I wonder if GPT-4 will be able to take over the romance novel industry.
I gave up on the story when it started to get romantic because I wasn't really in that kind of a mood at the time.
And to go further: a system that collects articles on the same topics and highlights semantic differences (facts, tone, framing, ...).
I'd love a ublock origin style plugin for identifying submarine advertising, astroturfing, etc. Could feed it press releases/advertisements and the like from major corporations.
Also, elaborating from / interpreting OP, to explore the parts of a given article which have absolute merit, and discovering patterns in effective language.
Obviously this won't be necessary knowledge for the sake of writing, though nonetheless interesting for linguists. But with the machines busying themselves with that, a good analysis and production could have a profound effect on spoken language. As in, you are what you read, and, unless you're still reading the classics, for a decent majority(?) that will necessitate an evolution in language. Not to mention the potential misuse by politicians and public speakers who will have a new level of delicate and gripping rhetoric.
For papers like the NYT, WSJ, or WP, every story with a byline involves a day's work at least. They read the feeds, sure. But if read carefully, you will notice (among other things) that almost every story will state that the journalist tried to get into contact with the major subjects of the story. It will either include their comment, or something like "... declined to answer/did not respond to inquiries/etc".
Then, there are the magazines, like the Atlantic or New Yorker. They make up a good chunk of what's generally considered "journalism", and rewriting wire stories just isn't something they do.
More likely carve a niche for romances made by AI.
Absolutely this. But the final form of this requires some input from the reader – front camera access and retina scanning presumably. It may evolve, without proper curtailing, (unidentifiable ads aside) to be a pretty powerful tool of motivation / pacification / manipulation.
>Eventually the content produced for particular readers will only be roughly literate, let alone clever or stylish.
Don't know about this, I have slightly more faith in people's ability of appreciation. Though I could be embarrassingly wrong.
I feel (a little hyperbolic allowances, if you will) it's in the books for an Infinite Jest type of entertainment to arise, be it in kindle or netflix form. That is, a piece of entertainment so excruciatingly entertaining, that people will literally and completely drop whatever it is they were doing before (or, you know, just miss a week of work for the sake of the most intimate and powerful writing they've ever experienced) and bask in the glories of their own personal god revealing truths of the universe to them.
Not everyone, in fact I dare do say the majority, don't want to read hyper-personalized content to the point that only we can read it, most of us don't even know what we want, and sometimes that doesn't even matter.
Hyper personalization isn't the end game - at least in my opinion. In fact history has shown that we valued precisely the opposite, collective experience with low enough resolution so we have room to fill the gaps ourselves. How can you relate to others what only you understand?
Or we will eventually cease to be humans?
I didn't understand the "optimism is cowardice" part. The true optimism is believing we will survive long enough to reach that point :P