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The End of an Era

hughhowey.com

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Re: The End of an Era

#311

Post by Vegenoid »

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:…

Taking the lack of ability to identify good AI fiction as evidence that there is good AI fiction is absurd, because it means that there is no evidence which could ever point to there not being good AI fiction. There must be evidence which could contradict a hypothesis for it to be sensible.

Re: The End of an Era

#312

Post by hughhowey »

cautiouscat wrote: post #158

Even if the machine books are indistinguishable from meat books, why would you want to read something that didn’t come from someone’s heart?

I think about this a lot. For me, non-fiction stories hit way harder. I read a book about Amelia Earhart last month, and KNOWING it happened to a REAL HUMAN made the book 10x more powerful than a work of fiction about a lost pilot would feel. The same with documentaries; I love them because they happened.

However, I still watch movies about made-up things! TV shows that were written by a roomful of writers, all arguing and compromising, then taking notes from suits and producers, and making more compromises up to the day of shooting, even the day of editing! What comes out of that process is complete fiction, written by not-a-single-human-heart but rather a messy mash-up of humans combining their gibberish.

And sometimes it's still good. And I love it. Even though it isn't "real" and didn't come from a "real person."

So ... people may love a meat-book more in the future, but people will also love machine-books. Not you, by the sounds of it. But there are people not-you on Earth as well.

Re: The End of an Era

#313

Post by bonoboTP »

argentinian wrote: post #307
bonoboTP wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If it moves something in you, that's what mainly matters. This is a values question. Many would say that literature has a role in modeling certain behaviors and teaching lessons that are functional in society. Basically the fables and proverbs idea. Simply catering to what feels nice and what reinforces the biases and wishes of readers is not the same thing. Yes, most of literature is already crap and simply caters…

As you say, that already occurs with human made commercial crap literature. A person directing an IA could also lead it to build a story that teaches values.

True, but it's easier to get lazy and to just wire it up to an automatic engagement farming loop with no human input. Imagine the worst form of audience capture possible.

Re: The End of an Era

#314

Post by hughhowey »

smartmic wrote: post #135

> Artificial Intelligence is writing about as well as humans Does he really hold on this until the end of the article? (sorry, I had no time to read through it). It doesn't matter how well and sophisticated the writing is, what counts is the human connection. A human is talking to me through the writing. I am not interested in having communication with a machine, I want the vibes only humans can send and receive …

Did you even make it to the end of that sentence? It would've taken you less time than writing your comment. I said "at least as well enough to cause confusion and speculation"

But apparently there's enough confusion to be had by reading a few random words from a blog post, getting your blood pressure up, and writing a comment to show off your lack of attention span.

Re: The End of an Era

#315

Post by hughhowey »

Schlagbohrer wrote: post #230

Nice blog post but this one part is so irritating: "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. I believe such a utopia is possible. It does not violate the laws of physics, so much the laws of human nature." What irritates me is when…

Capitalism and profit motive are human nature.

It's also human nature to be irritated by your own reading comprehension (based on biases and assumptions you carry around daily) and then attribute that irritation onto a stranger instead of working on yourself. :)

Re: The End of an Era

#316

Post by suddenlybananas »

mattmaroon wrote: post #304
suddenlybananas wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Building something that supersedes us may have always been our purpose. This is just religion, but without even any serious philosophical/theological grounding.

You could say that about any religion given only a one sentence high level summary. “A guy in the sky made us in seven days.” has no serious, philosophical grounding.

Your comment's first half was a kind of freshman nihilism backed up by vague gesturing at science (despite the fact that science can't really answer normative claims or value judgements). You then follow it up with a totally unsupported teleological claim which completely contradicts the paragraph that came before.

Re: The End of an Era

#317

Post by hughhowey »

hoofedear wrote: post #32
latexr wrote: post #3

Deleted because I realised I am not in the mood to argue with people who don’t read; don’t make an effort to understand an argument; or make shallow dismissals thinking they consist in any way of a valid point. There are more important things to worry about than internet randos (and that includes me, if you’re offended).

I think his “ALL AUTHORS” point was about how authors will use AI in some form or fashion during their process, and points to how he did with his google search and his AI Gmail response. I don’t think he meant all authors using AI for their writing. Here’s the snippet: “Another thing that will happen is established authors will turn to AI for assistance, not just for writing but for research, cover art, editing, retu…

That's how I meant it. Love to have read the original comment telling me about all the authors out there who are somehow able to avoid the AI that is now in EVERY SINGLE THING WE USE, including our email and web searches.

Re: The End of an Era

#318

Post by w0de0 »

mattmaroon wrote: post #309
w0de0 wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans are extremely special! They have a unique trait no other extant and few antecedant species have/had… No other carbon terrestrial species can run for such long distances - a healthy young human can jog for 50 km or more on water and sugar: this is a (not too) breathtaking efficiency! Can you imagine being a gazelle who has been sprinting away from a human for six hours but they just keep coming? Terrifying. The…

And yet the cheapest car can easily outrun any human who ever lived. Everything is unique if you look into it closely enough. I would say that’s not the same as special, though I admit this is just semantics.

Just so. I don’t mean optimal locally or globally - the species is practically extinct! - only unique.

(A platypus is special too, while also rather the worst at everything it does.)

Re: The End of an Era

#319

Post by rootusrootus »

inigyou wrote: post #173
shmeeed wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strangely, I'm still seeing the comment. How does that work?

A user with enough reputation and who has enabled the option to view censored comments can vouch for a censored comment, restoring it.

I wonder how that algorithm works. At the risk of discussing a bit of a taboo topic (are there rules against this? there might be...), I've never vouched for a comment and had it come alive. I have many times been the final nail in a comment where my flag caused it to die, but I have never seen the opposite with vouch.

Re: The End of an Era

#320

Post by pibaker »

bsenftner wrote: post #98
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…

Finally, someone else understands that writing is not the goal, the entire point of all of this is our communications between one another and this market for narrative stories is a nice departure and it does convey important knowledge and moral lessons that larger society needs. But it is an indirection, an indirection to the mission of communicating solutions to how to live as a human and that is why we care, why th…

I'd like to live in a world where people only make art to serve a higher purpose. But we don't live in that world and never did. Before we had slop we had pulp — formulaic, low effort writing full of cliches of romance, lust, crime and adventure broke college students could churn out en masse to make a living.

I'd also recommend having a look at the books published by this article's author. I will admit that I have never read nor heard of any of them. But come on, just look at the books published covers and the way the author introduced them and tell me that they are not industrial products engineered for mass commercial appeal.

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