141–150 of 223 posts
AI doesn't need to write better than the best humans. It only needs to be good enough to replace a large part of the mundane paid writing that used to support writers while they developed their craft.
People seem to have very short memories. LLMs are easily capable of good writing. The fact that they are loaded up with obvious "tells" now is quite a recent development. One year ago, the writer Mark Lawrence posted an article [0] (featured on HN) describing how he generated 4 pieces of flash fiction with ChatGPT, asked 4 published authors (with a combined book sales of $15M) to also write a flash fiction piece, and…
However, once it's understood that it wasn't written by a human it loses all value. I use this quote by Kane Parsons a lot but I think it summarizes why humans like art.
> If I see an element of the environment has been, you know they used generative fill or whatever to change something about the scene, even if--. It just shuts the part of my brain that wants to know more about that world and wants to look for details, 'cause I would assume if they're willing to make an arbitrary choice there, they can make an arbitrary choice with literally anything.
Specifically, people like dissecting art whether its writing, a movie or an image. It could be seeing the Chekov's Gun finally fire, and going back through the pages to see the author wrote it in there earlier and you missed it. It could be speculating about the unopened questions the author deliberately left there. This is how a lot of people at least in my circles engage with art and AI provides none of that. Even if the author specifically prompts that into it, those arbitrary choices are going to be made in certain spots that just disinterests me.
1: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096969892... 2: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-45202-3
[flagged]
They absolutely cannot exhibit empathy. The definition of the word shows that:
> the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another
They don't experience feelings. They don't empathize.
But AI cannot (yet?) do the job of a skilled writer, coder, graphical artist and musician.
And it is the same problem every time, LLMs lack intention. That's essentially what the article is about, writers choose every word because they have something to convey. Something complex, deliberate, that can't fit in a simple prompt, a LLM can't get these nuances, it is all in the writer's head, so you get something generic, the information to do it better simply isn't there.
But it apply to other arts as well, ChatGPT flyers, Suno music, etc.. they all look and sound the same, because there is no intention behind them, besides all the technical issues, like inconsistent images and instruments blending into each others, the model just can't work with information it doesn't have, so it just generate something generic that looks like its training dataset.
And it is the same with code. Coding is not about the programming language, it is about expressing with precision what the machine has to do, and programming languages are really good at that, that's why they exist. LLMs let you use English instead, but it doesn't change the fact that everything has to be intentional, otherwise, the LLM will just put something that may or may not be what you want.
Most success stories of LLM coding are ports. Because someone already did most of the job with the original code, sometime even twice if we count the tests.
Everybody treats this as something innevitable, like the movement of the tectonical plates.
Everybody knows this is being paid with the giant transfer of wealth from the working classes towards the asset owning class via profilgate government expense, ZIRP and QE policies from the FED and the covid so-called stymulus. This created, via Cantillon effect, inflation for consumers and a bizarre and absolutely abnormal deluge of capital for our financial system masters that let they play God and make us, the plebe, obsolete. And yet we don't question anything.
We are accepting as inevitable and uncontrollable something that only looks to be like that.
I know, we all have our lives, out of the confortable anonymate here, I am a enthusiastic AI Booster. Out of some true zealots, we are all hedging our bets to stay on the right side of the city walls of the new techno-feudalism. But, realistically, how many of us the Musks and Thiels will need after they obsolete most of us, no matter how much skills and knowledge anyone of us may have? Just betting to be on the side of the oppresors is a very long bet my friends.
Nothing about it is inevitable, nothing about it requires, as if it was a law of nature, to be unregulated and the people be damned.
Not so many centuries ago, we had peasants riotting and guillotining their opressors, we had proletarian revolutions. They didn't have encryption, the internet, cell phones, digital radio modes that allow you to talk to some other partisan group accross the globe using a cheap chinese SDR and a simple dipole hang between trees.
Things can be different. We still can force some democracy down their throats.
I don't think there's any chance people will be employed to sell the output of their brains in 20 years, outside of "athletes", or whatever we end up calling people who think for sport. We mostly succeeded at doing this with muscles, and today there's no market for hauling rocks out of quarries manually. We're in the process of doing that for brains too. AI will outdo people in all practical uses. We're already there…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Derivatives (options, futures, swaps, etc) are a zero sum market, there is always a winner and a loser necessarily because the contracts have an expiration date. The same is not true for trading equities, they are not zero sum. There are dividends, buybacks, companies will sometimes spin off a part or parts as separate companies that you get newly issued shares of stock from (GE splitting into parts is a recent examp…
The market has been heavily engineered and gamed to be positive sum. But sometimes I wonder could it turn out to be negative sum on certain timescales. That is that overall money would be lost on markets.
This argument can be applied to anything AI does. AI can do bad writing, bad code, bad graphics and bad music. But AI cannot (yet?) do the job of a skilled writer, coder, graphical artist and musician. And it is the same problem every time, LLMs lack intention. That's essentially what the article is about, writers choose every word because they have something to convey. Something complex, deliberate, that can't fit i…
Call it "intention", call it "understanding", call it "effective communication." The lack thereof is obvious and easily identified.
> Most success stories of LLM coding are ports. Because someone already did most of the job with the original code, sometime even twice if we count the tests.
Another way to phrase this is:
Because someone already thought about the problem and what
needs to exist in order to solve it.I strongly disagree, for reasons that are different from what's discussed in the thread. It doesn't matter if LLMs can't hold a candle to some of the finest human writing. What matters is that before you become a world-renowned writer, you need to pay your bills, often for a long time. And that's what LLMs take away. All the mundane literature-adjacent works: journalism, translations, technical writing / corporate co…
The first careers I witnessed being negatively impacted by AI coming onto the scene .. just a couple years ago .. was tech writers. Source: my personal network of tech writer colleagues.