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AlphaWrite: AI that improves at writing by evolving its own stories

tobysimonds.com

131–140 of 162 posts

Re: AlphaWrite: AI that improves at writing by evolving its own stories

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Awful take. Transformers have greatly increased the potential number of cool things I can do in my lifetime. I've written poetry, short stories, I draw, and am an experienced professional software engineer, and thanks to transformers I've been able to augment my creative workflow. People were similarly dismissive about computers in general. And calculators, and the printing press, and Photoshop, and cameras, and ever…

You ARE, however, allowed to decide what constitutes Art - and the determining factor for many comes down to conception and intent. With the advent of creation by prompting, the conception and intent is abstracted away to a patron/artist interaction as opposed to the tool/artist synergy you contend. Providing only instruction and infrastructure as input means the appropriate analogy is something more akin to Medici/M…

[deleted]

Re: AlphaWrite: AI that improves at writing by evolving its own stories

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Awful take. Transformers have greatly increased the potential number of cool things I can do in my lifetime. I've written poetry, short stories, I draw, and am an experienced professional software engineer, and thanks to transformers I've been able to augment my creative workflow. People were similarly dismissive about computers in general. And calculators, and the printing press, and Photoshop, and cameras, and ever…

You ARE, however, allowed to decide what constitutes Art - and the determining factor for many comes down to conception and intent. With the advent of creation by prompting, the conception and intent is abstracted away to a patron/artist interaction as opposed to the tool/artist synergy you contend. Providing only instruction and infrastructure as input means the appropriate analogy is something more akin to Medici/M…

Nope, that's also incorrect. You get to decide what you think is art, but not what others consider art to be. That is the nature of subjectivity: your opinion holds no weight over others.

Re: AlphaWrite: AI that improves at writing by evolving its own stories

#133
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s precisely the problem, though. The internet is already rapidly filling with AI-generated slop, and it takes a non-trivial amount of human brain power to determine whether the how-to article you’re reading is actually a reliable source or whether it was churned out to generate ad revenue. The infinite number of monkeys with typewriters are generating something that sounds enough like Shakespeare that it’s makin…

Determining the quality of a how-to or any other kind of information you're looking for is the same job whether it was created by a human or by an AI. Check sources, read horizontally, patronize trusted producers and get your information from there. We've got a tragedy of the commons whereupon we've grown complacent that search engines and wisdom of crowds (of nameless strangers) would see us through, but that was ne…

Tragedy of the commons was a thing to consider when we had sheep that grazed on the commons. It changed significantly when we invented combine harvesters.

The listicle-rot was already painful when the listicles were human-written and poorly researched. Automating the process has not improved the situation.

Re: AlphaWrite: AI that improves at writing by evolving its own stories

#134
post #83

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Just to be clear, you are supporting a world where humans are powerless, few in number, and don’t interact much with each other anymore. As I’ve been saying for a decade, we are building a zoo for ourselves.

I support a world of radical abundance, one where humans and super-smart AIs have the maximum about of freedom (without harming one another, of course).

Here you go… thoughts?

https://x.com/aaditsh/status/1933084376855654851

Re: AlphaWrite: AI that improves at writing by evolving its own stories

#135
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s precisely the problem, though. The internet is already rapidly filling with AI-generated slop, and it takes a non-trivial amount of human brain power to determine whether the how-to article you’re reading is actually a reliable source or whether it was churned out to generate ad revenue. The infinite number of monkeys with typewriters are generating something that sounds enough like Shakespeare that it’s makin…

> AI-generated slop This phrase is kind of interesting to me because it implies that everything AI-generated is "slop". What happens when the AI is generating decent content ? Like, what if we develop AI to the point where the most insightful, funny, or downright useful content is AI-generated? Will we still be calling it, "AI-generated slop"?

I can't speak for everyone but personally, that would be fantastic. It's already magical, having a mostly-accurate oracle on my laptop that takes up the same space as a TV series but that I can literally converse with and that knows a surprising amount of everything. If it could close the loop to apply the same self-reflection that humans can do, it'd be better than most of us at everything.

