maybe I am being too small brained black/white about this, but something feels amiss about the idea of vibecoding a solution to an AI generated problem. How can we get better, doing the same thing that made us sick?
Quality non-fiction books are the antithesis of AI slop
231–240 of 265 posts
Re: Quality non-fiction books are the antithesis of AI slop
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
So now we'll have to investigate what "original" means? From what I can see, AI is absolutely able to create new work. Things that are not in the dataset, but look like they could be. This is pretty much what generalising means, they can make a wide variety of things that aren't actually in the original set but can hide in that set pretty well. When you are an original piece of culture, what do you mean by it?
Can an AI write a story about living as an artist in NYC in 2026, the cultural environment, etc. without that information being added to the dataset immediately as it happens? It seems pretty obvious to me that there are cultural trends which are happening instantaneously and aren’t merely some sort of consequence of past historical data.
But how could something be a cultural trend without some sort of anchoring in history?
I don't see why a computer (or a person) couldn't make up a plausible sounding story about a NYC artist of the present day? You would just reference things that don't change that much (artists having a boheme type existence, wild inequality in who can live off their art, NYC being a sort of place where people go to become successful).
Re: Quality non-fiction books are the antithesis of AI slop
#233Not to be intentionally contrarian, but I have thought a lot about this: I think good fiction is actually the antithesis of AI, fundamentally. LLMs are really only capable of combining different things into output. This can give you some creative results, but it is ultimately kind of limited. I cannot imagine that prompting an AI a thousand times would give you something truly original in the way many high-quality fi…
"…truly original in the way many high-quality fictional stories are." The older I get, the more "nothing new under the sun" returns again and again.
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Re: Quality non-fiction books are the antithesis of AI slop
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
So only people who have fought in wars can write novels about fighting in wars?
If the aim is to have actual knowledge of the experience, then yes. Of course not all works need to be this way, and many, many books are written about war by people that haven't been in it. The broader point is that LLMs cannot have original experiences.
But that's purely a matter of having sensors?
Stick a camera and a touch sensor on the machine, now it is experiencing the world.
Besides that, there is a lot of value in redigested experience. Quite a lot of history is only really examined in a larger context, where the person describing it cannot have experienced all the original events.
Re: Quality non-fiction books are the antithesis of AI slop
#235the cope from authors.
Re: Quality non-fiction books are the antithesis of AI slop
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the aim is to have actual knowledge of the experience, then yes. Of course not all works need to be this way, and many, many books are written about war by people that haven't been in it. The broader point is that LLMs cannot have original experiences.
But that's purely a matter of having sensors? Stick a camera and a touch sensor on the machine, now it is experiencing the world. Besides that, there is a lot of value in redigested experience. Quite a lot of history is only really examined in a larger context, where the person describing it cannot have experienced all the original events.
Is a human life, as experienced firsthand, the same as a first person camera recording it?
Re: Quality non-fiction books are the antithesis of AI slop
#237Not to be intentionally contrarian, but I have thought a lot about this: I think good fiction is actually the antithesis of AI, fundamentally. LLMs are really only capable of combining different things into output. This can give you some creative results, but it is ultimately kind of limited. I cannot imagine that prompting an AI a thousand times would give you something truly original in the way many high-quality fi…
> LLMs are really only capable of combining different things into output > The magic and absurdity of life is a necessary thing to create such works. These two points seem slightly conflicting. Why if a human is truly more creative than AI, must it experience "the magic and absurdity of life" if it can be creative without "combining things into output"? Is a creative human then just not splicing and recombining their…
> My view is that intelligence and creativity is all just purely recombination. AI can do that well just as humans can. The gap is that the data humans have access to is much more analogue, emotional, and grounded in the real world compared to the data that AI is currently trained on.
Yes!
Aside from the more fundamental questions about the nature of cognition and what constitutes intelligence, there's a practical matter: humans have life to learn from. We have a lifetime of persistent memories, an identity, a social life, physical interactions with the world of many qualitatively different kinds, and we're taken on a lifelong journey into different studies, workplaces, and living environments by the biological need to survive.
Even if human creativity is in some sense also recombinative at its core, we have a very different set of inputs from LLMs. Even under the (almost certainly false) assumption that human condition is basically similar in structure to an LLM, we should expect some differences in outputs based on these profound differences in inputs.
Re: Quality non-fiction books are the antithesis of AI slop
#238"To avoid the tedium, I decided that I would also flip to a random page of every book I shelved and read a random sentence from it." Also, this is about the lost joy of "browsing". I wonder how much serendipity played when wandering through a library (or other things in life—even window shopping). But now, everything on the internet, you more or less have to know what it is you're looking for—are rarely "surprised or…
I’m not sure I agree with that.
I’ve found plenty of interesting things by randomly wandering around on Gutenberg.org, completely undirected.
Re: Quality non-fiction books are the antithesis of AI slop
#239I love the "books for dads who like Pavement" prompt! It would be great if you could incorporate the same experience of "browsing" random page of some of the results that are returned
Re: Quality non-fiction books are the antithesis of AI slop
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah the latest batch is really keyed on certain phrases - well beyond “you’re absolutely right!” Of the past. And the readability is trash almost always by default. Probably because they are forcing code so hard that it’s aligning prose into functional groups or something.
Interesting. So you think it’s somewhat emergent, in that sense, rather than a sort of designed tone of voice/writing style specified by supervised fine tuning (or the system prompt)?
I don’t see anyone having a Pulitzer Benchmark in their system card. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