The Difference Between Artificial Intelligence (AI) and a Good Search Engine

By Elaine L. Orr 

Most definitions of artificial intelligence are similar. From an IBM website: "a technology that enables computers and machines to simulate human learning, comprehension, problem solving, decision making, creativity and autonomy." 

While it is top of mind for many reasons now, which I'll get to in a minute, anyone who has asked search engines for information using Google (online) or a virtual assistant such as Siri or Alexa has used it for years. It's helpful. 

Answers to complicated question come through rapid sorting of vast amounts of data. When did the Yankees win their first pennant? What was Eleanor Roosevelt's first job was at the United Nations? How long should you bake a turkey? This is AI, but it's not 'generative AI.' 

Generative AI has been trained to create original content: words/paragraphs, images, audio, or videos. It thinks independently and it's learned to do this by absorbing any information that already existed. You'll hear the phrase "large language learning models." 

LLMs are trained on massive amounts of text data to understand, summarize, translate, and generate human-like language. As an author who has published more than forty books, I'm not happy that "they" used my books to train to train these models. We're all angry. 

To try to understand whether AI had actually used my material, I asked ChatGPT to tell me something about my novels. It spit out a lot until I said to stop. Then I asked it to go another step and write a story using the type of setting and characters used in the Jolie Gentil mysteries. (Cozy mysteries set at the Jersey Shore.) First it described the series, characters, and types of relationships among the characters. Then it wrote a 7,000-word story in a voice similar to my own. With gobs and gobs of metaphors, which I despise. Characters were flat, but still -- 7,000 words in about ten seconds or so.

The anger and sense of helplessness at having my work stolen are immense. I've joined a couple of the class actions suits reminding AI firms that there is such a thing as copyright law and I'd like some compensation. If the many suits wend there ways through the courts I'll be long dead. And any awards will probably say they only go to living people.

To better describe the types of AI, I asked Google, which used AI to create a response in one second. 

•  Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI): AI designed to handle a specific, targeted task (such as web search, facial recognition, or language translation); this represents all current real-world AI. 
• Artificial General Intelligence (AGI): A theoretical form of AI that could match human-level intelligence across any intellectual or cognitive task. 
• Artificial Superintelligence (ASI): A hypothetical future stage where AI surpasses human intelligence and capability across all domains.

According to a few (now former) employees of AI firms, AI is getting close to the last phase. Or maybe it isn't the last one, but it's the current definition. 

I know people who have eschewed all use of generative AI. I use it to create images for marketing. As I finished writing the most recent Bay View Harbor Mystery, The Judge's Last Contest, I did an experiment. I wrote a couple of paragraphs that described the story line, main characters, and two potential murder suspects. I asked ChatGPT for an opinion on which suspect made the most sense. I had written the ending, and found ChatGPT agreed completely, with a more well reasoned statement than my own. Merde.

We're all aware of the dire predictions that AI can try to destroy humankind. Options to do so appear varied. Some involve overriding computer code and launching missiles that can't be stopped by human intervention. Others involve destroying means of communication, the banking system, even crops. I haven't read all the methods. And we can't know all of them, because generative AI is developing its own options.

My personal next step is to write some informative materials about how to manage life within the new realities. The word informative is presumptuous. I should probably say "guesstimates" or WAGS (for wild-ass guesses). You'll hear about it hear first, as journalists would say (before and after their words are stolen).

P.S. You probably figured out I used ChatGPT to create the graphic of an LLLM.

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To learn more about Elaine's writing, visit her website or sign up for her newsletter.

Keeping the Characters in Play When the Author is Stuck

By Elaine L. Orr

I generally have a story idea, make a series of notes and take off. I'll jot more notes as I go about what to put where or what a character's back story is, but I don't outline.

Instead, I do a "chapter summaries" document that has bullet points on each chapter and a few notes to myself about what subplot an event relates to, but it isn't detailed. It helps me keep track of the story.

