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The End of an Era

hughhowey.com

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Re: The End of an Era

#181

Post by smalltorch »

jtbayly wrote: post #105
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…

And the word was made flesh and dwelt among us.

Im curious what you mean by this

Re: The End of an Era

#182

Post by criddell »

monkeywork wrote: post #164
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 If my understanding is close to correct, than I can see why the million dollar advance was withdrawn.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 claimi…

Well, copyright claims are usually a civil matter (in the US at least). For a civil dispute you have to make a judge or jury believe you more than the other person.

But it sounds like you are talking about a criminal charge. There the bar is higher and the government has to prove beyond a reasonable doubt. In that case I suppose the government could do things like search your computer, subpoena the AI companies for their records, talk to your editor, talk to your family and friends, etc... All the usual stuff.

Re: The End of an Era

#183

Post by bawana »

Before the printing press, information was transmitted by word of mouth, skills were learned by joining guilds, and the largely illiterate public lived and learned from songs. As AI takes over and information becomes adulterated, people will enter their own bubbles. Ultimately, the only way to escape enslavement by AI will be to return to the world before the printing press.

Re: The End of an Era

#185

Post by tempest_ »

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…

It is very weird. 6 months ago I generated some documentation for a service that was largely undocumented. When it was done my only thought was "who is this for?" Is any one going to actually read this or are they just going to ask the LLM? If someone didnt write it, why would I read it? It just becomes something to pipe into the context for the next person. It seems though a lot of people don't have this experience, its like they think they are the only ones with access to this technology.

Additionally I am so, so ,so sick of reading claudes overly wordy technical writing ish bullshit. Its exhausting trying to find the fuck ups or hidden assumptions in the pages of text it produces for everything.

Every time I try and search for ways to make it stop I just find people trying to save tokens which I don't give a shit about. I just want it to communicate things to me without having to constantly read 4 paragraphs, dump the context or fork it or start a new session so it "remembers" or re-weights that is was told to be concise and terse in like 7 different places. Maybe I am using it wrong.

Re: The End of an Era

#186

Post by dahart »

> In my dream world, the robots do all the boring jobs and humans spend all their time being creative, connecting with one another, learning about the universe, and sharing our ideas and creations in a great big prosperous circle.

Bertrand Russell famously predicted* that machines would allow everyone to “work” no more than 4 hours a day. I just had a thought when reading Hugh’s article - what if work is by and large the thing that connects most of us with one another and compels us to be creative and learn about the universe? And TBH the thought already feels trite in advance; both religious and wealthy people have said this before for various reasons.

I’ve had the same ideal in mind for many years. It would be amazing if I could work less and devote more time to art & music, reading & travel, socializing & community projects. But using AI for work (writing code) isn’t making that happen yet and doesn’t feel like it’s even aiming in that direction. Now that we have machines that can do most of my job, I’m starting to worry because there are some signs that it might not lead to utopia, starting with how it’s beginning to demotivate otherwise strong and curious programmers from wanting to be better programmers.

I don’t know, it’s too early to draw conclusions. But is anyone feeling like LLMs are giving them more time? They’re helping me work on more things, and produce more output. They’re helping me context switch more easily and work on things between meetings. They’re also sometimes tiring, and I’m often using them instead of talking to someone. They’re not yet freeing up time, and it doesn’t feel like lack of better models is the problem.

[*] Russell’s “In Praise of Idleness” doesn’t age quite as well as I remembered. :P https://harpers.org/archive/1932/10/in-praise-of-idleness/

Re: The End of an Era

#187

Post by wolvesechoes »

rationalist wrote: post #57
jvanderbot wrote: post #55

Earlier 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.

> You could ask a human to "do something with 1M dollars" and get garbage too

At least the human's brain requires about 20 Watts to operate.

Cheap garbage is better than garbage requiring whole power plants nad billions of capital investment.

Re: The End of an Era

#188

Post by bigfishrunning »

1dom wrote: post #153
delis-thumbs-7e wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now though, I have to wonder if people who think this with such conviction are falling for the toupee fallacy. If this is the case it should be quite easy for you to provide examples of excellent AI-fiction. As for the “well-known author”, Occam’s razor says he (like most “well-known accomplished authors”) doesn’t know what the hell he is talking about.

> If this is the case it should be quite easy for you to provide examples of excellent AI-fiction. I feel that's the opposite of the toupee fallacy. The lack of labelled excellent AI fiction supports the idea that there's a lot of excellent fiction that was written by largely by AI but nobody was able to identify it as AI, because they were looking for writing that makes them vomit. Regardless, how about this: https:…

Just like how raw sewage tastes good, but people think it tastes bad because of how all of the raw sewage they've tasted tastes bad. But if only people ate more raw sewage, they'd find how much tasty raw sewage is out there!

Re: The End of an Era

#190

Post by un-diletante »

I feel like writing has traditionally had two purposes, to communicate some internal feeling or idea of the writer, and to entertain. For the reader, even if their primary purpose was to be entertained, they would have no choice but to also engage with the internality of the writer. This latter point is what is changing.

I fully admit that we have been surpassed by the machine in the ability to entertain. And the biggest problem with that is that entertainment is the primary factor that drives the popularity and consequently the financial success of a book. If a writer's primary purpose is to entertain, then they should be very worried. But if their primary purpose is to convey something from within themselves, the LLM cannot replicate this. They may however lose that portion of their audience to whom the communication of profundity is merely collateral to being entertained.

I'm not a professional writer, but when I do write, I do so with the intention of expressing something that I feel, which before being thought out and written exists as something not linguistic. The language is a means for the expression of this deeper experience whose communication is the end. But an LLM on it's own is not able to convey internal experiences that it does not have. If it seems that way, it is only achieved by manipulating and rearranging the experiences of the authors that make up it's training data.

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