I saw on the news today that AI companies are acquiring all the novels they can get their hands on that pre-date AI (I think it said written before 2022 but not sure of that date). They are putting the novels through a machine that removes the spine and then feeds the pages into the system to be read AND LEARNED from.
The goal is to use human written novels to teach AI how to do it so that AI won't write AI slop.
I read an article on this, from the point of view of a secondhand book seller. He's doing a roaring trade, but has grave misgivings because the tech companies buying the books are taking them out of circulation, sometimes destroying the only remaining print copy of a book.
AI companies are far short of ethical.
AJ
I'm quasi-following ongoing discussions about this on Twitter (X.com) and some of the rumors gathered by that are:
- the worst offender is allegedly Anthropic
- they apparently believe they are REQUIRED to shred the scanned books due to weird interpretation of copyright law: so they "transfer" the data and and no new copy is made, and so they don't break copyright. Allegedly there's been a court ruling to that effect: that Anthropic are permitted to train on copyrighted material if they destroy the physical copy they acquired.
- Since they can't be bothered to check if the book is or isn't under copyright they bulk apply this to everything. Added benefits (to them) is that this is faster and cheaper and they don't have to store or handle the proceessed material afterwards.
- possible meta benefits of this are: denying the material to competitors, and information control in general.
- it's not just novels, it's anything and everything they can get their hands on.
- yes, the supposed AI watershed date is roughly 2022; it's deemed there's no major volume of printed material with AI contamination prior to that; anything older thus fetch a premium for AI training purposes.
(AI contaminated training data supposedly may be poisonous to AI training purposes potentialy leading to phenomenon known as "model collapse" where complexity of the "long tails" (fringe cases, rich language, obscure knowledge) is lost while repetition is entrenched, defeating the purpose of as large as possible training data corpus and dreams of AGI ANSI etc (of whatever interpretation).
Caveats apply: practice know as "distillation" explicitly train a new AI model on the output of a different one, often resulting in similar overall performance with smaller weights volume. While mathematical loss is obvious, the practical is unknown and unnoticeable -- at least one step down. Iterative experiments that created "model collapse" alarms have been of relatively small scale for obvious compute resource reasons. More specialized distiled models are probably fine.)
- Elon Musk claims Grok do care to check for and preserve rare/valuable copies they come across creating a library. That implies they do not subscribe to the weird copyright infringementing emptor Anthropic seems to employ by destroying everything they scan.
- while all AI companies are doing this to some extent destroying physical copies that are not rare *yet* for marginal savings on processing costs and storage/handling expenses, they are apparently not the only one mass book burners. A business practice that hunt for potentially undervalued print copies to resell at high markup may be worse because they too destroy stock they can't move relatively short-term.
- this isn't (hopefully, no guarantee with types like Anthropic) about shredding one-of-a-kind sixteen century manuscripts. The concern is more about obscure than unique, in space between privately published novels, nineteenth or early twentieth century school textbooks and things like, say, 1991 "Wordperfect for Dummies" on the low end. While one may argue that loss of the last copy of the later leads to no "loss of knowledge" long having no practical value on the face, it still is a historic artificial informing a future researcher about topics like period and trade slang or engineering and visual design practices, or other questions we may not necessarily imagine right now -- and note the design specifics are irretrievably lost even if the text is destructively scanned and preserved as part of AI training dataset (further note: those are said to not be human readable files as they are).
If this AI book burning panic leads to renewed efforts to preserve such "worthless" obscure print artifacts that may be an unexpected silver lining. And, frankly, even the more responsible/charitable AI companies themselves should be interested: there's a valid speculation the current approach may be a dead end simply because we may not possess the unique data volume necessary to train that supposedly coveted Artificial Superintelligence, and if companies end up in turf wars destructively scanning and thus privatizing volumes of obscure data it's super unhelpful to the overall effort.
Where's Captain Scarlet when we need him?
AIs are like the Mysterons - to create they must first destroy!
