Artificial intelligence still has some way to go

How does 'Chat GPT automates 3rd rate record reviews' stop people that really want to write. Surely it's a challenge to people that actually want to do it (not just lazily opine) on a record to look at these outputs and come up with something better.

If bad, lazy writers are being discouraged this is a benefit.

― xyzzzz__, Monday, November 27, 2023 7:55 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

i was thinking more about people who will never be a great writer, but still felt the urge to organize their thoughts in writing and share their perspective with an audience. i think it is a nice skill to cultivate. maybe no nicer than painting or playing piano, but it is the one that i have the most experience with.

There are community settings where you can learn to paint and play music. Don't see that disappearing either.

Could even in future be community settings where ppl learn how to get the ai prompts just so in order to produce a bad fantasy novel/heavy rock album cover

"Community settings," yes, that has always been true.

My first painting class at the community center was in 1982. My family runs a ballet school, and I play in three bands. I edited a literary magazine.

However, there are people out there whose main concern is not whether they get to DO a creative thing, but rather whether they can pay the rent with it, feed their family, buy a shirt, go to a dentist. That's a different challenge.

Doesn't basically every "how to write good" advice start "write bad for a long time then write okay"? If that disappears as a professional option, then that will tilt the demographics towards people who can afford not to worry about making a living in the trenches - which I don't imagine xyzzzz intends as an outcome.

How does 'Chat GPT automates 3rd rate record reviews' stop people that really want to write. Surely it's a challenge to people that actually want to do it (not just lazily opine) on a record to look at these outputs and come up with something better.

If bad, lazy writers are being discouraged this is a benefit.

― xyzzzz__

writing badly doesn't make you a bad writer. writing badly is how you become a good writer.

this is maybe a sensitive subject to this group but when i was younger i was... very judgemental of music criticism. my perception of music writing was that it tended towards the sort of stuff GPT can spit out on Funeral. nowadays... i don't think that sort of stuff is a condemnation of P4K-style writing.

i write because it's a learning process. i learn things about myself as a person and as a writer when i put effort into challenging myself in my writing. what does ai learn from writing? does it get any insight from putting out that review, or is it blindly regurgitating?

when i look at ai writing i see something that's really great at form, but not so great in the way of content. even if a human looks at that and learns to write in that style, they're inevitably going to express some amount of meaning, to reveal things they have that the machines won't. even if a viewer can't _tell_ if something is machine generated or human generated... i think even the worst writing has an effect, good, bad, both, on the person doing the writing, expresses something about them.

humans are _creative_. that's an essential part of our nature. all of the sophistication of ai just helps us to understand what human creativity looks like.

i was thinking more about people who will never be a great writer, but still felt the urge to organize their thoughts in writing and share their perspective with an audience. i think it is a nice skill to cultivate. maybe no nicer than painting or playing piano, but it is the one that i have the most experience with.

― treeship.

this i think... i'm more skeptical of this. the thing is that we _are_ influenced by ai work. i don't think this is an ai thing, but the way we think and express ourselves is influenced by the norms around us. i have a friend who... she's very self-conscious about her writing. she envies my writing skill, wishes she could write better. i don't think ai would make her better at expressing the things she wants to express. it would just produce writing that better conforms to a certain norm.

The delicious irony of ChatGPT and the other text-transform engines is that the detached, depersonalised aggregation/synthesis of other sources is their forte, whereas as academics we have been using it as evidence of intelligent comprehension. Now we can't back away from it fast enough and are scratching around to imagine what else might actually constitute evidence of learning.

― assert (matttkkkk)

i mean to me this isn't just irony... academia actively frustrates me in a lot of ways. academic writing, academic publishing. one of my biggest role models, maybe even one of my heroes, is a lady named susan stryker. her work has done a lot to help me understand myself, understand who i am, what it means to be trans. she's hugely influential to me and also, i mean, a pretty marginal figure. most people don't know about her. probably her greatest professional accomplishment has been her role in establishing trans studies as a discipline. she writes, teaches, mentors... and she does it well. trans studies work, though, is academic. it's shot through with academic jargon. to my mind, this doesn't make it superior writing. a lot of academia just strikes me as so much... gatekeeping. learning words, learning concepts, learning to say things in a certain way.

working in academia makes a person's work inaccessible. not just in an intellectual sense - in a very literal sense. people are doing this work and if you want to read stuff published in TSQ, either you're in academia and have access to it, or, like me, you scour libgen for this dribs and drabs that leak out. i think the work of stryker and trans studies has had an effect, a profound effect. when i see abigail thorn in a latex dress explaining philosophical concepts, to me that approach is a descendent of susan stryker's work. and lots of other people's work as well, including, interestingly enough, brian de palma... but of all her influences, the philosophical ones are among the least known.

to my mind someone like thorn isn't a "popularizer", someone like jared diamond who distorts history to make it accessible. changing the form changes the content, changes the message, but thorn's message is, i think... an evolution of academia, rather than just a dumbing down. and it's way, way, way more accessible than academia - not just for the general public to see, but for people to _create_. they're two different approaches, and i think they're both important - making space for trans people within the academy, and finding a path forward outside of the academy.

