4 ms·

Completely agree. People really don't understand where this is going. It's not like society lacks mediocre mid-brow content as it is. LLM's and diffusion models

Completely agree. People really don't understand where this is going. It's not like society lacks mediocre mid-brow content as it is. LLM's and diffusion models reduce the cost of production to basically zero, and we now have an endless supply mediocre content. Extend it out a few 10x improvements, and we get an endless stream of so-so Netflix shows produced with zero effort. Basically WALL-E made real.

piyush_soni 4y ago
People are ultimately going to do that. And if we really can't figure out a book written by an AI from that written by a human, then what's the point of all of it? Eventually good authors will still succeed as their writing style will not be squeezed out of the grand summation of all the writings in the world.
- marcell 4y ago
  There are a lot of negative consequences: 1. Entire classes of skilled jobs are eliminated, only the most elite writers and artists can make money 2. Value for story creation gets concentrated in the few companies that own and operate the best LLM's and best stable diffusion models 3. Society becomes more fragmented because we are all watching different content These are just a few I'm able to think of in 2 minutes. It's a common mistake to assume all technological progress is an unadulterated good. Just look at all the unanticipated negatives that came out of the computer revolution, like every technological revolution before it.
  - Towaway69 4y ago
    Agree that the assumption is that progress, no matter what, is good and healthy. If one considers how inefficient humans are (daily consumption, heating, transport..etc) and how in comparison computers are extremely efficient (once they have been built), you realise where "pure" progress will take us. Ephemeralization is the term Buckmeister-Fuller used.
  - piyush_soni 4y ago
    I'm not at all assuming all technological progress is an unadulterated good - in fact, nothing is, everything would have a downside if it has an upside. All I'm saying is it's still bound to happen and we can do nothing about it. It's not the first time that 'entire classes of skilled jobs' have been eliminated. It's the natural side effect of automation and has happened with every generation of new products. Industry automation might have taken millions of jobs away so far to give us better products faster. Tomorrow my job as a usual developer might be gone to these AI tools (though it's a far fetched thought), and I have to be prepared for it, and re-skill/up-skill myself if I ever sense that day is about to arrive.
safety1st 4y ago
It doesn't look to me like the cost of production was zero and the content really wasn't bad. For anyone who didn't read to the end, the author (operator?) explains his process: > I typed a series of prompts to ChatGPT to get it to write me a story with the following plot: > Once upon a time there was porcupine. Every day, she baked a loaf of bread. One day the loaf disappeared. Because of that, she had too much butter. Because of that, things got slippery. Until finally she opened the first ever butter theme park. He mentions elsewhere that generating the images was a lot of work. So basically he and his friends had an oddball premise for a story, and with some non-trivial amount of labor, he produced a story which was far from the worst thing I've read on HN. It was actually pretty clever for a kids' story and the illustrations were good. The finished product was better than the prompt. Somehow the process produced a fairy, a plot twist and slabs of butter riding a roller coaster. Where's the crisis here? A person came up with an idea and used a tool to generate a work product from it. Without that tool he would have needed to hire a professional illustrator and maybe a writer. I bet this took a fair bit of work to do right. But the technology enabled a creative work that wouldn't have occurred otherwise. I have no doubt there will be tons of crappy spam enabled by ChatGPT too, but frankly this little story wasn't it, it was humorous and I doubt it was a trivial endeavor.
- danielcorin 4y ago
  Thanks for the kind words
- marcell 4y ago
  > I doubt it was a trivial endeavor. Per authors comments above, it was indeed a trivial endeavor: a few hours to tweak the prompts and a few hours to make the site. Compare to the most basic children’s book, which would take at least 10 hours to illustrate for a professional (10 picture times one hour per picture).
  - quonn 4y ago
    So then found objects and ready-mades are also a trivial endeavour? These authors published one of the first stories like that and that alone makes it not trivial.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
quonn 4y ago
You don't have to watch those shows then. Most movies and other content is already garbage. It's up to you how you spend your time.

piyush_soni 4y ago

People are ultimately going to do that. And if we really can't figure out a book written by an AI from that written by a human, then what's the point of all of it? Eventually good authors will still succeed as their writing style will not be squeezed out of the grand summation of all the writings in the world.

marcell 4y ago
There are a lot of negative consequences: 1. Entire classes of skilled jobs are eliminated, only the most elite writers and artists can make money 2. Value for story creation gets concentrated in the few companies that own and operate the best LLM's and best stable diffusion models 3. Society becomes more fragmented because we are all watching different content These are just a few I'm able to think of in 2 minutes. It's a common mistake to assume all technological progress is an unadulterated good. Just look at all the unanticipated negatives that came out of the computer revolution, like every technological revolution before it.
- Towaway69 4y ago
  Agree that the assumption is that progress, no matter what, is good and healthy. If one considers how inefficient humans are (daily consumption, heating, transport..etc) and how in comparison computers are extremely efficient (once they have been built), you realise where "pure" progress will take us. Ephemeralization is the term Buckmeister-Fuller used.
- piyush_soni 4y ago
  I'm not at all assuming all technological progress is an unadulterated good - in fact, nothing is, everything would have a downside if it has an upside. All I'm saying is it's still bound to happen and we can do nothing about it. It's not the first time that 'entire classes of skilled jobs' have been eliminated. It's the natural side effect of automation and has happened with every generation of new products. Industry automation might have taken millions of jobs away so far to give us better products faster. Tomorrow my job as a usual developer might be gone to these AI tools (though it's a far fetched thought), and I have to be prepared for it, and re-skill/up-skill myself if I ever sense that day is about to arrive.

safety1st 4y ago

It doesn't look to me like the cost of production was zero and the content really wasn't bad. For anyone who didn't read to the end, the author (operator?) explains his process: > I typed a series of prompts to ChatGPT to get it to write me a story with the following plot: > Once upon a time there was porcupine. Every day, she baked a loaf of bread. One day the loaf disappeared. Because of that, she had too much butter. Because of that, things got slippery. Until finally she opened the first ever butter theme park. He mentions elsewhere that generating the images was a lot of work. So basically he and his friends had an oddball premise for a story, and with some non-trivial amount of labor, he produced a story which was far from the worst thing I've read on HN. It was actually pretty clever for a kids' story and the illustrations were good. The finished product was better than the prompt. Somehow the process produced a fairy, a plot twist and slabs of butter riding a roller coaster. Where's the crisis here? A person came up with an idea and used a tool to generate a work product from it. Without that tool he would have needed to hire a professional illustrator and maybe a writer. I bet this took a fair bit of work to do right. But the technology enabled a creative work that wouldn't have occurred otherwise. I have no doubt there will be tons of crappy spam enabled by ChatGPT too, but frankly this little story wasn't it, it was humorous and I doubt it was a trivial endeavor.

danielcorin 4y ago
Thanks for the kind words
marcell 4y ago
> I doubt it was a trivial endeavor. Per authors comments above, it was indeed a trivial endeavor: a few hours to tweak the prompts and a few hours to make the site. Compare to the most basic children’s book, which would take at least 10 hours to illustrate for a professional (10 picture times one hour per picture).
- quonn 4y ago
  So then found objects and ready-mades are also a trivial endeavour? These authors published one of the first stories like that and that alone makes it not trivial.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

quonn 4y ago

You don't have to watch those shows then. Most movies and other content is already garbage. It's up to you how you spend your time.