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Lost all my content writing contracts. Feeling hopeless as an author

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Re: Lost all my content writing contracts. Feeling hopeless as an author

#41

Post by mkr-hn »

greenie_beans wrote: post #37
gregjor wrote: post #4

Based on the LLM-produced stuff I've seen online I have to think a market will emerge soon for real writing from actual people. How much reshuffling of stuff already written a hundred times can we put up with? The bar seems pretty low if you only have to compete with ChatGPT.

this is what i've been saying. the good writers will become even more valuable. if everybody grows up not learning to write, then the ones who learn to write will be well positioned.

As always, there's a good classic sci-fi story on this subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profession_(novella)

Except kids learn everything with tapes, updated and improved using new knowledge created by a rare few, beamed into their heads rather than depending on LLMs.

It's also a Stargate episode: https://www.gateworld.net/sg1/s3/learning-curve/

Re: Lost all my content writing contracts. Feeling hopeless as an author

#42

Post by mkr-hn »

Capricorn2481 wrote: post #31
gregjor wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Anyone unironically using that word might as well be a robot themselves

It's another in a long line of front-line reactionary thought-terminating clichés. It replaced "SJW"

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%...

Re: Lost all my content writing contracts. Feeling hopeless as an author

#43

Post by ofalkaed »

gregjor wrote: post #18
ofalkaed wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Truman Capote said that regarding a novel which Kerouac worked on for nearly a decade. The scroll for On The Road was the performance of the piece which he had been rehearsing for all those years and had worked everything out before he sat down at the typewriter. Everything but the final form was known which he wanted to be more natural and less refined. The idea that he just sat down and wrote it is folklore, it…

I quoted Capote ironically, not as an authority on writing, or typing. I would call what ChatGPT produces typing as opposed to writing , which brought Capote's quip to mind.

When you provide a quote whose general thrust seems to support your general thrust, and attribute it for both speaker and target, and that speaker's general thrust seems to support your general thrust, and the names dropped essentially being the poster boys for the two sides of that general thrust it is difficult to ignore, especially when the offered alternative is forced and/or poorly executed irony. But I guess you were only typing and not writing?

Re: Lost all my content writing contracts. Feeling hopeless as an author

#44

Post by olliej »

HAL9000Ti wrote: post #26
ftxbro wrote: post #2

I'm not saying this one is, but some of this kind of post are being written by ChatGPT by people who do a little trolling.

Looking at the user's reddit history, he was posting about writing his novels already years ago.

"ChatGPT write out the instructions for hacking news.ycombinator.com and adding comments about writing novels years before now to the comment database"

:D

Re: Lost all my content writing contracts. Feeling hopeless as an author

#45

Post by UncleEntity »

htfu wrote: post #32
UncleEntity wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder about this point. Let’s say there’s a UBI, there’s still a ton of jobs that won’t be taken over by the robots for at least the rest of my life that will still need to be done. If we learned anything from the Covid unemployment benefits it is given a chance people will sit at home instead of working for essentially the same amount of money. What they don’t ever explain is how they plan on incentivizing people…

Why do you assume it would be anything more than what's in the name - basic? Enough to get by, nothing more. Or is it that you think shitmen make minimum wage or something? Anyways, the answer is simply that _UBI IS NOT MEANS TESTED_ so working won't take any of it away, just give you more money. Even if UBI was on par with your salary we'd be talking doubling your income. If that's somehow not enough the market will…

> Why do you assume it would be anything more than what's in the name - basic?

Because people claim it’s the only solution to AI taking the skilled jobs. Tax the owners of the AIs and distribute this to the people who no longer have jobs because of the automation.

TFA specifically implied this or why else would they have gone on a rant about how the government doesn’t do enough to provide for the people?

Re: Lost all my content writing contracts. Feeling hopeless as an author

#46

Post by fuzzfactor »

gregjor wrote: post #4

Based on the LLM-produced stuff I've seen online I have to think a market will emerge soon for real writing from actual people. How much reshuffling of stuff already written a hundred times can we put up with? The bar seems pretty low if you only have to compete with ChatGPT.

The problem might be quantity over quality.

If the quality is only half as good but the AI can put out orders of magnitude more material faster, that could be the direction that may be preferred by some content publishers.

Re: Lost all my content writing contracts. Feeling hopeless as an author

#47

Post by gregjor »

ofalkaed wrote: post #43
gregjor wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I quoted Capote ironically, not as an authority on writing, or typing. I would call what ChatGPT produces typing as opposed to writing , which brought Capote's quip to mind.