AJ
100% certainty that Anthropic (or another company they set up) will be selling the contents piecemeal once they have destroyed the remaining physical copies.
First thing to do is teach AI what a man and woman is and isn't.
The AI algorithms are the worlds worst to use improper pronouns. (almost as bad as blue haired liberals)
Next thing would be to teach it to avoid RPG fantasy subjects that (should) only appeal to teenagers in mom's basement.
Reality has a place, and that place is true literature. Everything else is slop in my book.
As long as they don't use the "human written" slop that has infested SOL in the past year or so the idea might actually work. That stuff is a waste of bandwidth for sure.
And if it churns out more of what I just waded through in the "New Stories" list... we are all doomed.
First thing to do is teach AI what a man and woman is and isn't.
One reason I use grok for everything. A simple statement in the agent file:
"Respect period understanding of gender/sex along with language, gender roles, and other social norms for the period covered by the dateline provided"
Solves the problem completely for my proofreading and critique skills. Not sure about crafting prose because I don't allow it to do that (because it totally sucks at it, even with training).
I came across this story synopsis:
When courier pilot Neris Vael and her sentient ship are thrown through an impossible dimensional accident, they crash far beyond every world they know. Daniel Mercer, a widowed farmer, makes a choice before he understands what has landed on his property: he treats the strangers at the edge of his woods as neighbours. What follows is not a story of invasion or conquest. It is a story of repairs. Necessity becomes trust. Trust becomes friendship. Friendship becomes a household.
The synopsis is obviously AI-generated - only an AI would put a 'Not X but Y' construct in a synopsis.
And how do you throw something 'through an accident'?
Despite that, the story piques my interest. I know of at least two stories on SOL, human-written, that have addressed this sort of scenario (Colin Barrett and Vincent Berg), and they were both pretty decent. Graybyrd also has an excellent series involving crash-landed aliens but it has a very different tenor.
A long time ago I even attempted my own variant, but it's totally unpublishable. The aliens gave the protagonist a mind-reading device as a reward for his finding everything they needed to repair their ship, and it proved a double-edged sword.
AJ
Next thing would be to teach it to avoid RPG fantasy subjects that (should) only appeal to teenagers in mom's basement.
Reality has a place, and that place is true literature. Everything else is slop in my book.
So, the Illiad and the Odyssey, as well as Gilgamesh, or Beowulf, le Morte de Arthur, Frankenstein, Dracula, all of Grimm's Fairy Tales, and Easop's Fables, they are all 'Slop'?
Most of those stories are considered among the greatest works of literature.
I believe that modern books, such as The Lord of the Rings, or Red Planet, or movies, such as Blade Runner, or Alien, to be great stories; not slop.
All of the above are also inspirations, and often tropes for people that play Role Playing Games.
So, the Illiad and the Odyssey, as well as Gilgamesh, or Beowulf, le Morte de Arthur, Frankenstein, Dracula, all of Grimm's Fairy Tales, and Easop's Fables, they are all 'Slop'?
They predated role-playing games, although they may have inspired them.
AJ
AI crap is what you would expect from a couple of generations of people who were told that "everybody's special" and where everybody get a trophy, no matter how badly they perform. People with no self-respect.
A bunch of basement dwelling, role-playing gamers, in all likelihood.
Most of their 'work' is about as creative as feeding a Sinatra recording thru an auto-tuner to make it sound like Britney Spears.
Although, come to think of it, that would at least be funny. Most AI can't even manage that.
I doubt that they are role-playing gamers.
Everyone I knew who did played D&D came before AI and they weren't concerned with trophies or participating in anything that wasn't creative.
And the only "trophy" they wanted was to see their friends having fun with what they created.
If you're talking video games, there was and is no participation trophies for these guys. You were either good, or you were trash-talked to death until you quit or got good. (Most of us were athletes too.)
No one said "Good job" to people who couldn't pull their weight.