My beef is with AI slop, not AI content. Bring on genuinely good AI content, and send me to live on a farm in the country.

Re: AlphaWrite: AI that improves at writing by evolving its own stories

#136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now that the machines are coming for the white collar, the Luddites those same people once mocked are starting to look more reasonable. In the end the intelligence revolution will be a net benefit to society. In the short term there will be untold suffering.

Let me rephrase that: The machines are coming for bullshit jobs. They're so good at generating bullshit that anyone who generates bullshit for a living needs to be worried. Only problem is that some huge percentage of white collar work is bullshit. It's no secret. We all know it and accept it. How many of us have spent weeks or months (or years!) of our lives generating documents that end up going into a black hole (…

Everything is bullshit, some is just better or worse bullshit. LLMs have taken AI generated bullshit from 'laughably bad' to 'often good enough' in what, two years? Soon their bullshit will be better than yours and mine. And that's... well, that's a thing.

Re: AlphaWrite: AI that improves at writing by evolving its own stories

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In time many will say we are lucky to live in a world with so much content, where anything you want to see or read can be spun up in an instant, without labor. Man, you are talking about a world that's not just much worse but apocalyptically gone. In that world, there is no more art, full stop. The completeness and average-ness of stimulation would be the exact equivalent of sensory deprivation.

It seems paradoxical to say there is no more art, when AI’s ability for art generation is infinite. AI art can be equally stimulating, especially for people who will eventually be born in a time when AI generated art has always existed for them. It is only resisted by those who have lived their whole lives expecting all art to be human generated.

Art is suffering and hard work and pouring your soul into what you do. Art is making a statement that defines your whole life.

I am the programmer child of two artists, and I can say without hesitation that AI doesn't generate art

Re: AlphaWrite: AI that improves at writing by evolving its own stories

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You ARE, however, allowed to decide what constitutes Art - and the determining factor for many comes down to conception and intent. With the advent of creation by prompting, the conception and intent is abstracted away to a patron/artist interaction as opposed to the tool/artist synergy you contend. Providing only instruction and infrastructure as input means the appropriate analogy is something more akin to Medici/M…

Nope, that's also incorrect. You get to decide what you think is art, but not what others consider art to be. That is the nature of subjectivity: your opinion holds no weight over others.

Generally, it's inter-subjectively decided what art is, which works enter the canon and are passed on. Placing it solely in each individual, "it's only a matter of taste", falls a bit short of some centuries of aesthetic theory.

Also, AI is maybe only the last straw as Silicon Valley and the digital sphere was already "transforming" the creative industry, cp this piece: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/01/the-dea...

Re: AlphaWrite: AI that improves at writing by evolving its own stories

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the people generating AI-assisted writing are all the people that never had enough passion or talent to do it before. If you weren't inclined to write fiction or poetry etc before AI was here to do it for you, you probably shouldn't be doing it now.

Awful take. Transformers have greatly increased the potential number of cool things I can do in my lifetime. I've written poetry, short stories, I draw, and am an experienced professional software engineer, and thanks to transformers I've been able to augment my creative workflow. People were similarly dismissive about computers in general. And calculators, and the printing press, and Photoshop, and cameras, and ever…

So instead of adding your voice to the world you decided to give away your voice and abandon your humanity.

You obviously don't value your reader if you don't value yourself enough to speak with your own voice.

Re: AlphaWrite: AI that improves at writing by evolving its own stories

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems paradoxical to say there is no more art, when AI’s ability for art generation is infinite. AI art can be equally stimulating, especially for people who will eventually be born in a time when AI generated art has always existed for them. It is only resisted by those who have lived their whole lives expecting all art to be human generated.

Art is suffering and hard work and pouring your soul into what you do. Art is making a statement that defines your whole life. I am the programmer child of two artists, and I can say without hesitation that AI doesn't generate art

But people using AI do
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