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The End of an Era

hughhowey.com

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Re: The End of an Era

#441

Post by WillMorr »

It's really interesting hearing moderate takes from an author. It feels like most people with strong enough opinions to make a blog post are either (reasonably) digging in against ai or have completely given up. It feels like the majority of people who self-identify as readers have extremely high standards and don't realise it, there is clearly a large amount of overlap between chatbots and some chunk of human authors. It's already better at technical writing than I ever was, I'm just fine with it because I never wanted to be a technical writer.

I really appreciate that Hugh has the humility to talk about this transition in comparable terms to the one that launched him. It's definitely democratizing the ability to produce words in a similar way but I'm less sure it's otherwise meaningfully comparable. This feels like more of a re-cetralization: we're moving back towards the established players being the only ones able to write novels. Its just that the established players are now model weights being used by different people but with the same biases. Instead of blocking new authors via controlling access to publishing, chatbots and the people using them are functionally DDOSing every open channel for humans to get read and seem to be breaking the pipeline.

As an aside, the idea of streamer authors is fascinating. It'd be a completely new thing, it's like the maximalalist version of authors in serial mediums being overly sensitive to the immediate response to each chapter and overcorrecting.

Excellent read overall, thanks for sharing.

Re: The End of an Era

#442

Post by Izkata »

nntwozz wrote: post #90
palmotea wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A thinking press? Soon you won't be doing anything. At best you'll just be a bag of meat attached to automated processes you don't understand in order to take legal liability for it. Literally a scapegoat, except of a different species.

WALL-E captured this sentiment.

The Whispering Earring might be closer: https://croissanthology.com/earring

Re: The End of an Era

#443

Post by m463 »

bananaflag wrote: post #414
ticulatedspline wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly I feel like I've already lived this when CGI began eating practical effects in movies. Lots of people hated CGI. then it got better, then it got worse again but by then it was the norm and people's complaints don't have much teeth. Of course the best CGI back in the day was the CGI you didn't even notice was there. same with AI. when it's bad (and these days it's often bad) you notice, but then you don't not…

> Lots of people hated CGI. then it got better, then it got worse again What do you mean by "it got worse again"? Why did CGI tech get worse?

I think there are probably lots of reasons. gratuitous use and uncanny valley are two I hate and are sometimes related.

Re: The End of an Era

#444

Post by [deleted] »

furyofantares wrote: post #376
kriro wrote: post #211

""" Another prediction is that MOST readers will care about machine-vs-meat as much as they currently care about publishing imprints, which is to say almost none. """ This does not align with what I see in the fiction book space at all. At least in the communities that I frequent (fantasy, sci-fi, horror) there is no AI publication that I am aware of that is good. And readers react allergically to any notion of AI in…

> there is no AI publication that I am aware of that is good I think you're right that there isn't any that's any good right now, but that's beside the point that if that changes (or if that's wrong) then people mostly won't care. > At least in the communities that I frequent (fantasy, sci-fi, horror) I think if you are part of a "community" surrounding some genre, then you are probably exposed to an extremely non-re…

[deleted]

Re: The End of an Era

#445

Post by Gud »

sparsesignal wrote: post #205
xorcist wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This assumes one-shot generation. I don't use it that way, and I don't think many people who find it useful do. I use it as a colleague I'm drafting with. I'll ask how a sentence lands, tell it to make a paragraph more friendly or more dramatic, have it argue against a point I'm making. The piece comes together over many turns, and the information arriving in each turn is mine — it's not expanding one prompt, it's he…

Me? I tell it what to write, establish the general picture, then we write together.

Obviously I make software, not prose(not yet anyway). I would say, I contribute 95% of the “original thought”.

Re: The End of an Era

#446

Post by therealpygon »

furyofantares wrote: post #376
kriro wrote: post #211

""" Another prediction is that MOST readers will care about machine-vs-meat as much as they currently care about publishing imprints, which is to say almost none. """ This does not align with what I see in the fiction book space at all. At least in the communities that I frequent (fantasy, sci-fi, horror) there is no AI publication that I am aware of that is good. And readers react allergically to any notion of AI in…

> there is no AI publication that I am aware of that is good I think you're right that there isn't any that's any good right now, but that's beside the point that if that changes (or if that's wrong) then people mostly won't care. > At least in the communities that I frequent (fantasy, sci-fi, horror) I think if you are part of a "community" surrounding some genre, then you are probably exposed to an extremely non-re…

I have to agree in that, generally, people care in the same way they care on TT/Insta/etc, which is to say that any time they don’t know it’s AI they simply don’t care and will view/be amazed/laugh/share it. Until someone says “AI”, and then suddenly all those things they like magically become negative for some people.

It often has less to do with the content, and more to do with personal preferences. As one person told me, “Why do I care? I still thought it was funny.”

The difference is those types of communities tend to share similarly strong personal preferences about AI. It’s a bit like saying, “I joined a math community but no one wanted to talk about my diet and workout routines.”

Re: The End of an Era

#447

Post by 1dom »

delis-thumbs-7e wrote: post #195
1dom wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I wasn't making a comment about toupees, I was referring to the toupee fallacy.

Look, I don't know who you are, or what your background is, and without that, there's nothing I can do to convince you that AI is being used in writing and you can't identify it.

The fact is there's a well-known author saying from their experience that the writing produced by LLMs can be amazing, that's the article we're all here to discuss. I've then included a link to another article where a whole bunch of publishers couldn't tell if AI was being used.

This means either you're confidently know you're a more discerning reader/writer than a well known author and a bunch of publishers. Or, you know you're not, and you're choosing to believe your feeling that you know better then them, which I'm not really interested in discussing.

To be clear: I'm not saying AI doesn't produce slop, I'm saying it also produces stuff that the vast, vast majority, even of experts, cannot identify as AI produced. This means anyone who suggests they can easily identify it now, or "all AI stuff makes me vomit" is probably needlessly deluding themselves. I think this has only been the case for the last 6 - 12 months.

Re: The End of an Era

#449

Post by suddenlybananas »

mattmaroon wrote: post #437
suddenlybananas wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Things aren’t poorly thought out just because they’re a short internet comment. I could easily have delved into the background belief that’s deeply-rooted in Buddhist philosophy. Thinking humans aren’t special isn’t necessarily nihilism, it can be because you believe you’re only a tiny part of the vast universe, and that what we experience as “self” is just an illusion caused by limited processing power, and that sin…

>the universe itself has a level of consciousness that we don’t understand and might, for instance, want to

This is insane I'm sorry. Panpsychism is one thing, saying that the universe itself wants us to make AI is deluded.

Re: The End of an Era

#450

Post by ben_w »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #174
skinfaxi wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be an interesting legal case. I would expect it to lead to negligence on the part of the employer for lack of training, etc rather than attach to the employee pressing the button.

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

As is so often the case SMBC has already got a comic for this. I sincerely regard Zach Weinersmith (and also separately Randall Munroe) as two of the most pertinent voices in modern philosophy.

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/blame

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