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The End of an Era

hughhowey.com

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Re: The End of an Era

#161

Post by ilamont »

Fantastic take. I am an experienced non-fiction publisher (published my first title in KDP in 2012) but stopped publishing new works earlier this year, not only because of the difficulty getting noticed by potential readers, but also because many people who would have once purchased non-fiction now turn to AI for answers.

It was always a hard sell, but now the math for publishing nonfiction doesn’t make sense. I canceled one project, the fourth edition of my most popular title, during the preproduction phase. It will never see the light of day.

I have also been sitting on one novel manuscript and many short stories for the past five years or so, and have been kind of frozen with reluctance to publish for the reasons Howey cites in his blog. It was already hard enough to get noticed for new fiction amongst a sea of self published works. Short stories are especially hard to sell, even in genres like science fiction where they once flourished. AI opened the supply firehose further while sowing doubt amongst readers about the provenance of works published after 2022.

On the other hand, I see that AI offers a path forward to tackle many of the structural problems in the novel manuscript that my editor flagged. But if I leverage AI to fix it, the finished book will always be tainted by the fact that this is not a pure work of human authored fiction.

Re: The End of an Era

#162

Post by xpct »

Planktonne wrote: post #29

> 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.

That's a scary notion: what happens when the money claiming that AI writing is good, surpasses the one claiming otherwise?

Re: The End of an Era

#163

Post by senordevnyc »

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…

He talks about this in TFA:

Yo, this blog post could’ve been a freakin’ prompt. I have years and years of blogging for an AI to learn from, and over 20 novels, and tons of short stories. One prompt, and all this spills out. And if your goal is a blog post, you’re gonna love this era. If your goal is the joy of thinking in words, nothing has changed. So this is the real part, right here: Doing a thing for the love of the thing is no different than it ever was. The problem is, there aren’t many people for whom this applies.

Re: The End of an Era

#164

Post by monkeywork »

criddell wrote: post #53

I wonder how concerned writers and publishers are about copyright of AI written text? As I understand it, in a lot of jurisdictions, AI products are not covered by copyright. If my understanding is close to correct, than I can see why the million dollar advance was withdrawn.

How does one PROVE AI or human writing to determine copyright?

Who is challenging a lack of copyright on a work?

You publish a story, I take it and republish it / remix it / whatever, you invoke copyright protections and try to have mine taken down - how do I prove your work was AI and thus has no copyright, and how do you prove (or do you even have to) that it's human?

Who has the burden of proof - the person claiming AI created it, and thus it has no copyright, or the person who claims they wrote it and it does have copyright?

Re: The End of an Era

#165

Post by dspillett »

strken wrote: post #124
1dom wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI writing makes me vomit. I think this was fairly obvious and fair 1 - 2 years ago. Now though, I have to wonder if people who think this with such conviction are falling for the toupee fallacy. You said it yourself: someone you consider a well known (and presumably accomplished?) author thinks AI is pretty good at writing.

I haven't tried using an AI to write prose, but I use Claude to write code daily and it spits out the worst comments I've ever seen, along with some surprisingly good ones. Would we not expect AI fiction to be the same? A stream of poor and excellent taste, not particularly original or surprising, samey in hard-to-define ways, but capable of being hammered into a good story by an editor.

> Would we not expect AI fiction to be the same? A stream of poor and excellent taste, not particularly original or surprising, samey in hard-to-define ways, but capable of being hammered into a good story by an editor.

That could also describe many human writers…

AI writing seems to have a quality ceiling, or an ick floor if you prefer to think about it that way around, but is OK compare to bad human writers.

I'm still committed to the career suicide that is refusing to touch generative AI beyond the supped-up auto-correct/-suggest that has replaced the older method in my IDE (replaced, such that if I turn it off I also lose what I had before), but seeing results others around me have pulled out of the hat I have to admit the tech can produce serviceable work if properly fettled by a person afterwards.

Re: The End of an Era

#166

Post by shmeeed »

inigyou wrote: post #66
estimator7292 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48067472

Strangely, I'm still seeing the comment. How does that work?

Re: The End of an Era

#167

Post by xorcist »

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…

Right. LLMs are text production machines.

You can also view them as data expansion tools. They expand an input to an arbitrary long text. That text contains roughly the same amount of information as was contained in the input to begin with.

This is not very useful unless your work is content production. More useful is when the output length is shorter than the input. Then it is a (lossy) data compression tool. These are, as we all know, very useful for images and sound but now we have them for text too.

Re: The End of an Era

#168

Post by xpct »

stephc_int13 wrote: post #56
brador wrote: post #24

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.

François Chollet made an interesting geometric analogy on Twitter. We tend to view Intelligence as something unbounded, like the height of a pole. But it could be something closer to the roundness of a polished sphere. Once close to the limit, incremental improvements are less and less significant. The intuition we have about the nature of cognition and its whole shape and limits is almost entirely built by looking a…

I've been interpreting AI task solving capabilities as a search problem: being smarter lets us prune more of the tree and try out different things more efficiently. I think this fits into the sphere analogy quite well: at the limit, we need to experiment, use the experiments to create new abstractions and build on them repeatedly. This doesn't necessarily require more raw intelligence, but the time or resources to find how the pieces fit together.

Re: The End of an Era

#169

Post by aavci »

I scrolled through the comments as I am curious if anyone shared some ideas: What is the future of authoring by humans like? Instead of books being one of either ‘meat’ or ‘machine’, as this author is claiming, what would it look like for human authors to leverage AI for simply getting assistance for the stories they author? Could there be a healthy, non sloppy use for AI?

Re: The End of an Era

#170

Post by vessenes »

jgilias wrote: post #144
pianopatrick wrote: post #62

If 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.

Well, but then they would’ve just hopped on the eagles to fly to Mordor and just throw the damn ring into the volcano.

...Unless trench warfare your son was living through was on your mind as you wrote
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