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I Am Tired of AI

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Re: I Am Tired of AI

#871

Post by low_tech_love »

edavison1 wrote: post #502
low_tech_love wrote: post #27

The most depressing thing for me is the feeling that I simply cannot trust anything that has been written in the past 2 years or so and up until the day that I die. It's not so much that I think people have used AI, but that I know they have with a high degree of certainty, and this certainty is converging to 100%, simply because there is no way it will not. If you write regularly and you're not using AI, you simply…

>If you write regularly and you're not using AI, you simply cannot keep up with the competition. You're out. A very HN-centric view of the world. From my perch in journalism and publishing, elite writers absolutely loathe AI and almost uniformly agree it sucks. So to my mind the most 'competitive' spheres in writing do not use AI at all.

Will they maintain that stance when it gets into their pockets? I doubt it. If the public is not minding the difference, why would they?

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#872

Post by nitwit005 »

cubefox wrote: post #411
StrLght wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Extrapolation of past progress isn't evidence.

Past progress is evidence for future progress.

Not exactly. If you focus in on a single technology, you tend to see rapid improvement, followed by slower progress.

Sometimes this is masked by people spending more due to the industry becoming more important, but it tends to be obvious over the longer term.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#873

Post by low_tech_love »

edavison1 wrote: post #588
DrillShopper wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't matter how elite you think you are if the newspaper, magazine, or publishing company you write for can make more money from hiring people at a fraction of your cost and having them use AI to match or eclipse your professional output. At some point the competition will be less about "does this look like the most skilled human writer wrote this?" and more about "did the AI guided by a human for a fraction of…

So is the argument here that the New Yorker can make more money from AI slop writing overseen by low-wage overseas workers? Isn't that obviously not the case? Anyway I think I've misunderstood the context in which we're using the word 'competition' here. My response was about attitudes toward AI from writers at the tip-top of the industry rather than profit maxxing/high-volume content farm type places.

It’s not that black and white. Maybe 1% of the top writers can take that stance and maybe even charge more for their all-human content (in a kind of vintage, handcraft kind of way) but the other 99% will have to adapt.

It’s simply more nuanced. If you’re writing a couple of articles a day to pay for your bills, what will stop you from writing actually 10 or 20 articles a day instead?

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#874

Post by low_tech_love »

_heimdall wrote: post #461
low_tech_love wrote: post #27

The most depressing thing for me is the feeling that I simply cannot trust anything that has been written in the past 2 years or so and up until the day that I die. It's not so much that I think people have used AI, but that I know they have with a high degree of certainty, and this certainty is converging to 100%, simply because there is no way it will not. If you write regularly and you're not using AI, you simply…

> Now, I'm not going to criticize anyone that does it, like I said, you have to, that's it. Why do you say people have to do it? People absolutely can choose not to use LLMs and to instead write their own words and thoughts, just like developers can simply refuse to build LLM tools, whether its because they have safety concerns or because they simply see "AI" in its current state as a doomed marketing play that is no…

If you find yourself in a situation where you write one book at the same time as your peers are writing ten, how can you keep up? Also how can you justify to yourself not using it if nobody around you seems to value that, and even worse, is pushing you to actually use it? I find it hard to find a reason why you would. Unless we see a super strong reader revolution that collectively decides to shun AI and pay more money for all-human books.

Read that last sentence and tell you think that’s reasonable and likely to happen?

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#875

Post by low_tech_love »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #644
ks2048 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you write regularly and you're not using AI, you simply cannot keep up with the competition. Is that true today? I guess it depends what kind of writing you are talking about, but I wouldn't think most successful writers today - from novelests to tech bloggers - rely that much on AI, but I don't know. Five years from now, could be a different story.

It's not true at all. Much like the claims that you have to use LLMs to keep up in programming: if that is true then you weren't a good programmer (or writer in this case) to begin with.

That is absolutely wrong. Regardless of whether you were or not good to begin with, an LLM assistant will still accelerate a lot of repetitive tasks for you. Repetitive is repetitive, no matter if you’re John Carmack or the guy sitting in the booth next to you in the paper company. And anyway in a few years none of it will matter because programming without assistance will be a vintage thing of the past (like perforated cards).

