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An exercise for the haters: The following represents a crude history of human verbal communication. Please complete the series with the next term. Take as much

An exercise for the haters: The following represents a crude history of human verbal communication. Please complete the series with the next term. Take as much time as you need: - speech and oration - written word - paper - the printing press - the word processor - ? PSA their argument about ablism is spot on and is obviously so, if your understanding of what "AI" is goes beyond prompting an LLM to "do your work for you." So many knee-jerk critiques of "AI" are premised and possible on when the critic has little or no understanding of what "AI" is, even today.

jrflowers 2y ago
> if your understanding of what "AI" is goes beyond prompting an LLM to "do your work for you." This is a good point. If you ignore the fact that this is the ubiquitous understanding of what AI is and then envision a different, more charitable and far less popular definition of it, their point about ablism becomes more possibly arguable
- cthalupa 2y ago
  I talk to a lot of "normal" people about AI stuff pretty frequently, as the closest thing in my friend/family group to an expert. Almost all of them have used it and almost all of them understand that you can use it in ranges varying from asking for specific advice on things, to asking it to do portions of things, to asking it to do the whole thing. I don't think any of them would think that "Using AI to help you write a 50k word short story" would necessarily indicate telling ChatGPT to just write the story for you based on a short description.
  - jrflowers 2y ago
    The enormous wave of AI-generated drivel that caused publishers and contests to pause accepting new work stands as evidence otherwise. It isn’t that much of a matter of what you think people think about AI, you can literally just look at the pile of garbage “books” and stories that did not exist three years ago.
    - cthalupa 2y ago
      You're moving the goalposts. > If you ignore the fact that this is the ubiquitous understanding of what AI is and then envision a different, more charitable and far less popular definition of it, their point about ablism becomes more possibly arguable I am pointing out that this is not, in my experience, a ubiquitous understanding of what AI is. This is separate from what the impacts of AI are. But I'll play and switch topics - a huge portion of publishers stopped accepting direct submissions from authors decades before AI was a thing, because of all of the human-written drivel. If you want to be a published author and not self-publish (which I would argue is often a better situation than going with a lot of these smaller independent publishers to begin with), get an agent. You don't even have to be a particularly good author for this part - just invested enough to find agents that works in the space you are writing in and chatting with a few. They'll get your manuscript into the hands of publishers. That's their job. We already created a whole profession pre-AI that largely exists to filter out the bottom of the barrel stuff because it was already overwhelming publishers.
      - jrflowers 2y ago
        It is not moving the goalposts to point out that we use different measures of ubiquity. Your measure is things you have heard from your friends, mine is the nearly inescapable pile of generated garbage that has swamped the internet. I do not understand your point about agents other than I’m assuming that you’re pointing out that the flood of garbage has made their jobs more difficult as well. Anyway, it does not make any sense to believe that humans are especially not-lazy when it comes to generative AI in particular. https://www.vox.com/24141648/ai-ebook-grift-mushroom-foraging-mycological-society https://www.vox.com/24141648/ai-ebook-grift-mushroom-foragin... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willy's_Chocolate_Experience https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willy's_Chocolate_Experience https://variety.com/2024/film/opinion/megalopolis-trailer-fake-quotes-critics-1236115983/ https://variety.com/2024/film/opinion/megalopolis-trailer-fa... https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattnovak/2023/05/27/lawyer-uses-chatgpt-in-federal-court-and-it-goes-horribly-wrong/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattnovak/2023/05/27/lawyer-use... https://www.businessinsider.com/chatgpt-essays-college-cheating-professors-caught-students-ai-plagiarism-2023-1?op=1 https://www.businessinsider.com/chatgpt-essays-college-cheat...

jrflowers 2y ago

> if your understanding of what "AI" is goes beyond prompting an LLM to "do your work for you." This is a good point. If you ignore the fact that this is the ubiquitous understanding of what AI is and then envision a different, more charitable and far less popular definition of it, their point about ablism becomes more possibly arguable

cthalupa 2y ago
I talk to a lot of "normal" people about AI stuff pretty frequently, as the closest thing in my friend/family group to an expert. Almost all of them have used it and almost all of them understand that you can use it in ranges varying from asking for specific advice on things, to asking it to do portions of things, to asking it to do the whole thing. I don't think any of them would think that "Using AI to help you write a 50k word short story" would necessarily indicate telling ChatGPT to just write the story for you based on a short description.
- jrflowers 2y ago
  The enormous wave of AI-generated drivel that caused publishers and contests to pause accepting new work stands as evidence otherwise. It isn’t that much of a matter of what you think people think about AI, you can literally just look at the pile of garbage “books” and stories that did not exist three years ago.
  - cthalupa 2y ago
    You're moving the goalposts. > If you ignore the fact that this is the ubiquitous understanding of what AI is and then envision a different, more charitable and far less popular definition of it, their point about ablism becomes more possibly arguable I am pointing out that this is not, in my experience, a ubiquitous understanding of what AI is. This is separate from what the impacts of AI are. But I'll play and switch topics - a huge portion of publishers stopped accepting direct submissions from authors decades before AI was a thing, because of all of the human-written drivel. If you want to be a published author and not self-publish (which I would argue is often a better situation than going with a lot of these smaller independent publishers to begin with), get an agent. You don't even have to be a particularly good author for this part - just invested enough to find agents that works in the space you are writing in and chatting with a few. They'll get your manuscript into the hands of publishers. That's their job. We already created a whole profession pre-AI that largely exists to filter out the bottom of the barrel stuff because it was already overwhelming publishers.
    - jrflowers 2y ago
      It is not moving the goalposts to point out that we use different measures of ubiquity. Your measure is things you have heard from your friends, mine is the nearly inescapable pile of generated garbage that has swamped the internet. I do not understand your point about agents other than I’m assuming that you’re pointing out that the flood of garbage has made their jobs more difficult as well. Anyway, it does not make any sense to believe that humans are especially not-lazy when it comes to generative AI in particular. https://www.vox.com/24141648/ai-ebook-grift-mushroom-foraging-mycological-society https://www.vox.com/24141648/ai-ebook-grift-mushroom-foragin... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willy's_Chocolate_Experience https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willy's_Chocolate_Experience https://variety.com/2024/film/opinion/megalopolis-trailer-fake-quotes-critics-1236115983/ https://variety.com/2024/film/opinion/megalopolis-trailer-fa... https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattnovak/2023/05/27/lawyer-uses-chatgpt-in-federal-court-and-it-goes-horribly-wrong/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattnovak/2023/05/27/lawyer-use... https://www.businessinsider.com/chatgpt-essays-college-cheating-professors-caught-students-ai-plagiarism-2023-1?op=1 https://www.businessinsider.com/chatgpt-essays-college-cheat...