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The End of an Era

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Re: The End of an Era

#261

Post by bayindirh »

cgio wrote: post #253
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…

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.

> No one likes generating content.

Oh no. I see the contrary.

One of my friends recently stated (paraphrased):

    - Since I can generate code, writing it feels mundane now. I don't write code anymore.
And they continued how they replace almost everything they do with LLMs.

I have seen people who never think but spend all their days querying LLMs for everything. Docs, help, howtos, system administration, coding...

What I see is an incentive for less work, less effort. Not income or status. They don't spend their "saved" time, if there's any, for personal activities or self-improvement either. They just do things with less effort, and just live as they lived before.

It's brain numbing.

> I would predict shorter and weirder stories and meme style communication patterns outside normal syntax.

I don't share the same sentiment, yet I don't have idea what to expect. It has to get darker to get brighter again.

We're just starting.

Re: The End of an Era

#262

Post by mike_hearn »

Offtopic for the actual post, but if you don't know the author and like sci-fi mysteries his Silo story is great. I haven't read the books because I'm enjoying theorizing but the Apple TV series is being broadcast now on a weekly basis. It's one of these very dense mysteries that asks you to figure out the clues. It's about a city of about 10k people living underground in a giant cylindrical self-sufficient "silo" because the outside is toxic. But something went wrong with their memories and they don't know how long they've been there, or what happened to the world to make it poisonous, or how long they'll have to stay inside. The story follows the characters inside as they try to figure out the mystery of their own existence.

Re: The End of an Era

#263

Post by inigyou »

aklemm wrote: post #233
xorcist wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What part of it do you think was sarcastic? Economic growth is measured by the resources humanity wastes.

Re: The End of an Era

#264

Post by cyanregiment »

un-diletante wrote: post #260
cyanregiment wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ha…

Even within your own brain, conveyance != experience.

When you report on your own experiences - like the warmth of the sun - that report is not itself the experience.

The scary part about an LLM (p-zombie) is that it can report on an experience exactly the same as if it had one, and for all intents and purposes it'd be sufficient for the task at hand.

After all, I don't need to have your experiences to know what you mean.

Re: The End of an Era

#265

Post by baggachipz »

I think LLMs will take over making those trashy beach novels, as they're essentially clones. And people who like them will continue to buy them; no shade, some people enjoy that. But for good original stories and plots, you're going to need people to create that world.

Re: The End of an Era

#266

Post by efields »

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.

This is happening in every creative industry. The creators on the edge of this space in every medium have seen it from both sides.

AI creative is easy to spot _right now_. It will not always be that way.

Re: The End of an Era

#267

Post by bsenftner »

b112 wrote: post #237
bayindirh wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You are describing the bifurcation of society that is the moral lesson of The Time Machine by H.G. Wells. The Morlocks are the scientific and engineering "gender" (so to speak) of the human race while the Eloki are the child-like humans kept around because they are the food the Morlocks consume to survive in that future.

Re: The End of an Era

#268

Post by mohamedkoubaa »

keiferski wrote: post #45
mohamedkoubaa wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ghostwriting has been the norm in many subgenres of nonfiction for a while now

Exactly, so in the "dystopian" future, people just use AI to write the books they were already having a ghostwriter make. If the books are original enough to be perceived as not-AI, the mind behind it will be creative enough to make the AI origin moot.

Originality is an interesting thing.

Books are a physical medium of organizing and distributing information by gluing a bunch of flat papers between covers. Properties like originality do not follow from the physical medium itself.

Publishers of travel guides in book form use the physical medium as an instantiation of the class of "interesting coffee table adornment expected to contain wit". Does that imply an expectation of originality? I would argue it does not.

Publishers of speculative science fiction, on the other hand, instantiate objects of the class "examinations into the human condition using technology as a lens". For this class, the use of LLMs is an abomination.

There are other subgenres of science fiction, of course, for which these sensibilities would be misplaced.

Re: The End of an Era

#269

Post by eudamoniac »

api wrote: post #119
okzgn wrote: post #25

Writing for the love of art, besides being a mental and reflective exercise that holds real value when it is of high quality, makes it hard for me to believe that this is the end of literature. It is difficult to think that someone who writes for pleasure would abandon it simply because of the exponential volume of AI-generated text.

Photography was not the end of painting. It was, however, a blow to painting as a vocation where a lot of your work was in the form of portrait painting.

It, plus video, also made painting culturally irrelevant. Approximately no one cares about paintings whatsoever. Books of modernity soon to follow I'm sure.

Re: The End of an Era

#270

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

1dom wrote: post #40
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.

> AI writing makes me vomit. I think this was fairly obvious and fair 1 - 2 years ago. Now though, I have to wonder if people who think this with such conviction are falling for the toupee fallacy. You said it yourself: someone you consider a well known (and presumably accomplished?) author thinks AI is pretty good at writing.

Good at constructing paragraphs, yeah. Generating coherent plotting and character development is still a human skill.
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