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Margaret Atwood: My Voice and Mind Are Not Replicable

• webmaven 3y ago
  https://archive.ph/ziaaE https://archive.ph/ziaaE
• chewmieser 3y ago
  I liked her take. Maybe AI will continue to improve to the point that it understands some of the literary devices she mentions but it’s like anything AI generates so far - devoid of soul.
  • stuckinhell 3y ago
    I would say to try one of the novel writing open source built AI's before you solidify that opinion. They are advancing fast and furiously, my husbands D&D group uses AI for story telling and narratives, and it's been quite compelling, interesting, and dare I say even funny and insightful.
• throwuwu 3y ago
  An unimaginative take for a scifi writer
  • YeGoblynQueenne 3y ago
    Which one?
• harshreality 3y ago
  Current popular AI (LLMs, music generation, image generation) doesn't have a concept of facts, structure and sequence; they don't have an emotional concept of something on the edge of novelty, but not so novel that it's jarring and chaotic. However, that says nothing about the future. Her essay is attention-seeking nonsense. She can't predict the future of art-generating AIs. Nobody can. This way she can write a "mea culpa" and admit to being wrong to get some additional attention for herself and her works once AI renders human production of new works largely pointless—because nobody will be able to verify it's human-generated rather than machine-generated, and human-generated works will cost more.
  • stoorafa 3y ago
    You’re re-stating points from the article, what mea culpa would she need to make? FTA: > But judging from the attempt recently made with one of these entities—“Write a Margaret Atwood science-fiction short story about a dystopian future”—anything more complex and convincing is as yet beyond it. The result, quite frankly, was pedestrian in the extreme, and if I actually wrote like that, I would defenestrate myself immediately. The program, so far, does not understand figurative language, let alone irony and allusion, and its flat-footed prose was the opposite of effective storytelling. But who knows what the machines might yet achieve? you may say. I’ll wait and see. Maybe they’ll at least turn out a mediocre murder mystery or two.
    • harshreality 3y ago
      That, as a writer of science fiction, she can't imagine AIs will ever turn out anything more than a "mediocre" work of fiction. The game AI naysayers like to play is that anything not made by a human is inherently mediocre, because value is largely subjective, and they implicitly define away the possibility of a great AI creator because knowing it was made by AI ruins it for them. The same narrative existed for go, even the fall and winter before the Alphago–Lee Sedol match. The AI beat Fan Hui, but was still mediocre and would never challenge top professionals for the foreseeable future. There would be inherent limits an AI would run up against because it lacked some quality necessary to be a top-level competitor (or artist).
      • cma 3y ago
        She doesn't say that is all it will turn out, it seems you are adding that in to discredit her; she says wait and see and it may at least be able to turn that out.
        • harshreality 3y ago
          So her essay is content-free. "This may happen, or it may not." Great. Thanks for your input, Margaret.
• xvector 3y ago
  Maybe not perfectly, but certainly close enough.
• cainxinth 3y ago
  At the rate of AI development these days, I think she should have added a “yet” to the end of her title just to be safe.
• mimd 3y ago
  I expected a more probing take from a sci-fi writer. After all, to examine in depth the chasm between her and chatgpt is to be at the forefront of science! But perhaps it's too much to hope for any deeper interest. Her scifi is and was a frosting atop political essays, to make them palatable for mass consumption. Still, I must give her the benefit of the doubt and excuse her lack of effort. The Atlantic does that to people.
  • SenAnder 3y ago
    Sci-fi? Goodness no! She writes speculative fiction. Stuff that "could really happen". Science fiction is, according to Atwood, no more than "talking squids in outer space." https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/aug/10/speculative-or-science-fiction-as-margaret-atwood-shows-there-isnt-much-distinction https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/aug/10/speculative-or...
    • didntcheck 3y ago
      As much as I dislike the way sci-fi is looked down on (or at least used to be), I also think referring to socially-speculative fiction like Handmaid's and 1984 as sci-fi makes no sense. Nobody's reading 1984 for the telescreens! Nor calling Animal Farm "fantasy" because it has talking animals Sure, sci-fi is often very speculative, but lots also includes (for example) mystery elements, yet it would be strange to necessarily call all mystery stories set in a slightly future or alternate-contemporary timeline "sci-fi" I guess you could roughly taxonomize stories on "socially speculative" and "technologically speculative" axes. A high value in the latter often pushes the former up, but not necessarily the other way
      • YeGoblynQueenne 3y ago
        >> Nobody's reading 1984 for the telescreens! Surprisingly, nobody ever read Asimov for the positronic brains, either.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    • 3y ago
• rcme 3y ago
  This is a problem that philosophy has long tried to tackle. Imagine your mother dies in a car accident on her way home from the store. A mad scientist finds her lifeless corpse on the side of the road and creates a perfect robotic replica, complete with an AI “brain” trained to act just like your mom. Would you feel differently about the robot compared to your real mom? My answer is that yes, I would care. For the same reason I would prefer the original Mona Lisa compared to an atomically-perfect replica. There is something special about unique individuals and objects, and this is not something that can be replicated by a machine.
