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The End of an Era

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Re: The End of an Era

#191

Post by jodacola »

fidotron wrote: post #104
palmotea wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is difficult to think that someone who writes for pleasure would abandon it simply because of the exponential volume of AI-generated text. But the "exponential volume of AI-generated text" turns "writing for pleasure" into a solitary act. There's no chance you'll be able to quit your day job, because people like what you do any will pay for it. So many people faking it with AI means that it'll be struggle to get…

The truth is much "pursuit of art" is a status exercise by those with the leisure capacity to do so, and this only maintains status because most people do not have the spare time and energy to put into it. In the event everyone is sitting around with time on their hands wondering what to do and we have machines that spit out endless reams of anything it is a very curious question what exactly it is most people would…

Whoa, fascinating: what to call this paradox I'd never considered before?

From the blog post:

> In my dream world, the robots do all the boring jobs and humans spend all their time being creative, connecting with one another, learning about the universe, and sharing our ideas and creations in a great big prosperous circle.

But with this and your other comment [0] about humans churning out 10 articles a day and changing the idea of what's "valuable" leads me to a bit of a conundrum I can't quite unwind:

If AI took over all the boring jobs (chores, labor, etc.) and we had all the time in the world to be creative, and we did just that, to the effect of humans generating dramatically more from "creative" ventures, have we created the same scenario, from a different approach? What then?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49122692

Re: The End of an Era

#192

Post by tetris11 »

bawana wrote: post #183

Before the printing press, information was transmitted by word of mouth, skills were learned by joining guilds, and the largely illiterate public lived and learned from songs. As AI takes over and information becomes adulterated, people will enter their own bubbles. Ultimately, the only way to escape enslavement by AI will be to return to the world before the printing press.

Given the nose-diving literacy rate history might begin to repeat itself

Re: The End of an Era

#193

Post by DarkUranium »

xorcist wrote: post #167
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…

Right. LLMs are text production machines. You can also view them as data expansion tools. They expand an input to an arbitrary long text. That text contains roughly the same amount of information as was contained in the input to begin with. This is not very useful unless your work is content production. More useful is when the output length is shorter than the input. Then it is a (lossy) data compression tool. These…

I really hate the whole thing about companies promoting using LLMs to change one-liner emails into this long multi-paragraph thing that ends up saying almost nothing ... just wasting everyone's time in reading them (with an extra sprinkling of hallucinations).

Re: The End of an Era

#194

Post by inigyou »

marcosdumay wrote: post #180
inigyou wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are shadowbanned and have been writing mostly into the void for the last three months. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48067472

Looks to me that the ban was reversed at some point. The GP's comments are quite reachable.

Enable showdead and scroll through their history

Re: The End of an Era

#195

Post by delis-thumbs-7e »

1dom wrote: post #153
delis-thumbs-7e wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> If this is the case it should be quite easy for you to provide examples of excellent AI-fiction. I feel that's the opposite of the toupee fallacy. The lack of labelled excellent AI fiction supports the idea that there's a lot of excellent fiction that was written by largely by AI but nobody was able to identify it as AI, because they were looking for writing that makes them vomit. Regardless, how about this: https:…

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 read it yet to judge ourselves - just that publishing agents are completely out of touch. If it were truly great I don’t think anyone would care, since hey, good writing is good writing, no matter where it comes from. We would just read it and enjoy.

Similarly models are for fact able to produce music and images that are very difficult to differentiate from meat made, but still… Most people don’t like them. Something seems always a bit off, kinda artificial and boring. Lack of imagination, lack of authenticity, lack of voice.

Re: The End of an Era

#196

Post by ChrisLTD »

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.

Re: The End of an Era

#197

Post by dspillett »

monkeywork wrote: post #139
dude250711 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as we add the stigma of them getting paid for their AI's effort too. Then it could absolutely work.

Why would there need to be a stigma for getting paid based on a tool they used? Do other authors have a stigma for using a word processor instead of a typewriter? Artist have a stigma for using photoshop instead of canvas?

> Why would there need to be a stigma for getting paid based on a tool they used?

Is it being used a tool, or is it being used as a ghostwriter? There is often stigma attached to that when done by humans.

> Artist have a stigma for using photoshop instead of canvas?

Yes, that used to very much be the case. Now it is often considered a different form of expression, so loses a lot of the stigma mostly by not pretending to be what those looking down on it are comparing it to.

Similar in the debate between CGI and practical effects.

Perhaps if AI-backed authors are willing to have their work classed as a different type of writing they can skip by the comparison-stigma too?

Re: The End of an Era

#198

Post by [deleted] »

kardianos wrote: post #92

What LLMs have shown me most, is: Alternatively most blog posts could have been paragraphs. Most books could have been single chapters. Most newspaper articles could have been tweets. That being said, most readers want you to hold your hand step by step. They don't want to the outline: they want you to give them a story. Most people and writers know this already. To me, it was new.

[deleted]

Re: The End of an Era

#199

Post by Kamq »

dspillett wrote: post #165
strken wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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. That could also describe many human writers… AI writing seems to have a quality ceiling, or an ick floor if you prefer to think about it that way around, but is OK compare to bad human writers. I'm st…

I don't think you're committing career suicide. I've seen people get serviceable results out of it, and it always involves reading the code in depth. Reading the code being slower than writing it, they're almost never getting a speed up.

That being said, the better coders I've seen aren't looking for a speed up, they're generally looking for something to bounce ideas off of, or to get a first draft going to defeat writer's block or something (I guess this is technically a speed up, but not the way people mean when they describe slinging tokens around). It's generally to wind up at a better solution at the end than to get a sustained speed up (which seems to only be possible in boilerplate heavy domains, but those were previously slowed down by the boilerplate and are really only coming up to speed with everything else, at significant cost).

Re: The End of an Era

#200

Post by cael450 »

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.

I agree, but I do think it makes the book industry more difficult. A flood of books makes it makes it harder for new authors to make it. Just like a new youtuber has a very difficult time. Eventually publishers will turn to AI just to deal with the volume on submissions, and then it will become just like YouTube, where an algorithm decides who wins and loses.

At the same time, readers will have to sift through an insane amount of books to find what they like. It is already kind of like this, even before AI. This causes people to rely more on reviews and word of mouth, which becomes a volume game and is also influenced by the algorithms.

I don't think it is the end times for literature, and for those who put the work in, they can find their places. But it is a whole new set of challenges.

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