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The End of an Era

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Re: The End of an Era

#421

Post by pessimizer »

miki123211 wrote: post #346
bsenftner wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

No. I think narrative stories are a "brain hack", in the same way heavily processed food, drugs, clickbait, soap operas and TikTok are brain hacks, combined with some exclusivity status signaling games. They're just old enough to have gained a cultural cachet that more modern forms of entertainment don't yet have. Same for art, music, comedy and culture generally. There is nothing wrong with those "brain hacks", if t…

> No.

What's the purpose of this? You didn't disagree, you just went on a tangent. Is this another "brain hack?" If so, there is something wrong with them. They often make words appear to be something that they are not.

Like a magician would use a thing called "indirection."

Re: The End of an Era

#422

Post by bsenftner »

pibaker wrote: post #320
bsenftner wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 n…

We do live in that world, but that world is also filled and conditioned by the predator and prey structure we all operate within. The higher purpose that Art serves today is aliased, hidden, and conveyed in layers of metaphor. This is somewhat of a game, as the predators playing the art game try to consume their prey, anyone that is not an art philosopher in the pursuit of stories to explain our situations and not fame or wealth. The obvious paths were long ago traveled and farmed to barren land, and all that is left is the extremes as nobody wants to admit that this, this with all of us, is it and nothing more.

Re: The End of an Era

#423

Post by bsenftner »

b112 wrote: post #347
bsenftner wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are describing the bifurcation of society that is the moral lesson of The Time Machine by H.G. Wells. The Morlocks are the scientific and engineering "gender" (so to speak) of the human race while the Eloki are the child-like humans kept around because they are the food the Morlocks consume to survive in that future.

Yes, I've read the book, the two movies (one modern one from the 60s?), and the sequel, very well done!, by Stephen Baxter. It's a good concept, but for some reason I thought of a military movie I watched recently, where someone was going on about how they were third generation military. And how their friends and family were military. Sort of the same kind of siloing there.

Stephen Baxter, I loved his "The Light of Other Days". I need to read more of him.

Re: The End of an Era

#424

Post by Terr_ »

brap wrote: post #113

>Let’s examine another crazy version. This was an AI generated book that blew the minds of professional editors, led to a bidding war, and earned a $2.4M advance. Let’s examine a third version: the people investing $2.4M into this book use AI in their evaluation process. Honestly I don’t think it’s that crazy. What’s more likely, that current AI wrote a whole ass novel which professional editors meticulously read and…

> Let’s examine a third version: the people investing $2.4M into this book use AI in their evaluation process.

On that note, LLMs exhibit "self-bias", so knowing what kind of model does the judging helps you tailor your thing to its prejudices, even if just by using the same model to "spruce up the woring so that this wins a competition."

Further along that spectrum is adversarial models where you create a new model designed to bamboozle the judge, but that's a lot more work.

Re: The End of an Era

#425

Post by nullorempty »

Let's suppose an AI and a Human wrote a book each and it's the same word-for-word.

Will the effect of the book be the same on readers?

From a perspective of classic materialism the effect should be the same.

But what if the thought is material?

How does the world change then if AI takes over a significant portion of writing.

Re: The End of an Era

#426

Post by suddenlybananas »

mattmaroon wrote: post #372
suddenlybananas wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It was a Hacker News comment, not a doctoral thesis. People like you are why this site so desperately needs a block feature.

I just don't like this kind of poorly thought out misanthropy.

Re: The End of an Era

#427

Post by palmotea »

jodacola wrote: post #191
fidotron wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 changi…

> 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.

In the world we're actually building, it's the opposite. We're on track for the robots to take the creative jobs, leaving boring and dirty jobs for the humans. It does he design and writes the code, while you're stuck with endless code reviews and monitoring.

It's because they're building technology for its own sake, not for people living in this world.

Re: The End of an Era

#428

Post by inigyou »

recursive wrote: post #252
wolvesechoes wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You could ask a human to "do something with 1M dollars" and get garbage too At least the human's brain requires about 20 Watts to operate. Cheap garbage is better than garbage requiring whole power plants nad billions of capital investment.

And the human is human. The idea that we'd have to justify the existence of humans relative to LLMs based on objective metrics sounds like it's leading in a bad direction. If the LLM gets their power budget down to nineteen watts, what does that mean for humans?

Capitalism is a paperclip maixmizer. If we didn't want to be culled when surplus to requirements we would've chosen a different system.

Re: The End of an Era

#429

Post by recursive »

inigyou wrote: post #428
recursive wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the human is human. The idea that we'd have to justify the existence of humans relative to LLMs based on objective metrics sounds like it's leading in a bad direction. If the LLM gets their power budget down to nineteen watts, what does that mean for humans?

Capitalism is a paperclip maixmizer. If we didn't want to be culled when surplus to requirements we would've chosen a different system.

The ones getting culled aren't the ones that chose the system.

Re: The End of an Era

#430

Post by palmotea »

skinfaxi wrote: post #249
TeMPOraL wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You get paid for having liability attach to you. Soon it may be the only thing you could be paid for.

Are employees usually liable for process-related issues? Like individual employees weren't liable for dispensing too-hot coffee but McDonalds was liable. Or how cops aren't liable in their individual capacity if it was a failure of training, etc.

It may not even legal liability, just blame.

For instance: give John the job of monitoring the HR AI so it isn't racist. To do that he needs to do impossible task of checking 10,000 automated resume evaluation decisions per day. No one can do that, so eventually he just approves them all.

Then if the system is determined to be super racist, you proceed to blame it on John, and fire him for being negligent and not doing his job. You put out a press release, and hire Steve into John's role. Your decisive actions show you're taking the problem seriously and the company isn't to blame.

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