4 ms·

Finally, someone else understands that writing is not the goal, the entire point of all of this is our communications between one another and this market for na

Finally, someone else understands that writing is not the goal, the entire point of all of this is our communications between one another and this market for narrative stories is a nice departure and it does convey important knowledge and moral lessons that larger society needs. But it is an indirection, an indirection to the mission of communicating solutions to how to live as a human and that is why we care, why the interest persists despite lifetimes of narrative dreck. We are adrift without instructions, and no religions are not the instructions.

jtbayly 2mo ago
And the word was made flesh and dwelt among us.
- smalltorch 2mo ago
  Im curious what you mean by this
  - harimau777 2mo ago
    They are quoting John 1:14. At the beginning of his book, John describes Jesus as being the personified word of God. That was likely an early example of the influence of Neo Platonism on Christianity.
    - smalltorch 2mo ago
      Yes but curious GP's thoughts on comparing LLM writing to the reference and how it relates to the topic
  - inigyou 2mo ago
    In the beginning were the Words, and the Words made the world. I am the Words—the Words are everything. Where the Words end, the world ends. You cannot go forward in the absence of space. Repeat.
  - jtbayly 2mo ago
    Wow. My comment is auto-collapsed. I'm not aware of this phenomenon on HN. Is it a moderation thing? It hasn't been downvoted. I don't think I've been shadow-banned or had this comment flagged or anything. Anyway, to answer your question, I was pointing out that the request for "important knowledge and moral lessons that larger society needs" and "communicating solutions to how to live as a human" as well as lamenting that "We are adrift without instructions" is actually a request for religion. Religion is how to make sense of how to live. So the comment is asking for religion and rejecting religion at the same time. At the same time, I was pointing out that one religion in particular has directly addressed the point that "writing is not the goal." The "word"—or "logos" in the greek—is the reason, the logic, the rational principle of the cosmos behind the words. It points to that need for a solution for how to live, as well as showing there is a real answer.
bayindirh 2mo ago
Many of us understood that, and tried to tell it over and over. My keyboard is worn, my mind is numb, my soul is weary from typing/telling that the output is not the aim, but the content it carries, the substance it holds. Yet a very vocal group advocates integrating LLMs into every aspect of their lives, and the other group watch in dismay. On the other hand, I used a sentence form used by LLMs in a comment during a morning-brain moment, and an angry mob tried to crucify me with torches and pitchforks. Many people love to generate text with LLMs, but most of same crowd apparently hates to read LLM output. An interesting phenomenon.
- inigyou 2mo ago
  It must be a distinction between engineer-type brains and leader-type brains. If you're focused on social status climbing, the fact that you produced a report, and the length of that report, is far more important than whether the contents of the report have any relation to reality beyond the surface level. This is true if you're trying to get VC funding as well. It's even in institutional academia, as seen by the Sokal affair.
  - bayindirh 2mo ago
    To be frank, I neither live/work in an environment or live for "climbing" anything, so fluffware is not something I produce or understand. On the other hand, I have friends who play that game, and I don't talk with most of them, because their life views and mental states continually drift to a state which makes no sense whatsoever for me, so we grow apart.
    - b112 2mo ago
      Eventually, enough engineers will breed with enough engineers, that we'll be a different species, incapable of communicating with weirdo humanity.
      - bsenftner 2mo ago
        You are describing the bifurcation of society that is the moral lesson of The Time Machine by H.G. Wells. The Morlocks are the scientific and engineering "gender" (so to speak) of the human race while the Eloki are the child-like humans kept around because they are the food the Morlocks consume to survive in that future.
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
pibaker 2mo ago
I'd like to live in a world where people only make art to serve a higher purpose. But we don't live in that world and never did. Before we had slop we had pulp — formulaic, low effort writing full of cliches of romance, lust, crime and adventure broke college students could churn out en masse to make a living. I'd also recommend having a look at the books published by this article's author. I will admit that I have never read nor heard of any of them. But come on, just look at the books published covers and the way the author introduced them and tell me that they are not industrial products engineered for mass commercial appeal.
- wredcoll 2mo ago
  I agree, any book that is liked by more than one other person is a crime against artistry and a moral failing.
- bsenftner 2mo ago
  We do live in that world, but that world is also filled and conditioned by the predator and prey structure we all operate within. The higher purpose that Art serves today is aliased, hidden, and conveyed in layers of metaphor. This is somewhat of a game, as the predators playing the art game try to consume their prey, anyone that is not an art philosopher in the pursuit of stories to explain our situations and not fame or wealth. The obvious paths were long ago traveled and farmed to barren land, and all that is left is the extremes as nobody wants to admit that this, this with all of us, is it and nothing more.
