3 ms·

Fiction books to follow soon? Will kids still sit down and read an assigned book when they can just prompt "generate a movie of Shelley's Frankenstein, faithful

Fiction books to follow soon? Will kids still sit down and read an assigned book when they can just prompt "generate a movie of Shelley's Frankenstein, faithful to the source, except as required by my_movie_preferences.md". Reading the text may become as rare as learning ancient Greek to read the Odyssey.

aerhardt 4mo ago
You say soon but what you just described is still sci-fi as far as I can tell.
- ryandrake 4mo ago
  I wonder, if the technology will actually get to the point where it can AI/Remix up a bunch of TV shows or movies that are as high quality / nonslop as the original, and if that would satisfy me. Let's say I'm living in the past and think Star Trek TNG and the X-Files was peak TV. If I could just hit enter and generate an in-all-ways-believably-authentic episode, maybe I just wouldn't watch anything else. Would it matter to my brain that real people didn't make the episode if it was indistinguishable from the real thing?
  - jaimie 4mo ago
    Nothing, Forever was basically this idea applied to Seinfeld. The video quality was low, but some of the ways it captured the same absurdities as Seinfeld was remarkable at the time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing,_Forever https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing,_Forever
  - ben_w 4mo ago
    On a similar vein, I was just thinking of the TNG episode Hollow Pursuits earlier today. Somehow, this is one of the episodes I never actually watched, but it is interesting to me how often the Trek scripts cover essentially identical ideas to current discussions about AI: Moriarty insisting to Barclay that he was conscious even when his program wasn't running, Pulaski saying Data was just remixing and not actually intelligent, various examples of deep fakes, cyber addiction, AI going weird sometimes while following orders and sometimes just as an emergent bug.
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- ben_w 4mo ago
  It may not yet be fully automated, and you may have to choose between "cheap and bad or the price of a house and kinda acceptable", but it's definitely possible.
tliltocatl 4mo ago
"Self-help nonfiction" have always been a waste of paper. And honestly, most of the time I hear "X was replaced by AI" I find myself thinking "good riddance, but we could drop X altogether and not loose anything of value." Fiction, on the other hand… Much of fiction's value isn't just the content itself, is that they create a shared language medium. A book might actually be meh (came up with some examples, but then decided to drop it so as not to offend anyone), but the fact that people you talk with have read the same book and understand same references makes reading it valuable. So, it's unlikely to happen, until we delegate all of our communication to AIs, which isn't likely to happen any time soon.
yakshaving_jgt 4mo ago
"Luke… I am your father." "…You're absolutely right!"
- shermantanktop 4mo ago
  c'mon, spoiler alert, jeez
  - epihelix 4mo ago
    Spoiler alert: Luke had a father. No cloning with this guy, just a bonafide byproduct of two bad actors and some awkward sand ...
epihelix 4mo ago
I'd like to think people will continue to read because reading is an inherently pleasurable activity, and because the medium captures nuance that can't be replicated in video. However, the loss of reading self-help books surely will hurt no-one. It is an ill wind, etc ...
malloryerik 4mo ago
Of course it's possible, but reading and watching fiction feel very different and can you see a way to change that? The word may continue to decline compared to image. But the image is soon to become nearly as cheap and hackable as the word.
runako 4mo ago
This may well happen, but the fraction of people still capable of absorbing original texts will have a tremendous advantage over people who never learned to think.

aerhardt 4mo ago

You say soon but what you just described is still sci-fi as far as I can tell.

ryandrake 4mo ago
I wonder, if the technology will actually get to the point where it can AI/Remix up a bunch of TV shows or movies that are as high quality / nonslop as the original, and if that would satisfy me. Let's say I'm living in the past and think Star Trek TNG and the X-Files was peak TV. If I could just hit enter and generate an in-all-ways-believably-authentic episode, maybe I just wouldn't watch anything else. Would it matter to my brain that real people didn't make the episode if it was indistinguishable from the real thing?
- jaimie 4mo ago
  Nothing, Forever was basically this idea applied to Seinfeld. The video quality was low, but some of the ways it captured the same absurdities as Seinfeld was remarkable at the time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing,_Forever https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing,_Forever
- ben_w 4mo ago
  On a similar vein, I was just thinking of the TNG episode Hollow Pursuits earlier today. Somehow, this is one of the episodes I never actually watched, but it is interesting to me how often the Trek scripts cover essentially identical ideas to current discussions about AI: Moriarty insisting to Barclay that he was conscious even when his program wasn't running, Pulaski saying Data was just remixing and not actually intelligent, various examples of deep fakes, cyber addiction, AI going weird sometimes while following orders and sometimes just as an emergent bug.
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
ben_w 4mo ago
It may not yet be fully automated, and you may have to choose between "cheap and bad or the price of a house and kinda acceptable", but it's definitely possible.

tliltocatl 4mo ago

"Self-help nonfiction" have always been a waste of paper. And honestly, most of the time I hear "X was replaced by AI" I find myself thinking "good riddance, but we could drop X altogether and not loose anything of value." Fiction, on the other hand… Much of fiction's value isn't just the content itself, is that they create a shared language medium. A book might actually be meh (came up with some examples, but then decided to drop it so as not to offend anyone), but the fact that people you talk with have read the same book and understand same references makes reading it valuable. So, it's unlikely to happen, until we delegate all of our communication to AIs, which isn't likely to happen any time soon.

yakshaving_jgt 4mo ago

"Luke… I am your father." "…You're absolutely right!"

shermantanktop 4mo ago
c'mon, spoiler alert, jeez
- epihelix 4mo ago
  Spoiler alert: Luke had a father. No cloning with this guy, just a bonafide byproduct of two bad actors and some awkward sand ...

epihelix 4mo ago

I'd like to think people will continue to read because reading is an inherently pleasurable activity, and because the medium captures nuance that can't be replicated in video. However, the loss of reading self-help books surely will hurt no-one. It is an ill wind, etc ...

malloryerik 4mo ago

Of course it's possible, but reading and watching fiction feel very different and can you see a way to change that? The word may continue to decline compared to image. But the image is soon to become nearly as cheap and hackable as the word.

runako 4mo ago

This may well happen, but the fraction of people still capable of absorbing original texts will have a tremendous advantage over people who never learned to think.