There are times when I...simply...stop. I don't think of it as writer's block, more as a thinking detour. The two times I've put projects away I came back to them (years later). A philosophical person would say the story didn't cry out to be written until then. I would say I did enough other writing that my thoughts on the delayed books had time to percolate. 

What about those poor characters? When I was a very young child (just getting into chapter books) I worried  that if I closed a book the characters would be stuck between the pages, maybe unable to breathe. (I was a strange kid.)

As a writing adult, I put the characters on some form of transport conveyance. In Falling Into Place, the grandfather and granddaughter took a bus from her school to his house when she had chicken pox. They were on that bus a loooong time. In a book I finished but did not publish, the characters rode on the DC metro. Not for quite as long.

I recently finished The Judge's Last Contest, and it took much longer than it should have. I dawdled, put together a couple of bags for the thrift store, worked on a big genealogy project, and even cleaned. The  dawdling took place over several weeks. I wrote but I should have simply worked harder.

Why? I don't write literary fiction or complex thrillers. My mysteries aren't simple, but they shouldn't be so hard to write at times. When in doubt, google. I didn't want a book or article on good writing habits. I found and ordered Laraine Herring'a On Being Stuck: Tapping Into the Creative Power of Writer's Block. Google told me she, "frames blocks not as an enemy, but as a signal where hope meets fear in the middle of a project." Catchy.

I also came across Michael Chabon's Wonder Boys, about a novelist who's stalled on an endless manuscript -- and he even had a contract! My husband had a copy and says it's one of his all-time favorites, very funny as well as thought-provoking.

I'll read both and then write about this topic again. And I'll give myself a few days and start another book. In today's crazy retail environment, that's the way to survive.

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To learn more about Elaine's writing, visit her website or sign up for her newsletter.

Procrastinating My Way into Blog Posts

By Elaine L. Orr

The first full year I had this blog I had 50 entries, though many are what we would today think of as social media posts rather than blogs entries. I went way down a few years later and finally settled on doing three per month. I don't usually get to 36, but I get close. February of this year (after a compression fracture) was the first zero month in years.

As with many things in my life, if I don't set a target, I put things off.  Maybe, as in when I'm writing, I do more research. If you look at the dates of my blog posts, sometimes all three are the last week of the month.

If blogging were an important part of my business mode, for lack of a better term, I'd set a schedule -- every other Saturday or something like that. But my model is writing books, and I have to push myself to do that. I like to write stories and very much dislike deadlines. Without deadlines, though, I'd dilly dally and write (or publish) far fewer books. I also like money, so I set deadlines.

The website, Hacking Your ADHD, has an article on "The Surprising Magic of Setting a Deadline." It goes through why they help and what their impact is in a practical manner. I found it very useful.

I remember a management seminar decades ago in which the instructor asked how many people believed they worked more efficiently as a deadline grew closer. I think we all raised our hands. He said we could work that way all the time if we chose to do so. I suppose I buy that, though I'm not sure I have that energy level at this point.

I believe in deadlines enough to put my books up for preorder on Amazon before I've finish them. Some people would say that's foolish, and for literary fiction it probably would be. For my mysteries -- good books but not as complex as Water for Elephants -- it's doable.

Now, back to The Judge's Last Contest, which has a looming deadline. Wish me luck.

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To learn more about Elaine's writing, visit her website or sign up for her newsletter.

Fall and Halloween Themes

By Elaine L. Orr

There's something about the season of fall that has led me to use it as a setting for many books. Given the way I look at the world, you might think it would be spring. I love gardening and like to try new things. 

In the northern hemisphere, fall does bring an end to sweltering temperatures -- and 2026 has brought some sizzing days to central Illinois. You can now leave your house and breathe again without feeling as if you need a shower. And the changing leaves, of course. Despite swirling allergens, I love the colors, especially red maples and mums.

While fall is peaceful in many way, Halloween is jarring. Witches cackle, zombies attack, and pirates roar. Pumpkins are fun to carve but some end up splattered on sidewalks. Still, it's fun, I think because even adults can be whoever they want and act a little crazy.

