4 ms·

I’m sure someone more knowledgeable and well-spoken than I will provide a more scathing takedown of this article soon, but even I can laugh at its breathless en

I’m sure someone more knowledgeable and well-spoken than I will provide a more scathing takedown of this article soon, but even I can laugh at its breathless endorsement of some very dubious claims with no supporting evidence. “AI might write a decent novel by 2030”? Have you read the absolute dreck they produce today? An LLM will NEVER produce a decent novel, for the same reason it will never independently create a decent game or movie: It can’t read the novel, play the game, or watch the movie, and have an emotional response to it or gauge it’s entertainment value. It has no way to judge if a work of art will have an emotional impact on its audience or dial in the art to enhance that impact or make a statement that resonates with people. Only people can do that. All in all, this article is unscientific, filled with hand-waving “and then a miracle occurs”, and meaningless graphs that in no way indicate that LLMs will undergo the kind of step change transformation needed to reliably and independently accomplish complex tasks this decade. The study authors themselves give the game away when they use “50% success rate” as the yardstick for an LLM. You know what we call a human with a 50% success rate in the professional world? Fired. I don’t think it was responsible of IEEE to publish this article and I expect better from the organization.

ysofunny 1y ago
the LLMs will do to novels something else: I think it'll be possible to publish a "book" as a series of prompts. which the LLMs can expand out into the narrative story. it's a novel you can chat with. the new novel for the post-LLMs era is more like publishing the whole author... which then you can "intervew" as an LLM (reminiscent of Harry Potter when Ron's sister find the evil journal, and she basically "chats" with the notebook)
- kcplate 1y ago
  No idea why you are getting downvoted for this, it seems to me this would be exactly the kind of thing you could do…even hallucinations would contribute in a meaningful way.
kcplate 1y ago
Likely due to my nearly 40 years experience in the tech industry, and knowing where we were then compared to where we are now—I am floored by what LLMs are doing and how much better they are even in the last 2 years I have been tracking on them. That said, I will make no definitive statements like “never” and “can’t” as it relates to AI in the next 5 years because it is already doing things that I would have thought unlikely just 5 years ago…and frankly would have thought functionally impossible back 40 years ago.
- timr 1y ago
  LLMs are cool and they're amazing for what they are, but the hype is just ridiculous right now, and the extrapolation fallacy is still a fallacy. Without a good structural reason to assume exponential growth (e.g. organism reproduction, which is itself not actually exponential), it's kind of the Godwin's Law of AI debate: the first person to say "if we only project forward X years..." terminates the conversation. I appreciate your unwillingness to say "never" here, but I think the parent comment deserves credit for calling out something important that rarely gets discussed: the importance of emotion for producing great art. This is one of the classic themes of Asimov's entire Robot ouvre, which spends many books digging into the differences between (far more advanced) AI and actual human intelligence. There are fundamental, definable, structural deficiencies that separate LLMs from human thought, it's plainly incorrect to pretend otherwise, and the...extrapolationists...are neglecting that we have no idea how to solve these problems.
  - kcplate 1y ago
    > deserves credit for calling out something important that rarely gets discussed: the importance of emotion for producing great art That’s subjective though. An opinion I agree with, but still subjective. I think it’s within the realm of possibility given the advances we have seen so far that a near future AI given enough input describing emotion could simulate it just enough for people to accept that it created a “decent” work. Likely undetectable by most people as AI created vs human created. > we have no idea how to solve these problems. Yet. Obviously time and talent moved us from Eliza to ChatGPT/Gemini. Is it really unlikely that time and talent can’t push us over the artificial emotion precipice as well? I am not betting against it.

ysofunny 1y ago

the LLMs will do to novels something else: I think it'll be possible to publish a "book" as a series of prompts. which the LLMs can expand out into the narrative story. it's a novel you can chat with. the new novel for the post-LLMs era is more like publishing the whole author... which then you can "intervew" as an LLM (reminiscent of Harry Potter when Ron's sister find the evil journal, and she basically "chats" with the notebook)

kcplate 1y ago
No idea why you are getting downvoted for this, it seems to me this would be exactly the kind of thing you could do…even hallucinations would contribute in a meaningful way.

kcplate 1y ago

Likely due to my nearly 40 years experience in the tech industry, and knowing where we were then compared to where we are now—I am floored by what LLMs are doing and how much better they are even in the last 2 years I have been tracking on them. That said, I will make no definitive statements like “never” and “can’t” as it relates to AI in the next 5 years because it is already doing things that I would have thought unlikely just 5 years ago…and frankly would have thought functionally impossible back 40 years ago.

timr 1y ago
LLMs are cool and they're amazing for what they are, but the hype is just ridiculous right now, and the extrapolation fallacy is still a fallacy. Without a good structural reason to assume exponential growth (e.g. organism reproduction, which is itself not actually exponential), it's kind of the Godwin's Law of AI debate: the first person to say "if we only project forward X years..." terminates the conversation. I appreciate your unwillingness to say "never" here, but I think the parent comment deserves credit for calling out something important that rarely gets discussed: the importance of emotion for producing great art. This is one of the classic themes of Asimov's entire Robot ouvre, which spends many books digging into the differences between (far more advanced) AI and actual human intelligence. There are fundamental, definable, structural deficiencies that separate LLMs from human thought, it's plainly incorrect to pretend otherwise, and the...extrapolationists...are neglecting that we have no idea how to solve these problems.
- kcplate 1y ago
  > deserves credit for calling out something important that rarely gets discussed: the importance of emotion for producing great art That’s subjective though. An opinion I agree with, but still subjective. I think it’s within the realm of possibility given the advances we have seen so far that a near future AI given enough input describing emotion could simulate it just enough for people to accept that it created a “decent” work. Likely undetectable by most people as AI created vs human created. > we have no idea how to solve these problems. Yet. Obviously time and talent moved us from Eliza to ChatGPT/Gemini. Is it really unlikely that time and talent can’t push us over the artificial emotion precipice as well? I am not betting against it.