7 ms·
I let Claude Code write an entire book
- karmakurtisaani 1y agoDid you read it tho? We might be approaching a time when saying an author has written more books than they've read might turn from a joke to a fact.
- gjm11 1y agoThe actual author is Claude, and Claude has read a lot of books.
- novosel 1y agoIt is interesting to me that your emphasis is on _lot_, and not on _read_.
- gjm11 1y agoWhy? I emphasized "lot" because presumably the training data for a high-end model like Claude includes literally millions of books, far more than any human being has read even a few pages of. To me, "Claude has read a lot of books" would read pretty oddly here. I suppose the idea would be to contrast with the (hopefully few) books it's written to date, but I can't think why the emphasis would be called for.
- novosel 1y agoYes, I understood your argument, and your emphasis is on the point there. I am simply asking in what sense did Claude read all those books. I am sorry if I have hijacked the disscusion. edited: spelling
- gjm11 1y agoIt's read them in the same sense as it's written a new one: it's ingested them, had what pass for its mental processes influenced by them, remembered some of their contents, etc. You might want to say that that isn't "reading", just as we never say that aeroplanes "fly" since they don't do the same thing as birds, never say that computers "play chess" since the calculations they do are very different from those done by human chessplayers, never say that machines "dig ditches" since they don't have the experience of tired muscles and the sun beating down on their backs, etc. As you may gather from the tone of the previous sentence, I am not altogether convinced. I do agree that the two things aren't equivalents. I can imagine futures in which AI systems have a training process that somewhat resembles the present one, and also do something that corresponds more closely to human reading[1], and then I'd want to reserve the term "read" for the latter. What Claude has done to all the books that helped shape it isn't exactly reading. But it's quite like reading for our present purpose; when someone jokes about an author having written more books than they've read, they mean that the author doesn't have much awareness of other people's work, and that isn't a problem Claude has. [1] E.g., they might have some sort of awareness of the process, whatever exactly that might mean; they might do it "for pleasure", whatever exactly that might mean; etc. Those things would require the AI systems to resemble humans in ways present AI systems aren't designed to and, so far as I can tell, don't; maybe some future AI systems will be that way, maybe not.
- synthos 1y ago> First Revision - Completed with minimal human contribution (auto-accept mode) > > Second Revision - Planned with increased human-in-the-loop involvement At least 'minimal human contribution' in the first revision. So scan read it as it revised the book. I do find it amusing to think that people might just ask an AI to summarize the book instead of actually reading it. Maybe even 'review' it as well. The future will have authenticity in short supply
- bjt12345 1y ago> The second insight is that human hallucinations are fundamentally social. Unlike AI, which hallucinates in isolation, humans hallucinate collaboratively. At the dinner party, each false fact was immediately reinforced by social validation. The nods, the interested expressions, the follow-up comments - all of these served to solidify the hallucination into shared "knowledge." Oh boy, that burns - the Futuristic AI dystopia won't be robots killing humans, but robots embarrassing us to death by revealing our ignorance.
- vasco 1y agoI feel like we do a great job of that already and the internet is full of people pointing it out from others.
- noworriesnate 1y agoWhat you may be ignorant of is that there are IRL communities as well where there’s not enough of this behavior
- gosub100 1y ago> the internet is full of people This is the part that is about to change. Big time. The Internet is going to be full of bots thanks to LLM. It's going to get to the point where the majority of "people" are fake and the suspicion will overlap onto the actual people. It will reach a point where nobody will believe anybody online. Inb4 "we've had bots forever now". You know what I mean.
- hombre_fatal 1y agoI don't think it will be much different than how we already conduct ourselves online. Consider the thousands of replies to a Reddit submission that probably never happened, or the thousands of replies to a screenshot of a headline/tweet/text post with no source and nobody even asking for one. Thousands of people voraciously pretending it's the most serious thing in the world so they have an excuse to share their two cents and some emotion over it. I don't think we very much cared about the veracity of most things we encounter day to day. It's mostly an excuse to engage and socialize. LLMs seem to perfectly fit into this. Now everyone can find their personal hobby horse to engage with, and there will always be some straw men reply guys to keep you entertained.
- anorwell 1y agoIs it any good? Perhaps we can ask Opus to review it to find out.
- karmakurtisaani 1y agoIt's full of made up scenarios and anecdotes. Make it a little bit worse and it'll reach Malcolm Gladwell level.
- __alexs 1y agoGemini seems to think it's very interesting.
- IshKebab 1y agoI skimmed one chapter and it just decayed into lists. Why do LLMs love lists so much?
