One of my favorite stories on Clarkesworld is "The Secret Life of Bots", by Suzanne Palmer: https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/palmer_09_17/
Does anyone think a LLM could write this?
Sci-fi mag pauses submissions amid flood of AI-generated short stories
51–60 of 117 posts
Re: Sci-fi mag pauses submissions amid flood of AI-generated short stories
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is one of his essays I vehemently disagree with, and think has hurt Silicon Valley. The idea that ideas and idea people are worthless has had a cascading effect of putting non idea people in idea people seats, or locking out a class of people from participating unless they have some other engineering or marketing or leadership skill. Apple would never have become without Steve Jobs being able to see what was and…
It's rather that developers don't want to work for idea people because they usually are not Steve Jobs, who is the exception to the rule.
And just like every profession there are idea people and people who think they are idea people. Unlike engineering, you can’t as easily make interview tests that pretend to be able to discern between those who are good at something and those that aren’t. Idea people are left to hitting a home run, succeeding and making a name for themselves. No one is going to hire a first timer into Chief Idea Officer.
Paul’s letter is a reason we don’t see more Jobs type people. Industry has been told to dismiss those who don’t do. Instead of finding a way to harness them.
Why isn’t the formula for a startup finding a Jobs and pairing them with a Woz? The idea that there are no more Jobs has almost become a self fulfilling mythology. Let’s see a bot write those two sentences on its own.
Re: Sci-fi mag pauses submissions amid flood of AI-generated short stories
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
Statistically, yes. Infinite monkeys being as productive as they are, you'd eventually get Shakespeare out by accident.
Are the number of responses by ChatGPT to a given prompt infinite? I suppose that even monkeys at a typewriter can't produce an infinite number of different books, even if that number is really, really large (hello, Mr. Borges). But, I assumed (without a lot of subject matter knowledge) that the number of possible responses was actually much less than just randomly typing keys, because it's picking words from a frequ…
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Re: Sci-fi mag pauses submissions amid flood of AI-generated short stories
#54I think this is an under appreciated symptom of a much larger problem, accelerated shit production.
I've observed that markets are really bad at selecting for quality. The "invisible" hand is driven by price and so the production of "equivalent" products at a lower price does two things;
1) It consumes product demand from quality insensitive consumers (the whole 'sucking the oxygen out of the eco system problem.')
2) It takes the margin support that those people provided out of the pipeline, leaving only the folks who are quality focused as the market.
I have complained about this in the past with respect to personal computer hardware. I (and others) have used the term "crapitalism" to describe the hollowing out of the market by the flood of poor quality products.
With technology that is pretty easy to do by substituting "work alike" but less expensive parts, these work in the short time and then fail in terms of lifetime or drift over time specifications.
Now we have "cheap creativity" in the form of prompt directed creative works. I expect that we'll see a flood of self published romance novels on Kindle (even at 0.99/each you need perhaps a dozen sales to cover your time investment) Stories that speak at only one level (the constructions of the plot and the actions of the characters) then swamp the market and more nuanced stories or works will not be sold because of the money spent on these which isn't available to spend on better works.
I think this will be a huge legacy for these technologies and I don't think history will look favorably on it, but one can never know right?
Re: Sci-fi mag pauses submissions amid flood of AI-generated short stories
#55I think this is an under appreciated symptom of a much larger problem, accelerated shit production. I've observed that markets are really bad at selecting for quality. The "invisible" hand is driven by price and so the production of "equivalent" products at a lower price does two things; 1) It consumes product demand from quality insensitive consumers (the whole 'sucking the oxygen out of the eco system problem.') 2)…
Ironically, LLMs are really low grade creative engines that will prop up the industries that have optimized creativity away. A highly creative society/culture would have minimal interest in LLM use cases like this or in entertainment more broadly.
What will the schism become? Organic vs. inorganic works? Will there be one or will it just be a guess?
