The concept is fabulous, and I do agree that there were some gut-kick reactions. Any tool that can help a writer progress their craft is a welcome addition, as far as I am concerned, but there are consequences that probably even the creator did not think about. Tools are never used the way the creator envisioned. Being "cool" is not a reason to embrace. I can see both sides, but I really did not understand how the tool worked, and until I do....I am going to struggle with which side of the fence to land.
Fear of AI just killed a useful tool
171–180 of 309 posts
Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool
#172I believe that if you are using my book as data/model/whatever for something that makes money, then I want a piece of the action. If it's just a paragraph, fine go ahead. But the whole book? Give me money.
At two extremes, say:
If I read your books and use them as a strong foundation from which to write stories (e.g. I don't do any worldbuilding, & just re-use settings/characters without my own introduction), it seems reasonable that my derivative would need some kind of license from you.
If I read your books and write book reviews about them (including small excerpts from the book), it seems unreasonable to require your explicit permission.
I think the website mentioned (which displays stats about a book, and a couple of excerpts) falls far closer to the latter case than the former case.
Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool
#173I’m with the artists on this one. Our obsession with converting everything into input for an algorithm that spits out an ill-defined number (what the hell is “vividness”?) needs to stop. We already tried this with human communication and gave birth to the dystopian nightmare that is social media, why keep repeating our mistakes?
> I’m with the artists on this one. Our obsession with converting everything into input for an algorithm that spits out an ill-defined number (what the hell is “vividness”?) needs to stop.
Usefulness is immaterial here.
Is he allowed to do this? Yes.
What's wrong with presenting a page count and word count, for example?
Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, they don't provide the full book, just a few sentences before and after your search prompt (same as Prosecraft). In both cases, however, if you had the patience, you could search the last few words of the text returned from your prior query and slowly work your way through the entire book.
A few sentences? For most books I've seen, it's a few pages. Google will block you from retrieving more pages from the same book eventually. Using a VPN and a different account may get around one limit, but I experimented with multiple VPNs and browsers once, and although I was able to get a majority of a book's pages, after that google stopped showing me full previews of any of the remaining pages no matter where th…
It shows you a few pages if you are previewing the book (i.e. "look inside"). But if you are using search, it will show you where your search query shows up in the book, no matter what page the search query is found. This means you could theoretically search a book sentence by sentence, and it will eventually have shown you the entire book. I'm not claiming this is an efficient or practical way to game the system and read books, only that google books does contain the full copy of the book text and can reveal the contents of any passage. This is basically how Prosecraft works (at least what i glean from the article) - it doesn't let you read a whole book, even though it may contain a representation of the full text.
Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool
#175Copyright issues aside. My personal opinion is that these tools are mostly useful to suck the "soul" out of a book. They give you templates and stuff and useful statistics to help you go to the lowest common denominator. The problem is more visible in the movie industry, where they have had script templates for a hundred years now (actual time interval pulled out of a*), but it's starting to show up in books too. For…
I wonder about a parallel for paintings. What if there was an analysis stating exactly the brushes the painter used, the number of strokes, the exact pigments, etc? Would that, in your opinion, "suck the 'soul' out of a painting"?
I could see this as a brilliant learning tool. A tool to provide deep insight into something that would be very challenging to quantify personally. I think all this would make future authors better, not worse.
Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
How his this different from all the vampire novels that hit the shelf after the success of Twilight? Publishers alway preferred the money makers, just the measure changed. Nowadays writers can at least publish their books without the need of publishers and I think some like the help of the bad Silicon valley stuff that made writing, publishing and interacting with the readers easier. I'm on your site if it's about au…
> publish their books without the need of publishers Except those are very likely to be metoo vampire novels. And lately LLM generated. I'd move that on the contrary, the role of the publisher as a curator will only become more important in the future.
But publishers will have to deal with a lot more content thanks to LLMs.
Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
(Edited) No, he didn’t say anything about them. People side against their interests all the time, finding a few writers that like this is trivial. Are those people the majority opinion on this or are we just trying to prove how wonderful this technology is?
I'm assuming you read the article. Let's recap: > I launched the prosecraft website in the summer of 2017, and I started showing it off to authors at writers conferences. The response was universally positive, and I incorporated the prosecraft analytic tools into the Shaxpir desktop application [...] And he goes on mentioning that some authors even reached out to him to get their books added. Unless you are accusing…
There’s no way to qualify the sample size of writers based on his claims so within the bubble of his experience I’m sure it’s correct but not useful to base an argument on that writers at large are onboard with this and as for good faith engagement your response to parent…
“Everybody not agreeing with you represents "chauvinistic SV attitude"?”
…wasn’t very good faith either as it’s unclear whether the writers share the same belief as some tech people that AI and humans doing stuff are the same and use that idea to further a pro AI agenda as opposed to them just finding a useful tool to incorporate into their workflow regardless of the underlying technology or politics. Your response assumed the former and paints parent poster as wrong based on your assumption. Some writers liking the tool, just like some artists liking stable diffusion, doesn’t invalidate the original criticism or imply their ideology.
Indeed my experience jives with what he said. Many AI people I’ve seen comment are very much “adapt or die” when it comes to AI technology, suggesting that writers/artists must (even if begrudgingly) use these tools to stay competitive and see many datasets as fair game even when their authors are against its inclusion in said datasets, such as the author of this article.
Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you want to do this kind of thing, let authors opt-in (or publishers). If it's fair use, why should you have to do that? The same copyright law protecting author's ownership rights over their art also provide "fair use" to other people. Someone may disagree with current fair use laws (and I suspect many outraged here do not), but that's a broader issue not related to this particular tool. It just 100% seems like…
> also provide "fair use" to other people "How much of someone else's work can I use without getting permission? Under the fair use doctrine of the U.S. copyright statute, it is permissible to use limited portions of a work including quotes, for purposes such as commentary, criticism, news reporting, and scholarly reports." https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-fairuse.html Limited portions, not the entire work.
That's ludicrous. It's counting words in a book. You can't copyright facts and that is all the tool is doing. Pages that are reproduced are only excerpts which falls squarely under fair use.
It's no different than you checking out the book from the library and counting all the words.
Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
Things like GPT already create competition for authors even using their names. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37042561 Pure text statistics won't do the same.
Wrt. your link, the same thing could have happen to this author if these spam books contained complete gibberish (and someone listed it on Amazon/goodreads using the authors name). This isn't legitimate competition (i.e. books written by LLMs that rival the quality and style of the actual author). This is a failure of the selling platform to QC the books they are selling.
LLMs make the scams better just like they will make spam better.
If it's gibberish you know you got scammed, LLM texts look convincing so you don't know for sure.
Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool
#180For this particular example, the tool doesn't seem like it's a big deal. It just analyzes works for data. I'm not sure how this would be any different from a literary critic doing the same thing manually. In general, though, I think artists would be less hostile to technological innovations if the people imploring them to "figure out how to embrace the technology rather than fear it" weren't actively trying to destro…
I will admit that I am mildly confused by this outrage, but it is X/twitter so the standards are different.
All that said, I remember doing basic text analysis in college and then sentiment analysis in my MBA class.. is the concern out there, because of how source material was acquired?