Participation Trophies & AI slop are for people who want to be a part of everything by putting in the least amount of effort possible.
AI crap is what you would expect from a couple of generations of people who were told that "everybody's special" and where everybody get a trophy, no matter how badly they perform. People with no self-respect.
I love how this is always presented as a dunk on the people who got the trophy and there's absolutely zero thought given to questions like "who gave out participation trophies" because that seems like the party who's really to blame here.
I will anticipate your counter argument of "oh the kids would have thrown a tantrum if they didn't get a trophy" yeah man they're kids, they have tantrums, it's the job of adults to not give in on that and you fucked it up, nice job blaming the kids for your failures.
I love how this is always presented as a dunk on the people who got the trophy and there's absolutely zero thought given to questions like "who gave out participation trophies" because that seems like the party who's really to blame here.
Yes! Thank you!
I have the same thought every time I see people complain about how all the young ones are addicted to social media on their phones these days. Well... who fucking WROTE those addiction-focused algorithms facebook and Co introduced and then got perfected by TikTok!? Certainly not the 12-year-olds glued to their phones.
At least as much to the point: who gave them the phone?
Yes, there are reasonable reasons for kids of some ages to have phones. That doesn't mean 'install whatever you want' or 'use it whenever you want'.
And that's on the parents. Facebook, TikTok, etc aren't handing out phones to kids, nor are them preventing parents from taking said phones away.
this is my first story written with A.I and here is what I noticed:
1. The longer the story, the more mistakes it makes. My first few chapters were around 40% rewrite, now its more 70%.
2. Too much repetition.
3. Despite giving it extensive details of characters, it keeps depicting one character for another.
I'll finish this story with A.I but I doubt I'll use it again.
A.I Story are easy to detect, for now. Look for phrase repetition.
I just read that one (or more) of the AI companies is (are)
programming specifically to eliminate or at least limit em-dashes, as that is one of the most frequent indicators of AI output.
as that is one of the most frequent indicators of AI output.
And one that is completely unreliable and inaccurate.
Did you see the arxiv paper on StoryScope[1], by any chance? I haven't thought about their methodology deeply enough to form a really strong opinion on their conclusions, but at least in terms of identifying hallmarks of AI fiction they have some interesting points. They basically condense a story into a set of narrative "features", where a feature is a closed-form question with discrete answer choices, on the idea that stylistic watermarks are easier to ablate with light editing than narrative watermarks.
They ended up with some interesting results (and again, I haven't reasoned about their methodology enough to have a strong opinion about validity here, so you would be well-served to read the paper yourself and have a think); AI fiction tends to over explain themes, while human fiction tends to leave space to infer; AI fiction has much tighter causal chains and fewer sub-plots, while human fiction tends to explore non-linear narratives and have more messy loose ends, that sort of thing.
It's some interesting stuff and may provide a useful vocabulary to talk about AI writing detections in a way that's more robust than the basic style hallmarks that everybody thinks of.
[1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.03136
It's some interesting stuff and may provide a useful vocabulary to talk about AI writing detections in a way that's more robust than the basic style hallmarks that everybody thinks of.
I'm reading it now. It's solid (so far), though I'm skeptical that the features are durable against future training/improvements.
For sure the durability against model improvement is an extremely open question. I'd love to read a reproduction of the paper in six months with a bunch more models to see how it holds up over time.
The goal is to use human written novels to teach AI how to do it so that AI won't write AI slop.
Not possible, because in the end it will always be simply throwing things together in accordance to it's algorithm.
It will never be "real", it will never "think". Just as it was over five decades ago it is just a simulation that follows programming.
For example, no matter how good "AI Voice" has gotten in the last two decades, it is still incredibly obvious to me and I can detect if a narration is real or synthetic in a minute or less.
AI can not really "learn", it can at best simulate "learning" along the parameters built into the programming.
At the risk of repeating myself (okay, fine - to repeat myself): Define 'think'. Define 'real'. And define 'AI'.