Re: Sci-fi mag pauses submissions amid flood of AI-generated short stories
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
reminds me of PG > The fact that there's no market for startup ideas suggests there's no demand. Which means, in the narrow sense of the word, that startup ideas are worthless. http://www.paulgraham.com/ideas.html#:~:text=The%20fact%20th... .
This is one of his essays I vehemently disagree with, and think has hurt Silicon Valley. The idea that ideas and idea people are worthless has had a cascading effect of putting non idea people in idea people seats, or locking out a class of people from participating unless they have some other engineering or marketing or leadership skill. Apple would never have become without Steve Jobs being able to see what was and…
I usually say "ideas are a dime a dozen."
What I mean by this is that so many people starting tech businesses get really hung up on "protecting their idea" so it won't be "stolen" by others. But what makes an idea valuable isn't the idea, it's the execution. These people are worrying too much about the wrong thing.
I don't mean that ideas are worthless. Everything we create starts with an idea.
Re: Sci-fi mag pauses submissions amid flood of AI-generated short stories
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's rather that developers don't want to work for idea people because they usually are not Steve Jobs, who is the exception to the rule.
And just like every profession there are idea people and people who think they are idea people. Unlike engineering, you can’t as easily make interview tests that pretend to be able to discern between those who are good at something and those that aren’t. Idea people are left to hitting a home run, succeeding and making a name for themselves. No one is going to hire a first timer into Chief Idea Officer. Paul’s letter…
> Why isn’t the formula for a startup finding a Jobs and pairing them with a Woz?
Maybe because there are very few Jobses and Wozes around? And those that are, are probably working on their own startup.
Re: Sci-fi mag pauses submissions amid flood of AI-generated short stories
#58I think this is an under appreciated symptom of a much larger problem, accelerated shit production. I've observed that markets are really bad at selecting for quality. The "invisible" hand is driven by price and so the production of "equivalent" products at a lower price does two things; 1) It consumes product demand from quality insensitive consumers (the whole 'sucking the oxygen out of the eco system problem.') 2)…
Ironically, LLMs are really low grade creative engines that will prop up the industries that have optimized creativity away. A highly creative society/culture would have minimal interest in LLM use cases like this or in entertainment more broadly. What will the schism become? Organic vs. inorganic works? Will there be one or will it just be a guess?
I think you are largely correct. My observation is that "quality" as a discriminator in a market requires enough market share for quality in order to continue funding it. If you split the aggregate market into a standard distribution, the ability to sell quality products into that market seems to evaporate quickly once you get beyond 1.0 SD from the mean.
The more interesting point (to me) is your second one, which is how do you educate the market to recognize the "cost" of low quality? It is understanding that cost that convinces the market to pay what is required to get the quality version of the product.
Re: Sci-fi mag pauses submissions amid flood of AI-generated short stories
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
What does the value in writing mainly consist of? Edit: currently this question is at -3, as though it’s obvious to everyone the difference between valuable writing and not valuable writing. To me it’s a worthwhile question, particularly because the more precisely we answer it the more precisely ChatGPT will become able to produce valuable writing a couple releases from now.
It's the way the story is told. If it was all about the idea, you'd just read the Wikipedia plot synopsis, say "ah what a great story that was, so glad I read it" and move on.
Anna Karenina.
It basically tells you the plot on the first page, and yet is 1000 pages of something incredible. It's like being able to see inside someone else's mind - not being told what they're thinking, but being able to feel the emotions as they do.
Re: Sci-fi mag pauses submissions amid flood of AI-generated short stories
#60Soon, however, I expect AI to write even better, more personal, and more riveting stories than humans. It is just that they are bad now that they are blocked from submissions.
Wait until we get to submit EMG/EEG/ECG emotion profiles correlated with eye tracking so we can consume and direct highly personalized stories that feel immense and moving.
Then let Facebook buy it and make you feel intimately connected to the latest product/party/trend that pays them the most.