Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The End of an Era

hughhowey.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 480 posts

Re: The End of an Era

#291

Post by Xirdus »

anon373839 wrote: post #251
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…

> 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…

My wife uses ChatGPT a lot for advice on child development and parenting in general. Every so often, it says things like "in my experience, what I've noticed works best is..."

Re: The End of an Era

#292

Post by bee_rider »

boogieknite wrote: post #283
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…

my coworker presented a 93 page pdf for a project plan entirely created by $230 of Claude's deep learning. i hope i wasnt too mean while asking him variations of "what now? what do i do with this?" the answer is obvious: read it. but so much of it covers problems which are already solved and my coworker clearly hasnt considered at all point is: maybe llm output is best not shared. maybe, like a dream, the only audien…

Having made the mistake of writing a couple of them, I’m pretty sure the only uses of non-fiction documents longer than ~30 pages is

* As a reference; people can look look up just the algorithm they want

* As a token that says “I’ve thought about this problem”

(The former is somewhat a subset of the latter. All of the stuff they didn’t read when they used the work as reference was there to provide them confidence that the algorithm they plucked out of the thing had some thought behind it).

Re: The End of an Era

#293

Post by lubujackson »

aavci wrote: post #169

I scrolled through the comments as I am curious if anyone shared some ideas: What is the future of authoring by humans like? Instead of books being one of either ‘meat’ or ‘machine’, as this author is claiming, what would it look like for human authors to leverage AI for simply getting assistance for the stories they author? Could there be a healthy, non sloppy use for AI?

It is just like coding.

If you are on top of the AI, it is a powerful tool for exploration of ideas, organization of thoughts, bridging connections, outlining, filling in gaps.

But if you vibe write, it will look good on the surface but be full of illogical, contradictory statements, disconnected characterizations, etc.

Re: The End of an Era

#294

Post by ryandrake »

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,…

To be fair, LLMs didn't really change this that much: Throughout my career, I've been generating docs that nobody is going to read, only because some process somewhere says "In order to get engineering approval to commence work, an Engineering Risks Document (ERD) must be produced." Everyone knows that nobody reads these, but someone with a rubber stamp checks to see that the doc exists and it looks sufficiently long, and then he stamps the stamp. LLMs just make producing this shit faster.

Re: The End of an Era

#295

Post by w0de0 »

mattmaroon wrote: post #256

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 l…

Humans are extremely special! They have a unique trait no other extant and few antecedant species have/had…

No other carbon terrestrial species can run for such long distances - a healthy young human can jog for 50 km or more on water and sugar: this is a (not too) breathtaking efficiency!

Can you imagine being a gazelle who has been sprinting away from a human for six hours but they just keep coming? Terrifying.

The ability to do so truly defines the species, to the extent they’re taxonomied as ‘homo marathoniensis‘ (fun fact: during the atomic age most human philosophers used ‘homo sapiens sapiens’ - more like ‘homo vanus vanus’ amirite).

Re: The End of an Era

#296

Post by hughhowey »

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.

The full sentence I wrote: "Artificial Intelligence is writing about as well as humans — at least well enough to cause confusion and speculation — and that’s creating an existential crisis among authors, confusion among readers, and legal action within the industry"

"About as well as" doesn't mean "better." Wild that you jumped from one to the other.

I continue: "-- at least well enough to cause confusion and speculation --" This is factual.

One thing I am sure of is that computers are better at reading than people. The way some people read makes me want to vomit.

Re: The End of an Era

#297

Post by _dwt »

I've never read Howey's books but have them mentally filed next to, like, Dungeon Crawler Carl, the Bobiverse, whatever that long thing is with all the superheroes, thousand-chapter cultivation LitRPG blah blah blah as Reddit-beloved high-wordcount fan-fiction-adjacent genreslop.

I hate being a snob, but when we read "artificial Intelligence is writing about as well as humans", maybe take that with a grain of salt? It has not been my experience that AI writing is remotely near a "good" human writer.

Re: The End of an Era

#298

Post by hughhowey »

brap wrote: post #113

>Let’s examine another crazy version. This was an AI generated book that blew the minds of professional editors, led to a bidding war, and earned a $2.4M advance. Let’s examine a third version: the people investing $2.4M into this book use AI in their evaluation process. Honestly I don’t think it’s that crazy. What’s more likely, that current AI wrote a whole ass novel which professional editors meticulously read and…

I love your fourth version! That's the best plot twist.

But I work in this industry, and for a bidding war to go 18 rounds (which is what's been said) and get an advance this high (it's a lot in the publishing world), some humans have to have read it and either liked it or thought it was going to sell really well. But your speculation is more amusing (and sci-fi) than mine. Bravo.

Re: The End of an Era

#299

Post by hughhowey »

pyth0 wrote: post #9
bkieffer wrote: post #5

Is the AI that writes "about as well as humans" in the room with us right now?

Did you stop reading at the em-dash? > Artificial Intelligence is writing about as well as humans — at least well enough to cause confusion and speculation No matter your opinion on AI writing, this is just a fact.

Reading comprehension is suffering these days.

Re: The End of an Era

#300

Post by [deleted] »

ghaff wrote: post #33
boriskourt wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"But then I have to remind myself that I don’t sound like AI, it sounds like me. I’ve been em-dashing and comma-splicing up a motherfucking storm these past two decades. It was fun then, and it’s fun now." From the source.

The em-dash thing really annoys me. Using them has been house style the last couple of places I worked and I'm not just going to stop using them because some idiot might think they were generated by AI.

[deleted]
Post reply on HN