The first two of those terms aren't easy to define, particularly if one includes the notion (fairly popular in both physics and philosophy at the moment) that our universe is deterministic in one way or another. The third is often conflated with current LLMs.
If our universe is deterministic, human beings are, by definition, simply throwing things together in accordance with the algorithm of the universe, and are a simulation of decision-makers, following programming.
At that point, the argument simply becomes that we have better programming. A difference of quality, perhaps, but not kind.
That doesn't mean 'AIs' (e.g. LLMs built by the current design of LLMs) will ever achieve 'AGI' or 'think.' It seems very unlikely that they will. But that is hardly the only class of AI.
There is no necessary reason to believe that a computational device can't 'think.' At some level of computation, they can or we can't, most likely. There is no model of computation more powerful than a Turing Machine (except for some corner-case models which are not believed to be physically possible to construct). That includes human cognition.
Mind you, there are theories that human cognition exceeds the limitations of Turing Machines in some ways - but those theories are currently hypothetical and untestable.
On your last point, there exist LLM 'AIs' that can learn within a reasonable understanding of 'learning' (storing and retrieving information and acting based on that information). To really dig into it, we would also need to define 'learning' in an unambiguous manner, and that's about as easy to do as defining 'thinking' in a way that distinguishes human thought from Turning Machines. A Turing Machine can learn no better than an LLM can be designed to learn, and (again) there is no testable model of human cognition that exceeds what a Turing Machine is capable of.
The TLDR here is: be careful of broad statements based on undefined terms. They really don't mean very much.
For example, no matter how good "AI Voice" has gotten in the last two decades, it is still incredibly obvious to me and I can detect if a narration is real or synthetic in a minute or less.
I found Marc Nobbs' test very illuminating. There was one human passage and four versions rewritten by AI. IMO, one of the AI versions was very obvious, but without being told beforehand that one was human and the other four were AI, it would have been nigh on impossible.
In the right circumstances, human writing and AI writing can be virtually indistinguishable.
AJ
In the right circumstances, human writing and AI writing can be virtually indistinguishable.
Just a year ago, I could easily tell an AI image of a human apart from an actual image of a human. And the same with AI songs.
Now? I can't tell the difference for both.
And I'm not alone. The BBC news site did one of their little 'quizzes' a few months ago, where the task was to tag pictures of people AI or real. The majority of participants (myself included) were wrong, often tagging the real pictures as AI 🫣
And it's very apparent on Youtube, with many posts on purely AI-generated music where the comments section below is full of thirst comments from (unsurprisingly), men saying how much they love the singer's voice and how beautiful the singer is on the (AI) cover art. Completely oblivious to the fact the singer doesn't exist.
As I have mentioned elsewhere, the last bastion of being able to be right, was in video, but the difference in quality of animated music videos on Youtube over the last six months has been a little shocking. There are a few Youtube channels I regularly frequent for my taste in music, where just a few months ago, the videos were bloody obviously AI. The videos being released in the last couple of weeks, I can't tell. Well, I can, just, because A: I know from the channel history all the videos are AI and B: there are no long pan shots (or whatever the technical term is) the cuts are all the same length, and C: the people in them are all different for each (whatever it's called, scene?). However, even the latter, C is starting to become obsolete because now the people in each segment are starting to become the same. So continuity between scenes is improving and no doubt, the length of shots will also subsequently increase.
Boy, I don't get it. I worked hard to learn to write. I went to school to learn to write. I forged a career from writing. Through both fiction and commercial writing, I have supported a comfortable lifestyle. Regardless of a project or an assignment, I write everyday. I love the craft of writing. Why would I deny myself that pleasure? I really don't get it...
Jo
I love the craft of writing. Why would I deny myself that pleasure? I really don't get it...