- Cyphase 1y agoTop 13 Reasons LLMs Love Lists [Click to begin the slideshow]
- tux3 1y agoThere have been good discussions recently about preventing AIs from being too sycophantic. There have been some dangerous moments where LLMs would praise every idea the user has as genius, ground-breaking, and a brilliant observation. Some academics have reported a noticeable increase in the volume of crackpot emails they get daily. They're full of LLM-generated nonsense, where the AI goes along with the nonsensical ramblings, always telling the person they've found some critical insight. While this feels good, it can end up reinforcing dangerous nonsense. This encourages some people to dig further and further into what the LLM is constantly telling them is a brilliant idea. Most of the time it's pretty harmless, but when it veers into "revealing hidden patterns" and "illuminating human cognition", you start to worry about a disconnect with consensus reality.
- iLoveOncall 1y ago> Most of the time it's pretty harmless I think we have to stop the idea that wasting people's time at such high scale is harmless. It's not.
- amelius 1y agoReminds me of Google's Doodles, which must have annoyed millions of people and wasted millions of minutes worldwide, and don't get me started on ads.
- falcor84 1y agoGoogle doodles generally bring me joy and let me know about world events I wasn't aware of. I honestly can't think of a single one that annoyed me. Often it's just "oh, it looks interesting, but I don't have time to click on it now; maybe I'll look into it later"
- amelius 1y agoMaybe you never ran into them when you didn't want any distractions, like while working?
- rjurney 1y agoAs a writer, this is deeply comforting. The book is total shit. It sounds like an AI, not like something a person would connect with for even a moment. Not even in the opening lines.
- dinfinity 1y agoDid you read more than the opening lines? When you've read it in its entirety, could you indicate on a scale from 1 to 10 what score it would get compared to published books you've read (including of course all the best and the worst ones)?
- NameError 1y agoIt seems silly to expect someone to read the whole book before evaluating it when the creator didn't even read the whole book before publishing it
- dinfinity 1y agoIf someone claims "the book is total shit", it is entirely reasonable to ask if they've actually read it, regardless of who or what wrote it.
- evanelias 1y agoIf you flip through something claiming to be a "book" and immediately see that a majority of pages just contain nonsensical bulleted lists, and furthermore see that chapter titles are printed overlapping with the book title on each page, you can correctly conclude the entire thing is a zero-effort pile of shit without wasting any further time to read it.
- dinfinity 1y agoI read through a bit of it and it really wasn't all that bad. The only thing that I found to be really problematic were the made up experiences. Clearly hallucinations are still a big problem for LLMs, but if we manage to get rid of those a book like this can really be quite serviceable (a lot of human-written books are badly written so the bar isn't incredibly high, imho). The creator should really tweak the prompt/process to include automatic review explicitly intended to remove hallucinations. It clearly is already the intent: "Future iterations of this experiment will include AI-powered fact-checking of the content." I'm looking forward to what the improved version will look like.
- amake 1y agoWhy would I read a book that a person couldn't be bothered to write?
- gchamonlive 1y agoSometimes it's not about the destination, but the journey
- cbm-vic-20 1y agoJust feed it to an LLM and let it summarize it for you.
- _Algernon_ 1y agoThat would require something worth summarizing
- cheema33 1y agoYou consume many things that a human did not bother to produce.
- s1mplicissimus 1y ago>> You consume many things that a human did not bother to produce. apart from maybe at times eating wild growing food - what kinds of things did you have in mind?
- shawabawa3 1y agoWhy would you choose not to read a book based on how it was written rather than the content? If it came out that Stephen king had been using AI for decades would that make his work any worse?
- shinycode 1y agoActually LLM exists in the first place because creative people like him wrote down their thoughts. If no human ever wrote anything, LLMs wouldn’t be able to generate anything would they. Now because LLM are rehashing on human content the feeding value for us is less important. What would be nice is an LLM that writes a book that spans accros authors of different fields to aggregate and consolidate knowledge, saving us the time of reading all the books
- bgwalter 1y agoAll issues that are implicitly pointed out as novel in the introduction have been discussed for centuries. Not only by scholars and experts. Literally 50% of Internet discussion is about biases, selective facts, spin etc. The problem with "AI" is that propaganda can be automated and that it wastes our time. The topic is suited for "AI" because it is a soft topic that lends itself to uninhibited preaching. "AI" is also great at writing presidential speeches. It is probably the only thing it is good at. Nevertheless, the result is still painful to read.
- gradus_ad 1y agoThe premise is wrong. Humans don't listen to one another and nod unthinkingly. They criticize and validate relentlessly. Friends aren't mistaken for oracles. We have learned to not trust one another, except when one is speaking from deep experience and expertise in a given domain. AI is presented as an expert in every domain though, so we are lulled into a vulnerable state of unvigilance.
- robotbikes 1y agoI really found the story in chapter 14 (recursive self-improvement) about the guy who got so addicted to self-improvement that he ended up in his own meta-reality unable to understand even himself because he was getting so much better and hacking his learning. A completely fabricated story with no basis in reality that I'm aware of but man there are a lot of bullet points to make it seem factual. What are we going to do about the worrying trend of 10X hackers self-improving so much that they aren't able to exist in the real world. Here's an excerpt "The Addiction to Acceleration The fourth uncomfortable truth is how recursive improvement becomes compulsive. Kenji can’t stop because each day of not improving his improvement feels like stagnation. When you’re accelerating, constant velocity feels like moving backward. This addiction manifests as: • Inability to accept plateau phases • Anxiety when not optimizing optimization • Devaluing of steady-state excellence • Compulsion to add meta-levels • Fear of falling behind yourself Recursive improvement can become its own trap." I find that this criticism is far less applicable to say individuals but perhaps it could be levied against the way companies are currently treating AI. Which of course is where this comes from.
