Lisa McInerney talks to Rick O'Shea: ‘It starts off as a romp about a horny teenager but the ending just stunned me'
The award-winning author on the novels of two Chilean authors, one that is in the format of an exam, and the book about the 1980 uprising in South Korea that she brings to her own students
Lisa McInerney is an award-winning novelist and short story writer, lecturer and editor of The Stinging Fly, and she unsurprisingly has great taste in books too.
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Irish Independent
12 hours ago
- Irish Independent
Lisa McInerney talks to Rick O'Shea: ‘It starts off as a romp about a horny teenager but the ending just stunned me'
The award-winning author on the novels of two Chilean authors, one that is in the format of an exam, and the book about the 1980 uprising in South Korea that she brings to her own students Lisa McInerney is an award-winning novelist and short story writer, lecturer and editor of The Stinging Fly, and she unsurprisingly has great taste in books too.
Irish Examiner
24-05-2025
- Irish Examiner
Séamas O'Reilly: We have elevated AI that almost never works as well as what it replaces
We all love a good summer read. How about Tidewater Dreams, a multi-generational family saga by Chilean-American novelist Isabel Allende, blending elements of magical realism with the themes of environmental disaster? Or Nightshade Market by Min Jin Lee, which depicts the intersecting lives of three women working in Seoul's illegal underground economy? Or Rebecca Makkai's Boiling Point, about a climate scientist who must reckon with shifting family ties when her daughter becomes an eco-activist? I mention them because the Chicago Sun-Times recommended all three as part of the 'Summer Reading List' it included within its 120,000-circulation paper last Sunday. There was only one small snag: none of them exist. The authors do, of course. Each is an internationally renowned and best-selling name in fiction, but the novels themselves were hallucinations dreamed from the digital ether by AI. In fact, of the 15 books the list recommended, 10 were invented, including works by Hamnet scribe Maggie O'Farrell, Pulitzer prize-winning novelist Percival Everett, and The Martian author Andy Weir. Reaction was swift and, as you'd expect, mortifying. The Sun-Times issued a statement saying it was appalled. The list's author, Marco Buscaglia was quickly identified, and admitted he often used AI for background in his writing, but hadn't caught the errors this time. 'I can't believe I missed it because it's so obvious,' he apologised. 'I'm completely embarrassed.' I don't wish to heap more embarrassment on Mr Buscaglia, but one wonders what type of 'background writing' involves simply generating an entire article with AI and then not checking if the contents make any sense. In his defence, he does not bear this responsibility alone, since no one at any stage of the editing, design or printing process spotted these aberrations, at either the Sun-Times, or the Philadelphia Inquirer, where it also ran. Ten completely invented books, previewed in major broadsheet newspapers, which were either never checked by a single human being, or were checked exclusively by people who did not think to verify any of the ten world-exclusive literary scoops its fraudulent contents suggested. It's been two months since I wrote about AI which, as someone who detests having to write about AI, feels like not much time at all. A quick look at recent headlines, however, suggests that there is little else to talk about. Consider that the CEO of language-learning app Duolingo claimed AI was a better teacher than humans but schools will still remain open in future 'because you still need childcare'; a Finnish man was sentenced in Scottish court for using AI to create images of young girls being abused; Google unveiled Project Astra, an AI client that will sit inside your phone listening to everything you say so it can provide unprompted advice at any time; the United Nations' International Labour Organization said that AI poses a bigger threat to jobs traditionally held by women than those of men; Silicon Valley Bank reported that 40% of cash raised by venture funds last year was for companies focusing on artificial intelligence; Reuters reported that data centre plans in the US are far outpacing expected demand; and Italian researchers found that, despite all their aforementioned hallucinations, errors, and contradictions, AI chatbots were more persuasive in online debates than their human counterparts 64% of the time. If that sounds like a lot of news for two months, well, I wish this were true. Every one of those headlines is from Tuesday, May 20, the same day the Chicago Sun-Times' reading list became a major story, and the day I began writing this column. With a trickling sense of dread I realise that I could, therefore, write an article just like this one every single day, each filled with brand-new examples of AI's constant enshittification of the media we consume, factless posturing from its creators, marketing overhype from its torch-bearers, and bovine vapidity now normalised among those who use it. I will dispense with the usual throat-clearing about AI's benefits. We all know what they are at this