That has nothing to do with AI. Many years ago when I received feedback from a submission editor that I didn't understand, I began my journey to learn the craft of writing fiction. All those things like head-hopping, show don't tell, passive voice, POV, strong verbs, etc., etc. made me appreciate the craft. I was so excited that I kept bringing up in this forum things I learned. My posts were met with resistance and scorn so I realized most writers here don't have your passion for the craft.
Taking that to the next level, there are people who not only don't want to bother learning the craft, but they don't want to bother writing. They simply use AI to do the writing for them.
But the news report was about the AI companies actually trying to teach their products how to craft fiction better.
My posts were met with resistance and scorn so I realized most writers here don't have your passion for the craft.
Resistance to the demands of 'experts' (not you, but the submission editors) has zero to do with passion for the craft.
Imagine e e cummings trying to be published today. His submissions would never make it past the gatekeepers.
passion for the craft
Passion for the craft makes you a writing expert.
Passion for writing makes you an author.
AJ
My posts were met with resistance and scorn so I realized most writers here don't have your passion for the craft
I have another take on that. Humans fear what they do not understand. I was always of the impression that your intention was good, but your presentation...well...
It reminds me somewhat of how a child trying to convey an idea in their head, gets frustrated and angry, because they lack the ability to convey and disseminate their thoughts/feelings. And when they get angry and frustrated, their ability to converse drops even further, and they end up in a 'doom loop'.
That, in my humble opinion, is what makes amateur writers struggle to comprehend the 'proper' technical ability of 'the craft'. They simply lack the comprehension of the basic tenets, which are the rules for the more complex structures. Or to put it simply. "You need to learn to walk before you can run."
Because they don't understand, they slip back into a more defensive posture, which, in human terms, is fear and anger. This is complicated further by being an instinctual reaction rather than a reasoned reaction/response. So yeah, it can be seen as 'resistance or scorn' but most likely, it's just ignorance manifesting itself in ways the individual can deal with/comprehend.
That, in my humble opinion, is what makes amateur writers struggle to comprehend the 'proper' technical ability of 'the craft'. They simply lack the comprehension of the basic tenets, which are the rules for the more complex structures. Or to put it simply. "You need to learn to walk before you can run."
This is all simply part of the learning curve.
I have been writing stories like these for over two decades now. And I even look back at my earlier stories and cringe with how absolutely basic they are. But like anything else, the more you do it the better you get.
Honestly, I think there is something broken in many of the younger generations, in that they want instant gratification and results. They do not want to put in the work, they just want finished product, no matter how bad it ultimately is.
There are many utilities that claim to detect AI writing, but most are absolute garbage.
Shakespear and the Bible are more likely to be detected as AI-produced than results from Chat GPT or Copilot.
Most of the 'AI detectors' can't tell if something was written by Grok or Charles Dickens, but many authorities believe the results.
AI can write words. Perhaps, in time, it can learn a proper use of rythm in writing. Maybe it can learn how to properly switch between sentence and paragraph structures. Switch between short and long versions of both. Or how to use repetition the right way.
But two things it can't do, no matter how many books it reads. Understand the illogical nature of emotions or how to express those emotions other than by making a list of what they are and are not in constant contrast.
The other thing is messy human writing. Messiness, while very human, isn't logical. Messiness must be edited out. The problem with perfectionists as writers is that they edit the life out of a story. If that is, they ever finish what they've started.
For AI to be readable and enjoyable, it has to be de-AI-ed. And that's only a little less time-consuming than writing and editing it yourself.
MD
But two things it can't do, no matter how many books it reads. Understand the illogical nature of emotions or how to express those emotions other than by making a list of what they are and are not in constant contrast.
And more than that, it really is unable to "surprise" a reader no matter what.
An AI might someday be able to write something remotely passing as a "story", but it will be unable to replicate something like the writing of O. Henry or Rod Serling. And it certainly will not be able to "create" a distinctive voice like that of Damnon Runyon.
And I wish a lot of luck in it trying to write a story set in the past, say the 1960s or 1950s let alone the 1920s or turn of the century. Language and meaning have changed since then, and I think any attempt it made would be laughable.
