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The End of an Era

hughhowey.com

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Re: The End of an Era

#301

Post by hughhowey »

senordevnyc wrote: post #175
monkeywork wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again - did you even read the article you are commenting on? The author gives an example of a novel that had a huge advance offered on it and then pulled because of AI concerns... in order to get to the point of having the offer a bunch of competent writers, editors etc didn't notice.

It's annoying to come here and read 80% of comments by people who clearly didn't even read the article in question, but decided this was an excellent time to trot out their anti-AI screeds that totally fail to engage with the actual article. Human slop.

Human slop is right!

Stealing that phrase. Thank you for it.

Re: The End of an Era

#302

Post by Xirdus »

xorcist wrote: post #212
DarkUranium wrote: post #193

Earlier 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.

In webcomic form: https://marketoonist.com/2023/03/ai-written-ai-read.html

Re: The End of an Era

#303

Post by argentinian »

harimau777 wrote: post #218
argentinian wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue that a story can mainly provide a connection with your own subjectivity. If it moves something in you, that's what mainly matters. If your goal by reading is too learn about the subjectivity of another real person, then yes, read human authors. You said it, that's it's part of what a book can offer, but there can be other reasons for reading

Off topic, but you name is somewhat ironic. Argentina's most famous writer, Jorge Luis Borges, built much of his career on the idea that writing is inextricably and inherantly linked to its author.

Completely agree with Borges in that. When the author is an AI, there's no human author, the result is a mix of what information it was feed, how its algorithms work, and what does the person giving commands to the IA asks. There's some link to the person who directs the IA.

I believe Borges would have loved IA.

Re: The End of an Era

#304

Post by mattmaroon »

suddenlybananas wrote: post #288
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…

>Building something that supersedes us may have always been our purpose. This is just religion, but without even any serious philosophical/theological grounding.

You could say that about any religion given only a one sentence high level summary. “A guy in the sky made us in seven days.” has no serious, philosophical grounding.

Re: The End of an Era

#305

Post by skydhash »

actionfromafar wrote: post #272
inigyou wrote: post #145

Earlier 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…

I thought for a second you were going the opposite way with the brain thing. Good leaders are very much concerned with accurate and timely communication. It can be a very engineer thing to point at a vanilla Doxygen dump and call that thing "documentation".

It is documentation. This week, I looked at the Laravel API docs[0], just as much as I looked at the framework guide[1]. It all depends on the question you have and the answer you need.

It's like the car manual (Do they still ship with one?) where every detail is laid out. It's not important for daily driving, but when you to fix an electrical problem, that's the reference you need.

[0]: https://api.laravel.com/docs/13.x/index.html

[2]: https://laravel.com/docs/13.x

Re: The End of an Era

#306

Post by hughhowey »

mike_hearn wrote: post #262

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" be…

Thanks, Mike! Glad you're enjoying.

Re: The End of an Era

#307

Post by argentinian »

bonoboTP wrote: post #284
argentinian wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue that a story can mainly provide a connection with your own subjectivity. If it moves something in you, that's what mainly matters. If your goal by reading is too learn about the subjectivity of another real person, then yes, read human authors. You said it, that's it's part of what a book can offer, but there can be other reasons for reading

> If it moves something in you, that's what mainly matters. This is a values question. Many would say that literature has a role in modeling certain behaviors and teaching lessons that are functional in society. Basically the fables and proverbs idea. Simply catering to what feels nice and what reinforces the biases and wishes of readers is not the same thing. Yes, most of literature is already crap and simply caters…

As you say, that already occurs with human made commercial crap literature.

A person directing an IA could also lead it to build a story that teaches values.

Re: The End of an Era

#308

Post by hughhowey »

1970-01-01 wrote: post #61

I've yet to read anything authored by AI that was truly excellent writing. It simply does not have the chops to write at that level. The great American novel will not be written by AI. Maybe "co-authored by Claude and friends", but not authored.

It will one day. For sure. I'd wager within the next ten years there will be a major controversy about an AI book winning a top prize in literature.

Re: The End of an Era

#309

Post by mattmaroon »

w0de0 wrote: post #295
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…

And yet the cheapest car can easily outrun any human who ever lived. Everything is unique if you look into it closely enough. I would say that’s not the same as special, though I admit this is just semantics.

Re: The End of an Era

#310

Post by argentinian »

kriro wrote: post #221
argentinian wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds to me like the most reasonable attitude. If a story is compelling for a certain person, why care about how it was created?

This mindset is called "death of the author" [1] and the quick summary is that the author's intent doesn't matter. Most book people I know disagree with it. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_the_Author

What does matter? That's completely subjective. If the intent of the author matters to you, then, to you, it does.

There's not an abstract "not mattering of the intent of the author" independent of different people with certain values.

You could say that the intent of the author is the number one issue that matters. That's completely subjective, that's just, like, your opinion, man.

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