Jeff Duntemann's Contrapositive Diary

74 today. Data from my family tree indicates that I’m doing all right by still breathing: I’ve lived longer than any man in my paternal line going back to one Johann Andreas Duntemann 1729-1808. He made it to 78. If I can log five more years, I’ll be the oldest guy in my paternal line going back as far as I can see, which (for now) is a man born in 1687, who died at 51. I’ve seen the names and lifespans of other, older Duntemann men here and there, but I can’t connect any of them to my own line.

That’s one way to look at a year that wasn’t…exactly…the best. I was diagnosed with prostate cancer last fall, had radiation treatment in January, and have recently been told by my oncologist that the radiation worked and my PSA is now 0.86. That was a big drop, let’s say. We need to keep an eye on it, but that’s part of what getting older entails: keeping an eye on all your various “health numbers” as I call them, to be sure nothing is severely out of line. In a blood panel some months back I found that my vitamin B-6 levels were literally off the chart on the high end. Doc told me to quit the B-50 supplements we’ve been taking for years and years. I did. Last Tuesday I gave them some more blood, and learned that my B-6 levels now are dead-center in the normal range.

Whew. (I think.) I’ve never heard of anyone overdosing on B vitamins, but a little research shows that it can happen. I have a mild neuropathy in my right foot, and I have to wonder if excess B6 (pyridoxine) had anything to do with it.

About a month ago we had to send poor little Dash back to his Creator. He was 17 and developing multiple serious symptoms all at once. He lived longer than any of the other six dogs we’ve had as a couple. So the Pack are all now in God’s green fields. We cried, sure. Who wouldn’t? We spent a lot of time with the Pack, and Dash retired from the show ring as an AKC Grand Champion. So he did very well, and we will always imagine him at his best.

There’s nothing like a cancer diagnosis to scramble your creative faculties, and I’m only just recently generating some new ideas and plot arcs for my (stalled) novel, The Molten Flesh. I did publish a new and significantly rewritten version of my 1971 short story “Whale Meat” and later on a new short story, “Morning Man,” about an AI disk jockey at a small-town AM radio station. Both are available for 99c on Amazon. The two stories were platforms to try using generative AI to create covers for short ebook fiction. Not great, not terrible, and I learned a few things in the process.

That’s all the bad stuff. Carol and I have never been closer. We bought a spectacular new car: a Subaru Crosstrek. I got a new mini-split AC installed in my garage/workshop/shack so it’s not always an oven in there. I found a bunch of ancient manuscripts at the bottom of an old box that I thought were gone forever, including parts of a story I wrote when I was 10, on the ancient typewriter my grandmother Sade gave me that year. I’ve made peace with Windows 11. We’re still doing strength training and enjoying it as much as ever.

Nonetheless, I now say 73 to 73. Forgive me if I don’t add ET CUL…

• Creatine not only helps you build muscle—new tests strongly suggest that it can help the body fight cancer cells. The tests are with mice, so there will need to be a lot of further research, but this is great news for anyone (like us) who take creatine on a daily basis.
• Lazarus Version 4.8 is now available. It’s a bugfix release, compiled with FPC 3.2.2. Free and easy to update. Go get it!
• IBM has created a 7 angstrom node for making extremely high-density chips. It’s done by stacking sheets of transistors vertically and bonding the transistors together in a way that makes logic gates etc, with potentially up to 100 billion transistors on a single chip. Screw flying cars. This is the future I had hoped for!
• A guy who’s been blogging now for 25 years lays out a fascinating history of the technology he’s used along that timeline, and how it has evolved. I knew a lot of this (my blog is now 28 years old) but he puts it all in one place in a single well-written article.
• It had to happen. I should have written an SF story about it back in the early ‘80s, but back then I didn’t drink wine. So don’t pop that cork just yet. Claude can act as your AI sommelier.
• Broadcom and OpenAI have announced Jalapeno, a custom chip designed specifically to handle AI inference logic. It’s a sort of AI accelerator, and with any luck at all it will specialize the AI chip market so that the rest of us can afford system memory and SSDs.
• Here’s a slightly weird AI-related site: In The Weights. It’s basically a leaderboard of names present in all the major AIs. I’m #148 on the leaderboard, with a score of 841. It found two hallucinations on me, one claiming that I was an American actor and comedian; the other an electronic/experimental musician. I’m dead certain (but not dead) that I’m the only Jeff Duntemann who has ever lived (yes, I have a third cousin Jeff Dunteman, one n at the end) and I have never done any acting or composing. (Thanks to Mike Bentley for the link.)
• Venezuela got hit by two violent back-to-back earthquakes, one Richter 7.2 and the second 7.5. Carol and I lived through the October 1989 Loma Prieta quake, which logged at 6.9, and the quake was one major reason we left the Santa Cruz area in 1990 for Arizona shortly thereafter.