And this is something I have even seen human authors struggle with. As they will often use a phrase or word in a way that was completely foreign in a piece set in the past. Just take the slang term "Going ballistic", that was not even used in that context before the early 1980s.
And I have experienced that many times, hearing an anachronistic term or phrase taking me right out of a story. The amount of modern US English slang I heard in just the first 15 minutes of the "Willow" TV series a year or so back had me turn it off and never even finish the first episode. Or in a novel set in the 17th century calling a carriage for hire a "Hansom cab", a term and description that would not even exist for another century.
It would be like setting a book in the Spanish Conquest of the Aztec empire, and they see an airplane flying overhead. And not only that, but knowing it is actually called an "airplane" without being told.
As they will often use a phrase or word in a way that was completely foreign in a piece set in the past.
Unless it's done intentionally in a humorous way, like in "Back to the Future" where Marty asks for a Tab and the guy tells him he has to buy something first.
Unless it's done intentionally in a humorous way, like in "Back to the Future" where Marty asks for a Tab and the guy tells him he has to buy something first.
Or even the next thing he asks for, which would be completely foreign to anybody younger than 50, as "Pepsi Free" has not been made since 1987.
There is a difference between an anachronism made for a purpose, and one just because the writers are lazy or incompetent.
There is a difference between an anachronism made for a purpose
Actually, my example wasn't an anachronism. It was dialogue. The person speaking knew of the product.
I just brought it up as something funny.
Actually, my example wasn't an anachronism. It was dialogue.
Actually, that is an almost perfect example of an anachronism.
That is simply something that does not fit in chronologically within the setting. It can be an object (AK-47 in the US Civil War), a person (a Connecticut engineer in medieval England), or an concept (somebody introducing the writings of Karl Marx into medieval Poland).
And while it is spoken and not a physical object, it does indeed apply. Just as two people from the 23rd century after a conversation with somebody in the 20th century fiving him the concept for transparent aluminum.
That is simply something that does not fit in chronologically within the setting.
I thought because Marty went back in time and a Tab soda was in his time period, then it wasn't an anachronism. I thought an anachronism was when it was a mistake, like a clock in Shakespeare's play before there were clocks (not someone from the future bringing back a clock).
My bad. I thought an anachronism was only an error in literature.
I thought because Marty went back in time and a Tab soda was in his time period, then it wasn't an anachronism. I thought an anachronism was when it was a mistake, like a clock in Shakespeare's play before there were clocks (not someone from the future bringing back a clock).
On balance, I think I'm with you on this, noting that any dictionary definitions of 'anachronism' are surely invalid in time-travel situations. The element of 'mistake' seems to be the crucial element.
And that opinion is worth exactly what you paid for it.
AJ
The element of 'mistake' seems to be the crucial element.
Uh, really? That's kind of an odd thing to hinge the definition on; a story could absolutely include an anachronism deliberately. Consider, I dunno, an episode of The Flintstones featuring a typewriter where a bird chisels characters into a stone tablet.
It's anachronistic, but also deliberate.
Edit: or I mean, consider literally anything else about The Flintstones, the show is basically anachronisms stacked on top of each other.
The element of 'mistake' seems to be the crucial element.
I had an enlightening chat with Google's AI. If it's unintentional, it's a mistake. If it's intentional, it's a creative device. But both are anachronisms.
I'm not so sure. If it's a fictional setting and a character knows or has something that comes from another era, it's not an anachronism to that character.
I wouldn't class Ky's inventions in Lumpy's Imperium series as anachronisms.
Grey Wolf's VOAT series has the time-travelling characters mentioning eg films that hadn't come out yet - I wouldn't class those as anachronisms either.
AJ
I'm not so sure.
I asked ChatGPT for an example of an intentional anachronism and the following is what I got:
In the movie A Knight's Tale (set in medieval times), characters dance to modern rock music, including David Bowie's "Golden Years." The filmmakers deliberately mix medieval settings with modern cultural elements for comedic effect.