-

in terms of the way it educates, so much. i don't mind that educators are being challenged to find new ways to connect with their students. in particular the way the novel is valorized as an art form is... i think excessive. the novel is only one kind of writing, yet for a long time one's worth as a fiction writer has been judged by one's ability to write novels. i've seen lots of writers i respect complain about these norms. ambrose bierce, in his "devil's dictionary", defined the novel as "a short story padded". kurt vonnegut jr lamented the loss of short story publishing as a detriment to writing. bierce, his forte was journalism. i feel like if i was ever going to make a living in writing it would have been in journalism. i grew up reading books written by newspaper columnists. it's ephemeral writing, just like my writing here is ephemeral writing, but it's got advantages that my writing just doesn't. i never thought i'd say that i miss erma bombeck and lewis grizzard... well, i don't, i guess. their writing was ephemeral. what makes me sad is that my generation didn't produce any bombecks or grizzards.

at the same time i mean... there are advantages. i see memes pointing out stuff in early 20th century newspapers that's clearly recognizable as shitposting. it's not like the ideas they expressed are dead... younger generations have just found new ways of expressing them, new ways of communicating. writing is no longer the be-all and end-all. this is one of the things that frustrates me about my compulsion to write... it's good writing, but it's kind of the definition of tl;dr. there are other, better ways to communicate the sorts of things i want to communicate.

it's been a long time since people have gotten paid by the word the way l. ron hubbard did. i don't miss those times.

all of this word vomit is to say that, to me, ai isn't undermining healthy institutions. it's attacking the weaknesses in creative work, rather than its strengths. the styles of communication we've become attached to, the crutches we lean on, it kicks them out from under us. it's cruel to kick the crutches out from under a cripple. it's crueler to break a person's legs.

Andrew, that is often the story for interns and editorial assistants in NYC publishing - $3,000 a month in rent, $0 salary. Hmm. I wonder what people are able to make that work.

Could it be... people with rich parents? As a result, NYC publishing has been a province of rich people for centuries. Do you think that affects what books get published and what voices get heard?

i'm starting to think that some of the people i know who make art for a living might have wealthy parents

The delicious irony of ChatGPT and the other text-transform engines is that the detached, depersonalised aggregation/synthesis of other sources is their forte, whereas as academics we have been using it as evidence of intelligent comprehension. Now we can't back away from it fast enough and are scratching around to imagine what else might actually constitute evidence of learning.
― assert (matttkkkk), Sunday, November 26, 2023 10:57 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

STEM's final revenge against the humanities. it was a murder-suicide though because this thing also codes and analyzes data.

it's cruel to kick the crutches out from under a cripple.

goddammit that's another shitty part about getting old, i think it was offensive of me to say that last word. my apologies.

i know we have a lot of compsci people here but jfc fuck STEM forever

even my presence on the internet at all makes me feel nothing but scorn and shame

Lol @z_tbd.

John Adams is alleged to have said "I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain."

What might a current version be? "I study investment banking so that my children can study management consulting, so that their children can study immersive virtual gaming and lo-fi trip-hop."

"i study machine learning so my child can become a twitch streamer"

Lol @z_tbd.

John Adams is alleged to have said "I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain."

― Iris Demented (Ye Mad Puffin)

john adams said that? dang i thought that was yang wenli

What might a current version be? "I study investment banking so that my children can study management consulting, so that their children can study immersive virtual gaming and lo-fi trip-hop."

― Iris Demented (Ye Mad Puffin)

"i'm a data analyst because it gives me the opportunity to do the things that are actually important until we get rid of capitalism"

https://futurism.com/sports-illustrated-ai-generated-writers

"But now that it's under the management of The Arena Group, parts of the magazine seem to have devolved into a Potemkin Village in which phony writers are cooked up out of thin air, outfitted with equally bogus biographies and expertise to win readers' trust, and used to pump out AI-generated buying guides that are monetized by affiliate links to products that provide a financial kickback when readers click them."

i know we have a lot of compsci people here but jfc fuck STEM forever

― butt dumb tight my boners got boners (the table is the table), Monday, 27 November 2023 bookmarkflaglink

even my presence on the internet at all makes me feel nothing but scorn and shame

― butt dumb tight my boners got boners (the table is the table), Monday, 27 November 2023 bookmarkflaglink

Chill out...a little

"humans are _creative_. that's an essential part of our nature."