docfort 2mo ago
I think the first goal of writing is to talk to yourself. Without an external, unchanging scratchpad, most people cannot keep their thoughts truly straight. It can feel otherwise, but trying to write something about any tricky topic even a few pages in length can take a long time to be self-consistent. Clarifying it takes even longer, especially when you intend to share it. Writing as thinking is definitely a thing. I believe it’s the trickiest part of understanding how such interesting things pop out of a language model trained to predict the next token and rewarded with pleasing sequences. Since it is not thinking, it proves that certain sentences (most?) can be generated thoughtlessly.
- visarga 2mo ago
  Don't just focus on the model, half the turns in a session belong to the human, it's an instrument that depends on how well the user wields it. It does not need to produce the novel insights, just to support the user to have them.
- foobarian 2mo ago
  I like the term I've seen someone use for LLMs: a "thought partner." Truly it's the duck programming duck I've always wanted.
  - Brian_K_White 2mo ago
    I say that LLM's are a pacifier. LLM output is to conscious output as a silicone nipple is to a breast. Sure, at some level, there are some people who at least some times, cannot pecieve a difference. That does not prove that there is no difference or that the difference doesn't matter.
    - WorldMaker 2mo ago
      I think that LLM's are a broken mirror or maybe disco ball. What you get back is almost always a reflection of what you put in, just garbled through and with the reflections of so many other people. The best parts that I often get back are mostly just the stuff that I already put in it. I think that's also where LLMs get the most dangerous. That ELIZA effect of telling you exactly what you told it but in a slightly rephrased way makes you think that you think that your ideas are genius. You've got someone "actively listening" and telling you whatever idea you just gave it was the best idea it ever heard. That's not what you want from a serious writing partner. You want a writing partner to challenge you, to point out your mistakes and flaws, to make you better, to offer a truly different perspective to your own. You don't want a dark reflection from a "yes man" to spiral into.
miki123211 2mo ago
No. I think narrative stories are a "brain hack", in the same way heavily processed food, drugs, clickbait, soap operas and TikTok are brain hacks, combined with some exclusivity status signaling games. They're just old enough to have gained a cultural cachet that more modern forms of entertainment don't yet have. Same for art, music, comedy and culture generally. There is nothing wrong with those "brain hacks", if they make us happy and don't have negative consequences, why not use them, but we should recognize that it's what they are. I think that an alien intelligence could communicate with us about Ohm's law and Rieman's last theorem, maybe even debate resource and power allocation strategies (democracy, monarchy, capitalism, socialism) with us, they could probably understand the pull of sports, even if they couldn't participate in it themselves, but art and humor would be completely lost on them and considered a weird human excentricity.
- tavavex 2mo ago
  Culture and art can teach something to its audience, unlike most of the garbage you likened it to. It's clear you don't hold it in much regard, since you compare it to outright scams (clickbait) and even imply that consuming fiction is basically done for virtue signalling. But like it or not, humans are not computers. They are animals with messy, complex thinking and reasoning that is impossible to fully describe, and incredibly complex societal systems created from their chaotic interactions. These messy people don't learn from datasheets and reference manuals, even if you'd like it to be otherwise. Of course, there's a place for non-fiction, I like some of it a lot. But art has subtlety to it - instead of smacking people in the face with data and lists of objective measurements, it can pry into them by using the human ability to imagine themselves in other shoes, experience emotions that aren't results of real life events, and much more. There is a reason why parents teach their children values by reading them fables or educational stories, not the legal code of their jurisdiction. And this is also why fiction actually changes the minds of people reading it, arguably doing it more effectively than nonfiction. Slop (clickbait, average tiktok content, whatever else you're imagining) doesn't make you feel new things or think of something you haven't thought of before, art does. The aiens are also a bit of a copout. You're just assuming that there's bound to be this perfect species (that are effectively computers) that operate only on mathematics and discrete logic, who are obviously superior to us and can show us our wrong ways. What if computers aren't always superior? Or what if organic life requires some of that messiness you don't like to be viable? What if the aliens had their own weird things we could never relate to?
unethical_ban 2mo ago
You're both missing the point, I think. You're missing that AI and the people who utilize it in secret will fool readers. Today, you cannot watch a video of something amazing, submitted by a stranger, and trust that it is real. People who don't doubt the source of a book will read AI-created content thinking it is the real thing. Reputation will mean more than ever before in the age of AI. People doubt "mainstream" news, but their reputation for verifying sources and stories for truth will be the only way people can trust what they read and see. Novelists and creators will have to build trust with their audience, if the audience is caring enough to demand authenticity.

