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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

#101

Post by crancher »

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…

I tackle these ideas/questions head-on using Claude to help book-shape the result. https://spine.zice.app/jeremy/the-smaller-infinity In my view, the accumulating density of useful language/token patterns is the real story, not who/what is processing them. There is no "why" other than the universe's physics permit such accumulation, but that doesn't make the "how" any less interesting. You can click the header and copy the whole thing to clipboard, ask your favored agent for summary/conversation.

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

#102

Post by sevenzero »

slopinthebag wrote: post #92
sevenzero wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ill check the book out as I am extremely interested in these kind of topics. Although I am extremely pessimistic. You wrote "the west", what system will (in theory) work out? And how much does it value the individual? I know capitalism for example, can in theory, never succeed as its base premise is built on endless growth (which simply wont work out with finite resources). It's a short term system that we need to im…

Tainter suggests that societies collapse because the costs of maintaining complexity eventually outweigh the benefits. “Collapse” in this context is more like a simplification than a catastrophe. And he points out that for a lot of people, the collapse actually made life better for them, as it becomes more local and less totalitarian. I mentioned the west because I’m a westerner with little experience of other system…

> Tainter suggests that societies collapse because the costs of maintaining complexity eventually outweigh the benefits. “Collapse” in this context is more like a simplification than a catastrophe. And he points out that for a lot of people, the collapse actually made life better for them, as it becomes more local and less totalitarian.

This premise sounds very intriguing. And yea I named capitalism just because I don't think we can go on like we do currently, and I'd agree that in theory it's not complex at all. In fact it makes a lot of sense (in the short term, and as long as people are willing to get exploited to be able to finance life).

Nonetheless maybe heavily regulated capitalism works, allthough, regulators are prone to corruption and act way too slow. And lobbyists preventing measurements to combat climate change as an example, I currently see as direct threat to my personal wellbeing. Hard to believe in a system that relies on exploitation, the big "if you work hard you can make it" lie and actively threatening ones or ones children's wellbeing by being ignorant to obvious and well researched topics for short term monetary enrichment...

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

#103

Post by red75prime »

Alpha3031 wrote: post #83
red75prime wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's another technical point: > They're word-association mechanisms with no embodiment and no way to associate the text vectors they manipulate with real-world phenomena. This is wrong too. RLVR grounds foundational models in reality.

Aren't RLVR signals typically based off formal systems not natural phenomena? The formal sciences are certainly useful for producing tools used in natural science, but it's not entirely clear they alone are sufficient to associate text to natural (real-world) phenomena. Honestly, the pretraining and RLHF are probably more tied to the world than RLVR, for all that RLVR might be useful (maybe even more useful) for maki…

Yeah, I should have said RL, not RLVR. The point is RL interacts with external world, while autoregressive pretraining is limited to the passive ingestion, and RLHF relies on a model of human preferences that has no access to truth sources besides the limited training data it was built upon.

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

#104

Post by ben_w »

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…

> but Western culture has lost the vocabulary to express their true sentiment. They are grasping for words but can't reach for "soul" and other religious terms because that would sound ridiculous in a secular modern world

Ironic to implicitly accuse Stross of this; as I recall, he's one of the voices describing The Singularity as Christian Eschatology/Book of Revelation/the rapture for atheist nerds.

> Would you want the machine to write literature if, hypothetically it could write indistinguishably from any great writer? I guess not.

One of his own paragraphs explains his non-financial perspective and reason:

  I do not want or need a large language model to write my fiction for me. I write fiction compulsively—before I was published I wrote for many years as a hobbyist—so why on earth would I pay someone else to take my fun away?
I may not have quite the level of obsessive desire to write as he has, but I have some, and it is different from the desire to simply consume someone (or some*thing*) else's work.

Without criticism, he is also clearly upset about the economic impact this will have on him (he says specifically he is "one of the parties to the settlement in the class action lawsuit against Anthropic AI for pirating ebooks to train their LLMs" and "train an LLM that is intended to compete for revenue with the authors of the works they stole"). Writing is not a high-earning job (with the exception of a few superstars who may as well be lottery winners), and he has written in support of very long copyright durations that can be inherited.

> People will rather talk about fake water consumption problems than touch the topic of the human soul or spirit.

For a living, he writes about Cthulhu and their ilk doing mind control; I want to say I don't think this would put him off, but if it did he'd hardly be the only professional author who can write a fictional story about something without being able to apply such ideas to rhetoric. (He'll hate being compared to Rowling here, but consider how Rowling hates trans people while her fiction has a variety of shape-shifting spells).

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

#105

Post by bonoboTP »

andy99 wrote: post #91
bonoboTP wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Do you believe it was this edge case he was referring to in making his point?

No, I simply think the person is not familiar with these concepts, which is not a crime, it's okay to be wrong, I didn't want to banish that person from here, just corrected the statement. But might have been also a brain fart. Happens. Just wanted to correct it in the interest of beginner reading this.

Once Musk said he believes in Transformers instead of diffusion (or the other way around). When actually diffusion transformers are very popular and mainstream. What he meant was autoregressive inference vs diffusion. People like to use buzzwords while not knowing them. Old issue, it was the same decades ago.

To make it even more confusing, there are also diffusion LLMs, which typically but not necessary, use transformers also.

