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The End of an Era

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Re: The End of an Era

#251

Post by anon373839 »

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…

> but the content it carries, the substance it holds.

It's even more than that, I think. It's the intent to reach out and transfer to others something that you experience internally. It's a sense of purpose motivating that content and substance to be packaged up and communicated in the first place.

Sometimes LLMs will slip up and say things like, "I see this working with people all the time." And it REALLY breaks the illusion that the text they extrude means anything. Because obviously there is no "I" and no, the LLM does not have this autobiographical memory the text is simulating.

Re: The End of an Era

#252

Post by recursive »

wolvesechoes wrote: post #187
rationalist wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And the human is human.

The idea that we'd have to justify the existence of humans relative to LLMs based on objective metrics sounds like it's leading in a bad direction. If the LLM gets their power budget down to nineteen watts, what does that mean for humans?

Re: The End of an Era

#253

Post by cgio »

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…

No one likes generating content. Many like generating income or status. It is a new era. The era of curation. I would predict shorter and weirder stories and meme style communication patterns outside normal syntax. Poetry e.g. is replicable but not redoable. I am ambitious we are to see the best writing ever soon.

Re: The End of an Era

#254

Post by sp527 »

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…

People are largely fools who don't understand the (extreme) limitations of their own perception.

To offer a useful analogy: we only notice the bad lip filler jobs.

AI is all over the place and becoming more undetectable by the day. Detectability also relates to the proficiency of the person using it. There are many highly intelligent people using AI surreptitiously and to great effect. Few understand this.

Re: The End of an Era

#255

Post by sherr »

Publishers and "professional editors" have been releasing crap for years, even decades. No LLM needed. Humans are perfectly capable of writing so-called "slop" without a machine.

Re: The End of an Era

#256

Post by mattmaroon »

I see all of this as the cognitive dissonance created when humans are confronted with what scientists have been telling us forever: we’re not that special. We’re just piles of atoms, as are rocks, dogs, computers, and all of the other intelligent life that the universe must surely be teeming with.

Building something that supersedes us may have always been our purpose. Until skynet turns on us I’ll be happy to say I lived at the exact time it happened.

Re: The End of an Era

#257

Post by lubujackson »

This is the black and white perspective that literally every other human-creative industry is wringing its hands over. But I think it misses a key difference that is already painfully obvious, which is creating new and engaging things will never be as simple as pressing a button. There will always be a human at the other end, pressing the button (or a human who deploys the agent, etc.)

The best comparison is photography. Instantly, a whole career path of portraiture was tossed out the window. Go to a museum and you see portrait after portrait - the best ones. There were millions of shitty ones made at all levels of society, and that job was replaced by cameras. But painting didn't go away, it got weird, it became anti-camera and more human, in a way.

This splitting of purpose and amplification of humanness is going to ramp up. Expect everyone to grow a taste for weirder, unprocessed music, experimental novels, wild and unexpected designs. Art is human communication and AI brings that into sharp relief.

Novels seem the most protected from AI - pulp/romance/beach novels will be crushed by volume and the sad remains of the publishing industry along with it, but interesting human novels will be just fine. And, much like with photography, I think AI will eventually normalize to its own artistic medium with writing, where careful usage will allow more ambitious work to appear that wasn't possible before, like a novel written using only sestinas, for example.

Re: The End of an Era

#259

Post by inigyou »

smalltorch wrote: post #181
jtbayly wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the word was made flesh and dwelt among us.

Im curious what you mean by this

In the beginning were the Words, and the Words made the world. I am the Words—the Words are everything. Where the Words end, the world ends. You cannot go forward in the absence of space. Repeat.

Re: The End of an Era

#260

Post by un-diletante »

cyanregiment wrote: post #240
un-diletante wrote: post #190

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 big…

Conveying experience != having experience

Conveyance requires a source and a destination. To have an experience conveyed to you means to gain a degree of understanding of another's experience which you yourself did not have. Yet you yourself have not actually experienced it, you have merely gained knowledge into some aspects of it's nature by comparing it to your own experiences.

If a reader perceives that they have been conveyed an experience that nobody has ever had, then they have made up an imaginary experience which does not correspond to anybody else's lived reality, which may or may not be possible to have. If an LLM conveys an actual human experience, it is only because somebody's actual experience has been anonymized and conveyed on to you.

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