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The End of an Era

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Re: The End of an Era

#451

Post by DeluluDon »

plastic-enjoyer wrote: post #395
miki123211 wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. I think narrative stories are a "brain hack", in the same way heavily processed food, drugs, clickbait, soap operas and TikTok are brain hacks, combined with some exclusivity status signaling games. They're just old enough to have gained a cultural cachet that more modern forms of entertainment don't yet have. Same for art, music, comedy and culture generally. There is nothing wrong with those "brain hacks", if t…

Shit engineers say

Arrogance plays a big part in this persons life.

Re: The End of an Era

#452

Post by tough »

b112 wrote: post #347
bsenftner wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are describing the bifurcation of society that is the moral lesson of The Time Machine by H.G. Wells. The Morlocks are the scientific and engineering "gender" (so to speak) of the human race while the Eloki are the child-like humans kept around because they are the food the Morlocks consume to survive in that future.

Yes, I've read the book, the two movies (one modern one from the 60s?), and the sequel, very well done!, by Stephen Baxter. It's a good concept, but for some reason I thought of a military movie I watched recently, where someone was going on about how they were third generation military. And how their friends and family were military. Sort of the same kind of siloing there.

If you look at history you might find that's very much the case in the real world too https://acoup.blog/2026/07/18/collections-pre-modern-armies-...

Re: The End of an Era

#453

Post by stasomatic »

danaris wrote: post #334
inigyou wrote: post #4

LLMs are writing as well as humans for people who think writing words is the goal. Printing presses also write words better than humans. LLMs are solving the problem one layer higher than printing presses, but still several layers down from the top. Note that LLMs aren't useless, since they have other strengths which can make them equal or better than humans in certain applications. For instance, they can tirelessly…

> LLMs are writing as well as humans for people who think writing words is the goal. Only if what you mean by this is "for people who think padding a word count is the goal". LLMs absolutely do not write well , by human standards.

LLMs absolutely do not write well, by human standards.

You are right to push me on this :)

Re: The End of an Era

#454

Post by okzgn »

fidotron wrote: post #234
okzgn wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for your opinion. To be more specific, there are many subjective views on what value is. I didn't mean a literary piece always has market value if nobody is buying it, but it can still be valuable educationally as a masterful or sublime example of literature.

You are deliberately skirting the core problem which is your perception of value is completely warped by supply and demand. If you have a surplus of something then it will cease to be of value to you. For example you do not actually "value" air, since it is everywhere and so we ignore it, but stuck somewhere where it is not you will come to appreciate it fairly quickly. You seem to believe there is something magic an…

If somebody makes something excellent, it deserves congrats (monkey or not). I'm from Donetsk (with a lot of mental culture, and literary/tech habits), and I later lived in Ecuador (where there is little literary/tech habit and reading culture).

Re: The End of an Era

#455

Post by rustyboy »

dageshi wrote: post #352

I read a lot of amateur litrpg, prog fantasy and cultivation stories on royalroad.com I would guess I've actually tried to read more AI written stuff while checking out new stories than a lot of people in this thread. In practice what I discovered is, AI spends a lot of words to say very little, its prose is quite annoying most of the time. It often makes mistakes in terms of continuity as the story continues. Now bo…

This is a great point, one that I think is reinforced by the fact that these models (at least so far) arn't being trained and benchmarked on "good writing". Which in and of itself is going to be, to your point, a moving target.

And to be clear I don't doubt Fable couldn't pump out 13 thousand alternative fan fictions to Game of Thrones and they would follow some distribution curve that you'd see in meat-space, some garbage, some good, and a lot in the middle.

Re: The End of an Era

#456

Post by foobarian »

WorldMaker wrote: post #433
Brian_K_White wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I say that LLM's are a pacifier. LLM output is to conscious output as a silicone nipple is to a breast. Sure, at some level, there are some people who at least some times, cannot pecieve a difference. That does not prove that there is no difference or that the difference doesn't matter.

I think that LLM's are a broken mirror or maybe disco ball. What you get back is almost always a reflection of what you put in, just garbled through and with the reflections of so many other people. The best parts that I often get back are mostly just the stuff that I already put in it. I think that's also where LLMs get the most dangerous. That ELIZA effect of telling you exactly what you told it but in a slightly r…

I think it is a net positive for me, because I am super unconfident by nature and the agreeable, almost sycophantic output from major LLMs give me just enough of a boost to debias me. They are certainly better than a physical rubber duck.

Re: The End of an Era

#457

Post by theshrike79 »

stavros wrote: post #432
mike_hearn wrote: post #262

Offtopic for the actual post, but if you don't know the author and like sci-fi mysteries his Silo story is great. I haven't read the books because I'm enjoying theorizing but the Apple TV series is being broadcast now on a weekly basis. It's one of these very dense mysteries that asks you to figure out the clues. It's about a city of about 10k people living underground in a giant cylindrical self-sufficient "silo" be…

I've read half of the first book but didn't enjoy it as much as the show. I wasn't really a fan of the writing and the show rearranged some storylines around that, in my opinion, gave the story better pacing.

Book two (SHIFT) is the reason the TV show had to move stuff around a lot.

It's pretty much unfilmable due to real world reasons, so they're doing it this way instead.

Read the books, loved them. Watching the show and I really want to know how they get to the end because of all the changes.

Re: The End of an Era

#458

Post by effseven »

jalev wrote: post #127

We had this exact drama about 3 weeks ago in the SFF community, when a bunch of editors admitted to accepting and paying for submissions from very clearly AI author[^1], which led to some more interesting revelations: there are many Editors in this space that care _more for the premise of the idea shown to them_ than the actual quality of writing. I have a suspicion this is what happened here too. Agents, Editors, et…

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Re: The End of an Era

#459

Post by effseven »

argentinian wrote: post #354
bonoboTP wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but it's easier to get lazy and to just wire it up to an automatic engagement farming loop with no human input. Imagine the worst form of audience capture possible.

What's wrong with that? There's the low quality slop for the people who desire it, and then there's the high quality literature that's appreciated by people with good taste, and that cannot be easily produced

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Re: The End of an Era

#460

Post by effseven »

stereolambda wrote: post #396

What most takes seem to miss is that hardly anyone these days reads just because it's an easy way to fight boredom and pass some time. It's not 1920s. There's lots of less demanding and very much available ways for that, short-form video being the extreme. So if you're reading books at all, there's some ideological (or cultural, for the lack of a better word) reasons about broadening your mind, caring for your attent…

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