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The End of an Era

hughhowey.com

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Re: The End of an Era

#461

Post by yuye »

fidotron wrote: post #59
okzgn wrote: post #25

Writing for the love of art, besides being a mental and reflective exercise that holds real value when it is of high quality, makes it hard for me to believe that this is the end of literature. It is difficult to think that someone who writes for pleasure would abandon it simply because of the exponential volume of AI-generated text.

> holds real value when it is of high quality Does it? This assumption is the core of the entire problem. It might do as some, bluntly, self indulgent exercise but beyond that in society scarcity of things other people need and want is what drives value. We are in for an absolutely huge rebalancing of what it is that is considered valuable.

>what it is that is considered valuable.

I fear we humans are on the losing end of that reconsideration.

Re: The End of an Era

#462

Post by Mr_Minderbinder »

hughhowey wrote: post #308
1970-01-01 wrote: post #61

I've yet to read anything authored by AI that was truly excellent writing. It simply does not have the chops to write at that level. The great American novel will not be written by AI. Maybe "co-authored by Claude and friends", but not authored.

It will one day. For sure. I'd wager within the next ten years there will be a major controversy about an AI book winning a top prize in literature.

Perhaps you should find an author willing to take the other side of that bet. Make it the literary version of the Levy bet in chess.

Re: The End of an Era

#463

Post by TiredOfLife »

teeray wrote: post #141
jmartrican wrote: post #77

What if we remove the stigma of authors using AI. We say, have at it, use all the AI you want. What then? The market is still finite. The authors are still competing with each other. They will still have to be good at creating compelling books that people want to read. Will the whole thing just blow over and AI would be "just another tool" that authors use to get their work out?

AI destroys your writing voice. There are authors who I enjoy not only because they write a compelling story, but they do so in such a way that is lyrically enjoyable. Engineers fall into the trap of thinking that if the slop machine emits the Internet-average sentence to describe a character’s actions, then it will suffice for all audiences and works of literature. “Add more adjectives and flowery language” will onl…

Wtf is "writing voice".

Re: The End of an Era

#464

Post by k310 »

The author created a writing tool, neo[0]at github [1]

Dowloadable,freemium [2] but the Premium is 20 Espees. So, what's an Espee, other than an award from ESPN? (ESPY)

[0] https://hughhowey.com/neo-a-word-processor-for-authors/

[1] https://github.com/smeans/neo

[2] https://neotechnologies.io/app-details.php?app=neo-word

Re: The End of an Era

#465

Post by delis-thumbs-7e »

1dom wrote: post #447
delis-thumbs-7e wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s plenty of people who use good toupees/wigs and are open about it (or went bald and saved their hair with mystery medicine). I’m sure if models can now produce amazing fiction it wouldn’t take more than few minutes and Claude subscription to prove us doubters wrong. Maybe that debut novel is amazing, but the fact that we are even discussing whether it’s AI or not tells me it might not be - in any case we can’t…

I wasn't making a comment about toupees, I was referring to the toupee fallacy. Look, I don't know who you are, or what your background is, and without that, there's nothing I can do to convince you that AI is being used in writing and you can't identify it. The fact is there's a well-known author saying from their experience that the writing produced by LLMs can be amazing, that's the article we're all here to discu…

Basically you are coming to conclusion that everyone must have been wearing toupees past year.

Only thing I asked you was provide evidence, which should be pretty easy to come up with. If I asked you to produce an example of a 2D-platformer game AI has made from scratch, you had no trouble to prove me wrong. Yet you have to default on appeal to authority. Could it be those publishers are creating buzz to sell something? Besides, I’m sure there’s dozens of quotes saying LLM’s cannot produce shit with some really authoritative names behind them. That also doesn’t mean anything.

I’m certain there’s plenty of books generated solely or in last part by LLM’s. They usually have some scantily clad woman or man in the cover. In genre fiction it is becoming a nuisance, but then again, many readers do not care. So I know that LLM’s cannot produce not slop, but not exactly good literature either.

But the claim is there is yet again some secret super-AI somewhere that produces this amazing writing and has been doing so past 6-12 months. Well the shelves full of amazing new books, are we living new renaissance of literature? As a book nerd, am I desperately trying to find hours in the day to read all these new Ulysses’, Lord of The Rings, Search of Lost Time’s and whatnot? Is every blog post so good that it could be written by Nabokov?

You probably guess the answer.