- robotbikes 1y agoHonestly there are some interesting concepts and broad overviews of them but this is hardly a "book" but just a verbose LLM document that briefly lists a lot of concepts without sufficiently or consistently fleshing them out into actual meaningful chapters. Not to say that this sort of thing isn't potentially useful but it seems more like the starting point of an outline of a book rather than anything resembling a finished published book.
- tpmoney 1y ago
- chaosbolt 1y agoAI makes things too easy, this will destroy culture. We thought that movies adapting to the tiktok generation wouldn't kill cinema, and that new and better directors would rise... this didn't happen and even the latest movies from good directors like ridley scott are quite bad. Now 3 years ago I typed "lovecraft nietzsche" and would only find 2 videos on youtube that pertain to what I'm looking for, aka the link between the two and how lovecraft's cosmicism might be a metaphor for the abyss etc. but those 2 videos are both excellent, 2 different people thought what I thought but cared enough to write it down and make a video about it. Today I can barely find these videos, there is a sea of AI generated videos with AI narrated text rambling on and on about lovecraft this nietzsche that to hit the 20min mark and maximize ad revenue, all this in a sea of short videos that youtube push harder and harder like multiple shorts between each 2 normal videos. Did another plateform overtake youtube? Not really. Now some author will use AI to help with his next book, it will work and he will publish faster, then other authors will do the same, and others will optimize it more and more until most books available will be 90% written by AI, colleges will teach you AI assisted writing, and decades after that no one would even think to write a book without the help of AI. How the hell would you explain to your publisher that you need 3 years to write the sequel when everyone else is doing it in 3 months. It really does take the beauty out of the whole experience.
- cheema33 1y ago> It really does take the beauty out of the whole experience. Beauty is subjective. For a long time we were an agrarian society. Getting up early, getting on a horse and tending to your land every day, was probably considered beautiful by some. But we don't do that anymore. We are probably going to see a similar shift in society. At a much more accelerated pace.
- gokhan 1y agoJust like in blind wine tasting, I suspect people’s perceptions (including many here) would be very different if the author hadn’t told us it was created by AI. There’s a noticeable negativity on HN toward AI when it comes to coding, writing, or anything similar as if these people have been using AI for the past 30 years and have reached some elevated state of mind where they clearly see it's rubbish, while the rest of us mortals who’ve only been fiddling with it for the past 2.5 years can’t.
- podgietaru 1y agoYeah? The sentiment of “why read something somebody didn’t bother to write” sort of has to be. And when it comes to books, I find that to be a fairly compelling argument. I want my fiction to be imbibed with the experiences of the author. And I want my nonfiction to be grounded by the realities of the world around me, processed again through a human perspective. It could be the best written book in the world, it’ll always be missing that human element.
- cheema33 1y agoI don't understand it either. I suspect it is the fear for their own wellbeing. The fear is well placed. But the response is perplexing. The only way to deal with this challenge is to try to stay ahead of it. Not to stick your head in the sand.
- myaccountonhn 1y agoFor me its the injustice of stealing data, scrapers incurring huge costs to open source projects, companies exploiting cheap labour in labelling that data and finally the growing environmental cost that makes me not want to use LLMs.
- podgietaru 1y agoI have that issue too. But for literature it’s something more primal. Fiction feels like the ultimate distillation of the human experience. A way to share perspective and experience. And having some algorithm flatten that feels utterly macabre. Not to be too dramatic. I know that not all fiction is transcendent. But still. There’s something so utterly gross about using a machine for it.
- jbellis 1y agointeresting experiment! it does seem like the consensus is that o3 and (at a much lower cost) r1 are better writers than claude, but obviously anthropic's agent framework doesn't support those
- scrumper 1y agoI've seen worse at an airport bookshop. This was funny: "The irony is delicious and deeply instructive. Every flaw we've identified in artificial intelligence exists, magnified and unchecked, in human intelligence. But here's the critical difference: when it appears in AI, we can see it, measure it, and try to fix it. When it appears in humans, we call it "just being human" and move on." Poor Claude thinks it's all a bit unfair. I didn't read much of it though, it made me feel a bit like I was a naughty avout being punished by reading pages from The Book.
- fabiofzero 1y agoIf you can't bother to write it I won't bother to read it.
- nunez 1y agoUsing LLMs to write self-help style books like this one is a slam dunk use case, honestly. This book was dry (though it's prompt feels creative) but full of anecdotes and listicles --- the perfect slate for some big name needing a book deal.