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The End of an Era

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Re: The End of an Era

#171

Post by owl57 »

bayindirh wrote: post #138
bsenftner wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

Many of us understood that, and tried to tell it over and over. My keyboard is worn, my mind is numb, my soul is weary from typing/telling that the output is not the aim, but the content it carries, the substance it holds. Yet a very vocal group advocates integrating LLMs into every aspect of their lives, and the other group watch in dismay. On the other hand, I used a sentence form used by LLMs in a comment during a…

> Many people love to generate text with LLMs, but most of same crowd apparently hates to read LLM output. An interesting phenomenon.

Are you sure it's the same people? I feel the opposite: it's the same people who happily read tons of LLM output themselves and send some of it to others.

Re: The End of an Era

#172

Post by senordevnyc »

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 he thinks AI is better at writing?

He talks about this in the article, did you read it? Reasons include AI winning writing contests, AI hitting bestseller lists, and now apparently an AI-written book inspiring a bidding war between publishers that resulted in the supposed "author" getting a $2.4M advance (until it was revealed that the book was written by AI).

Re: The End of an Era

#173

Post by inigyou »

shmeeed wrote: post #166
inigyou wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

A user with enough reputation and who has enabled the option to view censored comments can vouch for a censored comment, restoring it.

Re: The End of an Era

#174

Post by TeMPOraL »

skinfaxi wrote: post #116
palmotea wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A thinking press? Soon you won't be doing anything. At best you'll just be a bag of meat attached to automated processes you don't understand in order to take legal liability for it. Literally a scapegoat, except of a different species.

That would be an interesting legal case. I would expect it to lead to negligence on the part of the employer for lack of training, etc rather than attach to the employee pressing the button.

You get paid for having liability attach to you. Soon it may be the only thing you could be paid for.

Re: The End of an Era

#175

Post by senordevnyc »

monkeywork wrote: post #143
gorbachev wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Again - did you even read the article you are commenting on? The author gives an example of a novel that had a huge advance offered on it and then pulled because of AI concerns... in order to get to the point of having the offer a bunch of competent writers, editors etc didn't notice.

It's annoying to come here and read 80% of comments by people who clearly didn't even read the article in question, but decided this was an excellent time to trot out their anti-AI screeds that totally fail to engage with the actual article. Human slop.

Re: The End of an Era

#177

Post by f311a »

dartharva wrote: post #117
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.

Default unspecifically-prompted AI writing makes you vomit, because it has a specific pattern. But with enough well-defined prompts AI can be made to write in practically any style, often with results unrecognizable as AI-generated.

It does not matter which prompt you use. Even a long article with a small input (of what to write) will include weird details and structure.

People tried to fool Pangram by using custom prompts and instant feedback (rewrite until it passes). After hundreds of rounds, the text was still detected.

Although it's harder to detect such text by humans, there will be clues if you want to write a whole book based on a few pages of input.

Re: The End of an Era

#179

Post by Tarq0n »

bayindirh wrote: post #138
bsenftner wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

Many of us understood that, and tried to tell it over and over. My keyboard is worn, my mind is numb, my soul is weary from typing/telling that the output is not the aim, but the content it carries, the substance it holds. Yet a very vocal group advocates integrating LLMs into every aspect of their lives, and the other group watch in dismay. On the other hand, I used a sentence form used by LLMs in a comment during a…

Sometimes the medium is the message though. Especially in literature, prose matters. It's not just about what is said but also how.

This applies even in "low" art. AI generated imagery from mainstream models tends to be so ugly it detracts from effectively communicating what the prompter intended.

Re: The End of an Era

#180

Post by marcosdumay »

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

Looks to me that the ban was reversed at some point. The GP's comments are quite reachable.
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