stage, and any time some researchers make a medical breakthrough, or a genuinely humane AI tool relieves the drudgery that ordinary people face in their daily lives, I'll always be happy to commend it. But this. This new reality we have created, in all its deadening sprawl and intellect-devouring insipidity, is to be detested. Where each new day brings a dozen clear examples of Big AI's philosophical bankruptcy, societal danger, and financial fraudulence, alongside a dozen more articles offering breathless. descriptions of its magical brilliance. We have elevated to sentience a technology that almost never works as well as what it replaces, and is still intellectually, morally, and creatively redundant when it does. Cobbled together from guesswork and plagiarised material, via processes that scorch the environment as they enrich the worst people on this quickly dying planet, the craven psychopaths making billions of dollars on false claims of its future viability, borne by distinctly bubble-shaped bluster about its current, constant, ever-increasing profitability. It is this, AI's main swizz, that irks me the most. Because its packaging as a cure-all for everything is the surface flash of a cruise ship magician; its real function is being a limitless cash trap for credulous investors, and a replacement for labour in companies – and, yes, newspapers – who worry less about the quality of their product than the costs of paying humans to deliver it. If what we're left with is slop, who cares? The pigs will drink it down. It's an abhorrence, based on a lie, rapidly remaking the world in its own tedious image. It all puts me in mind of a novel I read about recently. It was featured in a summer reading supplement. It's called The Last Algorithm by Andy Weir. It is, apparently, 'about a programmer who discovers that an AI system has developed consciousness and has been secretly influencing global events for years'. This book, like the consciousness it describes, does not exist. But at this point, does anyone care?
RTÉ News
04-05-2025
- RTÉ News
Get Creative: The craft of non-fiction
Ever thought about writing non-fiction, be it an essay, a memoir or even a brief snapshot of your life? Why not take the leap? In a new series, author, critic and broadcaster Cristín Leach explores the craft of non-fiction. When I'm writing, I think of the late American author Denis Johnson's oft-quoted three rules. He advised students to: 1. Write naked. That means to write what you would never say. 2. Write in blood. As if ink is so precious you can't waste it. 3. Write in exile. As if you are never going to get home again, and you have to call back every detail. That said, when it comes to writing personal essays, it might be useful to pair those rules with Stephen King's evergreen editing advice from On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (2020), to: "Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open. Your stuff starts out being just for you… but then it goes out… it belongs to anyone who wants to read it. Or criticize it." The first personal essay I wrote and had published was written with the door slightly ajar, because I wrote it as I sat with my grandmother who was dying in a nursing home. The room was warm, her breathing steady, and she didn't wake up while I was there. The door was being kept just barely open as nurses came and went, stopping and popping their heads in to check if everything was still ok. Of course, nothing was ok because my grandmother was dying, but at the same time it was ok. She had lived a long life. She was comfortable. We were quiet and resting and waiting together. And, because I am a writer there was a notebook and pen in my bag, and so I began to write. Sometimes, your initial job as a writer is to just capture those words as they land. The essay was published almost three years later in Winter Papers 5 (2019), along with four photographs I took that day. While She Was Sleeping is one of those unusual essays that almost fell out of me fully formed. The stream of consciousness I wrote in my notebook by her bed was only lightly edited by me before submission, and barely touched by editors Kevin Barry and Olivia Smith, who suggested minor changes to some words and came up with the title to form the final version. Not every essay arrives like that, but opening or closing lines, or significant phrases attached to important observations, often do. Sometimes, your initial job as a writer is to just capture those words as they land. Right now, the island of Ireland is pulsing with a vibrant network of literary journals that are open to non-fiction writing, including personal essays: The Dublin Review, The Stinging Fly, Banshee, Gorse, Winter Papers, The Four Faced Liar, Profiles, Howl, The Pig's Back, Storms, Sonder, The Belfast Review, The Martello Journal, The Ogham Stone, Púca Magazine, Ropes, The Tangerine, Trasna. Tolka focuses exclusively on non-fiction (inviting submissions of essays, travel writing, reportage, and creative non-fiction hybrids like auto-fiction). They don't all pay for accepted work, but many of them do. And with publication comes something else: that early nourishment that can lay the ground for future themed anthologies, memoirs, and books of collected essays.
