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The End of an Era

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Re: The End of an Era

#21

Post by inigyou »

andy99 wrote: post #16

AI writing is not good. Seeing this post, and another comment on here earlier today to the effect of “we’ve solved prose”, I’m genuinely really confused. I don’t want to be insulting, even if the first place my mind runs is basically people must not read very much or think very hard about what they read. I can’t imagine a world where anyone ingests a material amount of AI writing and things it’s even “acceptable”. Bu…

Hijacked signals. When they read good writing they get a certain emotional response. This is not triggered by the totality of the writing but certain aspects closer to the surface level. They also get it from reading slop because it hits the same triggers.

It's like how evolution taught humans that sugar indicates a good densely-packed food source, so then corporations just started putting sugar in everything and humans eat it as ravenously as they eat actual food.

Re: The End of an Era

#22

Post by michaeld123 »

f311a wrote: post #10

This is a well-known author, but how come he thinks AI is better at writing? AI writing makes me vomit. Also, I think he's too enthusiastic about the future of readers. In my opinion, reading books will be a very rare hobby pretty soon. The decline started more than 10 years ago.

that's not how I interpreted the whole article.

Re: The End of an Era

#24

Post by brador »

Is there a cap on AI intelligence?

Is it just a case of throwing more and more resources at a pattern recognition machine with no upper limit except the energy of the universe and the economy of the algorithms?

Someone else suggested the maximum intelligence is capped as the average intelligence of its training data, which is an interesting take.

Re: The End of an Era

#25

Post by okzgn »

Writing for the love of art, besides being a mental and reflective exercise that holds real value when it is of high quality, makes it hard for me to believe that this is the end of literature. It is difficult to think that someone who writes for pleasure would abandon it simply because of the exponential volume of AI-generated text.

Re: The End of an Era

#26

Post by pu_pe »

It's the end of many eras, all at once. I think the same dilemma will appear for games, music and film too. As our ability to detect AI content deteriorates most authors will resort to it, at varying degrees.

Re: The End of an Era

#28

Post by hbcdbff »

Completely disagree, I think LLMs write horribly badly.

Documentation, marketing, prose, it’s all horrible slop writing, immediately recognisable regardless of model

Re: The End of an Era

#29

Post by Planktonne »

> Artificial Intelligence is writing about as well as humans

This is just untrue.

There's a lot of money in claiming it's true, with varying levels of hedging and insincerity, but AI writing follows the pattern of AI everything else: if you're not competent to judge quality, then you think it is high quality.

Re: The End of an Era

#30

Post by mathisfun123 »

mwigdahl wrote: post #12
MichaelZuo wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh that is an interesting metaphor. A next higher layer printing press?

I don't buy it, although I agree with GP's larger point about other strengths. Printing presses are about exact duplication of writing. The internet is a higher layer printing press. LLMs substitute for (some of) the human effort of producing the text that a printing press or the internet can then replicate.

> Printing presses are about exact duplication of writing.

maybe LLMs are seen to write as well as humans because most humans have poor reading comprehension skills? to wit: OP is using an analogy to make their point, where the components don't need to be an exact fit to make the point (ever heard the phrase "the map is not the territory"?)

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