Re: The End of an Era

#466

Post by zug_zug »

mike_hearn wrote: post #262

Offtopic for the actual post, but if you don't know the author and like sci-fi mysteries his Silo story is great. I haven't read the books because I'm enjoying theorizing but the Apple TV series is being broadcast now on a weekly basis. It's one of these very dense mysteries that asks you to figure out the clues. It's about a city of about 10k people living underground in a giant cylindrical self-sufficient "silo" be…

Really? Though the show initially showed some promise, I think I've found it disposable so far. I'd put it out there with Foundation, the LOTR remake, and so many others. I don't know if it even belongs in the category of things that started strong but lost their way (stranger things, severance).

My hill to die on is that you shouldn't start making a show, or a series, until you know how it'll all resolve (I'm looking at you George RR). And once you do you shouldn't extend it for any amount of money.

Re: The End of an Era

#467

Post by 7402 »

stereolambda wrote: post #396

What most takes seem to miss is that hardly anyone these days reads just because it's an easy way to fight boredom and pass some time. It's not 1920s. There's lots of less demanding and very much available ways for that, short-form video being the extreme. So if you're reading books at all, there's some ideological (or cultural, for the lack of a better word) reasons about broadening your mind, caring for your attent…

What?

I read all the time for entertainment and to pass the time. And I hate short-form video.

Am I the only one?

Re: The End of an Era

#468

Post by doug_durham »

ChrisLTD wrote: post #196
un-diletante wrote: post #190

I feel like writing has traditionally had two purposes, to communicate some internal feeling or idea of the writer, and to entertain. For the reader, even if their primary purpose was to be entertained, they would have no choice but to also engage with the internality of the writer. This latter point is what is changing. I fully admit that we have been surpassed by the machine in the ability to entertain. And the big…

> I fully admit that we have been surpassed by the machine in the ability to entertain. Why though? Daily here on HN, posts are pilloried for being AI generated and full of AI tropes. AI generated content might be drowning out human generated content, but I wouldn’t say that it’s surpassed human content in a qualitative way.

Most popular fiction is formula entertainment like Tom Clancy novels. Tom Clancy novels are their own industry now. I have zero doubt that AI tools can generate countless variations of good guy US special OPs going after bad guy terrorist books. The "AI tropes" are over sold on HN. With the correct prompting and iteration today's AI tools can make nuanced fiction which avoids the low effort tropes. BTW "high effort" work with AI tools is but a small fraction of what of the effort using traditional means.

Re: The End of an Era

#469

Post by cobzilla »

I’d imagine most books are read by people who don’t know much or anything about the author who wrote the book.

Likewise, even if the reader does know about the author and think the author is a bad person, they still read the book, watch the movie, listen to the song, etc

The reality is most people don’t get invested in the creators or the creation. It’s just a good story and all the meta-stuff doesn’t affect most people’s consumption.

So, that is to say, AI writing, music and all the other arts will be commercially successful.

Now, there will also be a market for human-created content, which people will consume specifically because the content is human-created.

Re: The End of an Era

#470

Post by WorldMaker »

foobarian wrote: post #456
WorldMaker wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that LLM's are a broken mirror or maybe disco ball. What you get back is almost always a reflection of what you put in, just garbled through and with the reflections of so many other people. The best parts that I often get back are mostly just the stuff that I already put in it. I think that's also where LLMs get the most dangerous. That ELIZA effect of telling you exactly what you told it but in a slightly r…

I think it is a net positive for me, because I am super unconfident by nature and the agreeable, almost sycophantic output from major LLMs give me just enough of a boost to debias me. They are certainly better than a physical rubber duck.

I feel it is a net negative for me. One of my hobbies has always been fiction writing. The LLM reflections of my own writing become slot machines to me for cheap dopamine hits. It's not because LLMs are good at fiction writing, far from it, it's that LLMs are good at reflecting my own writing back to me in fun house mirror ways that amuse me and frustrate me and pleasantly surprise me.

That slot machine addiction gives me a lot of perspective on what LLMs are good at in coding versus what they appear to be good at. It's easy to characterize them as "over-eager junior developers" or "powerful rubber duck debuggers" but their biases are still your biases so long as you are the one writing the prompts. A lot of the "surprises" aren't intelligence but fun house mirror versions of the same biases you input into the system.

I keep referring to their coding capabilities as "legacy code as a service" and the addiction to the fictional equivalent only underscores that understanding of LLMs. You don't write the next great American novel getting a word salad of past great novels back full of the best and worst of your own writing. You don't write the next great American software getting a legacy code jumble of past great software back full of the best and worst of your own prompting.

At the end of the day I'm still a pragmatist and using the LLMs in my programming efforts, but I don't trust them as a partner, I use them as a tool. (A biased tool that I know needs a careful eye.)

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