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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

#111

Post by logicallee »

scarmig wrote: post #99
andai wrote: post #79

> They're word-association mechanisms with no embodiment and no way to associate the text vectors they manipulate with real-world phenomena. Doesn't most of this also apply to a guy living in The Matrix?

Embodiment doesn't exist, even in regular humans. We do not have direct access to reality; we have sensory inputs that are much lower bandwidth than one might expect but correlate with external events, and our brain uses them to form rich world models that are usefully predictive. Most of the world we experience is just in our head.

I get what you're saying (mostly based on low bandwidth from sensory organs as opposed to direct access to reality), but your conclusion that we therefore don't have embodiment goes very far. It would be like saying planes don't really fly, since they fly by wire and only have limited inputs and outputs, rather than direct access to reality itself. Well, yeah, they fly using sensors rather than knowing reality itself, but they're still flying. Humans still obviously have embodiment.

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

#112

Post by camillomiller »

dgellow wrote: post #47
llm_nerd wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

You‘re both contributing negatively to the discourse by doing that sport team fighting…

Of course, quality of the discussion above all else, including destroying the world and the fabric of society via a financial grifting scheme that is commoditizing free knowledge.

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

#113

Post by ben_w »

LogicFailsMe wrote: post #52

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…

  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.
I'm sure I've read about Hollywood scriptwriters having tools like this.

(Or is this just the Gell-Mann amnesia effect striking again?)

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

#114

Post by threethirtytwo »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #71
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.

sorry but I see incorrect AI responses almost every day in things I query on Google, generally because I am often querying on something I am an expert in and I just want a linking source. There will be a good link in the result, generally, but the AI almost always messes up some elemental fact, sometimes it is because the AI has "misunderstood" what I asked which is reasonable, but most of the time the result shows t…

Of course but for obvious mistakes like this one it’s more likely a human hallucinated than an LLM

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

#115

Post by ben_w »

derektank wrote: post #63
dbspin wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) Having met Stross, and briefly spoken to him way back when, he never actually believed in the singularity as a possible future. 2) Turns out it was the sci-fi author who was wrong all along! Fascinating to see someone confidently citing a meme, while actively evidencing the fallacy it exposes.

>he never actually believed in the singularity as a possible future. I think my favorite moment in the book is when one of the characters (at the time, a digitized consciousness traveling at near light speed in a space ship the size of a coke can to explore an anomalous signal sent by alien life) argues that the singularity is a ridiculous concept and will never happen. I always thought that was a really clever obser…

It could be either or both. He comments here sometimes, perhaps he will say. Or not, there's likely too many AI-bros in this particular thread.

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=cstross

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

#116

Post by rahimnathwani »

bitexploder wrote: post #57
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 mo…

He doesn't want to use a model trained on someone else's text. So he would need to train a model from scratch. I don't know whether his own texts would provide enough data.

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

#117

Post by ben_w »

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.

> 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 think that's likely to be all the sex and drugs? Though I'm basing that on the Wikipedia plot summary. I have no interest in darkening my day by actually reading any work that can be rightly described as "dystopian".

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

#118

Post by dwb »

crancher wrote: post #108
dwb wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 seq…

Sure, we're cyborgs, but still very much of the flesh, and I think we have to draw a line somewhere.

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

#119

Post by keeda »

This is very interesting coming from an author in whose writing autonomous, super-powerful AIs have been a common theme.

Consider his book Accelerando (which I'll take the opportunity to plug again, especially as he's made available for free here: http://www.accelerando.org/fiction/accelerando/accelerando.h...) Not only did I find it quite engaging and thought-provoking, it is also proving rather prescient, and even helpful in decoding some of the things that are happening today.

For instance, in the very first chapter the protagonist spawns agents to go research something in the background and report back to him. And then a year ago, I randomly became curious about a rather involved topic (how fast could we feasibly replace all human labor with robotics), but I did not want to spend time researching so I outsourced it to Google Deep Research which churned away for almost half an hour and came back with a 30 page report with 49 citations via "actual internet searches for verifiable sources." (If you're curious about the conclusion: not for a very long time partly due to critical supply chain constraints.)

After I went through the report, it suddenly struck me: my agent may have executed in a GPU cloud instead of a cybernetic brain, but holy crap I had literally just lived a SciFi scene! A scene that I did not expect to experience in my lifetime!

Which is why I found TFA a bit unexpected. TFA says a few things that I would disagree with. Like, no, AI is not a "stochastic parrot" and I'd assume he'd be primed to realize it. And AI is not competing with authors -- other authors with AI are, and using AI trained on real text to aid writing has been a thing since the days of red squiggly lines in word processors, which TFA even acknowledges.

If you see his last few comments (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=cstross) it's clear he's pretty negative on the tech industry and Capitalism, which I tend to agree with. I can see how that could color his thinking.

That may also mean he's avoided LLMs to the extent that he is not aware what the frontier models have become. I would encourage him to put aside his distate and re-engage with them deeply; maybe he'd be at least a little bit excited to see some of his writing turn out to be prophetic in some good ways besides the bad.

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

#120

Post by ben_w »

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #76
bananaflag wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He had already disappointed me in 2011 with this post https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/06/reality...

Why is that disappointing? Everything he said there seems perfectly reasonable.

A large part of that goes via arguing about consciousness.

Starts of with a quite defensible:

  First: super-intelligent AI is unlikely because, if you pursue Vernor's program, you get there incrementally by way of human-equivalent AI, and human-equivalent AI is unlikely.
But the moment he hits that (parenthetical) paragraph about consciousness, he blends human capabilities with human-like consciousness.

If human-like capabilities required human-like consciousness, early models (like GPT-4) passing all those exams would suggest those models being "as conscious as" a university student. (My inner Douglas Adams wants to invert this, but the best I can do is "The Xarloxians did not consider university students to be conscious beings; their reasoning being…", which you may recognise as a riff on Babel fish and the non-existence of God).

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