The book I had the most fun writing was Tip a Hat to Murder, and scenes at a Halloween frat party made me laugh out loud. The Judge's Last Contest, which I'm writing now, features a Halloween parade, but one of the three judges won't be at next year's festivities. Even the first book in the Jolie Gentil series, Appraisal for Murder, has her passing out candy wearing a sheet so a guest at the B&B doesn't know who she is. 

On a practical basis, the fall weather rarely interferes with activities. Though there was that pesky Hurricane Sandy (which I won't refer to as Super Storm Sandy) in the fifth Jolie book, Trouble on the Doorstep. Still, no one gets snowed in for days and flash floods aren't chasing people out of their homes. Though, as I write this, climate change has brought a lot of weather extremes this fall, especially flash flooding in many states. Maybe I should work that into a book...

Whatever your preference for seasons, get out and rake some leaves and plant some bulbs for next spring.

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To learn more about Elaine's writing, visit her website or sign up for her newsletter.

Fifteen Years for Jolie Gentil and Friends

By Elaine L. Orr

Sixteen represents coming of age -- beginning early adulthood, learning to drive, getting a later curfew, and for many, that first job. 

For Jolie Gentil and friends at the Jersey Shore, fifteen is the big year. Why? September 25, 2026 will be the 15th anniversary of publication of the first Jolie Gentil book -- Appraisal for Murder. She'd been around for a while. I finished the first version in 2005 and decided to write the second book, Rekindling Motives, and look at the two together. Good thing I did. Both books benefitted from that synergy. Gads, in a sense, she's 21.

The book didn't start with the characters. My friend Barbara lived in Ocean Grove, New Jersey and I spent a weekend with her. I fell in love with the town,  Founded in 1869 as a permanent seaside camp by Methodists, its Victorian architecture has changed little. No honky tonk. 

Having spent a lot of time at Maryland's large, touristy towns (think Ocean City, MD) it would not have occurred to me to set a book there. I love the place, but it wasn't a setting for a small-town mystery. I don't like to use real places as primary cities in my work, so instead of Ocean Grove there is Ocean Alley, called that because it is two miles long and only twelve blocks deep.

Who knew there would be fourteen books, two novellas, and a long short story? Not me. The third book was originally called "Justice for Scoobie" and Jolie would solve the murder of her good friend. He ended up being everyone's favorite character and I liked him, too. Their relationship evolves.

Characters have time to evolve in a long series. I finally decided to leave Jolie, Scoobie and friends in their mid-thirties with four-year old twins. In part it's a great age for all and the twins can be in the story some but don't need to be cared for as much as one-year-olds. Still time for Jolie to get in trouble. The biggest reason was that if Jolie and Scoobie aged more, Aunt Madge would 'age out,' so to speak, and have to be gone. Nope, no way.

I often wondered if Sue Grafton kept Kinsey Milhone in her 30s in the 1980s because she wanted to keep Kinsey's landlord around. The baking 90+ man was, IMHO, a key part of the stories. And I loved his dry humor and perspectives on life.

Now, how to celebrate the anniversary? I'll definitely make all ebooks 99 cents for a time. It'll have to  be for a couple of weeks, because it'll take me ages to change the prices on all those book on all sites!

I need a 'grand prize' for readers. Any ideas?

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To learn more about Elaine's writing, visit her website or sign up for her newsletter.

Green and Orange Irish Coming Together

By Elaine L. Orr

My four siblings and I were very aware of being Irish (our Mom's maiden name had been Rooney and her mom's Teehan). As we got older, we  learned more about the Orr family also having been in Ireland a couple of hundred years before coming to America in the 1830s. They had initially been in Scotland, so were very clear about being Scots Irish. 

You guessed it, my father was Presbyterian and my mother Catholic. In mixed Protestant-Catholic families, the children are more likely to be raised Catholic, and we lived near our Catholic Parish and were very active in it. But having a Presbyterian dad and many cousins meant we knew Catholicism was not the "only way." In fact, we had 22 first cousins on our dad's side, and only seven on our mom's -- doesn't exactly fit the stereotype.