Yes to that, don't feel chat GPT us breaking that.

So this:

"all of the sophistication of ai just helps us to understand what human creativity looks like."

Is to give ai too much credit, on what I've seen so far.

why aren't they doing more research to investigate how easily AI can eliminate CEO and board of directors positions?

Robots would probably be really good at firing people. "The algorithm would like you to clean out your desk. Please shred your keycard and a Roomba will come by shortly to vacuum it up."

I research ai and labor management, and there is at least one start-up out there that offers "AI-based" termination services

i'm sure chatbot will be happy to recommend resources for dealing with terminated and looking for new employment

ok "ai-based" wasn't quite right, but: https://www.onwardshr.com/severance-package-management

There was a movie about termination services, called Up in the Air. Anna Kendrick, George Clooney, Vera Farmiga.

Sixth Sense-style spoiler alert: Clooney was a robot the whole time.

I don’t think layoffs and firings could be any worse! But there’s always room for innovation

"all of the sophistication of ai just helps us to understand what human creativity looks like."

Is to give ai too much credit, on what I've seen so far.

― xyzzzz__

well in the sense that it allows us to rule out things that get taken for "creativity" but which in actuality can be done by machine

things are creative when human beings create them. the process of creativity is very humane and fulfilling. it allows people to feel proud of themselves. they produced something that is now in the world that others can benefit one.

maybe this is a chair. maybe it is a poem. maybe it is a song.

ai can probably produce reasonable approximations of these things. but they don't mean the same thing.

the process is what matters. and if ai makes the process seem useless, that absolutely sucks. it is sucking the life out of an already dessicated populace, medicating themselves with opiates and alcohol, foreclosing one path to healing or meaning. or not foreclsing --- MOCKING.

ai is a very big problem. existentially. i will post my op-ed about this again, because i am shameless: https://architizer.com/blog/inspiration/stories/ai-will-destroy-creativity-if-we-let-it/

i agree with you, treesh.

also sorry for my outburst earlier, it came out of despair.

Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump
·
29 Dec 2014
Deals are my art form. Other people paint beautifully or write poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals. That's how I get my kicks

https://futurism.com/sports-illustrated-ai-generated-writers

"But now that it's under the management of The Arena Group, parts of the magazine seem to have devolved into a Potemkin Village in which phony writers are cooked up out of thin air, outfitted with equally bogus biographies and expertise to win readers' trust, and used to pump out AI-generated buying guides that are monetized by affiliate links to products that provide a financial kickback when readers click them."

― rob, Monday, 27 November 2023

What a story.

(this is what i mean by "good enough", xposts to kate! good enough to pass for sports illustrated, even if it gets caught in the year 2023. the ability of LLMs to fool enough people with bland nonsense isn't going to get worse -- it'll only get better. at the same time it feels like a very elitist thing to say "it's not good enough for me, but it seems to be good enough for other people", even though that's close to what i think. i wish it was bad enough that people would reject it out of hand. but i don't really see that rejection. it seems 'good enough'!

That story doesn't say whether it's passing any kind of test on readers or not. It doesn't say whether it makes any money or whether it will be sustainable in the long term.

What that story is telling me is what we already knew: the internet has broken magazines and newspapers and made the old world unsustainable. It's just very funny how generative content has combined to deepen that break.

in the matrix they used people as batteries i think

https://bsky.app/profile/lukeplunkett.com/post/3kf7fkp6y4d2f

john
@johnsemley3000
Sports Illustrated, which recently published content by A.I. "authors," once paid William Faulkner to watch a a hockey game between the Rangers and Canadiens. he compared the action to "the frantic darting of the weightless bugs which run on the surface of stagnant pools."

---

This is not a lot better than the generated thing on volleyball

This is a conclusion on the thread around that AI singer songwriter

---

Osita Nwanevu
@OsitaNwanevu
Anyway, seems like the main tools we've got to protect people's ears, eyes, and jobs re: AI art at the moment are copyright law and snobbery. Not keen on leaning too heavily on copyright law for obvious reasons and I'm not a lawyer anyway. So snobbery it is. For me, at least

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Guess the argument I am seeing here is that aesthetics will be corrupted overtime but I'm not sure. If I see people buying it I will pay attention. Right now it's just a moral panic.

xp i want to lol but come on, it is better. Tho kind of funny on its own terms for being self-conscious and try-hard.

i once read absalom, absalom! in one sitting. (weird period in my life emotionally). can ai do that????

