I've yet to read anything authored by AI that was truly excellent writing. It simply does not have the chops to write at that level. The great American novel will not be written by AI. Maybe "co-authored by Claude and friends", but not authored.
The End of an Era
61–70 of 480 posts
Re: The End of an Era
#62If a novel is 70,000 to 100,000 words, then a whole novel can fit in the context window for AI. That has to be good for the editing process. I.e. you can use AI to scan the whole book for various issues over and over again until all those issues are found and fixed.
Re: The End of an Era
#63Earlier 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.
This is a terrible analogy.
It's quite clear that the author means AI writing is now good enough to cause confusion and speculation as to whether a given piece of writing was human-authored.
The confusion and speculation caused by your nude transit adventure is about what the hell you're doing and why.
Re: The End of an Era
#64AI 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 think it's a difference of reading levels.
AI 'writing' makes me ill, but that's happening because I can 'feel' the prose's samey hollowness in every paragraph.
But! If someone is just moving word by word and is focussed on just the gist (the average reading level is '6th grade' here in the states), then it will not repel them the way it does us. Also, AI's grammar is impeccable, if bizarre, and the word choices can be facially erudite, so that might also be mistaken as a signal for competence where none exists.
Re: The End of an Era
#65Completely disagree, I think LLMs write horribly badly. Documentation, marketing, prose, it’s all horrible slop writing, immediately recognisable regardless of model
Is that still going to be the case in 1 year? 5? 10?
Re: The End of an Era
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Allow me to offer a minor reframing: printing presses aren't about duplicating writing. The printing press exists to mass produce text regardless of how or where the content of the text was produced. LLMs likewise are text production machines. They don't produce writing , they produce text . Text without writing is what we call slop in the modern parlance. LLMs are literally throwing random dice into a printing press…
You are shadowbanned and have been writing mostly into the void for the last three months.
Re: The End of an Era
#67Earlier 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.
You're misunderstanding ... that's not at all the claim. Confusion and speculation is a consequence, not an indicator. Running around naked in traffic might well cause confusion and speculation, but it wouldn't cause anyone to confuse you with an automobile or result in speculation that are one.
At least AI is better at reading than are most people.
Re: The End of an Era
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
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That's true, but I can still tell if a big article was mostly written by AI. The author talks about writing cheap stories, but right now, you can't do this. Cheap stories are pretty bad, because there is very little human effort to polish them. The more effort you put into AI written stories, the better they become, but it's not cheap at all. You have to rewrite and review them.
How do you know the ones you don't think are written by AI, actually aren't?
Re: The End of an Era
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
Go ask an LLM to "do something with 1M tokens".
I think that is a bad argument. You could ask a human to "do something with 1M dollars" and get garbage too.
The point is that the deciding is the "higher layer." It's not that LLMs cannot, but LLMs as designed do not. They are not designed for free-ranging days off, they are designed to help us do things, and that makes them somewhere between us and published works.
It's no different than an editor standing between the author and a book, or a publisher, or a printing press. It's part of the process of idea realization, so it's just on that spectrum somewhere between book sale and author idea. (even though in another flipflop, that editor might be an author and now elevated to the premier deciding role). It's about how the tool fits, not what the tool is ultimately capable of.
So the analogy holds, just fine.
Re: The End of an Era
#70I think this is even worse for music. There’s almost no way to tell if a track is produced by humans or AI.
If there's no way to tell, does it matter?