The important distinction is that an anachronism isn't necessarily a mistake. It's an intentional anachronism when the author or filmmaker knowingly places something outside its proper historical period for a creative purpose.
I asked ChatGPT for an example of an intentional anachronism
They're not hard to think of! Baz Luhrman's Romeo + Juliet is full of them. Monty Python and the Holy Grail has them - Antioch not being canonically known for its supply of Holy Hand Grenades, for example.
The important distinction is that an anachronism isn't necessarily a mistake.
They can be done very purposefully, that is often the point in any story that involves time travel. Or where eras are deliberately mixed up for an effect (Baz Luhrman and Knight's Tale are examples of this).
However, when it comes about because the authors-creators are simply lazy that is completely different.
Dictionary definitions vary. Some include 'error' as a component; some don't. Usually one or another includes 'error'. Merriam-Webster's first definition includes error.
1
: an error in chronology
especially : a chronological misplacing of persons, events, objects, or customs in regard to each other
found several anachronisms in the movie
2
: a person or a thing that is chronologically out of place
especially : one from a former age that is incongruous in the present
By the time I reached my teens, the housewife was an anachronism, replaced on television by the perky, glamorous, character of That Girl, Marlo Thomas, who kept her boyfriend at bay in the interest of pursuing her acting career.
—Joyce Maynard
I think the concept of the draft is an anachronism from the time before laptops and word processing software.
—Sarah Manguso
I tend to follow definition two when my characters mention anachronisms, particularly because theirs are usually future things being referenced in the past.
I would agree - a simple mention of a future thing is not itself an anachronism. Most are 'errors' - Steve calling someone a 'predator' when that word doesn't have the meaning we have later, for instance. But mentions of Alanis Morisette's 'Ironic' are perhaps that, without the 'error' context (though using the word in an 'Alanis' sense would be an error).
One sidelight with intrauniversal anachronisms is that time isn't the only variable. The word 'anachronism' is both right and wrong if used to reference e.g. a movie that existed in one or another first-life universe but not in their current one. For them, it's from their past and being mentioned 'out of time', but it has no time-based meaning to anyone from that universe.
any dictionary definitions of 'anachronism' are surely invalid in time-travel situations
I agree with the basic concept here.
In general, if a story is trying to recreate a historical setting, an anachronism is any person, thing, or concept that doesn't belong in that period.
When a character travels back in time, there is no good definition of 'anachronism' since the premise itself gives us two eras: the traveller's home time and the time they have travelled to. (More, if they have "previously" travelled into their own future.)
In the better done time travel stories, the traveller makes an effort to conform to the time they have arrived in. If they do this perfectly, the only anachronism is their presence. In most time travel stories, the story has them make mistakes, so the anachronisms accumulate.
Also, in general, anachronisms come with at least three degrees of intentionality:
1. The character intentionally introduces it for his own purposes. (e.g. providing antibiotics to Alexander the Great, so he can continue his conquests)
2. The author intentionally has the character introduce an anachronism by mistake. (e.g. the character loses his wristwatch)
3. The author makes a mistake. (e.g. because they thought that Alexander's cavalry had stirrups)
Edited. (I don't know how I got two thoughts quite so confused when I originally wrote this.)
I agree with the basic concept here.
In general, if a story is trying to recreate a historical setting, an anachronism is any person, thing, or concept that doesn't belong in that period.
I think that's the standard and most frequently occurring situation.
When a character travels back in time, there is no good definition of 'anachronism' since the premise itself gives us two eras: the traveller's home time and the time they have travelled to. (More, if they have "previously" travelled into their own future.)
I think an Einsteinian type view is appropriate. To be a genuine anachronism, it must appear as an anachronism to all observers.
If Marty McFly travels back to the American War of Independence and mows down zillions of redcoats with his AK-47, to Marty McFly the AK-47 isn't an anachronism.
AJ