adventure-of-penelope.vercel.app
The plot was sourced from a group of friends.
Art, in this case illustration and narrative, requires a coherent viewpoint. In literature this is often referred to as the authorial voice. Voice is special because of the uniqueness of the human life behind it, which I realize sounds a bit airy-fairy, but is very true once you start digging into what works and what doesn't. When you read something and wonder why it's so engaging when it's not _that_ much different than other very similar pieces, that's often what's at work.
It's also why some pieces really don't work for some people. The "a kid could draw that" critiques of various modernism styles come from this place.
I don't begrudge people experimenting with art through LLM generation, and perhaps it can be a great tool for scaffolding ideas, I grant that. However, I do worry about the deluge of poorly conceived LLM content that will make the good stuff harder to find. We had a glorious age where the gatekeepers had lost most of their power. With the flood of content about to be released, I'm afraid we'll find ourselves beholden to them once again.
I think it depends on how you use it. If you write a one-line prompt, you'll get a "generic" result. With more guidance, you can get something much more personal. For example, you could imagine a story and let ChatGPT pick the actual words.
At the end, you can put an arbitrary amount of work to get a generated story. You can treat ChatGPT as a co-author who will help you do the parts you want (e.g. find ideas, find text structure, write the actual sentences). The end result depends on how much work you want to do yourself.
This IMO is a handwavy criticism of AI-generated content by people judging content who have the foreknowledge that the content was AI-generated.
To put it another way, pretend it was a year (or more) ago and ChatGPT/Stable Diffusion were ~unknown. You stumble across this kids book. Be completely honest here: would your reaction be "there's no way a human created this book"?
-> Hedgehog making bread -> Loves making bread -> One day bread stolen -> Butter everywhere -> Hedgehog sets out to find culprit -> Finds culprit -> Opens butter themed amusement park with culprit -> The End
There is no overlapping theme or logic to the story. Children's book will have some form of gimmick and stick to it (young humans aren't all that bright) so you can have a baker hedgehog that encounters adversity (bread is gone) and maybe tie it in with a human culprit (bread thief, didn't say please or something), but the butter amusement park is out of place and uncanny.
-> Caterpillar eats food -> Caterpillar eats more food -> Caterpillar eats even more food -> Caterpillar gets sick -> Caterpillar eats less food -> Butterfly.
The succession of events have a thread that join them together. I'm pretty sure ChatGPT could write it as well if you give it the above summary, but the hedgehog story doesn't have that and feel uncanny because of it.
Take a look at Penguin in Peril for example.
Cats are hungry -> they go to see a film -> they are still hungry so they decide to steal a penguin -> the penguin escapes -> the penguin swims through a fountain back to the zoo -> the cats get put in prison.
I dunno maybe it's still fairly coherent, but we've gone from "completely impossible" to "bad children's books" in like 2 years. How many more years do you think it will take to get to "good children's book"? I bet less than 10.
Where the Wild Things Are - a fever dream about rebellion and unrealized sexuality, hero's journey into the latent world and back.
Green Eggs and Ham - picky eating works on its own, or can stand in for just about any other unpleasant experience. The repetition mirrors the real-life experience of getting used to something you don't like.
Can't remember the name, about fuzzy little monkey people living in a hut? - really cozy, about the warmth and safety of being a cuddled-up tiny person without worry.
There's no throughline in this one. The prickly porcupine stands in for a stressed mom. The fairy stands in for a child who messes up the kitchen. The solution is play all day and leave the kitchen dirty? Doesn't hold together.
I'd take out the filler "journey" bit, add in some conflict between the mom and kid, and make the ending more realistic (fairy uses magic to make icing for the cake?). That might bring it up to library-filler tier book.
To me, the art looks really impressive though. Again, no throughline - I'd expect a progression that goes from lonely porcupine -> in the wilderness -> sharing the stage -> back at home but happy
THIS. This is exactly the power of these models. The AI generated an entire story in some extremely quick amount of time and an experience Human can edit and curate the results. It generates first drafts trivially.
> Once upon a time there was porcupine. Every day, she baked a loaf of bread. One day the loaf disappeared. Because of that, she had too much butter. Because of that, things got slippery. Until finally she opened the first ever butter theme park.
It seems like the LLM did exactly what the author wanted
I read the prompt and I can see the human’s intention: write a story about how you turn something bad into something good. But the AI transitions didn’t land and instead of getting a heartwarming story of a clever hedgehog, it just feels like a badly executed Deus Ex Machina.