jtbayly 2mo ago

And the word was made flesh and dwelt among us.

smalltorch 2mo ago
Im curious what you mean by this
- harimau777 2mo ago
  They are quoting John 1:14. At the beginning of his book, John describes Jesus as being the personified word of God. That was likely an early example of the influence of Neo Platonism on Christianity.
  - smalltorch 2mo ago
    Yes but curious GP's thoughts on comparing LLM writing to the reference and how it relates to the topic
- inigyou 2mo ago
  In the beginning were the Words, and the Words made the world. I am the Words—the Words are everything. Where the Words end, the world ends. You cannot go forward in the absence of space. Repeat.
- jtbayly 2mo ago
  Wow. My comment is auto-collapsed. I'm not aware of this phenomenon on HN. Is it a moderation thing? It hasn't been downvoted. I don't think I've been shadow-banned or had this comment flagged or anything. Anyway, to answer your question, I was pointing out that the request for "important knowledge and moral lessons that larger society needs" and "communicating solutions to how to live as a human" as well as lamenting that "We are adrift without instructions" is actually a request for religion. Religion is how to make sense of how to live. So the comment is asking for religion and rejecting religion at the same time. At the same time, I was pointing out that one religion in particular has directly addressed the point that "writing is not the goal." The "word"—or "logos" in the greek—is the reason, the logic, the rational principle of the cosmos behind the words. It points to that need for a solution for how to live, as well as showing there is a real answer.

bayindirh 2mo ago

Many of us understood that, and tried to tell it over and over. My keyboard is worn, my mind is numb, my soul is weary from typing/telling that the output is not the aim, but the content it carries, the substance it holds. Yet a very vocal group advocates integrating LLMs into every aspect of their lives, and the other group watch in dismay. On the other hand, I used a sentence form used by LLMs in a comment during a morning-brain moment, and an angry mob tried to crucify me with torches and pitchforks. Many people love to generate text with LLMs, but most of same crowd apparently hates to read LLM output. An interesting phenomenon.

inigyou 2mo ago
It must be a distinction between engineer-type brains and leader-type brains. If you're focused on social status climbing, the fact that you produced a report, and the length of that report, is far more important than whether the contents of the report have any relation to reality beyond the surface level. This is true if you're trying to get VC funding as well. It's even in institutional academia, as seen by the Sokal affair.
- bayindirh 2mo ago
  To be frank, I neither live/work in an environment or live for "climbing" anything, so fluffware is not something I produce or understand. On the other hand, I have friends who play that game, and I don't talk with most of them, because their life views and mental states continually drift to a state which makes no sense whatsoever for me, so we grow apart.
  - b112 2mo ago
    Eventually, enough engineers will breed with enough engineers, that we'll be a different species, incapable of communicating with weirdo humanity.
    - bsenftner 2mo ago
      You are describing the bifurcation of society that is the moral lesson of The Time Machine by H.G. Wells. The Morlocks are the scientific and engineering "gender" (so to speak) of the human race while the Eloki are the child-like humans kept around because they are the food the Morlocks consume to survive in that future.

deleted 2mo ago

[deleted]

pibaker 2mo ago

I'd like to live in a world where people only make art to serve a higher purpose. But we don't live in that world and never did. Before we had slop we had pulp — formulaic, low effort writing full of cliches of romance, lust, crime and adventure broke college students could churn out en masse to make a living. I'd also recommend having a look at the books published by this article's author. I will admit that I have never read nor heard of any of them. But come on, just look at the books published covers and the way the author introduced them and tell me that they are not industrial products engineered for mass commercial appeal.

wredcoll 2mo ago
I agree, any book that is liked by more than one other person is a crime against artistry and a moral failing.
bsenftner 2mo ago
We do live in that world, but that world is also filled and conditioned by the predator and prey structure we all operate within. The higher purpose that Art serves today is aliased, hidden, and conveyed in layers of metaphor. This is somewhat of a game, as the predators playing the art game try to consume their prey, anyone that is not an art philosopher in the pursuit of stories to explain our situations and not fame or wealth. The obvious paths were long ago traveled and farmed to barren land, and all that is left is the extremes as nobody wants to admit that this, this with all of us, is it and nothing more.