  • kmlx 3y ago
    > There is something special about unique individuals and objects, and this is not something that can be replicated by a machine. of course. but what happens when you can replicate 1:1? would you still feel the same way? will the person that was replicated feel wrong for it? i don’t think things are as clear cut in this scenario.
  • fizx 3y ago
    What if replica mom was in your life for ten years before someone told you? I suspect you'd have a brief moment of shock and betrayal, and a few days/weeks later continue on as if nothing happened. (at least with respect to love for replica mom--i imagine you'll struggle with other issues forever)
    • gochi 3y ago
      I don't imagine you would get over such a shock or love them even near as much as you used to. That's practically a traumatic event, and would lead you to distrust everything else in your reality. We can look to people who have been adopted and how they feel about the situation as examples, a lot of people will continue to yearn for knowing who their biological parents are. It creates almost two forms of love, not lesser just different. Unless we get replica births!
  • paradox460 3y ago
    It's the star trek teleporter problem. Every time anyone teleports, they aren't traveling through space. Their fleshy meat construct is destroyed, and a nearly identical construct is recreated at the other side. Is it still the same person?
• stuckinhell 3y ago
  I understand the defensive posture many artists, writers, and art adjacent fields are taking, but I think they are missing the point (perhaps on purpose). Does the fact your individuality might not be 100% replicable matter and also who does it matter too ? I'd argue it really doesn't matter for most hollywood and consumer products. Art for art's sake is niche and irrelevant to the vast majority of people trying to scrape by. For example, people think sitcoms need to be funny, but that's not quite true. Lorne Michaels from SNL, learned the hard way that Sitcoms need to provide comfort first and foremost to be popular. Art and writing will likely move back to the old world way of requiring patronage than relying on hollywood style consumerism as people use AI to create their own "comfort" food style media and fiction.
  • haxiomic 3y ago
    > Art and writing will likely move back to the old world way of requiring patronage What a sad outcome in the pursuit of making the world a better place
    • wyldfire 3y ago
      Isn't this already what's done in many cases when artists take on donations via Patreon? Or selling wares on Etsy? Maybe it's not even bad that creating a corporation to manage art doesn't require a B&M gallery or all of the work that goes into maintaining a physical location. Maybe it's better if the funding goes more directly to the artist than a publisher.
    • stuckinhell 3y ago
      Why is that sad ? The AI will empower people to write their own stories just not for money.
• Balgair 3y ago
  I use these various AIs for fiction writing. I think Margaret misses some of their utility. You would never just squeeze out a novel with AIs as they currently stand. They are far too primitive and the context window if far too small right now. However, they are excellent at speeding up the process of fiction writing with humans involved. You get a draft together, but you feel like it could be more dramatic. So, you take a few scenes that you've written, put them in the AI, and then ask it to make them more dramatic. It comes back with okay-ish ideas. You iterate again. And again. Finally, you have something that really feels like what you're looking for. Then you send that out to your editor or friends and family. Instead of getting very high quality feedback in a week or a day (lucky!), you can get middling quality back in minutes. Yeah, it's not the absolute best, but it gets you out of your headspace and gets you iterating faster. You then send that better draft out for much faster feedback. It's like the rubber duck every programmer uses, only it talks back. There are other ways that I tend to use these AIs, but the idea is the same. You're not using them point-blank. You use them as a part of the process, and it speeds up that process as a result. Now, of course, she's not wrong here about publishers. They'll squeeze these AIs out for just crap and try to sell that, and, unfortunately, be successful. When author royalties and advances drop to $0, you can tolerate a lot in the long tail.
  • vintagedave 3y ago
    Could you share some examples of what an AI had written that is acceptable or useful for fiction writing, please? All AI-generated text I've seen had a certain feel or tone that was quite different from 'literature'. I'm really curious to see what you've managed to get them to do, and if you can, even which AIs you've used. Thankyou!
    • Balgair 3y ago
      For fiction writing, all of them work more or less the same. The trick to get the AI to produce more iteratable content is to use a really long prompt. The more specific you can be, the better. So, don't say 'in the style of Hemingway' to get something like Hemingway. Say something more like 'in the style of the character of Timeaus, in Plato's Timeaus, as translated by J. Harward' to get something that feels more like an ancient platonic dialog. Don't say ' I want a heroic character who fights dragons', say something like ' I want a maiden in distress over her recent divorce from her alcoholic husband of 7 years, Fred, and the incarceration of her mother for the 4th time for drug abuse. This maiden lives in upstate New York, and ....'. Give it as much as you can. And again, you use AI as an accelerant, not as the generator of the initial ideas. You still have to do that on your own. You can have the AI tweak things, suggest things, but having it make things up from whole cloth isn't the best. Take what it gives you, throw half away, iterate on the rest, repeat. Like with a longer prompt, if you give the AI the entire text that you need a hand with, and then ask it very specific things, you will get better results.
• lusus_naturae 3y ago
  Her voice is replicable to the point that your average NYT best sellers list etc. fiction reader will not be able to tell the difference. Her mind is a separate matter I think because there's stochasticisty in the brain, to some degree. I'd love to do a proper study on this, but that's my view currently. I base it on the way the other cells in the body normally behave.