(this is what i mean by "good enough", xposts to kate! good enough to pass for sports illustrated, even if it gets caught in the year 2023. the ability of LLMs to fool enough people with bland nonsense isn't going to get worse -- it'll only get better. at the same time it feels like a very elitist thing to say "it's not good enough for me, but it seems to be good enough for other people", even though that's close to what i think. i wish it was bad enough that people would reject it out of hand. but i don't really see that rejection. it seems 'good enough'!

― z_tbd

i guess what i'm saying isn't really a judgement on the quality of the writing per se, whether or not it passes a turing test or whatever... my focus is more on the material conditions under which ai is used, the capitalists who replace good writers with "good enough" ai. that's the important thing to me, not the ai itself.

when i see that sports illustrated is replacing writers with ai, i look at that within the context of print magazine publishing in 2023... a lot of magazines have closed, and the ones that haven't, one of the big-name examples is newsweek, which is pretty infamous for having its brand bought out at bargain prices by grifters who are using it to try and spread right-wing propaganda.

i lost a career once due to "good enough" technology. i went to school for medical transcription. i type 100 words a minute (this might not surprise anybody who is aware of my posting volume here) and i have a pretty good vocabulary. it was a good living. until they came up with computers that could listen to a recording and figure out what the speaker was saying. it wasn't perfect - not even to the level of youtube's auto-subtitles, at the time - but it was "good enough". it didn't get rid of the entire field of transcription, mind you. there still had to be humans involved to listen to the recordings and check them for accuracy. i mean you're talking medical chart notes here, the legal ramifications of having a computer mishear you...

so people with lots of experience in the field started doing that. i was one of the people without lots of experience in the field. i was 33 years old and i guessed i needed to find another career.

when i look at the material conditions people here, people who had careers doing journalism, are going through... they remind me a lot of what i went through 15 or so years ago.

i don't regret that i don't have a career typing up chart notes. i don't see the point of me spending my life doing work that isn't _necessary_. i switched tracks and i'm now working in a field that didn't exist when i first went to college. it was good work five years ago. now it's increasingly redundant and unnecessary. ai does a lot of what i used to do.

the issue isn't ai for me. the issue is what the fuck life i'm supposed to have when careers pop into and out of existence in a five year span. maybe our value as human beings shouldn't be dependent on what we're paid to do. maybe the people who perpetuate those values are _a problem_.

reading that this morning felt good, thank you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWmkXRrr2YY

lmao

lol yess

why aren't they doing more research to investigate how easily AI can eliminate CEO and board of directors positions?

NetDragon Websoft, a Chinese gaming company, claims to be using an AI program as its CEO, though it's almost certainly just a PR stunt. little-to-no information about what it's actually doing
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/netdragon-appoints-its-first-virtual-ceo-301613062.html

in medicine people have been using decision support for doctors which i assume they dont want to use for personal pride reason but it make ssense

so why not a ceo software

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK543516/

I just want to humourlessly point out "AI CEOs" would mean software optimized to maximize shareholder value making decisions about layoffs, plant locations, personnel policies, wages, etc. Please understand I'm not saying human CEOs are good, just that being ruled by an algorithm could be worse!

the issue isn't ai for me. the issue is what the fuck life i'm supposed to have when careers pop into and out of existence in a five year span. maybe our value as human beings shouldn't be dependent on what we're paid to do. maybe the people who perpetuate those values are _a problem_.

― Kate (rushomancy), Tuesday, November 28, 2023 9:43 AM (six hours ago)

I started reading Brian Merchant's new book on the Luddites on Sunday and he mentions how at the dawn of the industrial revolution using machines to eliminate livelihoods was perceived as a moral question. He even quotes Elizabeth I telling some inventor guy he can't have a patent for a knitting machine because it would destroy jobs

Okay I had to try to track that Elizabeth quote down: https://conversableeconomist.blogspot.com/2019/03/the-story-of-william-lee-and-his.html

Just wait till AI CEOs have to deal with AI peons unionizing...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFfaL3_Mv0s

It seems more likely that companies charging usurious royalties and licensing on monopolized AI models will be the thing that keeps human labor a thing far past the point where anyone would really want to do it.