docfort 2mo ago

I think the first goal of writing is to talk to yourself. Without an external, unchanging scratchpad, most people cannot keep their thoughts truly straight. It can feel otherwise, but trying to write something about any tricky topic even a few pages in length can take a long time to be self-consistent. Clarifying it takes even longer, especially when you intend to share it. Writing as thinking is definitely a thing. I believe it’s the trickiest part of understanding how such interesting things pop out of a language model trained to predict the next token and rewarded with pleasing sequences. Since it is not thinking, it proves that certain sentences (most?) can be generated thoughtlessly.

visarga 2mo ago
Don't just focus on the model, half the turns in a session belong to the human, it's an instrument that depends on how well the user wields it. It does not need to produce the novel insights, just to support the user to have them.
foobarian 2mo ago
I like the term I've seen someone use for LLMs: a "thought partner." Truly it's the duck programming duck I've always wanted.
- Brian_K_White 2mo ago
  I say that LLM's are a pacifier. LLM output is to conscious output as a silicone nipple is to a breast. Sure, at some level, there are some people who at least some times, cannot pecieve a difference. That does not prove that there is no difference or that the difference doesn't matter.
  - WorldMaker 2mo ago
    I think that LLM's are a broken mirror or maybe disco ball. What you get back is almost always a reflection of what you put in, just garbled through and with the reflections of so many other people. The best parts that I often get back are mostly just the stuff that I already put in it. I think that's also where LLMs get the most dangerous. That ELIZA effect of telling you exactly what you told it but in a slightly rephrased way makes you think that you think that your ideas are genius. You've got someone "actively listening" and telling you whatever idea you just gave it was the best idea it ever heard. That's not what you want from a serious writing partner. You want a writing partner to challenge you, to point out your mistakes and flaws, to make you better, to offer a truly different perspective to your own. You don't want a dark reflection from a "yes man" to spiral into.

miki123211 2mo ago

No. I think narrative stories are a "brain hack", in the same way heavily processed food, drugs, clickbait, soap operas and TikTok are brain hacks, combined with some exclusivity status signaling games. They're just old enough to have gained a cultural cachet that more modern forms of entertainment don't yet have. Same for art, music, comedy and culture generally. There is nothing wrong with those "brain hacks", if they make us happy and don't have negative consequences, why not use them, but we should recognize that it's what they are. I think that an alien intelligence could communicate with us about Ohm's law and Rieman's last theorem, maybe even debate resource and power allocation strategies (democracy, monarchy, capitalism, socialism) with us, they could probably understand the pull of sports, even if they couldn't participate in it themselves, but art and humor would be completely lost on them and considered a weird human excentricity.

tavavex 2mo ago
Culture and art can teach something to its audience, unlike most of the garbage you likened it to. It's clear you don't hold it in much regard, since you compare it to outright scams (clickbait) and even imply that consuming fiction is basically done for virtue signalling. But like it or not, humans are not computers. They are animals with messy, complex thinking and reasoning that is impossible to fully describe, and incredibly complex societal systems created from their chaotic interactions. These messy people don't learn from datasheets and reference manuals, even if you'd like it to be otherwise. Of course, there's a place for non-fiction, I like some of it a lot. But art has subtlety to it - instead of smacking people in the face with data and lists of objective measurements, it can pry into them by using the human ability to imagine themselves in other shoes, experience emotions that aren't results of real life events, and much more. There is a reason why parents teach their children values by reading them fables or educational stories, not the legal code of their jurisdiction. And this is also why fiction actually changes the minds of people reading it, arguably doing it more effectively than nonfiction. Slop (clickbait, average tiktok content, whatever else you're imagining) doesn't make you feel new things or think of something you haven't thought of before, art does. The aiens are also a bit of a copout. You're just assuming that there's bound to be this perfect species (that are effectively computers) that operate only on mathematics and discrete logic, who are obviously superior to us and can show us our wrong ways. What if computers aren't always superior? Or what if organic life requires some of that messiness you don't like to be viable? What if the aliens had their own weird things we could never relate to?

unethical_ban 2mo ago

You're both missing the point, I think. You're missing that AI and the people who utilize it in secret will fool readers. Today, you cannot watch a video of something amazing, submitted by a stranger, and trust that it is real. People who don't doubt the source of a book will read AI-created content thinking it is the real thing. Reputation will mean more than ever before in the age of AI. People doubt "mainstream" news, but their reputation for verifying sources and stories for truth will be the only way people can trust what they read and see. Novelists and creators will have to build trust with their audience, if the audience is caring enough to demand authenticity.