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Quality non-fiction books are the antithesis of AI slop

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Re: Quality non-fiction books are the antithesis of AI slop

#241

Post by brazzy »

keiferski wrote: post #220
brazzy wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not if the only result you can judge is also language-only, and the entity has access to a large corpus of descriptions produced by people who have had the experience.

Then you're just comparing descriptions, and you're also dependent on the language skills of the experiencers, and you're still stuck with the problem that language is not a complete map of reality. So an LLM may be able to give you the optimal description of a feeling, on par with what a person would give you; but it won't be equivalent to the actual feeling.

Does it matter (why and how) if you can't tell the difference, no matter how hard you tailor the question towards that end?

It's basically the Turing test.

Re: Quality non-fiction books are the antithesis of AI slop

#242

Post by dimitrios1 »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #218
keiferski wrote: post #138

Not 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.

"I will say nothing new!"

- St John of Damascus

Re: Quality non-fiction books are the antithesis of AI slop

#243

Post by everdrive »

keiferski wrote: post #220
brazzy wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not if the only result you can judge is also language-only, and the entity has access to a large corpus of descriptions produced by people who have had the experience.

Then you're just comparing descriptions, and you're also dependent on the language skills of the experiencers, and you're still stuck with the problem that language is not a complete map of reality. So an LLM may be able to give you the optimal description of a feeling, on par with what a person would give you; but it won't be equivalent to the actual feeling.

>and you're still stuck with the problem that language is not a complete map of reality.

Definitely agreed, but at least when talking about experience we've been stuck in this position for most of human history. How do I know what it's like to eat a hamburger? Perhaps, like the cute visual in Ratatouille there is a deep inner experience but (also like in Ratatouille) when I need to communicate that experience with another person I'm stuck relying on language, and the language is found lacking.

I know it's just a kid's cartoon, but interestingly Ratatouille was making this exact same point -- he really lacks any meaningful way to convey his inner experience. It's locked behind language. The film tackles this by showing an Remy's complex and interesting visual, but his friend only gets the fuzziest, dullest visual when he attempts to communicate it.

Remy's immediate rat & family peers actually _never_ get to understand his experience, and instead later help him out of love an allegiance.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xizttM_Cbuc

Re: Quality non-fiction books are the antithesis of AI slop

#244

Post by lordnacho »

keiferski wrote: post #236
lordnacho wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No, it's the same as a camera recording it and digesting it.

Re: Quality non-fiction books are the antithesis of AI slop

#245

Post by deadbabe »

keiferski wrote: post #138

Not 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…

While you are right that humans can probably find some original ideas that are not just combinations of inputs, the universe of things that humans will find interesting to read is not that vast, and that’s why there are only really like 7 types of stories, and those are the ones that survive through a process of natural selection.

Everything else is just not that interesting to a human.

Re: Quality non-fiction books are the antithesis of AI slop

#246

Post by lordnacho »

keiferski wrote: post #185
awongh wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure I understand the analogy. You could say that the reason why artificial flavors work in food is because we know how to recreate flavors from first principle chemistry. The dislike of the artificialness of cheetos also doesn’t stop many many people from eating them. I would say human made slop writing isn’t any better or worse quality than LLM writing. Knowing if it was made by a real person makes a differ…

Just because the form of a story is the same as another story does not imply that the content is interchangeable. I could write you a story right now about being an expat living in Poland in 2026. It’s unclear to me how an LLM would have the cultural knowledge or experience to write such a story that is actually accurate and up to date, without already having something like my story already in its dataset.

Yeah but you would just be doing the same thing: mashing up some known information about humans and Poland. You would pick plausible names like Marek or Piotr, plausible places like Warsaw or Gdansk, and some random flavour of story that is either completely general across cultures (hero's journey) or some local tale from Poland.

Shakespeare did the same, so I wouldn't blame you for it.

Re: Quality non-fiction books are the antithesis of AI slop

#247

Post by FabHK »

sparklingmango wrote: post #229

Can I make a feature request? I would love to be able to search by author. I recently started Caro's LBJ series (it's amazing so far) and I'm curious how many awards he's won. Anywho, I love non-fiction so I plan to visit this website often. Thank you and great work!

More generally, just sort by any of the column headers (year, title, publisher, author, score, ...) by clicking on it. In some views it works, in some it doesn't. A bit unintuitive.

The toggle between "traditional" text and "semantic" search is cool and new, but maybe the toggle could stay visible (it's there on the home tab, but then not anymore on the books tab).

Re: Quality non-fiction books are the antithesis of AI slop

#248

Post by oh_no »

keiferski wrote: post #138

Not 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…

I have also thought about this a lot but have less developed views on fiction (short version: I don't currently want to read an LLM-written novel, but I expect that will change in the future and there will be some I enjoy)

But I want to say that non-fiction books are a lot more resistant to LLMs than you might think. I'm reading two non-fiction books currently. And both (https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/17801.Underground, https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/44824581-a-k-pop-live) could not have been written by an LLM. One is based on in-person interviews that were hard to set up, and the is based on a log of sources a number of which are going to live events.

Not every book fits this pattern of course. But even a more straight forward book (https://www.goodreads.com/series/139929-designers-dragons) will often rely on sources that are not easily accessed by an LLM, they may not be digitized, or they may not be accessible in your common digital collections.

I 100% think LLMs can do good synthesis work, don't really think we have the tooling/checking in place for them to write a competent non-fiction book yet, but that will certainly happen, but I still think the best and most interesting non-fiction remains firmly in the realm of humans.

(Also, a lot of non-fiction is memoirs, travelogues, etc. which LLM can't really replace unless you're dictating to it.)

Re: Quality non-fiction books are the antithesis of AI slop

#249

Post by MillironX »

I very much have had the same experience as the author with research libraries. I have learned so many life-changing techniques and derivations from books that were two or three down from the book that I was looking for. When I became a research associate, I would often have my librarians ship the books to the branch closest to my office, and I stopped browsing the shelves myself. It wasn't until I went to the main library that I checked out a book several over from the one I had found in the catalog that I had a major breakthrough. Now that same library has collapsible shelving that makes browsing feel like a chore, and it makes me think we lost something valuable.

That said, I had high hopes for the catalog that the author had put together, but for my technical fields, I found it lacking. Trying to find books that would be close to van Soest's Nutritional Ecology of the Ruminant or van der Werf's Animal Breeding: Use of New Technologies, yields a whole bunch of pop-sci titles. The joy of finding these titles at the library in the past was how remarkably understandable and engaging they were while remaining scientifically rigorous. I immediately feel that the pop-sci titles that I was recommended are going to try to sell me something or some idea, rather than letting me explore ideas myself. I guess that means I need to go back to browsing library shelves myself.

Re: Quality non-fiction books are the antithesis of AI slop

#250

Post by JKCalhoun »

tombert wrote: post #238
JKCalhoun wrote: post #214

"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.

If they have a sort of "wander UI", that's cool. I'm not sure what that looks like though.
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