Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The End of an Era

hughhowey.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 480 posts

Re: The End of an Era

#41

Post by krapp »

whazor wrote: post #19

Two of my favorite (sci-)fi writers both use crazy big Excel files that almost crash their computers when loading. For research but also keeping track of story loops. I can imagine something like ChatGPT Work with markdown/python/CSV's can do quite some magic for such writers.

There are already tons of specialist non-AI tools for writers to be able to keep track of story elements, research, etc.

Writers (older genre writers particularly) tend to be a bit behind the technological curve, and they stick with whatever works. If you want to see a treasure trove of "old web" sites, look up the site of any sci-fi or fantasy author. Chances are its design and layout still look like something from the late 90s.

The vast majority of AI apps don't actually solve any novel problems (pun intended come at me,) they're just new versions of existing solutions "but with AI."

Re: The End of an Era

#42

Post by p-e-w »

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.

[flagged]

Re: The End of an Era

#43

Post by gorbachev »

pyth0 wrote: post #9
bkieffer wrote: post #5

Is the AI that writes "about as well as humans" in the room with us right now?

Did you stop reading at the em-dash? > Artificial Intelligence is writing about as well as humans — at least well enough to cause confusion and speculation No matter your opinion on AI writing, this is just a fact.

The average person, yes. A professional, competent writer, editor, journalist? Not even close (currently).

Re: The End of an Era

#44

Post by f311a »

voidfunc wrote: post #13
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.

AI makes you vomit because most uses of it are hamfisted attempts at doing a thing. People are going to eventually figure out how to polish and refine the usage and outputs so you cant even tell it is AI. This is already becoming increasingly true for code and software. The next step is writing and then media.

> People are going to eventually figure out how to polish and refine the usage and outputs so you cant even tell it is AI.

Personally, I'm gonna go offline after this and meet more people. One of the reasons I read comments is because it's human conversation. When everything will be ridden by bots — I'm out.

There is no point in consuming this.

Re: The End of an Era

#45

Post by keiferski »

mohamedkoubaa wrote: post #36
keiferski wrote: post #31

I think this is much more likely than any of his predictions: "buying and reading a book" becomes even less of an isolated activity than... it already is becoming. Instead it's more and more a media product, attached to authors/characters that are big in other formats, specifically, video. Because people are reading less and watching more video to begin with, entirely separate from AI. David Goggins is kind of a perf…

Ghostwriting has been the norm in many subgenres of nonfiction for a while now

Exactly, so in the "dystopian" future, people just use AI to write the books they were already having a ghostwriter make.

If the books are original enough to be perceived as not-AI, the mind behind it will be creative enough to make the AI origin moot.

Re: The End of an Era

#46

Post by ghaff »

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…

As someone who does a lot of writing, I ended up doing a lot of re-writing of what I'll call reference architectures in a previous role. I did use an LLM for some of the missing context up-front. It was essentially boilerplate and I did revise it--took out some things I didn't think important and added some things I thought might be.

But I basically never use them for a blog post except maybe to include some boilerplate explanation of some technology. (Which I'm familiar with but don't want to rewrite or copy and paste.)

Could that change? Perhaps. But I don't really use today.

Re: The End of an Era

#47

Post by gdulli »

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…

I read his take as not that "we've solved prose", but that we've created the McDonald's slop food version of prose, and people who are undiscerning will cause it to succeed and dominate the culture. While the effects of other people eating McDonald's affects us all in indirect ways, the effects of other people accepting lowest common denominator slop art/labor is going to be much more dire.

Re: The End of an Era

#48

Post by jibal »

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.

"how come" makes me want to vomit. (That "It’s a common idiom" is completely irrelevant. And note that it doesn't actually make me vomit.)

Also, here's another thought. In my opinion, here's my opinion.

Re: The End of an Era

#49

Post by criddell »

mathisfun123 wrote: post #15
pyth0 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you stop reading at the em-dash? > Artificial Intelligence is writing about as well as humans — at least well enough to cause confusion and speculation No matter your opinion on AI writing, this is just a fact.

since when is "confusion and speculation" an indicator of quality/goodness? if I ran around naked in traffic it would also cause confusion and speculation.

I think he's talking about it more in the sense that there will be speculation about the provenance of some work.

For example, if desktop fabrication tools get cheap and good enough, maybe one day garage tinkerers will be making Patek knock offs that an expert with a loupe, spectrometer, and a lot of time can't definitively say that any particular watch made after 2034 (to pick a date) is genuine. That would cause a lot of confusion and speculation in the market for used watches.

I think that's what his crypto bros comment was all about (aside from being a joke). Maybe crypto tech could provide evidence to support provenance claims?

Re: The End of an Era

#50

Post by zkmon »

I don't see it as abrupt as it was portrayed. Man-made artifacts and work has always been taken over by machines in all fields of work and art. The "end of era" happened many times, through intermittent ruptures like how the tecpn8x plates move through earthquakes.

Loss of human touch is a problem. Playing a chess game while being aware that the opponent is a bot, is not same as playing against a human.

The "plasticification" is something we wanted all along, supported it through excitement and awe. Science is the plastic.

Post reply on HN