8 ms·

Whole areas of publishing are trying “have an expert write a book mostly with AI, then have an editor un-fuck it”. There are tons of businesses trying this “bri

Whole areas of publishing are trying “have an expert write a book mostly with AI, then have an editor un-fuck it”. There are tons of businesses trying this “brilliant” plan right now. From what I can tell, the labor savings is… low, and maybe zero. The output’s such trash, it takes enormous effort to clean it up. This stuff only seems to be a huge time-saver when someone doesn’t give any shits about how good the output is—so, mostly spam, scams, and astroturfing. [edit] to temper the pessimism, it is really nice in small ways, in capable hands. But it’s not gonna be replacing many workers any time soon. Outside helping editors and writers with idea generation and little touch-ups, it’s great for non-writers who want to maintain a consistent tone in e.g. marketing copy, but requires the operator to have good taste and to be fairly thoughtful, which means they’ve got to be above-average at this stuff to begin with.

krainboltgreene 3y ago
The second order effect is that because this effort is now possible every shadow or unknown contains this effort. Weirdly worded Reddit title? Must be an LLM. Poorly shot image? Must be StableDiffusion.
- ben_w 3y ago
  > StableDiffusion New underground marketing campaign by Polydactyls Against Mutilation, or lazy excuse when you get caught using the machine?
ben_w 3y ago
Well before GenAI, CStross has blogged about the value-add of editors being quite large. I suspect he probably can't give a complete answer to the relative expense of human editors for human vs. AI writing given that he's said that the merest hint of GenAI in his profession would be a reputational death sentence. But he posts here sometimes, so: *waves*
atoav 3y ago
LLMS, like cryptocurrency has now been discovered by the business bros with the dollar signs for eyes. This will make a big part of the world will get actively shittier and aside from actual cool and useful applications like summarization etc. I predict that the malicious usecases outweigh the good ones at least 10:1.
add-sub-mul-div 3y ago
It's more a statement on the time than the technology, but at this moment GenAI was destined to become a force multiplier for laziness, grift, profit, and predation more so than forces that will make society better.

krainboltgreene 3y ago

The second order effect is that because this effort is now possible every shadow or unknown contains this effort. Weirdly worded Reddit title? Must be an LLM. Poorly shot image? Must be StableDiffusion.

ben_w 3y ago
> StableDiffusion New underground marketing campaign by Polydactyls Against Mutilation, or lazy excuse when you get caught using the machine?

ben_w 3y ago

Well before GenAI, CStross has blogged about the value-add of editors being quite large. I suspect he probably can't give a complete answer to the relative expense of human editors for human vs. AI writing given that he's said that the merest hint of GenAI in his profession would be a reputational death sentence. But he posts here sometimes, so: *waves*

atoav 3y ago

LLMS, like cryptocurrency has now been discovered by the business bros with the dollar signs for eyes. This will make a big part of the world will get actively shittier and aside from actual cool and useful applications like summarization etc. I predict that the malicious usecases outweigh the good ones at least 10:1.

add-sub-mul-div 3y ago

It's more a statement on the time than the technology, but at this moment GenAI was destined to become a force multiplier for laziness, grift, profit, and predation more so than forces that will make society better.