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On the non-use of AI in my writing process

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Re: On the non-use of AI in my writing process

#31

Post by skrebbel »

sxp wrote: post #7

While Stross is currently a neo-Luddite who doesn't believe in the Singularity, his book Accelerando is probably the best work of Singularitarian fiction ever written. It was written in the 2000s, starts in the 2010s, and covers the various decades of this century. I highly recommend it for anyone who wants to know how weird this century will be. It's also available for free online. [1] It's one of my favorite books…

Calling people Luddites for not believing in the Singularity is like calling people communists for supporting affordable health care.

Re: On the non-use of AI in my writing process

#32

Post by tptacek »

sodapopcan wrote: post #26
tptacek wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's pretentious about them? They express a distinctive rhythm in written English. What's the the punctuation you would use instead?

People seem to LOVE parens, although I was taught that they are almost 100% never the correct thing to use in prose. But apparently "some fucker" will accuse me of being pretentious ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Otherwise, I see people just use a regular dash a lot. I love the em dash myself, but of course stopped using it so I won't get accused of AI (which is sad). It's easy to type, at least on a Mac.

Parens and em-dashes do different things. A simple parenthetical is an secondary aside (it's a half step towards a footnote). An interrupting phrase is intended to (abruptly) command attention.

I mean, make the case em-dashes are overused and used lazily, I'm right there with you. I just don't see the pretense.

Re: On the non-use of AI in my writing process

#34

Post by FeepingCreature »

sxp wrote: post #29
threethirtytwo wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He hallucinated. This is how you verify non AI nowadays. AI is so good that if you see an hallucination as obviously wrong like this one it’s a sign it’s written by a human.

Yeah. Ironically, if he used an LLM to proofread his work, it would have told him that GAN's are generative not "generalized". That LLMs are primarily built on Transformers rather than GANs. And that they're more famous for image generation rather than image recognition.

And that GANs haven't been relevant in image generation since 2021.

Re: On the non-use of AI in my writing process

#35

Post by sxp »

> I'd quite like a tool (running entirely locally on my own hardware, with no cloud service and no copyright-thieving grifters making bank on it via subscription fees) that digests a manuscript and derives a scene-by-scene timeline, that I could then query interactively and use to plan my next round of edits. Being able to map out where and when each protagonist and minor character shows up, and see a frequency distribution heat map of names in the manuscript, would be useful.

Interestingly enough, I do this with various books I'm reading. E.g, I'm currently rereading Accelerando and had Claude generate a wiki-like timeline of key events, characters, and salient plot points. That makes it easier to jump around when I want to re-read a section and grok a plot thread that is scattered across chapters. Ironically, it also exposes inconsistencies (or "hallucinations" as some might call them) in the text because the author didn't have an AI proofread the text.

Re: On the non-use of AI in my writing process

#36

Post by sxp »

collingreen wrote: post #28
sxp wrote: post #7

While Stross is currently a neo-Luddite who doesn't believe in the Singularity, his book Accelerando is probably the best work of Singularitarian fiction ever written. It was written in the 2000s, starts in the 2010s, and covers the various decades of this century. I highly recommend it for anyone who wants to know how weird this century will be. It's also available for free online. [1] It's one of my favorite books…

You think accelerando is utopian sci fi!? Which characters perspective are you identifying with so strongly? They all have pretty severe societal challenges that makes me surprised to see the word Utopia.

The protagonist who believes that information should be free and that scarcity is mostly artificial due to bad economic models. And that it would be possible to implement proper pro-human capitalism or communism if we had enough compute to solve standard CS problems like filling knapsacks or maximizing flow through a graph.

Re: On the non-use of AI in my writing process

#37

Post by sodapopcan »

tptacek wrote: post #32
sodapopcan wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People seem to LOVE parens, although I was taught that they are almost 100% never the correct thing to use in prose. But apparently "some fucker" will accuse me of being pretentious ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Otherwise, I see people just use a regular dash a lot. I love the em dash myself, but of course stopped using it so I won't get accused of AI (which is sad). It's easy to type, at least on a Mac.

Parens and em-dashes do different things. A simple parenthetical is an secondary aside (it's a half step towards a footnote). An interrupting phrase is intended to (abruptly) command attention. I mean, make the case em-dashes are overused and used lazily, I'm right there with you. I just don't see the pretense.

I understand that, I'm saying that people mis-use them when they mean to use an em-dash. I think I ass-u-me'd a bit too much in my comment.

Re: On the non-use of AI in my writing process

#38

Post by jrm4 »

meheleventyone wrote: post #22
folkrav wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the background of what looks like a Panglossian techno-optimist novel, horrible things are happening. Most of humanity is wiped out, then arbitrarily resurrected in mutilated form by the Vile Offspring. Capitalism eats everything then the logic of competition pushes it so far that merely human entities can no longer compete; we're a fat, slow-moving, tasty resource – like the dodo. Our narrative perspective, Ain…

> Regardless of believing in the “singularity” or not, please explain how this sounds utopian in the slightest without borderline (if not literal) sociopathic anti-human worldviews. There was a guy on here the other day trying to argue that Brave New World wasn't a dystopian novel. There are some absolutely wiiild world views out there.

I'm almost 50, but I absolutely could see how someone younger could view it that way -- precisely because the present is much more similar to than novel than it used to be?

Like, "cautionary" but not full on "dystopian."

Re: On the non-use of AI in my writing process

#39

Post by bonoboTP »

sxp wrote: post #29
threethirtytwo wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He hallucinated. This is how you verify non AI nowadays. AI is so good that if you see an hallucination as obviously wrong like this one it’s a sign it’s written by a human.

Yeah. Ironically, if he used an LLM to proofread his work, it would have told him that GAN's are generative not "generalized". That LLMs are primarily built on Transformers rather than GANs. And that they're more famous for image generation rather than image recognition.

Transformers are an architecture and GANs are a training method for the architecture. There are GAN Transformers.

Re: On the non-use of AI in my writing process

#40

Post by exe34 »

card_zero wrote: post #25
tptacek wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's pretentious about them? They express a distinctive rhythm in written English. What's the the punctuation you would use instead?

It's like saying I am intimately involved in the printer's art. This is usually not true, unless you're involved with a very niche publisher who still has a box of sorts and inky fingers. Hyphen-minus all the way.

No it doesn't. I happened to have read "design and typography in easy steps" as a (bored) child of the 90s, but that's the extent of my "printer's art" knowledge.

I don't understand the celebration of ignorance myself. There are lots of things I don't know how to do or how to use, but I'd never dream of complaining because somebody else does.

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