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The End of an Era

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Re: The End of an Era

#321

Post by cautiouscat »

hughhowey wrote: post #312
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 argui…

I should probably clarify that something like a television show, movie or game where it’s likely a group of people is still included in my “someone’s heart” even if it’s many hearts.

Let’s take Backrooms for an example. In the interviews with the cast, Kane, and others they usually all hit on “so and so was so passionate and added X”. Hearing about everyone’s passion and seeing the end result reflect that makes the experience of watching it so much more enjoyable.

If someone generated a Backrooms film, there would be none of that.

I’m not saying you’re wrong for liking machine books or anyone should be wrong for thinking that, but I just can’t imagine them being equal in the view of the arts.

Re: The End of an Era

#322

Post by cyanregiment »

un-diletante wrote: post #277
cyanregiment wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even within your own brain, conveyance != experience. When you report on your own experiences - like the warmth of the sun - that report is not itself the experience. The scary part about an LLM (p-zombie) is that it can report on an experience exactly the same as if it had one, and for all intents and purposes it'd be sufficient for the task at hand. After all, I don't need to have your experiences to know what you…

I agree with conveyance != experience, and looking at it again I agree with your original statement with regards to the "!=". But I do believe that conveying experience requires having it. By conveying, I don't mean conveying the idea of a possible experience, but conveying knowledge about a real experience that a real experiencer had. What is conveyed is not the entire experience which is impossible, what is conveye…

Kant would agree, and went further, saying that people should always tell the truth, "even if it meant saving a friend's life from a murderer" and that it was an unconditional moral duty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_a_Supposed_Right_to_Tell_Li...

Contemporarily we have methods like radical honesty - another moral absolutist take that also asserts a primacy of truth, that as long as you tell the truth, you can do no wrong

For a lie always harms another; if not some human being, then it nevertheless does harm to humanity in general, inasmuch as it vitiates the very source of right... All practical principles of right must contain rigorous truth... Kant

So, that's the moral side of things. Whether or not you believe in truth as a moral compass (or even a component of it or some moral rubrik), I'll leave up to you! What you said:

> But if I am not really grateful, then my words haven't conveyed information about an actual experience

...gets more at the utility of honesty, as a conveyer of experience. While I might argue you still have conveyed an experience (just not one you had), because the references and end experience still happened in the mind of the receiver, the end (target) experience was had.

The invention of lying is largely due to it working just as well (or better than) the truth in the first place. Maybe the first lie was an accident, and evolution took over where only the best liars passed on their ideas.

So that you could even have an experience rich enough to contemplate!

Re: The End of an Era

#323

Post by zbentley »

Aurornis wrote: post #273
inigyou wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It must be a distinction between engineer-type brains and leader-type brains. If you're focused on social status climbing, the fact that you produced a report, and the length of that report, is far more important than whether the contents of the report have any relation to reality beyond the surface level. This is true if you're trying to get VC funding as well. It's even in institutional academia, as seen by the Sok…

> is far more important than whether the contents of the report have any relation to reality beyond the surface level. This only works in broken companies where leadership is already overrun with other status climbers. If someone tries this trick at a functional company and is discovered, their reputation takes a huge hit that can take years to overcome, if ever. At high performing companies reputation is everything.…

> This only works in broken companies

The promotion of LLMs is, I believe, basically a referendum on how many companies are broken in that way. So far, the adoption statistics are looking like it’s most of them.

Re: The End of an Era

#324

Post by rootusrootus »

Henchman21 wrote: post #286
jalev wrote: post #127

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, et…

You don't need to look to AI slop for the end times. It's much closer than that: 20 years ago barely 1% of couples needed medical assistance to have a child. Now, that number is ~17%? Sperm counts falling to an average of zero by 2045? That is a path to extinction.

I am skeptical of those numbers. Like, decades ago 1% needed IVF? I assume that's what you are referring to. Is that not partly a result of it being fairly new technology, quite expensive and not readily available to most people? And the 17% number, while it does seem to be about right, how much of that is just that the average age of parenthood keeps going up and up? It does not seem surprising that the older you get the more problems you have with fertility.

I would be interested to know what the actual rate of sperm count decline is, controlling for age and such.