I think that's pretty different than GP's point about art needing to have "voice." It seems entirely clear to me that AI will get to the point where it can generate something coherent in terms of plot/theme/logic - that's just a matter of time.
The reason I might not have guessed it was a machine creation is that the prose is adequate on a technical level, and previous markers for machine creation included wonky prose. But going forward we'll all learn new markers for machine-created dreck.
Never is a really, really long time.
> Art, in this case illustration and narrative, requires a coherent viewpoint.
Why can't an AI have a coherent viewpoint, especially in the context of a children's book, where that viewpoint need only be incredibly simple? "John has lost his <insert item>, feels sad about that, and wants to get it back" is a coherent viewpoint, and certainly something AI can (if not now, at some point in the future) write a coherent story about.
> Voice is special because of the uniqueness of the human life behind it, which I realize sounds a bit airy-fairy, but is very true once you start digging into what works and what doesn't.
So what works and what doesn't? You're saying all of this at a high level and giving a timeline of forever on your prediction, but then you say it's true if you dig in without doing that.
> It's also why some pieces really don't work for some people. The "a kid could draw that" critiques of various modernism styles come from this place.
The thing about modernism is that it requires outside context to understand. It is a movement in response to art movements that preceded it, and the fact that its style uses simplistic shapes and lines is because of what it's a response to. You need to understand that history to appreciate why it is what it is.
In that sense, you're absolutely right - a child can't produce modern art, because even if it looks visually similar to existing art, it lacks that context.
The problem with that argument is that it's totally irrelevant to the topic at hand - children's books. They do not need history or context - those things serve no purpose because, for obvious reasons, they would be lost on the audience. All you have to hit is the superficial level - if you book looks and reads like a great children's book, it's a great children's book!
On a somewhat related note, I think AI art will eventually be seen as a movement somewhat akin to modernism. In response to the fact that art has become increasingly elite and insular (the whole fact that a modern painting can't be fully appreciated just by looking at the painting - you must know art history, which most people don't have the time or inclination to learn), people will be inclined to appreciate the flood of beautiful but democratized art that can be made by anyone. Just as the generation of artists before modernism thought it was awful, so will the current generation of artists about AI art. I'm a believe that art should be about aesthetics, not history, and AI art is certainly great for that.
True but irrelevant. If we want to get to decent art, we'll need something well beyond an LLM.
Humans generate stories using introspection. Every writer is their own first reader. They rapidly and iteratively try out story elements to create experiences and feelings. They then find the right words, again seeking out particular feelings. After iterating on the words for a while, they then have others read the words: partners, friends, eventually an editor. Those people all experience feelings, which get observed and sometimes articulated to the writer, driving further revisions.
LLMs can create story-shaped things. They can write glib, imitative dreck. But to write a new, compelling book, they need to be able to iterate against high-quality simulations of reader emotions. That may be something that we can create in the lab, but if we do, it won't be called an LLM.
Like, AI art generators don't just have issues with human hands or eyes, they also create buildings which are architecturally incoherent. I don't know how you solve that with mere data or refinements.
I'm curious how many modern children's books you've read. There are a ton of very shitty... Remixes with poor cheap art. Especially books for cities and holidays. I could see this eating into that
Perhaps, if the cover was engaging enough. However this seems like the kind of story that my child (4 1/2) might read once and then never pick up again. She'd be like "ew, who wants butter all over their kitchen?"
Much of children's best-selling fiction is extremely derivative. The way the market works, it's nearly impossible to get things published that aren't extremely derivative.
To the extent that, I think this might actually be a good place to start - with auto-generated derivative garbage - and then fix the "problems" with the plot through editing.
My first thoughts on this story were pretty negative. The plot is almost incoherent. There's not much conflict. But it does have a little bit of a mystery, and it does get resolved.
Although much of it came from out-of-nowhere (The Theme Park), Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and many other extremely popular children's books are literary nonsense.
The illustration definitely does not fit together well, and is not what you'd expect to get from a book you paid $20 for.
But, overall, it's really not bad.
I could see a huge market for parents wanting custom books like this generated for their kids about all their zany interests. If your kids loves baking & cute animals & mystery - they'd probably love this story.