Amazon just messaged me that my latest Kindle title was now available. “Morning Man” is a 6,300-word short story with an interesting history. It’s about an AI DJ at a small farm-town AM radio station in Wisconsin. I wrote it in 1989. I never tried to sell it, but just threw it in a box full of old manuscripts, where it sat for the next 35 years or so.

Why didn’t I try to sell it? I couldn’t make the characters work. I’ve always been good with gadgets and world-building. Characters, well, I did my best, but the people in the story just didn’t sound especially real. Part of the problem may have been the fact that in 1989 we were preparing to launch PC Techniques and move to Arizona from Scotts Valley, California. My time and energy mostly went into that megaproject. By the time I retired in the teens and returned to fiction, I had mostly forgotten the story of Rusty the AI and his bewildered owner.

So I pulled it out, read it a few times, and rewrote it heavily. Now, having five novels and a couple of intense workshops behind me, I knew what I was doing. The characters now work. And you can have your own copy for 99c.

Well, AI DJs on broadcast radio are now real, and becoming common. Here’s one piece on the state of things as of 2025. Rolling Stone has another good piece on the topic, but it’s paywalled. My brief scan showed a few more, and if the topic interests you, you can probably find plenty.

I don’t expect the general public to believe that I predicted AI DJs in 1989. Nonetheless, I did. So take a look and see what you think. Reviews and ratings are always welcome; thanks in advance. And as I’ve said here more than once, I gotta go dig around in that box and see what else I wrote and then forgot about!

I was at our Fry’s grocery a few days ago, and while looking for a decent tray of organic radishes (I’m fussy about my radishes) the normally ignorable pop music they play above the low-level grocery store hubbub caught my attention. It was one or maybe two people whistling a repetitive theme. There were vocals between the whistles, but I couldn’t make them out, and was in truth way more interested in the radishes than than the music.

On the (short) drive home, I realized that the damn whistles were still playing, this time strictly in my head. I’m prone to this mental peculiarity, generally called “earworms.” I’ve evolved a mechanism to kill my earworms: I start creating parody lyrics for them. Oddly, this makes them go away. I don’t know why. As many of my long-time readers know, I’m good at parody lyrics. Here’s a sample of what I fired at the whistling earworm:

“I’m just a dope, just a typical mope, and that is all that I’ll ever be.”

That said, I sometimes hear store/restaurant music that appeals to me. Years ago I heard a piece in a restaurant in Colorado Springs that got stuck in my head, mostly for the guitar work. The lyrics were fuzzy and I heard them wrong, so having failed to identify the song on Google by its lyrics, it was years later that I heard it again on the radio of a rental car. It was “Found Out About You” by the Gin Blossoms.

But we now have better weapons: Google search on my phone listens, and you can tap a button to tell it to identify whatever music is playing. It worked beautifully for “Because the Night” by Cascada. Ten seconds and bam! I had the title, the artist, and a link to buying it. “Because the night belongs to muggers, / Because the night belongs to blood…”

Ditto last year, when they were playing an appealing item while I was standing in the line at the UPS Store. Pulled out my phone, and a coupla taps (and a few seconds) later, I had “Shut Up and Dance” by Walk the Moon. I enjoyed it enough that I didn’t try to filk it.

Back to the whistles. Now, I struggled for decades to identify an energetic instrumental for brass that I first heard at a grade school show in 1964 or ‘65. I tried to whistle it into my cell phone, but it didn’t work. (I figured it out by sleuthing, but at least I figured it out.) I’ve since found that Google can only identify recorded music. Whistling doesn’t work…

…unless the recorded music is made of whistling.

It was a perfect experiment: When I got home with the whistling earworm in my head, I pulled up Google on my phone, hit the song button, and whistled the whistle. I was startled when Google snagged it in a few seconds. The song was “The Walker” by Fitz and the Tantrums. Not generally something I like, but it was weird enough that I added it to my collection of $1.29 Amazon tracks.

There’s not a lot of whistling in pop music. I vaguely recall a song or two (Roger Whittaker?) which I’ll whistle for Google to see if whistling is just something that Google assumes is recorded music. One has to wonder if Fitz and his gang whistled it to make it easier for people to identify on Google. Or maybe dumb luck.

I’ll go with dumb luck, heh.