It’s the same with writing. If you find yourself writing a boring introduction section to a paper with a bunch of meaningless blabla, then why wouldn’t you use AI for that? There is simply no good reason, especially when you see mediocre researchers publishing at three times your rate and getting promoted over you.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#876

Post by low_tech_love »

itsTyrion wrote: post #823
low_tech_love wrote: post #27

The most depressing thing for me is the feeling that I simply cannot trust anything that has been written in the past 2 years or so and up until the day that I die. It's not so much that I think people have used AI, but that I know they have with a high degree of certainty, and this certainty is converging to 100%, simply because there is no way it will not. If you write regularly and you're not using AI, you simply…

Same goes for art. No longer can you see art on social media, press like and maybe leave a nice comment, you need to fricking pixel peep for artifacts as it's becoming less obvious.

Exactly. And it makes sense: think about how much one would have to pay for an artist to do the same? It’s simply inconceivable. The convergence is clear: we just won’t care about anything anymore after a while. Writing, art, whatever; it’ll all turn into noise.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#877

Post by low_tech_love »

vouaobrasil wrote: post #281
low_tech_love wrote: post #27

The most depressing thing for me is the feeling that I simply cannot trust anything that has been written in the past 2 years or so and up until the day that I die. It's not so much that I think people have used AI, but that I know they have with a high degree of certainty, and this certainty is converging to 100%, simply because there is no way it will not. If you write regularly and you're not using AI, you simply…

> If you write regularly and you're not using AI, you simply cannot keep up with the competition. Wrong. I am a professional writer and I never use AI. I hate AI.

Do you feel any pressure from your environment? Like seeing other authors publishing at a much faster pace than you?

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#878

Post by low_tech_love »

osigurdson wrote: post #437
low_tech_love wrote: post #27

The most depressing thing for me is the feeling that I simply cannot trust anything that has been written in the past 2 years or so and up until the day that I die. It's not so much that I think people have used AI, but that I know they have with a high degree of certainty, and this certainty is converging to 100%, simply because there is no way it will not. If you write regularly and you're not using AI, you simply…

AI expansion: take a few bullet points and have ChatGPT expand it into several pages of text AI compression: take pages of text and use ChatGPT to compress into a few bullet points We need to stop being impressed with long documents.

That’s the ideal way forward in my opinion. My optimistic view of the future is one where we get so fed up of the noise that we only write what is absolutely necessary, because anything more than that is AI-generated.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#879

Post by andrepd »

kenjackson wrote: post #830
latexr wrote: post #769

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I agree 100% with this sentiment, but, it also is a decent description of individual humans. But you can understand individual humans and learn which are trustworthy for what. If I want a specific piece of information, I have people in my life that I know I can consult to get an answer that will most likely be correct and that person will be able to give me an accurate assessment of their certainty and they know ho…

Actually humans are much worse in this regard. The top performer on my team had a divorce and his productivity dropped by like a factor of 3 and quality fell of a cliff. Another example from just yesterday is I needed to solve a complex recurrence relation. A friend of mine who is good at math (math PhD) helped me for about 30 minutes still without a solution and a couple of false starts. Then he said try ChatGPT and…

I call absolute bullshit on that last one. There's no way ChatGPT solves a maths problem that a maths PhD cannot solve, unless the solution is also googleable in 30s.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#880

Post by low_tech_love »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #232
low_tech_love wrote: post #27

The most depressing thing for me is the feeling that I simply cannot trust anything that has been written in the past 2 years or so and up until the day that I die. It's not so much that I think people have used AI, but that I know they have with a high degree of certainty, and this certainty is converging to 100%, simply because there is no way it will not. If you write regularly and you're not using AI, you simply…

I don't use AI in my own blogging, but then, I don't particularly care whether or not someone reads my stuff (the ones that do, seem to like it). I have used it, from time to time, to help polish stuff like marketing fluff for the App Store, but I'd never use it verbatim. I generally use it to polish a paragraph or sentence. But AI hasn't suddenly injected untrustworthy prose into the world. We've been doing that, fo…

When I wrote about trust, I see that I made a mistake: most people seem to have understood it as being in regard to fake things. I just meant trust as in, it’s not AI-generated.

Your comment about the fluff is exactly what I mean. I read some fluff that is AI-generated and some kind of disgust happens in my stomach, and I wish there was nothing written there at all. I just feel like it’s be best to not read anything than read something that’s AI-generated… it’s almost like the author is trying to trick me with a fake version of reality. I wonder if there’s such a thing as the uncanny valley for text?

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