Maybe it costs $1 or $2 - it's definitely not a big business - it's probably not going to "disrupt" the market (because it's so entrenched I don't even think disruption is possible).
If this is too much literary nonsense, I'd love to see what it could do if you asked for the same story "In the style of AA Milne" or Robert Lewis Stevenson or James Mathew Barrie or Beatrix Potter.
I can definitely see a near future where almost every parent does this for their kid once or twice a year.
But of course, it's the adults buying/distributing these books so you still need to "sell" it to them first.
(seriously, there's some so-cheap-I'm-not-sure-why-they-bothered kids' cartoons on Netflix, if you look for them—you're on the right track if it looks like it was rendered with mid-grade 2005 desktop 3D rendering tech using stock models and stock scenes with way-too-little decoration or clutter, despite in-fact dating no earlier than 2015. A lot of them have whole scenes that are basically just the characters talking in circles. The plots are always extremely straightforward and about 1/5 as much plot as they should need to fill the time, even by very generous reckoning. Lots of interpersonal conflict that amounts to nothing, existing just so they can have two characters have some conflict in a scene to absolutely no thematic-, message-, characterization-, or plot-related end. Most turn out to have been originally produced in India or Romania or something, if you start digging. It's crazy. But young kids will watch these.)
Trash in, trash out.
Just because there is a bunch of trash on Netflix and elsewhere doesn't mean we should pollute the kid's world more with it.
Especially at the age of reading. 1-5 is the most important age by far...
I don't know how we get this myth to stop perpetuating but it does not ring true to me at all. LLM's has proven to have "novelty" many times now.
Even so, it's a fun and interesting tool to use alongside traditional media, so I'm excited to see it improve.
Kid's books aren't intended to be novel. It's not like a four year old is going to say, "Man, this is a retread of Hamlet!" They are often re-tellings packaged up in a new way to appeal to kids in the current generation. Sometimes as simple as removing sexist, classist, and/or racist elements.
There's only so many words in the english language. If I ask ChatGPT to write me a story about how a I turn into a super hero tomato that saves the world against the villainy of pasta, that's a novel story I'm pretty sure.
As actual usage? I enjoy making stories up (or misremembering existing ones) for my daughter. The human touch is valuable to me. I also wonder: many well-loved stories of today started as a story the writer was telling his/her children; one example is The Hobbit. What if Tolkien had thought "screw this, I'm overworked and tired, I'll just type some prompt for ChatGPT and it will be enough for Christopher".
I know mine is a kneejerk reaction. But I can't help thinking that this is solving a problem no actual humans have. We know how to tell stories, good or bad. We don't need automation for this. We don't need help writing terribly bland and generic stories, either. So it feels vaguely dystopian to me.
Technically it is impressive. ChatGPT and things like it are the most impressive thing in years, to me.
But as a means of cultural encoding to help children understand what matters in the world and how they - specifically - fit into that world, it’s going to come up short.
Maybe we need a critic AI that can identify the most touching, meaningful, instructive, and morally enlightening stories out there and help us sort through the already daunting number of options
At some level, sure, it's not the same as coming up with a story on your own - there's not going to be anything meaningful in why you selected those particular elements of the story - but that merely constrains those choices to free you up to be creative with other aspects of the story.
I think there's still room for someone who wants to be creative to use the tools to provide the same experience you're describing. It's not like one has to give the raw output to one's child. And I think such raw outputs will be generally bland, missing something relative to those with a human touch. However, giving bland and meaningless entertainment to children wouldn't really be something new, and I still see a fair concern in there. I suppose this is already part of what articles on "Kids' YouTube" are talking about.[0]
[0]https://www.avclub.com/take-a-trip-to-the-automated-hellscap...
This is like coming up with a plot idea and having some hired writer write it. This already existed before computers. So you're essentially using GPT as a ghostwriter, only (unlike human ghostwriters) it has no way to come with something innovative, it just regurgitates whatever it's already in its data in some way or another.
"But," I can guess you'll object, "human (ghost)writers are already writing derivative crap, what's the difference?". Exactly. We already know how to hire humans to write derivative crap, and the truly good stuff is out of the question for GPT. So what is this solving?
But what about children's bedtime stories? Well, there are tons of really good bedtime stories, lovingly crafted by good authors. Do we need automated ones written by ChatGPT?
