[...]
> The value of an author’s work will not just be in how well it sells among humans, but how deep it has been included within the foundational knowledge of these intelligent memory-based systems. That potency will be what is boasted about. That will be an author’s legacy.
The fact that nominally "sane" humans with sizeable followings can publish megalomaniac articles like these and present them as anything other than descriptions of a dystopian hellscape makes me quite pessimistic about our future.
What even is the point anymore? They want flesh and blood robots to feed the algorithm overlords. They don't even seem to realise they're basically killing their profession/passion in doing so, although I doubt any writer with an ounce of self respect, passion and skill would perceive llms as anything other than repulsive monstrosities
That's quite an uninformed position to take. I suggest talking to more writers.
But yeah, feel free to be honoured that some company can profit from your work without recompensing you in any way.
Authors who make money primarily by creating art and selling it, and who do not wish to monetize their work through selling their persona, might have more of reason to be upset by the blatant violation of their legal rights by Sam Altman and his friends.
::slow clap:: Congratulations everybody. This is the future of pedagogy, learning, creativity, and appreciating things that we’ve bestowed upon humanity. I’ll bet our mamas are proud. Hopefully, now that writing, visual art and music are solved problems, we can clap the dust off of our hands and tackle life’s true inefficiencies that we’re clearly worse at than computers — eating a crisp apple off of the tree in autumn, falling in love, seeing a breathtaking summer sunrise over some Atlantic sand dunes… all that garbage that we couldn’t possibly pay the same amount of attention to or munge it up and share it with others nearly as efficiently as a computer could. That’s right. Let’s get to work on making the lean, productive life something that everybody has to want to aspire to, lest those troglodytes get left behind! I want the hyper-efficient Soylent version of making love to someone I just fell in love with so I can get back to work and make computer magic happen.
"Against the power of Mordor there can be no victory. We must join with him, Gandalf. We must join with Sauron. It would be wise, my friend."
This argument makes far less sense for memoir and fiction. The goal of these forms of writing is to induce specific emotional states in the reader. Having them regurgitated or summarized via a LLM does nothing to achieve their goal.
bgwalter•2h ago
And the entire linked piece is written in this propaganda style. That no longer works except as a morale booster for "AI" cultists who feel that their funding will disappear soon.
measurablefunc•16m ago