>Sales and marketing, of course, were always and will always be a different story.
If we could fix these, we could have bike lanes in places where they make sense
The End of an Era
231–240 of 480 posts
Re: The End of an Era
#232What if we remove the stigma of authors using AI. We say, have at it, use all the AI you want. What then? The market is still finite. The authors are still competing with each other. They will still have to be good at creating compelling books that people want to read. Will the whole thing just blow over and AI would be "just another tool" that authors use to get their work out?
Discoverability starts to break for new authors when more new books are published each day than humans on the earth. Established authors have the name recognition to compete as you say.
This has happened with other accelerants in various media/fields:
1. easy access to video recording and editing equipment has made it a lot easier to produce videos on sites like YouTube;
2. easy access to audio recording and editing (Audacity, etc.) has made it a lot easier to produce podcasts and other audio content (via LibriVox, Apple Podcasts, etc.);
3. easy access to writing software and self-publishing (Amazon, fan fiction sites, blogging platforms) has made it a lot easier to produce stories and books;
4. easy access to game engines and tools (Unity, Unreal, Godot, Twine, RenPy, etc.) have made it a lot easier to produce games.
Re: The End of an Era
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
I really hate the whole thing about companies promoting using LLMs to change one-liner emails into this long multi-paragraph thing that ends up saying almost nothing ... just wasting everyone's time in reading them (with an extra sprinkling of hallucinations).
I believe you are supposed to use an LLM on the receiving side to compress them again. This is supposed to help our economic growth during the coming decade.
/s I hope
Re: The End of an Era
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Thank you for your opinion. To be more specific, there are many subjective views on what value is. I didn't mean a literary piece always has market value if nobody is buying it, but it can still be valuable educationally as a masterful or sublime example of literature.
You are deliberately skirting the core problem which is your perception of value is completely warped by supply and demand.
If you have a surplus of something then it will cease to be of value to you. For example you do not actually "value" air, since it is everywhere and so we ignore it, but stuck somewhere where it is not you will come to appreciate it fairly quickly.
You seem to believe there is something magic and wonderful about literature, but this is because you have only ever lived in an environment where it is scarce and not dangerously abundant. The next stage is to claim "but it's not literature" even when it's the exact same strings of words merely constructed by machines and not humans, which is curious because up until now it had always been assumed that had the monkey succeeded in typing out Shakespeare it would still have been as valuable as had Shakespeare written it himself.
Re: The End of an Era
#235Earlier 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:…
There would be some cases where the author/prompter would want to show off how good it is. It would even be beneficial for the AI companies
Re: The End of an Era
#236> 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?
I think that's been the case for a while. We get
- Countless poorly-written AI books released
- Many, many articles saying that people should stop complaining and AI writing is just as good
Re: The End of an Era
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
It must be a distinction between engineer-type brains and leader-type brains. If you're focused on social status climbing, the fact that you produced a report, and the length of that report, is far more important than whether the contents of the report have any relation to reality beyond the surface level. This is true if you're trying to get VC funding as well. It's even in institutional academia, as seen by the Sok…
To be frank, I neither live/work in an environment or live for "climbing" anything, so fluffware is not something I produce or understand. On the other hand, I have friends who play that game, and I don't talk with most of them, because their life views and mental states continually drift to a state which makes no sense whatsoever for me, so we grow apart.
Eventually, enough engineers will breed with enough engineers, that we'll be a different species, incapable of communicating with weirdo humanity.
Re: The End of an Era
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I don't we disagree a little bit, I think. Content and substance also contains "how" alongside "what". At least that was my intention.
I stopped sharing my photos publicly to stop supplying training data for image generation models. I don't want to feed that machine.
Re: The End of an Era
#239LLMs 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…
>Right. LLMs are text production machines.
I use them as text consumption machines. They read and watch a lot of the books and movies i have no time to. And from the TLDR I decide whether the full thing is worth watching.
Re: The End of an Era
#240I 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 big…
Conveying experience != having experience