No, we probably don’t. Won’t and shouldn’t stop people from making more :)
The world doesn't need another love song [1]. But the human composing it might need it, as a form of expression, even if the result is garbage or trite. Humans enjoy creating stuff, even if nobody wants that stuff. Writers write, or their minds will explode. The creation process is its own goal.
This is not the case for ChatGPT; a LLM has no motivations.
Imagine being an OK writer and now you potentially have an editor. Imagine asking it to come up with a few ideas regarding something you're working on and you can use one as inspiration. There's just unlimited ways people will work with and integrate these new tools that you or I can't even possibly dream up.
As for asking if we need more bedtime stories - why not? Maybe it would be cool if me and my kid could use some experience we had together to create a story that features him and his friends in the mold of a classic story.
Yeah, but where did I say that? That's not my point at all.
Here are my thoughts, rephrased:
- We, mankind, don't need AI to "improve" writing. This is a problem nobody has. There's a plethora of writing, both for children and for adults.
- People enjoy writing, so this isn't an activity we want to "optimize". There's no need for ChatGPT here.
- When computers take over creating everything, what is left for us humans? If/when books are being written and published by AI, sure you can go on writing for your mom & friends I guess, but something fundamental will be lost.
- When most "content" (I hate that word) is created like this, some sort of extreme Netflixization of movies and books taken to its logical consequence, we will become consumers. Isn't that depressing?
> As for asking if we need more bedtime stories - why not? Maybe it would be cool if me and my kid could use some experience we had together [...]
I do this every night with my daughter, without AI. It's called "parenting". You don't need gadgets or computers for this. ChatGPT isn't solving an actual problem in this case either.
"Computer, tell my kid a funny story about that time something fun happened to us; I think it was yesterday, it's in my mobile logs anyway."
How do you know something is lost when using an AI to assist in writing? Could it be that something will be gained? Perhaps it will unleash creativity in people that wouldn’t have written before? Maybe the greatest literary work ever created will be built by someone using an AI. Or maybe we’ll see the limits emerge and this won’t be another John Henry story.
Your argument very much sounds like the argument of the Luddite’s. But here’s the thing - you can always check out of it. The Amish certainly have thrived while not participating in very much of what we call “advancements”. I think that’s a better approach than Ted Kaczynsky’s.
We can keep paying people to come up with optimisations to the algorithm itself, keep paying annotators to manually pepper human common sense into the system, but it's my theory that these payments won't keep up with the spread of automatically generated content in the source dataset and the negative impact that has on the language model that the algorithm outputs.
ChatGPT currently enshrines insight and style from 2020-2021 (more-or-less indistinguishable from insight and style from 2022-2023), but now that the system exists, rather than observing a rapid pace of new writing styles and original insights emerging on the web of 2024, we'll potentially see a slightly slower style/original insights emergence rate, then the next year an even slower emergence rate. This will continue until it reaches a stage where the spoken world of language and world wide web world of language have completely diverged, similar to the way 1950s film dialogue bore little resemblance to 1950s speaking styles.
Short-term, ChatGPT has called creative pursuits into question, but long term, I think such systems will strongly validate creative pursuits, and only really replace non-creative roles. By turning the web into a wasteland of written cruft, GPT will validate the need for human flourishes, error, divergences from the norm and the arbitrary rewriting of unspoken rules. I think only a strong AI raised like us in our own societies could infuse that kind of culture into its writing, but the process of developing such an AI would basically just be a reinvention of slavery, and we probably don't have the resources here on earth to support it longterm anyway.
This is just a very convoluted way of manually labeling data as good and bad.
Also, it would be possible to train bots on an archive of such material.(accordingly, out of date; so less useful in numerous ways).
Even if western governments adopt similar laws, however, I'm not sure if they would be that effective. People would start messing with the definition of AI. E.g. 80 years ago a spelling and grammar checker would probably have fit society's definition of AI, and both of those techs arguably have a cultural impact on the web. Spellcheckers lead to less new words or dialectal variations of words coming into existence, for example.
This. There are 10000 children's books out there with coherent art sets and a storyline that's not just total gibberish.
This kind of crap is no better than SEO blogs. Its only purpose is to pump out massive amounts of content in the hopes of earning a small amount of money on each squirt of crap that maybe amounts to something over the long term.
Build good things. Solve problems. That's how you make money.
