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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

#51

Post by dgellow »

bonoboTP wrote: post #19
Apocryphon wrote: post #4

From the comments: > I will concede that using LLMs in software development is a different category from fiction, insofar as the languages and APIs are much smaller and more tightly constrained and in software you actively don't want long-range dependencies between elements (something you often do want in fiction, i.e. put a gun on the mantlepiece in part 1 of the book, pull the trigger in part 3).

It can definitely plan such things. Because agentic systems don't have to output a book all at once. The mainstream still lives 1-2 years in the past. Agents can plan out a narrative draft, write it out section by section, maybe out of order, then tweak it, plant clues if it wants to, then trigger it in another chapter file etc. Then read the whole thing, reconsider, etc. It can iterate. I'm not saying it will be gre…

What are you talking about… You can use the word soul without believing in a religious concept of soul. It’s done all the time in secular societies. It’s even a very common term used to describe the problem with LLM generated content, that it lacks soul or human spirit, it lacks the human meaning, intent

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

#52

Post by LogicFailsMe »

I don't think it ever gets old to restate that the singularity and all of the gradiose promises of a glorious 21st century have last mile problems.

But this post seems to mostly channel Harlan Ellison. And while he was amazing in his prime, with some absolutely legendary rants, he didn't age well in the end.

I do like his challenge to make LLMs useful to himself and to other authors though. Someone needs to make that happen and nearly exactly how he described it.

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

#53

Post by sxp »

derektank wrote: post #45
sxp wrote: post #35

> 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 distr…

Are you able to share? Both your process and the specific timeline for Accelerando. I would love to build one for A Fire Upon the Deep

I'm not going to share because https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/acceler... has a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License. But I've paid for my copy of the book so I can do what I want with it.

If you want to build your own, you can feed this DESIGN.md to your favorite clankie: https://pastebin.com/huRkGnba

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

#54

Post by tialaramex »

folkrav wrote: post #16
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…

> 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…

Misreading SF is super popular in the techbro milieu.

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

#55

Post by krapp »

jrm4 wrote: post #43
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…

Belief in the Singularity and belief in God strike me as extremely similar. Both, I think, are extremely interesting ideas where very few theories, e.g. pro, anti, or anywhere in between, can be written off as ridiculous -- probably due to a lot of ambiguity and difficulty in defining proof. For me, I find the Singularity very implausible due to the fact that we talk about "general intelligence" quite a bit, and the…

There's a reason the Singularty was called "the Rapture for nerds" before LLMs were even a thing.

You can find a lot of neo-religious behavior within the AI accelerationist community. Cults coming out of rationalism and fear of the wrath of an angry AI God, making the world right for AI's coming (and even killing the nonbelievers.) Evangelism. Promises of infinite plenty in a post-scarcity heaven. Even a persecution complex - "Luddites" are increasingly demonized, hated, accused of moral depravity for their doubt, and for not abandoning the world, taking up their prompt and following the AI.

How many people post about how AI seems to be draining them of meaning and purpose, that it doesn't live up to the hype, that keeping up with the rituals is exhausting, but feeling that the problem must be with them and not AI? That's a religious person having doubts about the nature of their faith, unable to accept that the God they believe in might not be real, and framing their issues as their own moral failing.

And all of this before the "Singularity" even shows up, and people upload their minds - I mean, meet God in the air.

It's religion, very specifically neo-Christian ideologically. Regardless of any arguments one might make about the practical benefits of using AI in any particular field, it is obviously also religion.

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

#56

Post by pasquinelli »

chpatrick wrote: post #3
ainch wrote: post #2

> It would be foolish to deny the effectiveness of image recognizers based on generalized adversarial networks (GANs), the key neural network technology underlying LLMs I could be misreading this, but I hope the author doesn't think GANs are used in LLMs. They are cool, though.

Yeah, it's hard to take the rest seriously.

maybe you're looking for an excuse to ignore what's being said.

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

#57

Post by bitexploder »

sxp wrote: post #35

> 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 distr…

You could build a tool like that and on a MBP with 48+ GB of RAM all of that can happen locally in terms of keeping your content locally. I am sort of an outliner and planner and I heavily use AI when writing documents for work. I don't see why fiction / prose would be any different? Indexing your content with a vector RAG and having a little 27B model locally could do everything he wants with some help from a big model to implement it all. It sounds like a weekend of coding for a functional prototype to me.

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

#58

Post by derektank »

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.

Manfred and Amber’s lives don’t seem particularly dystopian. Human society, up until the Field Circus encounters the router and later returns home, seems pretty great. Chaotic and challenging, yes, sad for Microsoft shareholders, sure, but I would certainly rather live in a world with access to the technology they have than our own. Space exploration, extended life spans and rejuvenation, new methods of relating more closely with other human beings are all things I would love to experience.

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

#59

Post by magicalist »

andy99 wrote: post #49
ainch wrote: post #2

> It would be foolish to deny the effectiveness of image recognizers based on generalized adversarial networks (GANs), the key neural network technology underlying LLMs I could be misreading this, but I hope the author doesn't think GANs are used in LLMs. They are cool, though.

It’s unfortunate - he’s an author, it would have been fine to stick with an authors perspective that LLMs can’t write (which is true), as well as the copyright stuff (which I don’t agree with but he certainly has standing to give an opinion on). But he’s made the error of trying to come at it from a technical perspective, when he clearly knows nothing about that side of things, which discredits the rest.

> But he’s made the error of trying to come at it from a technical perspective

Huh? That quote appears to be the entirety of the "technical perspective" of the post and is an aside from his larger points that you have blessed as "fine". Literally nothing in the rest of the post relies on that incorrect statement.

Let me quibble with what is discredited here, given the entirety of your point is built upon an error.

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

#60

Post by magicalist »

sxp wrote: post #35

> 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 distr…

> 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.

That's not irony, or even cute. He's literally describing a tool he'd like to use to plan edits to his writing.

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