And independently of diffusion and transformer and llm or image generator, you can optionally put a GAN discriminator adversarial loss on any of them.

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

#106

Post by dwb »

drdaeman wrote: post #73
bonoboTP wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Would you want the machine to write literature if, hypothetically it could write indistinguishably from any great writer? I guess not. I sure would. If you want a religious tone to it… It would be a signal suggesting that the human spirit(tm) had finally transcended. If humans can someday build a machine that can truly carry a (trans)human mind, and let some future souls live unconstrained by all the quirks and lim…

I think attitudes like this are traitorous to the human species. You’re not talking about a transcendence, or at least, not one that I recognise. Our biology is an innate part of us - to improve, to fix, sure, but not to cast off. Who is directing this “transcendence”, and who benefits? I absolutely do not want a religious tone to any of this. Awful vibes.

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

#107

Post by shimman »

user43928 wrote: post #93
dgellow wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you considered engaging on those ecological concerns? There is quite a lot to dig into and can be pretty interesting. For example, try to project how much electricity will be needed to power all the datacenters in construction, then compare that to the existing grid and infra, then figure out the cooling capacity. If done well you will see that we have a pretty massive resource problem here

I had a look now, and apparently we are projected to increase by 2.3x datacenter power consumption until 2030 from 415 TWh to 945 TWh. That is going from 1.5% of global electricity use to 3%. It is less than I expected. Maybe if AI does work out better than expected for knowledge work or becomes applicable to robotics and fields like construction, we are going to see a larger buildout.

Okay nice, after looking at the macroview look at the immediate impact into local communities and how much data these companies refuse to, rightfully I might add, share with the public.

Weird how all these concerns can simply go away if they just simply shared the information the public wants (water usage, sound generation, power usage) rather than refuse to do so.

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

#108

Post by crancher »

dwb wrote: post #106
drdaeman wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Would you want the machine to write literature if, hypothetically it could write indistinguishably from any great writer? I guess not. I sure would. If you want a religious tone to it… It would be a signal suggesting that the human spirit(tm) had finally transcended. If humans can someday build a machine that can truly carry a (trans)human mind, and let some future souls live unconstrained by all the quirks and lim…

I think attitudes like this are traitorous to the human species. You’re not talking about a transcendence, or at least, not one that I recognise. Our biology is an innate part of us - to improve, to fix, sure, but not to cast off. Who is directing this “transcendence”, and who benefits? I absolutely do not want a religious tone to any of this. Awful vibes.

I find this "traitorous to the human species" interesting. You could not form these thoughts without an accumulated knowledge stored/accessed outside human biology. No other species forms such explicit thoughts because they lack access to that accumulated pattern of useful sequences. We've already "transcended" our biology in that sense. Who is directing... that becomes interesting in new ways once outside-a-body sequences start to accumulate. My guess is that it's that accumulation that sets the trajectory, just as DNA's "accumulation" of useful sequences produced forms fit for the local environment(s).

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

#109

Post by ben_w »

dwb wrote: post #106
drdaeman wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Would you want the machine to write literature if, hypothetically it could write indistinguishably from any great writer? I guess not. I sure would. If you want a religious tone to it… It would be a signal suggesting that the human spirit(tm) had finally transcended. If humans can someday build a machine that can truly carry a (trans)human mind, and let some future souls live unconstrained by all the quirks and lim…

I think attitudes like this are traitorous to the human species. You’re not talking about a transcendence, or at least, not one that I recognise. Our biology is an innate part of us - to improve, to fix, sure, but not to cast off. Who is directing this “transcendence”, and who benefits? I absolutely do not want a religious tone to any of this. Awful vibes.

> Our biology is an innate part of us - to improve, to fix, sure, but not to cast off.

Right now, necessarily so.

The more mysteries that science solves, the more we unweave the rainbow*, the worse the tension between rationality and our sense of what we are. Am I the atoms, or the pattern betwixt? Am I the present moment alone, my memories mere shadows of past patterns and my current form doomed to be a shadow to a future pattern of these self-same atoms?

Sometimes even the question is unbearable.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unweaving_the_Rainbow

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

#110

Post by ben_w »

user43928 wrote: post #93
dgellow wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you considered engaging on those ecological concerns? There is quite a lot to dig into and can be pretty interesting. For example, try to project how much electricity will be needed to power all the datacenters in construction, then compare that to the existing grid and infra, then figure out the cooling capacity. If done well you will see that we have a pretty massive resource problem here

I had a look now, and apparently we are projected to increase by 2.3x datacenter power consumption until 2030 from 415 TWh to 945 TWh. That is going from 1.5% of global electricity use to 3%. It is less than I expected. Maybe if AI does work out better than expected for knowledge work or becomes applicable to robotics and fields like construction, we are going to see a larger buildout.

> That is going from 1.5% of global electricity use to 3%.

> It is less than I expected.

I suspect this is because of the word "global". Are not most of these currently planned specifically for the USA? Sure, the USA has a disproportionate use of electricity, but IIRC it's like 16% (1/6th) of global?

3% of global electricity is roughly the same as 18% of US electricity; a bit less because not all the new DCs will be in the US, but that's something that I consider with regards to the economics and why I'm bearish on this topic, as I think it will be a case of Dutch disease in the USA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease

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