What happens when the computer does tell better stories to your kids than you do? When you turn the computer loose on them for a week and, well, god damn, by the end of the week they seem to have taken exactly the lessons they needed and are bringing them up in real-life situations and are even getting better at reading themselves, and raving about how good the stories are, and you can't deny that if you'd done it, the results wouldn't have been as good?
Now repeat for all the ways that humans find it satisfying to serve others using their creativity.
I very much doubt it's healthy for all the things we find fulfilling and enjoyable to have only intrinsic motivation to drive them.
It's hard to turn down better outcomes, but what if a side-effect is that as a species we become psychologically (even spiritually, if you will) lost? So kids are raised more effectively—but for what? So that all the things they enjoy doing are valuable to, and needed or wanted by, exactly no-one?
So we get more efficient at producing goods and entertainment—for what? So the brushes and paints we buy for our paintings that nobody cares to see and that your talentless cousin can outdo—in every way, including sublimity and mood and all that—with a lazy prompt on some future image generator, are somewhat cheaper? What's the point?
> What happens when the computer does tell better stories to your kids than you do?
Others have answered "but ChatGPT will never get as good at this". Let's, for the sake of argument, suppose that it does: suppose ChatGPT does get better.
What then? Why is it a net win for mankind that a computer program can tell better (or "good enough") stories? If mechanical tasks get done by machines, and creative tasks get done by machines, and games get played by machines, and everything under the sun gets done by machines...
...what's left for us, then? Writing is an enjoyable activity for humans. It's not something to "optimize", it's fine as it is. If we optimize humans out of the activity of writing (or composing music, or drawing, etc), have we truly "won"?
People still do all kinds of things which machines and computers can do better than we can. No reason to think that will change.
We will be left to ponder our existence and meaning in the vastness of the cosmos? Nope: in this hypothetical future, computers will also be better at that than us.
I'm not threatened by computers if they can design a car, or write a better programs (though my livelihood is threatened for obvious reasons). But why would I want computers writing novels? What is there for me to gain, as a human?
(I'm specifically excluding the "wow, this tech is amazing" angle from it. I'm also amazed by ChatGPT.)
I enjoy reading novels, and I wouldn't refuse to read an excellent one because a computer wrote it.
Think about whatever you enjoy doing: what if computers do it better, and become cheaper and faster at it, and you are no longer necessary? Sure, you could do it for your mom or partner to see, I guess. Disappointing, isn't it? Now repeat for every conceivable hobby or human activity. Do you see where I'm going?
> access to better novels
Are current novels bad? Do we have a lack of novels? Does the process of novel-writing need "disruption" by AI? Is mankind complaining, "if only we had more and better novels"?
Consuming the culture manufactured by the autonomous corporations that generate our reality so the capitalist class can afford their orbital pleasure domes and stem-cell purees.
Not like today, but worse: exclusively consumers of stuff automated processes produce. We won't create anymore; at best it'll be "computer, entertain me!". I really don't like that future.
Amateurs, however, do need the help. Not everyone is a born story teller, but if you have a story to tell and need help telling it, ChatGPT can fill in those gaps for you.
It might not be a work of art like LOTR, but you'll most likely just be getting tips and hints on how to format better.
Most writers learn by writing. This is a "solved" problem, in the sense that mankind has had writers -- successful and otherwise, good and bad -- for hundreds of years now. We got this, this isn't an activity that needs improving by AI tools. It's not an actual problem that humans have, e.g. "I would write better, if only I had an AI assistant!". Creative writing is also not about speed, it's not something that needs optimizing for that. For art in general, actually: "if only Picasso could paint faster!" is not an actual problem mankind has.
I'm talking about creative writing, mind you. Not some technical writing like creating manuals or reports -- I'm all for AI helping us with those.
We've been working on a platform/tool for this since September. And it's live in Alpha right now, https://bedtimestory.ai
We are working on a lot of feature requests and improvements at the moment, and distribution. Text, Audio and Video being the primary use-cases.
Making stories 100% editable and upload your own images is also in the works.
We are working on "Magic Images" that will allow you to insert yourself or your kids into the stories as stylised characters in your style of choice https://twitter.com/LinusEkenstam/status/1603536335884750848
We are also working on Magic Talking Cards, Video audio of the story character telling the story from their perspective https://twitter.com/LinusEkenstam/status/1603276364550807552
In our library there are over 10.000 stories https://bedtimestory.ai/library
We are looking for people to keep giving us feedback and help us push the boundaries on whats possible.
