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AlphaWrite: AI that improves at writing by evolving its own stories

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Re: AlphaWrite: AI that improves at writing by evolving its own stories

#141

Post by conartist6 »

conartist6 wrote: post #139
soulofmischief wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Awful take. Transformers have greatly increased the potential number of cool things I can do in my lifetime. I've written poetry, short stories, I draw, and am an experienced professional software engineer, and thanks to transformers I've been able to augment my creative workflow. People were similarly dismissive about computers in general. And calculators, and the printing press, and Photoshop, and cameras, and ever…

So instead of adding your voice to the world you decided to give away your voice and abandon your humanity. You obviously don't value your reader if you don't value yourself enough to speak with your own voice.

I mean, I'd throw your "art" in the garbage with all possible haste once I learned that it was actually AI's "art".

You can derive value from it because you know what parts you did, but I can't derive value because I will have to assume you didn't do any art and that any glimmer of humanity I see is just slop.

Reading slop makes me dumber and less creative myself: it takes away my chance to learn how others minds work. It takes away a diversity of real perspectives and styles and feeds me averaged clones of them so that on the whole I gain nothing -- just like training AI on its own output results in model collapse!

It takes my interest in other human beings and exploits that weakness to hack my mind. If I could defend against that hacking I would. Why would I waste my time thinking about something that wasn't even worth taking time of thinking of how to say?

Re: AlphaWrite: AI that improves at writing by evolving its own stories

#142

Post by conartist6 »

gabriel666smith wrote: post #69
zorked wrote: post #5

If there is something that I would like AI to never touch, it's that. Please stop making the world worse.

Wow! Why? Personally, I'm fascinated by the question of what Joyce would have done with SillyTavern. Or Nabokov. Or Burroughs. Or T S Eliot, who incorporated news clippings into Wasteland - which feels, to me, extremely analogous with the way LLMs refract existing text into new patterns.

I don't really understand. You think these great minds of writing lacked same level of linguistic capability as a model?

The authors were language models! If you want to simulate what they could have done with a model, just train a model on the text that was around when they were alive. Then you can generate as much text as you want that's "the same text they would have generated if they could have" which for me is just as good, since either way the product is the model's words not the artist's. What you lost that fascinates you is the author's brain and human perspective!

Re: AlphaWrite: AI that improves at writing by evolving its own stories

#143

Post by saberience »

vidarh wrote: post #127
saberience wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not a ludicrous comparison because people are saying that AI books should not label that they are by AI. My point is that books (fiction or non fiction) should label that they are by an AI or by a human. Someone said to me, if you can’t tell which did it, then it doesn’t matter. Well my assertion is that even if you can’t tell the difference, the provenance DOES matter.

It is a ludicrous comparison because one involved deception and one didn't. That people are saying that AI books should not label that they are by AI does not alter that - absent a label people don't know the authorship process today. They don't know if the authors name is real - it often isn't. They don't know if it's been written by a ghostwriter. And now they don't know if it's written by an AI. If that matters to…

But it does matter to you, that's precisely my point, we have already established that you don't want to be deceived.

If someone gives you a book by "JRR Tolkien" and it's written by an AI, you're going to be pissed off. If your "girlfriend" sends you a note and it's written by an AI, you're going to be pissed off.

If someone labels a book by "Jake Donaldson from New York" and it's ChatGPT, you're going to be pissed off.

People don't like to be deceived or pay for something and get something different from the thing they thought they were buying.

I don't want to buy something that an AI wrote, the only time I want to read AI writing, is if I directly ask it a question and get an answer.

Re: AlphaWrite: AI that improves at writing by evolving its own stories

#144

Post by saberience »

soulofmischief wrote: post #106
saberience wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the people generating AI-assisted writing are all the people that never had enough passion or talent to do it before. If you weren't inclined to write fiction or poetry etc before AI was here to do it for you, you probably shouldn't be doing it now.