I’m seeing more and more indie book covers that are startlingly good, and yet give that now-familiar impression that they were drawn by an AI. I’ve not studied prompt engineering but others have, and so I spent an hour using Musk’s Grok AI to generate a cover for my fantasy novelette “Whale Meat,” which I recently rewrote heavily and republished. Like an idiot I didn’t save the prompt that created the image. What surprised me is that by generating a second image from exactly the same prompt, I got a distinctly different image. I asked for a middle-aged homeless man with a heavy beard and a floppy work cap on a city street, summoning a whale through hyperspace. Here’s what I got:

I chose the one on the left, because it displayed more sense of menace on the man’s face. I also liked the clear indication that he’s the one doing the trick with the whale. The other image could represent a vision the man is having. (No more spoilers. It’s only 99c; if you’re curious, buy it!) The real weirdness is that both images came from exactly the same prompt. (Save your prompts—but don’t expect a given prompt to produce the same thing every time. So save each image that you create with any given prompt!)

Now I had a cover. But…is it mine? That was the first hint to me of the huge problem of how copyright law applies to the output of generative AI.

I see five big legal questions that need to be settled, probably in court:

1. Can material generated by an AI be copyrighted?
2. If material generated by an AI can be copyrighted, who owns the copyright?
3. If a piece of art created by an AI is incorporated into a larger work of art created by a human artist, does the AI art invalidate copyright on the work as a whole?
4. Does material generated by AIs trained on copyrighted material violate the copyright of the training material?
5. Is material generated by an AI trained on illegally obtained material (pirate downloads etc.) considered illegal?

There are smaller issues, but those are the important ones. #1 has supposedly been tried and resolved in the courts.  It went up to the Supreme Court, but the claim stands: Copyright requires human contribution. (H/T to Jim Strickland for sending me the link.) My problem with this is that a human crafted a prompt that created an image specified by the prompt. I consider prompt engineering a human contribution to AI art. If you use a stencil to craft letters on a sign, the stencil did not create the letters. You did. My guess is that #1 will be litigated further, and with any luck, a ruling will also answer #2. I don’t think #3 is a yes—but again, we have no decisions either way thus far.

The biggie is #4. Here’s a scenario to ponder: Suppose an artist needs to draw a picture of a bichon frise dog but has never seen one. The artist thus looks at online photos of bichons and then draws a picture of a bichon. The dog in the drawing isn’t identical to any of the dogs in the photos in terms of factors like size, pose, or hairdo. (Hairdo is a big deal with bichons, trust me. We’ve had six.) So: Is the artist violating the copyright of the photos he scrutinized before drawing the bichon? He trained himself on somebody else’s photos to get a sense for the breed, and then based on that training drew a dog not identical to any of the photos.

I think this much is clear: If you teach yourself enough about dogs to draw dogs, the dogs you draw are copyrightable, and you own the copyright. Furthermore, nobody can claim that drawing a dog violates the copyright of other pictures of similar dogs, barring methods like tracing a photo through tracing paper.

Here’s a counter argument that I’ve heard, don’t recall where: Superman is copyrighted. If you draw Superman and the drawing isn’t identical to any of the Superman copyright holder’s drawings, is your drawing a copyright violation? I’m pretty sure it is. God created dogs. Humans created Superman.

So which one applies to AI?

I’m not sure. I did some further experimenting with the Grok AI: I asked it to draw a bichon chewing on a bone. It did so, and the generated image (left) was photo-like and not cartoon-like as were the “Whale Meat” covers. I then did a Google image search on the created image, and got nothing remotely similar to the picture Grok had put together. Now, there are gazillions of photos of bichons online. Grok might have chosen one with a bone in its mouth and sent it back to me, unchanged. There’s no way I could ever know if that supposedly generated image were a literal copy or truly generated according to training.

The more I research the issue, the muddier the whole thing gets. It’s possible to copyright a recipe. However, the same steps in a recipe expressed in a different way are not a copyright violation, though the steps might be patentable. Fair use is the muddiest issue of all, made still muddier by questions of who (or what) is doing the using. Fair use still comes up in court cases, so it’s hard to know if training an AI on copyrighted material but not using the AI to precisely duplicate any of the copyrighted material is fair use. That issue may not be settled for decades.

Although it’s possible that an AI company would claim copyright on the images that its AI produces (point #2), that would light up our courtrooms in a big hurry—and possibly bring the curtain down on the company itself.

AI companies that pirate immense wads of copyrighted material for AI training should be sued into the ground, but that’s not really about AI. AI users who have no idea where the training material came from should not be held responsible for the piracy if they use the AI.

I’m just bringing up the problems here. I’m not a lawyer and even lawyers will probably admit that AI is a unique addition to the body of copyright law and that relevant law is not settled. I’m just speculating about the problems that we as writers and artists face. How well AIs can write fiction is a question I haven’t tried to answer, though I will run some experiments on that proposition as time permits.

I may or may not create another AI book cover. The “Whale Meat” cover was an experiment. I’d rather pay a human artist for science fiction / fantasy cover art and doubtless will. What happens in the greater publishing community across the next ten years or so will be fascinating. Grab your popcorn. Let’s watch.