Thank you! follow us on twitter to stay up to date, https://twitter.com/bedtimestoryAI
We have not built out the full search, filter and categories for the library yet, but we have stories in +100 different languages.
Super excited to be sharing more in the next few months.
Currently we are running 100% on OpenAI, GPT3 & Dalle2, but we have tried some (unofficial MJ solutions) and our own trained SD models. We are working on a feature we call "magic photos" that essentially allows you to upload a set of images of a human, train your own model, and use that in as many stories as you want, you can then create unlimited variations of that character in different situations.
Here are some early versions of that. My daughter as a scientist, in her sci-fi lab. She is created on SD using around 12 images for training, hosting the model ~5gb directly on S3. Then we just use GPU provider pay-per-use to generate the images based on prompts. https://twitter.com/LinusEkenstam/status/1617675627695583232...
I tried it and I wonder how I could generate more images. I made a story and only had one image.
I would also love to print it out as a book (don't see myself reading a book to a kid on a laptop / tablet) and that every page would have an image. Would also be good if I could define which content should be represented as an image.
Keep up the great work!
free stories only offers 1 image, and paid accounts you'll get 5 images per story. We are working on full Edit an upload images capabilites. https://twitter.com/LinusEkenstam/status/1617997909508902913
Paid accounts can also re-generate images using their own prompts for images.
So we are working on distribution, printed books, e-books, audio and video. It's all coming in the next few weeks.
Thank you for the kind comment!
We already have +10.000 registered users (most signed up in the past 30 days)
About 20.000 stories are generated and some 50.000 images
We are releasing about 2000 books on Amazon with 10 stories per book, and pay royalties back to the creators of each story.
So there will be a lot of noise, essentially we are taking on the big fish.
To be clear, Bedtimestories is just the beginning, its an easy target, and easy to market. Our mission is a lot bigger, we want to become "the narrative company" and are building the tools to make that happen.
Excited, and hope to have you and the wife and kids along for the ride!
/ Linus
Edit: Clarifications.
Right now the workflow is mostly automated, but we still manually approve stories before they get sent out to ensure quality. Unfortunately bc of manual time it takes + GPU costs + super high demand we will probably start offering a paid tier. Hope that helps!
By the way, if I may ask: since story generation seems to be free, what is your business model?
Re: pricing bc of the manual time it takes to approve stories + GPU costs + super large queue we actually just started offering a paid tier to move up the queue and get your story within 24 hours. Definitely still experimenting tho!
Another thing. Don't you have a bad feeling uploading images of your kids, conveniently tagged with their age, to a random web service that promises to delete the images without even revealing the makers?
I mean yes, it looks legitimate and you can find a person on Twitter who seems to be the maker of it, but that's not a guarantee for the safety of the uploaded images. I'm not a data paranoid, but careless sharing my kids' images with a random service like that crosses a border.
They are all very bland, and sound like someone is making a summary of the story rather than reading the story itself.
So I think it's great to get ideas of a plot for a story, but then you should write it yourself to make it more "lively".
I used to worry about that... but then someone pointed out to me that there are pretty much no stories of anyone being hurt by that.
Worst case, those images leak all over the web... And then what? The internet is already filled with pictures of people and children, yours won't stand out. The photos aren't tagged by name, and even if they were, few people care about obama as a 5 year old pirate [1], so why would they care about your child?
Overall, the risk of personal harm from a data leak seems really small - so I put my efforts elsewhere, like making sure my child gets to spend more time with me - that's infinitely more valuable.
[1]: https://img.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeed-static/static/enhanced/ter...
Also planning to have stock characters so you can make stories without uploading images since I get that's definitely a concern for most parents. Would love any other feedback on how to improve the experience!
When did you get the idea? ChatGPT is what sparked it for me.
This is an important part of the prompt:
> she had too much butter. Because of that, things got slippery.
> Until finally she opened the first ever butter theme park.
But the generated story doesn't say that the layer of butter in the kitchen was slippery, or explain that butter in general is slippery (and hence could create "slippery slides"), which make the idea seem like a bizarre jump:
> Sparkles was sorry for her mischief, and offered to help Penelope turn the butter back into bread. But Penelope had a better idea.
> Together, they opened the first ever butter theme park
It’s really not great though. On the last page the hedgehog becomes huge.
