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I find this sort of thing discouraging, as a guy who dreamt of being a novel writer long before becoming a “computer person”. The last few days, I let the intr
by spijdar 1y ago
I find this sort of thing discouraging, as a guy who dreamt of being a novel writer long before becoming a “computer person”.
The last few days, I let the intrusive thoughts win, and I played around with automating the process of building themes, characters, outlining, drafting, and revising a novel with the Gemini API, pausing between steps to manually edit each document. It’s crude, but with enough cycles of “read the last draft, write instructions for improving it, redo everything with those instructions” the end result is shockingly not terrible.
It’s not great. Good might even be too far. It’s derivative, and still feels like the embodiment of all the negative connotations of the term “genre fiction”.
Yet, I can’t escape the fact that it’s better reading than what I write. It is objectively less intellectually “interesting”, and it doesn’t have my “voice”, my artistic fingerprint. But it’s entertaining enough that I could see myself reading it at bedtime for fun, a sentiment I’ve never felt for my own writing.
And all that for a pittance of the effort it takes to write a long story. I’m still not sure how to feel about it. It’s sapping my willpower to continue writing “for real”, in the face of being able to “give life” to the characters and story ideas I’ve had languishing for a decade. I know that it’s not “real”, that the stories are superficial, and that the existence of these models is at best ethically questionable.
But for stories that, either way, I’ll probably never share with anyone else, it’s hard to feel that principled about it, in the face of a miserable comparison between my prose and an LLM’s prose. I’m sure if I wrote fiction for a living, I’d feel as passionate as the article’s author, but in my case, it’s just the melancholy of mediocrity. Ah well :-)
- twilight-code 1y agoAI can generate text, but it cannot truly 'create' - it remixes.
- lucyjojo 1y agowe human remix too... for me the difference is simply that AI writing has no author, nobody thought those words, and that is big to me.
- canpan 1y ago> Yet, I can’t escape the fact that it’s better reading than what I write I worry we will have a lot less good writers or artists in the future. Everyone starts bad, without the skill. The hurdle is, why should I put in effort to learn, if AI is already somewhat good. Someone mentioned here before, we learn to judge skill before we can learn the skill itself. The drive to jump the gap is what creates the genius. Please don't give up, you can do it!
- mattigames 1y agoI don't think that AI being somewhat good is the main stopper, it's that we know for certain that it will improve at a giant pace, the very same prompt that triggers a mediocre book today will trigger a good book tomorrow (as an aside, I firmly believe that the word "trigger" is way more apt than "create" when talking about AI output), there is billions of dollars invested to make sure of that, and is not like we haven't seen unbelievable leaps already for art generation.
- blibble 1y ago> it's that we know for certain that it will improve at a giant pace how exactly? it's already trained on the entire corpus of human generated text and outputs garbage there's not a second internet to plagiarise
- mattigames 1y agoThere is 2 things that are gonna help a lot, one is better classification, in that regard advances will help purge itself, just like our digestive system filters what we don't need models will do the same, e.g. scientific and factual models will have zero jokes in it's corpus, and you will know that the response you received came from such a humourless model, the second thing is just plain feedback, teachers will use AI and give it thumbs up or thumbs down and the machine will use such opinion over the opinion of most students, it will also favour the input by students with the most promise, those who win math championships and all that jazz.
- torben-friis 1y agoHumans aren’t competitive at chess against computers and haven’t been for a long time. Yet the game is as popular as ever, and people watch human players rather than AIs. We like playing. We like human touch. That’s still there.
- bluefirebrand 1y agoJust wait until you're actually watching AI generated video of humans that don't even exist playing chess matches that were never played in real life Isn't the future going to be so great?
- threetonesun 1y agoWhy would I watch those. The obvious reaction to all of this is going to be people leaving the house and seeing things in real life. Sure, some people won’t, but we’re already at the point where AI has ruined any sense of reality online.
- Avshalom 1y ago>Yet, I can’t escape the fact that it’s better reading than what I write. I mean most obviously: that's because you didn't write it. It has a novelty to it that you don't experience when you write and re-write a story yourself. More importantly though: as G.K. Chesterton supposedly said "Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly". The idea that you shouldn't write because you're not as good as you could be or you shouldn't plink around on keyboard because you can't play Bach is an idea that destroys any human endeavor and all human joy. If they are stories that you will never share: why care about quality; it should be pure self exploration.
- queenkjuul 1y agoI don't play music because i hope someone else will listen to it (i mean, maybe a little, i play gigs sometimes) but i really only do it because i enjoy it on my own, i enjoy the challenge of getting better, i enjoy the process of making my fingers do on the guitar what my brain is thinking. You can get better at writing. And i hate to say, you probably only judge your own writing so harshly because you wrote it. Songs i wrote that i didn't like ended up being some of my most popular. It doesn't matter though: other people liking it is a fantastic bonus on top of my enjoying having done it, not the point of having done it.