Awful take. Transformers have greatly increased the potential number of cool things I can do in my lifetime. I've written poetry, short stories, I draw, and am an experienced professional software engineer, and thanks to transformers I've been able to augment my creative workflow. People were similarly dismissive about computers in general. And calculators, and the printing press, and Photoshop, and cameras, and ever…

None of the tools that existed before created entire complete works with tiny amounts of effort.

E.g. "Write an amazing story for kids about a bear". ChatGPT writes a whole story for you. That's not "augmenting" your workflow, that's just doing all the work for you. And don't tell me, "writing the prompt is the new form of art", the reality is that writing these prompts doesn't require a tiny fraction of the talent required to write a novel from scratch.

The printing press is a horrible example also, it didn't write anything for you, it just literally prints already written content. Photoshop just let you edit already taken photos.

Cameras require you to go to places, take trips, put massive effort into actually making content from scratch.

A better analogy would be an automated flying camera that just goes off by itself to a destination, takes its own photos, edits them, and sends them to you, processed, edited, finished. All you did was say "go to Victoria falls and take photos."

Yes artists have used tools, pens, then a typewriter, a word processor i.e. the implements for the process, but the tools didn't ever replace the most important part of the artist, the actual creative work and imagination in the brain. The AI tools are just replacing the brain AND the actual implements.

Re: AlphaWrite: AI that improves at writing by evolving its own stories

#145

Post by southernplaces7 »

soulofmischief wrote: post #106
saberience wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the people generating AI-assisted writing are all the people that never had enough passion or talent to do it before. If you weren't inclined to write fiction or poetry etc before AI was here to do it for you, you probably shouldn't be doing it now.

Awful take. Transformers have greatly increased the potential number of cool things I can do in my lifetime. I've written poetry, short stories, I draw, and am an experienced professional software engineer, and thanks to transformers I've been able to augment my creative workflow. People were similarly dismissive about computers in general. And calculators, and the printing press, and Photoshop, and cameras, and ever…

To each their own, but to me specifically, and I know that many, many artists share this point of view, the idea of having some slop-generating algorithmic regurgitation system create the actual "creative" work that is supposed to be the basic definition of an artistic creation is both disgustingly vapid and far from art.

If you hate putting your own thoughts to writing so much that you offload its very essence to some machine through a few minutes of prompts, you're creating nothing, least of all any original creations and views of your own.

Comparing this to typing, editing, calculating and reprinting tools like the ones you mention is laughable and factually wrong. Even a calculator isn't the same. It doesn't create your mathematical equations for you, and a printing press or typewriter, camera or photoshop don't just brainlessly, mindlessly create your text or images for you.

Edit: If you're some content creator or PR manager with no artistic pretensions, and use AI because you just need some quick slop content for marketing filler, that's fine. It might turn clients off but at least you're not pretending to a creativity that you don't possess.

But to have AI create for you while calling yourself an artist is simply lazy intellectual dishonesty.

Re: AlphaWrite: AI that improves at writing by evolving its own stories

#146

Post by frozenseven »

EGreg wrote: post #134
frozenseven wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I support a world of radical abundance, one where humans and super-smart AIs have the maximum about of freedom (without harming one another, of course).

Here you go… thoughts? https://x.com/aaditsh/status/1933084376855654851

That's Reddit, wouldn't be surprised if it's rage bait. And even if it isn't, so what? One guy made a strange life choice based on a sketchy extrapolation. Not my circus, not my monkeys.

Re: AlphaWrite: AI that improves at writing by evolving its own stories

#147

Post by HappMacDonald »

saberience wrote: post #143
vidarh wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a ludicrous comparison because one involved deception and one didn't. That people are saying that AI books should not label that they are by AI does not alter that - absent a label people don't know the authorship process today. They don't know if the authors name is real - it often isn't. They don't know if it's been written by a ghostwriter. And now they don't know if it's written by an AI. If that matters to…

But it does matter to you, that's precisely my point, we have already established that you don't want to be deceived. If someone gives you a book by "JRR Tolkien" and it's written by an AI, you're going to be pissed off. If your "girlfriend" sends you a note and it's written by an AI, you're going to be pissed off. If someone labels a book by "Jake Donaldson from New York" and it's ChatGPT, you're going to be pissed…

The problem you are citing isn't "created by AI", the problem you are citing is "misattribution writ large".