And it makes no sense. Why was there too much butter? Why was some random girl in the house. How does butter make bread disappear? Why is one character a hedgehog and the other a human girl?
Author of "A Wrinkle in Time" Madeleine L'Engle said, "You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children."
Stories with animals that act as humans are a trend spanning from antiquity (Aesop) or earlier (myths) that just never went away (e.g. Guardians of Galaxy).
* (Currently) Most AI generated images have an aesthetic to them, so it's easy to spot sometimes. Typically low-res, smeared details, bad hands/body horror. This may improve over time, but I don't know how I'd feel ethically (both morally and in work/effort) leaning so hard on AI.
* For me at least, as soon as I learn something creative is completely (or mostly) AI generated I lose all interest in engaging with the content beyond surface-level consumption. I think fundamentally AI generated creative works are banal and will age horribly over time.
Honestly I think it would be much better to buy a nice paperback kid's book made by a human as a gift for your friend's kid. They'll love it and the kid will have a connection with a human author and artist.
This is like giving a kid an AI-generated JRPG game you made in an afternoon vs giving them a Final Fantasy game.
I can foresee a very near future where this market is absolutely overrun with auto generated books + artwork. I don't think of this as a good or bad thing. It's just going to be interesting to see who gets the first jump on this.
Good authors+illustrators for children are just so far ahead of any AI generated content right now it’s not even comparable. Something as seemingly simple as Julia Donaldson’s Smartest Giant in Town is a heart warming tale, told along a continuous theme with a consistent voice where the story wraps up beautifully at the end. Then it’s all brought together with delightful illustrations that match and delight so well. They aren’t just good illustrations. They are delightful. Heck. They even have Easter eggs of sorts. All of that gave my son and I so much to discuss, point at, draw, and sing together. Wouldn’t want any child who could have that experience to miss out on it.
Whether having to sift through massive amount of trash to get anything created with some quality is a good or a bad thing... decide for yourself.
With AI you can improve the quality of the writing, tweak the style of delivery, add detail to story lines, and deliver stories faster.
Automating creativity is so gross. Never mind the fact that these models are trained on stolen artwork and texts.
Being that there is enough of a debate on this topic alone that's been raging for decades it's not easily decidable by a one liner.
I think you might be in trouble there, a number of savants have been known throughout history who have been able to learn various things with no instruction and simply by hearing or seeing a work done by someone else have been able to recreate it or produce something in their style.
I think in the tech industry we get caught up on 'novel' and 'new' because duplication is cheap to the point of almost free.
Even after following along and gaining the confidence to paint on their own, they continue to use the same approach to painting. Are those paintings afterwards derivative works and to be treated the same way as an AI painting asked to create a scene with certain elements in the stye of Bob Ross?
The AI is learning. Why is one of those things stealing and not the other?
The definition of a derivative work is agnostic to the means to create it. The final product is what is being evaluated.
If the answer is "but the Bob Ross paintings that are derivative works by amateurs are never sold and only hung at home - it would only be an issue if they sold them or tried to display them publicly as described https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/106 " - then I would agree.
If I create an image through any means - be it paint on canvas, stylus on tablet, or prompt and ML and don't violate 17 U.S. Code § 106 then there shouldn't be any issue.
If, however, I publish that image - again, no matter how it is created - then there is an issue. But it isn't the maker of the paints, or Adobe, or the creators of whatever ML model generated it. A program cannot hold a copyright and cannot itself create a derivative work. ( https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/us-copyright-offic... ) and so the issue of creating and publishing a derivative work is upon the human who did it - not the computer.
If you want to sue someone for publishing an image generated as "create a landscape of San Francisco in the style of Pixar" then have Pixar go after the person who published that image. It doesn't matter what process created that image.
Part of the conceit of the story is that even a mechanical copy of a known work can become something else because of the inner experience of the person reproducing it. Menard's Quixote, his fictional author thought, was different because Menard knew things and lived through things that Cervantes before him didn't, and so the exact same words are injected of different connotations because of this.
It's absurd, but it explores something about authorship.
ChatGPT and AI have no inner lives, no authorial perspective, and so they cannot use this defense. In their case, a copy is truly "stolen" with no additional value.
When you're demonstrating or studying a tech (like we're doing with gpt now), there's a tendency to go "here's what it can do." Once people start using it for more mundane work, the focus becomes "here's what I can do with it."
