121–130 of 149 posts
Crazy how forward thinking this guy was in 2005 vs today.
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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.
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> 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.
You might not like the society they've built, but there are certainly arguments that a society where most people are happy is pretty utopian.
(It's very debatable, of course, but it's not instantly dismissable)
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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…
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> clearly upset about the economic impact this will have on him
So readers will read AI generated books because they are better than his writing? People can't invest ten bucks or however much into reading a good book? How about piracy? It exists. I bet I could download all his books in less than 5 minutes. If someone insists on not paying for that book, they can easily get it.
> he has written in support of very long copyright durations that can be inherited
This whole copyright and intellectual "property" idea is extremely new in human history. More people should know this fact. This has not been how people thought about culture before the ~1800s, or, well before the printing press. Copyright is a narrow exception to the general rule that people are free to listen to others and use the ideas and spread the ideas. There are exceptions like trade secrets and various dangerous information about nuclear topics and whatnot, but generally preventing others from talking about what they heard is tyrannical. If anything, copyright should be reduced to something like the creation of the work + 20 years. Not lifetime +X. That's plenty enough to be the sole distributor and to block others from building on top of it. After that it's time to let people use culture as it's always been. Changing, mixing, remixing, retelling, combining, etc.
The whole thing is often wrongly framed, with verbs like "consume", like "consuming content", which is just Orwellian language to describe having your eyes or ears open and remembering what you saw and heard. It doesn't consume a pdf to look at the words and read them. It doesn't consume a film to look at it being projected on a canvas. It doesn't consume a painting to step close and look.
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> 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.
Pretty much everyone in Brave New World is happy. You might not like the society they've built, but there are certainly arguments that a society where most people are happy is pretty utopian. (It's very debatable, of course, but it's not instantly dismissable)
Sure, like a pig, in a cage, on antibiotics...and an AI life companion in their ear. What I can't understand is why they're still on a forum with humans when they can go have that today.
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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…
> 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.
> 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?
Searle* strikes again! * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room
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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…
It's not like every model has the same amount of those shortcomings.
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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…
The AI you are talking about is a low-inference-cost model optimized for massive throughput. It's not like every model has the same amount of those shortcomings.