The young discipline of machine ethics both studies and creates moral (or immoral) machines. The BESTBOT is a chatbot that recognizes problems and conditions of the user with the help of text analysis and facial recognition and reacts morally to them. It can be seen as a moral machine with some immoral implications. The BESTBOT has two direct predecessor projects, the GOODBOT and the LIEBOT. Both had room for improvement and advancement; thus, the BESTBOT project used their findings as a basis for its development and realization. Text analysis and facial recognition in combination with emotion recognition have proven to be powerful tools for problem identification and are part of the new prototype. The BESTBOT enriches machine ethics as a discipline and can solve problems in practice. At the same time, with new solutions of this kind come new problems, especially with regard to privacy and informational autonomy, which information ethics must deal with.” (Abstract) The book chapter can be downloaded from link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-3-658-17484-2_32-1.