Edit: This is good reading, I think, though dense: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6455044/

Rates are down quite a bit in the last 50 years, about half. But extrapolating to zero in 50 more years is a stretch. Average is something like 40-50 million/mL, which is above the 15 million threshold considered normal, but does mean an increasing number of people are falling below that threshold. So yes there is going to be an impact, extinction seems highly unlikely however.

Re: The End of an Era

#325

Post by zbentley »

bayindirh wrote: post #246
tempest_ wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is very weird. 6 months ago I generated some documentation for a service that was largely undocumented. When it was done my only thought was "who is this for?" Is any one going to actually read this or are they just going to ask the LLM? If someone didnt write it, why would I read it? It just becomes something to pipe into the context for the next person. It seems though a lot of people don't have this experience,…

In the rare occasion I use LLMs, I always add at least one of the following: - Do not include opinions, just official documentation. - Add all references you have used as a bibliography section at the end. Then I skim the result, and jump to the references it has given. I don't have time for other way.

You have reinvented the search engine.

That’s not meant to be glib; Google and friends are pretty trash now.

Re: The End of an Era

#326

Post by marcosdumay »

inigyou wrote: post #194
marcosdumay wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

They have a lot of dead comments, and their recent comments are all non-dead.

Either people are vouching for those again and again, or the ban was lifted at some point. I don't really know how this works here, but the first option seems unlikely to me.

Re: The End of an Era

#327

Post by zbentley »

rhdunn wrote: post #232
ip26 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discoverability starts to break for new authors when more new books are published each day than humans on the earth. Established authors have the name recognition to compete as you say.

This has happened with other accelerants in various media/fields: 1. easy access to video recording and editing equipment has made it a lot easier to produce videos on sites like YouTube; 2. easy access to audio recording and editing (Audacity, etc.) has made it a lot easier to produce podcasts and other audio content (via LibriVox, Apple Podcasts, etc.); 3. easy access to writing software and self-publishing (Amazon…

Yes, and as Howey explains in TFA those things might be good for consumers and creators who create for fun, but they are not good for people who create in order to earn a living.

Re: The End of an Era

#328

Post by b112 »

ReptileMan wrote: post #275
b112 wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is what humans are for!! Ask people! There is no way a summary of these things fron an LLM has the correct context. (not really frustrated at you, as much as where society is going)

That is not how it works because of how bloated everything is. There is rarely a movie, book or series lately that are not 2 times longer than needed. So you are forced to go for aggressive recaps. Most of the non pulp books published - contain at least two times as many pages as needed for the story or narrative. The information density in the modern world is absurdly low.

Yes, I agree on modern trends for that. There are some modern authors not too bad in that respect, but it may be why I find older sci-fi books more appealing.

Re: The End of an Era

#329

Post by zbentley »

fidotron wrote: post #140
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.

Surely having the idea and curating the result actually is work? And pricing is determined by what someone else will pay for something, so if people want to read it and the author is charging for it . . . that's up to them if they want to make a trade about it. The odd thing is this attempt at gatekeeping what other people value.

> pricing is determined by what someone else will pay for something

That’s so reductive that even Keynes would probably take issue.

Discoverability is the axis of competition in this context, not price. The market has not effectively found out how to identify quality in order to price it, so externalities rule instead: pre-existing authors with recognizable names, whatever genre publishers like at a given moment (famously disconnected from what people actually want to buy), how many energy drinks a crabby editor has had by the time they get to your manuscript, and so on.

Search engine and recommendation systems were supposed to ameliorate those externalities. They didn’t.

Re: The End of an Era

#330

Post by docfort »

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 think the first goal of writing is to talk to yourself. Without an external, unchanging scratchpad, most people cannot keep their thoughts truly straight. It can feel otherwise, but trying to write something about any tricky topic even a few pages in length can take a long time to be self-consistent. Clarifying it takes even longer, especially when you intend to share it. Writing as thinking is definitely a thing. I believe it’s the trickiest part of understanding how such interesting things pop out of a language model trained to predict the next token and rewarded with pleasing sequences. Since it is not thinking, it proves that certain sentences (most?) can be generated thoughtlessly.
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