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The End of an Era

hughhowey.com

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Re: The End of an Era

#361

Post by ftkftk »

camel_Snake wrote: post #342
ftkftk wrote: post #142

> I watch videogame streamers play games. Millions of people do. There will be authors who livestream the entire book-writing-process (just typing that out makes me want to launch one today). No one person will watch the entire process, but enough people will tune in here and there, and it’ll on be on YouTube I would definitely watch this.

Ironically, I finally caught up on an online web series (though it's been adapted to a published book as well as audiobooks) and discovered the author does live stream their writing of unreleased chapters. They're a bit too prolific to actually dig into their overall process, but you can watch them type for hours straight. It's awfully boring tbh since there's no interaction and they're understandably focused on thei…

Thanks for sharing!

Re: The End of an Era

#362

Post by argentinian »

zbentley wrote: post #358
argentinian wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you are not taking into account that creators can be funded in different ways. For example like in Patreon. You can give part of your money to fund a creator that wants to create in order to earn a living. I believe that is better when people create for fun. If they need to create to earn a living they are forced to create and that is not the best incentive to create. Fun is a better incentive

> I believe that is better when people create for fun. If they need to create to earn a living they are forced to create and that is not the best incentive to create. Fun is a better incentive I'm not sure that's true (thousands of famous creative works from the Sistine Chapel to the Benin Bronzes were created on commission/for remuneration), but even if it is, how are creators gonna eat? If the answer is "get a day…

With IA, creation is cheap. It's inevitable that automation would make some jobs disappear. There's no solution, less people will be able to earn a living for creating art, I think.

What do you think about this?

Re: The End of an Era

#363

Post by jeffreyrogers »

I can flag a lot of content that does pretty well online as AI. There are certain rhythmic patterns in the sentence structure and the way arguments are set up that give it away. The writing is obviously "successful" in that it gets a lot of engagement, and many people either don't realize or don't care that it's machine generated, but I find it distasteful.

If I'm reading something I either want to be entertained or I want some specific information. If it's to be entertained then the story has to be good (writing doesn't necessarily need to be that good) and I haven't seen any AI generated stories that are that compelling. If it's informational then I can either ask an LLM directly and get something tailored for me, or I'm also interested in the emotional and human side, which an LLM can only imitate, since it has no theory of mind.

Re: The End of an Era

#364

Post by hughhowey »

samatman wrote: post #355
hughhowey wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 specula…

Heh. Literally, welcome to: Hacker News. It's always been like this.

Thanks! Everyone seems so nice.

Re: The End of an Era

#365

Post by atleastoptimal »

inigyou wrote: post #4

LLMs are writing as well as humans for people who think writing words is the goal. Printing presses also write words better than humans. LLMs are solving the problem one layer higher than printing presses, but still several layers down from the top. Note that LLMs aren't useless, since they have other strengths which can make them equal or better than humans in certain applications. For instance, they can tirelessly…

I really want to know what people specifically mean when they allude to some "higher" level of cognition that humans have above LLM's when it comes to useful outputs. I don't mean the nature of consciousness or internal experience (which is unfalsifiable), I mean the essence of cognitive labor as a tool: writing is about relating concepts, drawing comparisons, aggregating elements of reality into a fictive but believable narrative.

All these processes can be reduced to mathematics and computation. The human brain is just a tool, like any other organ. Do we deny this reality because it shields us from existential horror?

Re: The End of an Era

#366

Post by customguy »

sp527 wrote: post #254
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.

No, we now assume naturally full lips might be a lip job, too, and the naturally positive reaction is delayed or not forthcoming at all. That is all that achieved.

Re: The End of an Era

#367

Post by teeray »

argentinian wrote: post #350
teeray wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI destroys your writing voice. There are authors who I enjoy not only because they write a compelling story, but they do so in such a way that is lyrically enjoyable. Engineers fall into the trap of thinking that if the slop machine emits the Internet-average sentence to describe a character’s actions, then it will suffice for all audiences and works of literature. “Add more adjectives and flowery language” will onl…

You are ultimately stating that there's something unique about human minds that cannot be replicated by machines. It may be so, or not.

I think I was fairly clear that I’m talking about these machines, not all machines that exist or could exist. If I wasn’t, please read “AI” as “state of the art LLMs as they exist today.”

Re: The End of an Era

#368

Post by prerok »

ACCount37 wrote: post #351
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs don't do anything well by human standards. Not even the one thing (programming) they are supposed to be good at. It's disheartening how many people are prepared to accept the slop an LLM puts out just because it's fast.

I've seen way too much humanslop to be able to reject LLM slop outright. There are areas where the average of LLM slop already beats the average of humanslop by a sizeable margin.

Possibly, although I have to say that I get PRs now where it's clear it's a miss by the LLM and was generated by a human who did not take the time to understand the subject matter.

In the past, a human producing humanslop would get a serious talking to, but nowadays it's apparently a valid excuse "well, an LLM generated it". This approach is placing a huge burden on the reviewers, much more so than in the past.

Re: The End of an Era

#369

Post by losvedir »

rootusrootus wrote: post #319
inigyou wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A user with enough reputation and who has enabled the option to view censored comments can vouch for a censored comment, restoring it.

I wonder how that algorithm works. At the risk of discussing a bit of a taboo topic (are there rules against this? there might be...), I've never vouched for a comment and had it come alive. I have many times been the final nail in a comment where my flag caused it to die, but I have never seen the opposite with vouch.

Interesting. Every time I've ever vouched a comment, it came alive. (Though the last one I vouched ended up dead again after enough people flagged it, oops. I hope that doesn't mean I lost my power. In my defense, it was flagged to death based on being AI [apparently], which I didn't pick up the signal on, nothing super terrible / controversial.)

Re: The End of an Era

#370

Post by actionfromafar »

skydhash wrote: post #305
actionfromafar wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/…

It is documentation, but unless someone writes it, there's nothing "meaty" there explaining why certain choices were made, which APIs which will be deprecated, the overall design, where new things should go depending on what they do etc etc.
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