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The End of an Era

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Re: The End of an Era

#121

Post by argentinian »

shevy-java wrote: post #110

AI is beginning to seriously annoy me. I just watched: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eo5w2S-h5dI I think it is time to jail those CEOs that drive up the prices and destroy industries. RAM prices up 350%? ALL AI companies are in my opinion a mafia structure that must be eliminated. They not only force us to have to overpay (or be stuck) but also destroy industries downstream, thus eliminating jobs. All that cost sho…

The increase in prices is a signal to producers to increase production.

Email eliminated a lot of post office and paper production jobs, does that also annoy you? Washing machines eliminating jobs about washing clothes by hand? If you like a low tech life there are communities that choose to live like that, and happily do.

Re: The End of an Era

#122

Post by dartharva »

pyth0 wrote: post #9
bkieffer wrote: post #5

Is the AI that writes "about as well as humans" in the room with us right now?

Did you stop reading at the em-dash? > Artificial Intelligence is writing about as well as humans — at least well enough to cause confusion and speculation No matter your opinion on AI writing, this is just a fact.

Microsoft Word has auto-inserted em-dashes when you use hyphens in such a sentence since forever. Em-dashes are never a proof of AI-generated text.

Re: The End of an Era

#123

Post by scronkfinkle »

p-e-w wrote: post #37
inigyou wrote: post #4

LLMs are writing as well as humans for people who think writing words is the goal. Printing presses also write words better than humans. LLMs are solving the problem one layer higher than printing presses, but still several layers down from the top. Note that LLMs aren't useless, since they have other strengths which can make them equal or better than humans in certain applications. For instance, they can tirelessly…

I’d be interested to know what you think the “several layers” above a system that solves open mathematical problems in an afternoon, and writes entire operating systems from scratch, are.

> and writes entire operating systems from scratch

ehhhh, we're not really there. Not saying it's impossible to reach in the future but large tasks like this are still out of scope for LLM's beyond demoing toy applications. Impressive nonetheless, but I can't tell an LLM to reproduce microsoft word and have it give me a useful enough tool that doesn't contain an immense amount of bugs and require a human in the loop to replace it.

Re: The End of an Era

#124

Post by strken »

1dom wrote: post #40
f311a wrote: post #10

This is a well-known author, but how come he thinks AI is better at writing? AI writing makes me vomit. Also, I think he's too enthusiastic about the future of readers. In my opinion, reading books will be a very rare hobby pretty soon. The decline started more than 10 years ago.

> AI writing makes me vomit. I think this was fairly obvious and fair 1 - 2 years ago. Now though, I have to wonder if people who think this with such conviction are falling for the toupee fallacy. You said it yourself: someone you consider a well known (and presumably accomplished?) author thinks AI is pretty good at writing.

I haven't tried using an AI to write prose, but I use Claude to write code daily and it spits out the worst comments I've ever seen, along with some surprisingly good ones.

Would we not expect AI fiction to be the same? A stream of poor and excellent taste, not particularly original or surprising, samey in hard-to-define ways, but capable of being hammered into a good story by an editor.

Re: The End of an Era

#125

Post by YurgenJurgensen »

rationalist wrote: post #57
jvanderbot wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go ask an LLM to "do something with 1M tokens".

I think that is a bad argument. You could ask a human to "do something with 1M dollars" and get garbage too.

This terrible argument comes up in relation to AI over and over again. I don’t care if you built a brain surgery robot that outperforms the average person at brain surgery, I care if you built a brain surgery robot that outperforms the average brain surgeon. Outperforming “a human” at a specialist task is still essentially worthless.

Re: The End of an Era

#126

Post by cubefox »

stanac wrote: post #106
1dom wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI writing makes me vomit. I think this was fairly obvious and fair 1 - 2 years ago. Now though, I have to wonder if people who think this with such conviction are falling for the toupee fallacy. You said it yourself: someone you consider a well known (and presumably accomplished?) author thinks AI is pretty good at writing.

> I think this was fairly obvious and fair 1 - 2 years ago. And that's mostly for us, developers who use it all the time and maybe for other office employees. Not sure if random person would recognize LLM-isms.

Not even the random HN user detects LLM-isms. You regularly get downvoted for pointing it out. E.g. here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49087955

Re: The End of an Era

#127

Post by jalev »

We had this exact drama about 3 weeks ago in the SFF community, when a bunch of editors admitted to accepting and paying for submissions from very clearly AI author[^1], which led to some more interesting revelations: there are many Editors in this space that care _more for the premise of the idea shown to them_ than the actual quality of writing.

I have a suspicion this is what happened here too. Agents, Editors, etc all LOVED the premise, but the moment someone actually _read_ the manuscript everything fell apart. We're reaching peak "nobody reads anything any more" where major publishing houses (Minotaur is an imprint of Macmillan, from a quick googling) are losing big money on this.

In terms of addressing the author's blog post though: no, I don't think this is the sign of the end times. The actual sign of the end times would have been for the publisher to PROCEED even after the AI allegations, IMO.

[^1]: https://www.bona-books.com/news/we-bought-an-ai-story

Re: The End of an Era

#128

Post by nathias »

inigyou wrote: post #4

LLMs are writing as well as humans for people who think writing words is the goal. Printing presses also write words better than humans. LLMs are solving the problem one layer higher than printing presses, but still several layers down from the top. Note that LLMs aren't useless, since they have other strengths which can make them equal or better than humans in certain applications. For instance, they can tirelessly…

a great point, and I think a very rare one

Re: The End of an Era

#129

Post by delis-thumbs-7e »

1dom wrote: post #40
f311a wrote: post #10

This is a well-known author, but how come he thinks AI is better at writing? AI writing makes me vomit. Also, I think he's too enthusiastic about the future of readers. In my opinion, reading books will be a very rare hobby pretty soon. The decline started more than 10 years ago.

> AI writing makes me vomit. I think this was fairly obvious and fair 1 - 2 years ago. Now though, I have to wonder if people who think this with such conviction are falling for the toupee fallacy. You said it yourself: someone you consider a well known (and presumably accomplished?) author thinks AI is pretty good at writing.

> Now though, I have to wonder if people who think this with such conviction are falling for the toupee fallacy.

If this is the case it should be quite easy for you to provide examples of excellent AI-fiction.

As for the “well-known author”, Occam’s razor says he (like most “well-known accomplished authors”) doesn’t know what the hell he is talking about.

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