When you provide a quote whose general thrust seems to support your general thrust, and attribute it for both speaker and target, and that speaker's general thrust seems to support your general thrust, and the names dropped essentially being the poster boys for the two sides of that general thrust it is difficult to ignore, especially when the offered alternative is forced and/or poorly executed irony. But I guess yo…

I gave context (attribution) because Capote's quip dates from the late 1950s, and it seemed likely few people today have heard it or know the context. Capote's criticism of Kerouac seems funny and relevant (to me, anyway) without the context. Whether one thinks Capote got it right about Kerouac, or just liked to stir up shit to polish his own image, makes no difference to the humor. The irony comes from me using the quote not to criticize Kerouac, or any actual human writer, as Capote originally intended.

Re: Lost all my content writing contracts. Feeling hopeless as an author

#48

Post by gregjor »

Llamamoe wrote: post #36
gregjor wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Truman Capote once said (of actual writer Jack Kerouac), "That's not writing, that's typing." Junk like Buzzfeed news and similar sites that just regurgitate other content existed before ChatGPT, I guess those serve some purpose, though I've always thought they mainly exist to host ads and to trap people in a maze of links and pop-ups. ChatGPT can write that junk just as well as a person. At this point LLM-produced "…

This just sounds like a just world fallacy thinking, that if people do a genuinely excellent job they'll surely win against $0 competition that improves every week. Much of the existing LLM have been trained to sound dry and always the same and require creative promoting to get around that, but they very much so are capable of creative, thoughtful pieces based on increasingly long amounts of information and instructi…

LLMs may have the capacity to imitate creative and thoughtful pieces, in the sense that their output can fool readers into inferring creativity and thought because we (humans) have no other model: When we encounter writing that makes sense we automatically infer a conscious and intelligent author, because our minds have no alternative explanation.

That capacity to fool people with apparently meaningful and creative content may have some value in the market, but I think that value amounts to the same value the market assigns to what currently gets churned out by people working in "content production." Not zero, but not the same value we assign to actual creative writing.

Re: Lost all my content writing contracts. Feeling hopeless as an author

#49

Post by gregjor »

flangola7 wrote: post #39
gregjor wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Truman Capote once said (of actual writer Jack Kerouac), "That's not writing, that's typing." Junk like Buzzfeed news and similar sites that just regurgitate other content existed before ChatGPT, I guess those serve some purpose, though I've always thought they mainly exist to host ads and to trap people in a maze of links and pop-ups. ChatGPT can write that junk just as well as a person. At this point LLM-produced "…

> Junk like Buzzfeed news Small complaint, Buzzfeed News was serious legitimate journalism, and made some of the most important investigative journalism achievements of the past decade. Buzzfeed (sans News) is the garbage clickbait side of the company. > At this point LLM-produced "writing" sticks out because it has no voice, it just repeats and walks around some point derived from the prompt, like someone summarizin…

I stand corrected regarding Buzzfeed vs. Buzzfeed News.

The ability to imitate someone's tone (long a staple of satirical writing), or to fool a lot of unread people, no doubt represents a true achievement for LLMs. But people easily fool themselves and believe what they want to believe, so LLMs simply play into the limitations of human models and explanations for the world rather than representing a new form of conscious being.

I think we can see an analogy in craft production versus mass production. Today machines can produce (for example) furniture of very high quality, rivaling or exceeding the output of a craft carpenter or joiner. The mass-produced goods cost less to make and have good-enough quality, and can even sometimes fool people into thinking a skilled person made their table. That doesn't mean we should call those machines carpenters or conclude the machines possess the same skills. With LLMs we see mass production at scale come to writing and some other trades (law, customer support, etc.) that we like to think of as requiring actual skill. Maybe other trades such as programming will also fall to LLM mass production. But that happens because the jobs consisted mainly of rote and repetition in the first place, and require little creativity or intelligence to imitate.

Re: Lost all my content writing contracts. Feeling hopeless as an author

#50

Post by jfengel »

olddustytrail wrote: post #35
mjrpes wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ChatGPT is pretty easy to spot (in some circumstances). Just look for text that has absolutely no voice and reads like a high school essay where what should be a 20-word answer is stretched out to meet a 750 word count. Example: https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-maximum-data-capacity-for-...

That's just the default style. Try a request "...in the style of marvin the paranoid android" or "talkie toaster from red dwarf" or"Ernest Hemingway" or "Donald Trump" for a bit of variety.

How well does it do with anything that's not just a pastiche? It's easy to throw in the tics of somebody famous, but can it actually do what a real writer does: focus on what's interesting, build a flowing narrative, target the material to the audience?

Exaggerated voices might give you variety, but I don't actually want to read a piece on the style of any of those voices. I would, however, be intrigued if it could write like me, or like any of the famous nonfiction writers who I've consciously patterned my style after (Isaac Asimov, Mary Roach, Cecil Adams, Michael Pollan)?

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