If we had the capacity to legally enforce that things created by AI be labeled as such, then why stop at that terrible proxy for the real problem instead of just using that same legal infrastructure to outlaw all misattribution full stop?

I don't want to be legally required to put a bell on every single technological output that might in some circumstances make crimes easier to commit than doing it longhand was, and I am old enough to recall making the same case in the late nineties when folks were clutching their pearls over Photoshop's ability to enable counterfeit nudes.

Re: AlphaWrite: AI that improves at writing by evolving its own stories

#148

Post by soulofmischief »

phorkyas82 wrote: post #138
soulofmischief wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, that's also incorrect. You get to decide what you think is art, but not what others consider art to be. That is the nature of subjectivity: your opinion holds no weight over others.

Generally, it's inter-subjectively decided what art is, which works enter the canon and are passed on. Placing it solely in each individual, "it's only a matter of taste", falls a bit short of some centuries of aesthetic theory. Also, AI is maybe only the last straw as Silicon Valley and the digital sphere was already "transforming" the creative industry, cp this piece: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/20…

No. The simple fact is that you cannot tell two people, a producer and consumer of art respectively, what kind of relationship they are allowed to have nor, what medium they express it through, or whether or not it is a valid form of creativity. It is simply none of your business, and it's exceedingly arrogant to think otherwise.

Re: AlphaWrite: AI that improves at writing by evolving its own stories

#149

Post by soulofmischief »

saberience wrote: post #144
soulofmischief wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Awful take. Transformers have greatly increased the potential number of cool things I can do in my lifetime. I've written poetry, short stories, I draw, and am an experienced professional software engineer, and thanks to transformers I've been able to augment my creative workflow. People were similarly dismissive about computers in general. And calculators, and the printing press, and Photoshop, and cameras, and ever…

None of the tools that existed before created entire complete works with tiny amounts of effort. E.g. "Write an amazing story for kids about a bear". ChatGPT writes a whole story for you. That's not "augmenting" your workflow, that's just doing all the work for you. And don't tell me, "writing the prompt is the new form of art", the reality is that writing these prompts doesn't require a tiny fraction of the talent r…

You have missed the point of the analogy. I'd ask that you sit on this for a while and earnestly trying to understand what I'm explaining, which is how each generation of artists has a relationship with the prior generations that involves both imitation and rejection. Creatives are not one big blob of people, they all have their own opinions on what is and isn't great art, and it's all subjective.

And a lot of these moments of inertia, scenes, etc. are rooted in technological progress. And sometimes, the technological process is so great that prior generations of creatives feel as if the newer generations are "skipping" the required work to becoming a "true" artist; but that is just gatekeeping.

Re: AlphaWrite: AI that improves at writing by evolving its own stories

#150

Post by soulofmischief »

conartist6 wrote: post #139
soulofmischief wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Awful take. Transformers have greatly increased the potential number of cool things I can do in my lifetime. I've written poetry, short stories, I draw, and am an experienced professional software engineer, and thanks to transformers I've been able to augment my creative workflow. People were similarly dismissive about computers in general. And calculators, and the printing press, and Photoshop, and cameras, and ever…

So instead of adding your voice to the world you decided to give away your voice and abandon your humanity. You obviously don't value your reader if you don't value yourself enough to speak with your own voice.

Does a camera give away a photographer's "voice" just because he doesn't have to draw his art by hand, but can simply press a button?

Does a sculpture artist who uses aides to carry out his will give away his "voice" just because he didn't do the physical labor himself?

Does a game designer give away his "voice" just because he has a team under him that independently executes on all manner of creative work surrounding the his central thesis and incremental feedback?

Don't be preposterous! My voice is whatever I decide for it to be, how arrogant to decide that for me! If you aren't into it, great: you weren't the intended audience and your critique is irrelevant.

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