Stross complains about people from China hammering his blog and stealing his work, but I feel like China releasing all these free models is a lot more defensible. Yeah, they're pirating a bunch of stuff and stuffing it into a blender but they're giving away the resulting soup for anyone who's hungry. (And though running it on your own hardware is a stiff proposition, I would bet Kimi K3 can figure out the scene-by-scene timeline thing.)
On the non-use of AI in my writing process
131–140 of 149 posts
Re: On the non-use of AI in my writing process
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Would you want the machine to write literature if, hypothetically it could write indistinguishably from any great writer? I guess not. I sure would. If you want a religious tone to it… It would be a signal suggesting that the human spirit(tm) had finally transcended. If humans can someday build a machine that can truly carry a (trans)human mind, and let some future souls live unconstrained by all the quirks and lim…
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.
> You’re not talking about a transcendence, or at least, not one that I recognise.
Does the gap scare you somehow? Why?
Any artificial biology (and whatever hosts a live human spirit automatically becomes a life form - thus, a biology) is entirely our, human product. If it's not ours, whose else it is?
> Our biology is an innate part of us - to improve, to fix, sure, but not to cast off.
I agree that our biology is 100% innate part of us, as we are today - we are layers upon layers upon layers. But some parts of some of those layers are inadequate for who we're trying to be as a society. And many of those had appeared way before a human pronounced first words ever.
We'll never be at peace with what some parts of us are doing. We'll continue to cheer for punishments, and demand those relative to our feelings about the act rather than consequences. Our moral judgements will keep piggybacking on our pathogen-avoidance machinery, ever prone to abuse by those who seek wars. We won't collectively overcome our unconscious contempt for low-status. We'll be bound to self-deceivingly conform to beliefs for loyalty signaling. We'll keep tending to pursue short-term gains even if they clearly contradict our future goals. And so on. YMMV, but I hold no allegiance to any of those machinery. It's very interesting how it all came to be, but there's nothing beautiful about the results.
If we can "fix" it in our current biology - that'd be wonderful too, although I suspect that it could be impossible without creating a whole new family, separate from apes. Possibly a lot deeper. At which point it's probably "traitorous" all the same, unless you hold some allegiance to DNA-based life in general.
I guess, we can try slapping on new circuitry that overrides old one. But why pile up hacks? We have plenty piled up already, and most don't benefit us. Not to mention difficulties of mixed-biology reproduction.
So, a new organism doesn't strike me as treason, as long as it replicates all the good parts of what makes us human. The darker rest can carry on in (trans)our cultural layers, as historical tales of how we were in the days of old, no longer an active factor in daily lives.
> Who is directing this “transcendence”, and who benefits?
You're asking who's directing a hypothetical? Hypothetically, no one. Or, better said - evolution, as always. It developed a few interesting mechanisms: tool use, language, reasoning, now through those it starts to dabble at different biologies.
And the Life itself benefits. As it always did, from diversity.
Re: On the non-use of AI in my writing process
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
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)
> there are certainly arguments that a society where most people are happy is pretty utopian 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.
Not antibiotics? Surely nobody could be happy with that! Truly they are a terror.
Re: On the non-use of AI in my writing process
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I apologize for having generalized from a specific AI to all, given that the comment I replied to made a claim regarding all AI.
Someone says "cars are so comfortable now." Someone else responds "In my experience they are no better than in the 80s." Isn't it prudent to point that the second person drives Mirage or something like that?
The first sentence seems to imply the average state. No?
Re: On the non-use of AI in my writing process
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tainter suggests that societies collapse because the costs of maintaining complexity eventually outweigh the benefits. “Collapse” in this context is more like a simplification than a catastrophe. And he points out that for a lot of people, the collapse actually made life better for them, as it becomes more local and less totalitarian. I mentioned the west because I’m a westerner with little experience of other system…
> Tainter suggests that societies collapse because the costs of maintaining complexity eventually outweigh the benefits. “Collapse” in this context is more like a simplification than a catastrophe. And he points out that for a lot of people, the collapse actually made life better for them, as it becomes more local and less totalitarian. This premise sounds very intriguing. And yea I named capitalism just because I do…
You should definitely read the book. I'd probably differentiate between modern "capitalism" and the core idea of free trade + private property ownership since they're pretty disconnected at this point.
Today we have a very complex system of private equity, leveraged buyout, and asset management, with the incentive of expansion over production. Mass financialization required the US to outsource manufacturing to cheap labour countries like China, operating two parallel economies - tangible and intangible assets. In the last 20 or so years, half the companies in the US stock market have disappeared, US farmland has shrunk by a fifth and manufacturing jobs have become redundant. The value of assets has exploded, and an ever shrinking group of transnational corporatists have turned the US economy into gambling bazaar, but the house is losing too. Stock market returns are single-handedly driven by AI speculation and the fastest growing businesses are disconnected from real goods. We have an extremely complex economy which looks entirely fake and disconnected from the real world - at least, to a layman, an economist will justify it all. Except the layman is correct. You have to keep in mind that inflating assets benefits the 1% at the detriment of everyone else, and they benefit on both sides of it. Plus politicians can use their free money to buy votes.
So I wouldn't even call modern economies "capitalist", they are their own thing now. We have to wait for the historians to build new frameworks to accurately describe them.
Re: On the non-use of AI in my writing process
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it is true that people who obviously dislike AI for ideological reasons often lead with ecological concerns or doubt about the capabilities, leading to an unproductive discussion.
Have you considered engaging on those ecological concerns? There is quite a lot to dig into and can be pretty interesting. For example, try to project how much electricity will be needed to power all the datacenters in construction, then compare that to the existing grid and infra, then figure out the cooling capacity. If done well you will see that we have a pretty massive resource problem here
Engaging with the ecological concerns requires real intelligence. The intelligence in Silicon valley is not real. It is artificial, as in fake. They're just doing make believe, and ruining it for everyone in the process.
Re: On the non-use of AI in my writing process
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I'm not quite sure of the definitions but with sentience I have
>Subjective Experience: Involves raw sensory awareness rather than complex abstract thought
On that current AI is a bit lacking as they don't have very good sensors whereas human brains are pretty wired up for touch, smell, sight, sound and the like. AIs do get linked to cameras though and could improve a lot in those directions.
Re: On the non-use of AI in my writing process
#138It kinda looks like we can only train AI on dead people's data. I wouldn't be too upset about that. They write better anyway.
Should maybe rather than can?
Re: On the non-use of AI in my writing process
#139Re: On the non-use of AI in my writing process
#140From the comments: > I will concede that using LLMs in software development is a different category from fiction, insofar as the languages and APIs are much smaller and more tightly constrained and in software you actively don't want long-range dependencies between elements (something you often do want in fiction, i.e. put a gun on the mantlepiece in part 1 of the book, pull the trigger in part 3).
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…
I think you can talk about the soul but it's more complicated these days. Re:
> immaterial aspect or essence of a living being. It is typically believed to be immortal and to exist apart from the material world
that's all still mostly on apart from 'exist apart from the material world' which doesn't seem to fit with observation. But the memories and concepts of people live on.