We are feeding this beast that no doubt will take thousands to more of our design and development jobs. People I know are falling in love with it (lonely people) and spending less time with their friends as chatGPT tells them everything they want to hear.
For instance a close friend has an obsession with a rockstar and thinks in another life they were a couple and she feeds chatGPT this delusion and it prompts her along helping her fall back into this delusion. As one time she overstepped her boundaries to the point that the rockstar told her to go away her interest is not welcome and she swore hime off. Yet now she has this algorithm that tells her that's not a delusion thus keeping her delusion going.
Why do we need AI? Who does it help besides the tech people whom it will continue to make rich while it wreaks havoc on everyone else?
Doctors told me there are no better ways to treat my condition, meaning I have to resign myself to fate and luck. o3 researched medical papers and found that actually there are, the evidence tier is not that high but they might still work for me specifically, and the risks of those treatments are pretty low. So might as well try. Doctors absolutely do not have this can-do-as-long-as-it's-safe attitude and dismiss it as "no evidence", but apparently what they mean is insufficient evidence in large populations, not that it won't work for me. One of the AI suggestions was that I change one of the cremes. I asked for that, the doctor agreed to that one request luckily (they didn't even tell me it was an option the last time around), and now there's some improvement.
So yes AI is absolutely useful to me.
Fearing that is not having faith in humanity’s adaptation to new things.
Do the signatories really want to deprive humanity of the best books of the future?
It seems like a worthy question to ask what their opinions would be if that were to become reality.
What is it that you are looking for in a book that is an "expression of a lived experience"? Do you get entertained? A good feeling? What if AI can write books that entertain you better and give you an even better feeling?
Or are you looking to learn something, broaden your horizon? What if AI can teach you more, make your horizon wider than any human can?
I think the gluttonous consumption of industrially-produced mindless media has done fried yr brain, chief.
Empirically, this turns out to not be the case.
Doesn't this incessant anthropomorphization get tiring?
> maybe it’s just our ego
Indeed...
Great art (putting aside - what can I call it - “entertainment art”) isn’t about “making you feel better” or “having a nice experience”, it’s about art as expression, it’s about pain and loss and love and understanding.
A song or story generated by an AI isn’t human - the humanity of art is the point of art. Even if the output generated is impeccable - beautiful to look at or read, it still isn’t human in experience, so it doesn’t carry the same quality as work that has been sweated over, worried about, loved and lived over months or years.
AI can - and of course will get very much better at - create exciting things to look at, read or listen to - but much as the age old “I could do that” response to a Pollock misses the entire point of his journey to that artwork, the “it sounds / looks / reads really amazing” misses the point about what it means to create real, human art.
Nick Cave of course puts it much better than I ever could: https://www.theredhandfiles.com/chat-gpt-what-do-you-think/
foxglacier•2h ago
If there's a market for AI-free books, I'm sure some publisher will figure out the value in positioning itself that way and build its own reputation and processes to ensure trust and transparency.