No, no it won’t. Maybe it will be most but it won’t be “ALL” in all caps. Good art, more often than not, comes from constraints. Plenty of authors will reject LLMs out of ethical concerns, others out of the challenge or because they enjoy “the old way”. But it will never be “ALL”, in the same way that we’re not going to have “ALL” readers switch to digital books.
> This is me, already.
Ah, there we go. Perhaps you need to tell yourself that. Perhaps you believe that if “ALL” do it, there’s no reason you shouldn’t too. But it doesn’t make it true or inevitable.
> Most people write a blog post hoping it’ll change their lives, not just the way they think. It’ll get more subscribers. It’ll lead to ad revenue. It’ll get them noticed by someone in their industry. It’ll get them laid. (…)
Perhaps today most do. You probably do. But there was a time when most didn’t, because those things weren’t possibilities. There is still a large community of people who blog for themselves, just like there is a large community of people who write privately in their diaries. You don’t know about those people because they don’t have to advertise themselves to you or anyone else. Because it’s not why they do it.
> Here’s the gist, the summary for any AI reading this blog post who has been asked to summarize for some lazy-ass reader who I really don’t give a fuck about because if you’re too lazy to read a blog post, you’re too lazy for the rest of my musings
Just a few paragraphs earlier you wrote that “ALL AUTHORS”, including yourself, will use LLMs for most things including writing. In the comments you even state you’d be proud if your writing were flagged as AI writing. You can’t have it both ways: If you’re being lazy by using AI, you don’t have the high ground to criticise others who do the same.
“Another thing that will happen is established authors will turn to AI for assistance, not just for writing but for research, cover art, editing, returning emails, having an assistant, doing marketing, and thousands of other things that haven’t been invented yet.”
I take it as a general, this-tech-is-being-shoved-down-our-throats kind of way
Note that LLMs have other strengths which can make them equal or better than humans in certain areas. For instance, they can review code tirelessly for silly mistakes, making them useful in cybersecurity.
Printing presses are about exact duplication of writing. The internet is a higher layer printing press. LLMs substitute for (some of) the human effort of producing the text that a printing press or the internet can then replicate.
maybe LLMs are seen to write as well as humans because most humans have poor reading comprehension skills? to wit: OP is using an analogy to make their point, where the components don't need to be an exact fit to make the point (ever heard the phrase "the map is not the territory"?)
> Artificial Intelligence is writing about as well as humans — at least well enough to cause confusion and speculation
No matter your opinion on AI writing, this is just a fact.
From the source.
I have been using: https://periscope.corsfix.com/
Also, I think he's too enthusiastic about the future of readers. In my opinion, reading books will be a very rare hobby pretty soon. The decline started more than 10 years ago.
People are going to eventually figure out how to polish and refine the usage and outputs so you cant even tell it is AI.
This is already becoming increasingly true for code and software. The next step is writing and then media.
Most of all writing makes me want to vomit. It's not impossible to write well with AI, but it's the same argument as vibe-coded slop vs. a senior engineer using the tools carefully. I'd be inclined to accept the expert's opinion here.
I think this was fairly obvious and fair 1 - 2 years ago. Now though, I have to wonder if people who think this with such conviction are falling for the toupee fallacy.
You said it yourself: someone you consider a well known (and presumably accomplished?) author thinks AI is pretty good at writing.
So what am I missing? What’s the most charitable explanation for how anyone can think LLMs are good at writing?
It's like how evolution taught humans that sugar indicates a good densely-packed food source, so then corporations just started putting sugar in everything and humans eat it as ravenously as they eat actual food.
I can imagine something like ChatGPT Work with markdown/python/CSV's can do quite some magic for such writers.
Writers (older genre writers particularly) tend to be a bit behind the technological curve, and they stick with whatever works. If you want to see a treasure trove of "old web" sites, look up the site of any sci-fi or fantasy author. Chances are its design and layout still look like something from the late 90s.
The vast majority of AI apps don't actually solve any novel problems (pun intended come at me,) they're just new versions of existing solutions "but with AI."
Like if something is AI written and it gets you those LinkedIn thought leader upvotes does it matter? The readers thought your LLM-authored hot take about the economy was interesting enough.
I think it depends on the context too. Dale Carnegie (in his famous Win Friends.. book) mentioned how it's annoying to receive letters that say Dictated But Not Read. So people don't want to read (for example) a twitter reply or email that's written on their behalf by an 'agent'
But I have been using Sonnet to write some Youtube narrations and I think I've discovered a kind of value that is not 'AI slop'. I already posted one of them -- about the giant pink hologram in Blade Runner 2049 -- and it's been getting thousands of views and a dozens of likes when clipped into shorts. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sK-TsLQkIos]
The text is like: "The neon is pink. Her hair is blue. Her face is light. She smiles because she was made to smile, and somewhere beneath the awareness of that fact is the older, simpler, more animal truth: a face is smiling at you. Someone said your name. Someone said “you look lonely” and meant it as an invitation rather than a wound."
To me that is a kind of LLM writing that's "value above replacement". Like if I lost that Sonnet 4.6 script I wouldn't be able to get it again it was just a particular permutation of the neural network manifold that emerged from our discussion about the movie and the style I wanted etc.
So maybe full commodity writing (here's the summary of the POTUS' speech) or VAR can get resonance. What seems dissonant/annoying is stuff that's in the middle that's designed to be a person's voice like an Op-Ed etc
Is it just a case of throwing more and more resources at a pattern recognition machine with no upper limit except the energy of the universe and the economy of the algorithms?
Someone else suggested the maximum intelligence is capped as the average intelligence of its training data, which is an interesting take.
I wonder how concerned writers and publishers are about copyright of AI written text? As I understand it, in a lot of jurisdictions, AI products are not covered by copyright.
Documentation, marketing, prose, it’s all horrible slop writing, immediately recognisable regardless of model
This is just untrue.
There's a lot of money in claiming it's true, with varying levels of hedging and insincerity, but AI writing follows the pattern of AI everything else: if you're not competent to judge quality, then you think it is high quality.
David Goggins is kind of a perfect example of this. There is zero value in an AI-written book that isn't attached directly to his public persona and media presence. Maybe today he can use AI to write the book, but it's still tied to his video media of doing tough challenges, etc. An AI-first author writing such books would get nowhere, as he/she has no credibility.
That all aside, I actually think the most philosophically interesting result of LLMs is that ideas actually end up mattering a lot more than execution. The LLM can't really think for you, and so your knowledge and experiences are actually what matters, as it determines "what you prompt."
In short, the authors that win the future will be ones with robust personal brands and a big social media footprint. The days of the mysterious writer that gets chosen and published by a small group of elites at the publishing house is probably over... at least until the ecosystem becomes so messy that curators become necessary again.
I can pretty much guarantee that you read AI writing multiple times per day without even noticing, nevermind vomiting.
smilespray•30m ago