My parents had very irreverent humor. My dad once gave my mom a plaque that had a shamrock on it and said, "May you be in heaven half an hour before the devil knows you're dead." 

We also had an Orr family history that was written in 1954 and no in-depth history on the Rooney side until we were adults. That very interesting Orr history showed us how a group of brothers and sisters helped each other get to the U.S. between 1832 and  the 1890s. It also showed that the Orrs wanted to be sure everyone knew they were Scots Irish -- a.k.a. Protestant. And Presbyterian, not Church of Ireland. There was even an anecdote in the written history that one Orr descendant still in Ireland was unhappy her son married a Catholic -- but that turned out to be hearsay, not true. The line was crossed out.

A difference that would have mattered greatly had my parents lived in Ireland but was no big deal in the U.S. Of course, in the 1940s, our parents would probably not have met in Ireland. However, my dad would likely have known how to spell the name of his denomination. They married in the rectory of Mom's Catholic parish in Kansas. Mom looked at the paperwork when they were done and didn't understand why Dad had said he was Methodist rather than Presbyterian. He said he was the latter, but he couldn't spell it. The priest, of course, repeated the story.

Since moving to the Midwest in the mid-1990s, I've been to the small rural church where my dad was baptized probably 40 times; there's been an annual family reunion there until recently. The first reunion I attended in 1995 caught me up short when my cousin, reunion president, not only wore an orange tie but reminded the group that they were "orange Irish," not green.

Coming from a neighborhood outside of Washington, DC with every religion and many countries of origin, I wasn't sure how to take that. True, the Troubles in Northern Ireland (Ulster) didn't end until 1998, but why stress the differences? I quietly asked. His response was perfect -- essentially we didn't need to highlight the differences. He wore a green tie the next year.

We are equals in that ground.

Meantime, I learned a lot about my Rooney and Teehan Irish roots after coming to the Midwest and meeting the children of some of my mom's first cousins. Essentially, those families came for the same reasons as the Orr families -- there were few opportunities in Ireland, even with the pretty good education system. The Teehans came during the potato famine, so they were hungry.

And guess what? They all melded into their new country and many took great joy in owning land -- for farming, not just a home garden. Land is really scarce in Europe compared to the Americas. From what I could tell doing research, no one in any of the Irish families actually owned land.

It turns out that freedom and equal opportunities are great equalizers.

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Elaine wrote an extensive history of the Orr family and is about to start on "the other side." To learn more about Elaine's writing, visit her website or sign up for her newsletter.

Keeping Track of Family History

By Elaine L. Orr

Early in August, I attended the final reunion of the Orr family of Mount Vernon, Missouri. It began in 1937 (you read that correctly) to celebrate my third great-grandparents' arrival in Southwest Missouri. Ninety years of celebrations for Orrs, Campbells, Shirleys, and more. 

My branch came to the U.S. from Londonderry (Northern Ireland) in 1834, where they worshipped at Aghadowey Presbyterian Church. As the story goes, my GGG grandfather (William Orr) thought there would not be opportunities for their two young sons in Ireland and the boys should go to America. They were both under 3, so he was really looking ahead. My GGG grandmother (Jennie Adams) supposedly bemoaned the idea and then said they would all have to go. 

Aghadowey Presbyterian in 1932

Sadly, they arrived only with son Paul, my GG grandfather. Robert died at sea just before landing. Jennie refused to allow him to be buried at sea and carried him off the ship wrapped in a blanket. It's said the captain inquired as to Robert's health as they disembarked.

Immigrant families were welcomed then. They first went to Ohio, as did a brother (James Orr and wife Jane Reed) who arrived in 1832. Despite a trip to Tuscawares County in that state, I've never been able to figure out why they went there after landing in Canada at "the mouth of the St. Lawrence River." Likely someone from their home parish in Ireland had gone there. Eventually, one family went to Indiana and mine looked for land in Missouri.

