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The End of an Era

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Re: The End of an Era

#241

Post by w0de0 »

The mediocre may livestream, but I suppose the worst and the best, in seeking escape from the middle voice, now gifted to large language models, now not our own, that is, I say, the best and the worst will become esoterically poetic, will run on in agramatical authenticity, in voluminous polyglot, tiresomely peripatetic through the thesaurus. Loose change, slang, new coinage, words lazarized, older and rarer englishes, scattered everywhere.

Nonsense and beauty ascendant! Poesy freed from several centuries’ fuligin tyranny of the novel and horrid mass literacy; windmills again a just and proper enemy!

This new muse will mate with the corpse of epistemology to produce a second coming of baroque obscurant gnosticism. A fine time to be a scholar or a priest, the 2100s.

Re: The End of an Era

#242

Post by b112 »

projektfu wrote: post #217
tempest_ wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

For my medical notes assistant I had to set a global "write in a telegraphic, minimal style" because it was fluffing up every aspect of the notes. Nobody wants to read that BS and it's impossible to find information in a series of walls of text.

I wonder if reading cooking recipe sites in training contributed to this.

9 pages about how it felt to be a kid eating the dish, for 7 ingredients and a one line recipe.

Re: The End of an Era

#243

Post by fidotron »

harimau777 wrote: post #225
fidotron wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely having the idea and curating the result actually is work? And pricing is determined by what someone else will pay for something, so if people want to read it and the author is charging for it . . . that's up to them if they want to make a trade about it. The odd thing is this attempt at gatekeeping what other people value.

Price is determined by what someone is willing to pay but value isn't. If the value from art comes from expression, then LLMs directly attack the core value of art.

Damien Hirst, among many other prominent modern and historical artists, famously employed teams of human assistants to execute the bulk of the work. In the Hirst case that extended to the spot paintings, many of which he had very limited involvement in as a direct feature of the concept of the work itself.

Something tells me that doesn't alter the value of the art as expression of the intention of the artist, and not the assistant be it human or machine. In the spot painting case he was deliberately playing with this idea to the degree it added to the perceived value.

Re: The End of an Era

#244

Post by rsstack »

kriro wrote: post #211

""" Another prediction is that MOST readers will care about machine-vs-meat as much as they currently care about publishing imprints, which is to say almost none. """ This does not align with what I see in the fiction book space at all. At least in the communities that I frequent (fantasy, sci-fi, horror) there is no AI publication that I am aware of that is good. And readers react allergically to any notion of AI in…

You're definitely in a certain environment of readers. There are populations living on this Earth reading AI-generated books that are available on Amazon, an AI-generated TV shows. I am not recommending you try to engage and consume that content, just saying that it exists and there are people that either don't notice or don't mind.

Re: The End of an Era

#245

Post by Earw0rm »

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…

Most people love to drive, but hate to be stuck in traffic. Or for the countryside to be all freeways and the city to be all parking lots.

It's not the exact same asymmetry, but there are parallels.

Re: The End of an Era

#246

Post by bayindirh »

tempest_ wrote: post #185
bayindirh wrote: post #138

Earlier 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…

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,…

In the rare occasion I use LLMs, I always add at least one of the following:

    - Do not include opinions, just official documentation.
    - Add all references you have used as a bibliography section at the end.
Then I skim the result, and jump to the references it has given. I don't have time for other way.

Re: The End of an Era

#247

Post by b112 »

ReptileMan wrote: post #239
xorcist wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That is what humans are for!! Ask people!

There is no way a summary of these things fron an LLM has the correct context.

(not really frustrated at you, as much as where society is going)

Re: The End of an Era

#248

Post by CommieBobDole »

LLMs have solved writing in the same way image generators have solved stock photos - if you need an image that doesn't need to convey any information other than "I have added a somewhat-related image that doesn't look obviously AI-generated to this", you can now generate such an image pretty easily. That's a low bar, but almost the entire genre of stock photos exists in service to this goal.

Likewise, there's a whole lot of day-to-day writing that mostly exists to communicate "I have written some text about this subject because I am expected or required to" and at most needs to communicate some simple information. LLMs will probably replace a lot of that writing, at least temporarily. As people increasingly use LLMs to consume that information as well, it will probably eventually be replaced by some sort of inter-agent communications protocol.

Re: The End of an Era

#249

Post by skinfaxi »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #174
skinfaxi wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are employees usually liable for process-related issues? Like individual employees weren't liable for dispensing too-hot coffee but McDonalds was liable. Or how cops aren't liable in their individual capacity if it was a failure of training, etc.

Re: The End of an Era

#250

Post by [deleted] »

sparsesignal wrote: post #205
xorcist wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This assumes one-shot generation. I don't use it that way, and I don't think many people who find it useful do. I use it as a colleague I'm drafting with. I'll ask how a sentence lands, tell it to make a paragraph more friendly or more dramatic, have it argue against a point I'm making. The piece comes together over many turns, and the information arriving in each turn is mine — it's not expanding one prompt, it's he…

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