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The End of an Era

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Re: The End of an Era

#91

Post by cwiz »

I started writing because AI made me obsolete in software development. Or at least gave me depression that blocks me from writing code. What I did instead I started writing my thoughts as short stories and then made an attempt to write full blown 50k words novel. It worked as therapy surprisingly well.

I write mostly without AI but then I use AI for editing and grammar correction. Sometimes when I struggle with plot threads I ask AI for an advice. When I write about something that a have a vague understanding about I may ask AI to write a paragraph or two. I'm also open about it and warn reader in preface and mark generated text using italics.

As a new author I find AI both helpful and discouraging, because it CAN write better prose than me. I think text that's written for humans should be written by humans, but temptation to ramp up quality with zero effort is huge.

Then I experimented with different regimes when I only allow myself a couple of prompts at the end of the day when I done writing and only allow minor edits. At least my conscience is clear.

Re: The End of an Era

#92

Post by kardianos »

What LLMs have shown me most, is:

Alternatively most blog posts could have been paragraphs. Most books could have been single chapters. Most newspaper articles could have been tweets.

That being said, most readers want you to hold your hand step by step. They don't want to the outline: they want you to give them a story. Most people and writers know this already. To me, it was new.

Re: The End of an Era

#93

Post by applfanboysbgon »

p-e-w wrote: post #37
inigyou wrote: post #4

LLMs are writing as well as humans for people who think writing words is the goal. Printing presses also write words better than humans. LLMs are solving the problem one layer higher than printing presses, but still several layers down from the top. Note that LLMs aren't useless, since they have other strengths which can make them equal or better than humans in certain applications. For instance, they can tirelessly…

I’d be interested to know what you think the “several layers” above a system that solves open mathematical problems in an afternoon, and writes entire operating systems from scratch, are.

> writes entire operating systems from scratch

Yeah, yeah. Remind me how many people are using those operating systems? The ability of LLMs to produce dogshit software that nobody will ever use is truly unparalleled, but not especially world-changing.

Re: The End of an Era

#94

Post by pier25 »

For sure LLMs can write in perfect English (or any other language) and convey information.

But good writing is more than just conveying information. To me it's about connecting to a voice. This is a rare quality and AFAIK I have never experienced this with AI generated text or even with 99% of human written text for that matter.

Re: The End of an Era

#95

Post by alansaber »

cwiz wrote: post #91

I started writing because AI made me obsolete in software development. Or at least gave me depression that blocks me from writing code. What I did instead I started writing my thoughts as short stories and then made an attempt to write full blown 50k words novel. It worked as therapy surprisingly well. I write mostly without AI but then I use AI for editing and grammar correction. Sometimes when I struggle with plot…

Sounds just like using the gym for therapy

Re: The End of an Era

#97

Post by dkh »

f311a wrote: post #58
p-e-w wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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.

And you don’t expect it to improve? At the rate things are going?

Re: The End of an Era

#98

Post by bsenftner »

inigyou wrote: post #4

LLMs are writing as well as humans for people who think writing words is the goal. Printing presses also write words better than humans. LLMs are solving the problem one layer higher than printing presses, but still several layers down from the top. Note that LLMs aren't useless, since they have other strengths which can make them equal or better than humans in certain applications. For instance, they can tirelessly…

Finally, someone else understands that writing is not the goal, the entire point of all of this is our communications between one another and this market for narrative stories is a nice departure and it does convey important knowledge and moral lessons that larger society needs. But it is an indirection, an indirection to the mission of communicating solutions to how to live as a human and that is why we care, why the interest persists despite lifetimes of narrative dreck. We are adrift without instructions, and no religions are not the instructions.

Re: The End of an Era

#99

Post by fidotron »

okzgn wrote: post #86
fidotron wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> holds real value when it is of high quality Does it? This assumption is the core of the entire problem. It might do as some, bluntly, self indulgent exercise but beyond that in society scarcity of things other people need and want is what drives value. We are in for an absolutely huge rebalancing of what it is that is considered valuable.

Interesting standpoint. Do not forget what makes you human, and that's why there are a lot of different opinions and valuable, subjective literary articles.

> and valuable, subjective literary articles

There you go again.

I suspect if everyone on earth produced subjective literary articles at the rate of ten a day you would cease to consider them valuable, let alone a machine that can create them on demand.

Re: The End of an Era

#100

Post by i2km »

Article predicts that we'll see tools to "roughen up" slop to pass as human. Surprised we aren't there already...

I'm already being more careless with spelling and grammar because it gives authenticity.

Maybe people will revert to Jeffrey Epstein style prose to avoid any suspicion of slop..., e.g:

“no , bed, i, m laying on thefloor so it can't move.”

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