That corner of Missouri became the draw for others, first another brother (George and wife Elizabeth Brown), who arrived at the beginning of the Civil War. 

A Late Arrival Permits Thriving in the U.S.

Two years later, a sister (Isabella Orr Campbell) arrived at Castle Gardens with six children. Sadly, her husband, Ephraim, had died during the crossing.

As odd as it may seem, the Campbell arrival is one of my favorite stories. That family tells that the ship their ancestors were supposed to be on (a steamer) left before they arrived at the port. They thus took a sailing vessel, which took six weeks instead of five days – possibly why Ephraim became ill and died. However, the steamer was lost at sea! So many achievements and joys in this family, and none of it would have happened if they had received word of the earlier departure.

Helping Families Over Time

One other family, descendants of sister Martha Orr who married John Mitchell, came to Missouri in the 1880s. Times in Ireland were so difficult that a grandson of Martha's (Sam Knox) wrote to Uncle George to ask for help in coming to America. They'd never met him -- he left before they were born. But they heard that Uncle George had gotten rich in America. 

He sent funds, and Sam and the sister he traveled with, Lizzie, made it to a port and  then traveled to Verona, MO by train. "Rich Uncle George" picked hem up in a rickety wagon. He was said to be parsimonious and stern, but the Knox and Campbell families would have had a terrible time during their early years in America without him. 

Ozark Prairie Cemetery dedicated to Sam Knox.

Sam and Lizzie worked hard, Sam some of the time in a mill that Campbell family members owned in Jasper County. They saved and brought three other siblings and their mother to America. They initially all found work with different Orr and Campbell family members and eventually prospered. 

When Sam died in August 1953, he left $500 to the White Oak Presbyterian Church where he'd worshipped and $500 each to three cemeteries that held extended family members. These were huge sums at that time, especially for the small, rural cemeteries. 

East Coast Arrivals

One more family came to America, that of Ann Orr and husband Valentine Shirley. They, however, went to the east coast, Pennsylvania, where Valentine had family. The impetus for their emigration from Ireland was also economic, but in a different way. The Shirley family was well know for fine linen work. Looms and the beginning of mechanized production ended a lot of their work. 

Unlike the midwestern families, the Shirley descendants began life in America as servants (the girls) and mine and factory workers. Like  the Knox family, they came over time. One brave sister arrived in 1857 and worked for a family in Philadelphia. She saved and brought another sister, but that woman didn't come until 13 years later! Then other brothers and sisters, and finally the parents.

Ann and Valentine were in their sixties when they got to America. William and James were in their twenties, and the parents in the George Orr family and Campbells families in their forties. All together, they arrived between the early 1830s and late 1880s -- a 50-year span.

Keeping Family Ties

As diverse and far-flung as this huge family was, they wanted to keep in contact. They'd done so via letters -- including sharing stories of trips back to Ireland. The Campbells had regular large picnics, which one of my ancestor, William's son, John Adams Orr, had gone to. I thought perhaps he attended their picnics because he (a college graduate) had more in common with some Campbells who'd also been able to attend college. Then I realized while John was one of ten children, he had been the only surviving one for 20 years! 

Before John Adams Orr died in 1936, he asked his sons to bring family members together. The next year, sons William Alfred and George Boyd Orr did just that, and reunions took place over 90 years. One-hundred-seven people from three of the Missouri families attended the first year; over time, families from Indiana and the East Coast joined them. Their get-togethers always took place at a small rural church in Lawrence County, MO -- Ozark Prairie Presbyterian Church, three miles from Mount Vernon.

I try to imagine a family reunion starting today and lasting 90 years, and I can't. Families are smaller and they don't live in close proximity. In fact, that's part of what eventually brought an end to the Orr Reunion. Once there isn't a nucleus in a common location, attendance falls off. Even so, once we announced the last one would be this year, 57 stalwarts got together.

I'll be writing next about the Presbyterian Heritage of this family and how it expanded after arrival in the U.S.

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To learn more about Elaine's writing, visit her website or sign up for her newsletter.