It probably doesn't matter what children's stories language models can write themselves. It matters what stories people can write using them. Same for software/graphic design/law/etc. These are just tech demos.
This becomes clearer once demos play out. 2 years ago, scripting a philosophical debate using language models felt like AIs expressing their opinion. By now, we're past that.
[1] https://twitter.com/galaxykate/status/1583907942834716672
OTOH... using AI to create art shifts around supply and demand such that there will be practical implications. The way email correspondence between A customer and a bank may look very different once both are using GPT enabled email clients.
Do you have any doubt that many working artists' copyrighted work was included in the the training data that produced these systems, without those artists licensing their work for that purpose?
It's not gatekeeping to insist that a project obtain a voluntary license from the people who contribute their work to a project.
And it's not gatekeeping to point out the fact that these platforms have only been successful by using working artists' copyrighted work in violation of their rights, without asking permission or providing compensation.
When somebody brings up the invention of photoshop, they're not trying to disprove a point about paying salaries to the devs, and I am sure you knew that.
When the artists whose work was stolen to train these models are compensated for that work then maybe its a "tiny part". Until then it is taking peoples work and using it to create an ultimate competitor in their own market that they cannot compete with. They now have to compete against themselves and they haven't even been paid for that "privilege".
Rather, the problem is that these systems only exists today because of the involuntary contributions of the very same people who are likely to be put out of business.
It really is about the how the contributors to these systems are being treated. The coders that contributed to Photoshop are analogous to the artists whose work was used to train these models. The difference between them is that the former gave their consent to the contribution, and the latter did not.
That's it, that's the entire post. Never mind the "stolen artwork" argument, you still have people upset about "automating creativity".
So, like I said, it's one part of it.
Saying that I agree with you in that I see this technology as a tool that can be used by humans to make amazing things. No one really has yet as the outputs have just been blunted, sloppy things. But if I’m an artist I see these tools as the latest tool to help make things.
There is a difference between saying something is less than and calling it gross. Also, imho, value of art is usually the art not the process. Sometimes it is the process, like someone showing off a new method but that is of interest to very, very few people. Just like academic papers' methodology section. Even within the larger community, it's useful to only a few people. (Apart from just checking someone's work)
Good human photographers are still a thing. They can even get a job out of it! There are books about photos by photographers of renown.
AI automation here would be more like AI deciding which photos to take, and taking them for you, with your interaction limited to "take some nice photos of my vacation". Then some other AI could give likes to the photo, closing the loop so that humans need not be involved at all in that silliness of photography!
I find myself conflicted on this topic as I can see how the makers of yesterday have been replaced by process automation, taking away some of the magic of the creation process. But, just as a frozen meal from Costco has its place, so does AI generated art. The macro level ingredients may be the same, but the final product is different.
Before fast food, the number of chefs and home cooking would have had to be far higher and/or more frequent than now. Some would argue that we are paying the price for all that processed food now, but others would argue it's the only way to scale people's lives and their time.
I agree that something "feels" different about midjourney making artwork that I likely could never make myself, but I'm struggling to fully have a reason or complete reasoning for why. And then I wrestle with, is this a normal evolution problem? Just this time it hit something nearer to me personally and it impacts my life.
Would love to hear other's thoughts on this.
* A digital image is permanent. A meal, by design, is consumed and has a very specific lifespan.
* A digital image is trivial to duplicate and consume again. A meal can be very hard to duplicate (and may even require another chef, or food scientists). No two people can consume exactly the same meal.
* A digital image is not required to survival. Regular intake of food and water is (at least for humans).
and so on.
Frozen-ness is about mass production - but not about the origin of that food. It just conflates unrelated issues.
Art is just something we do and consume for fun. We don't need to make art more efficient, because there is already too much art to consume in a lifetime. Also there is no requirement to consume as much art as possible. And automating art making means that there will be even more average art that anyone interested will have to sift through to find something nice.
Overall all of this effort could be put into automating something that will make everyday life easier, like if you want to make art more accessible then for example automate translations so we can read books or watch movies that we previously couldn't.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quatuor_pour_la_fin_du_temps
A frozen food is made of real food, the process all starts from scratch with "natural" ingredients (well ingredients).
The frozen food vs fresh cooked food is more like a film vs live acting. Or listening on tape vs a live concert. Even this analogy is lacking, a frozen food is made fresh at some point, it is about mass production not origin and ownership.
The frozen food is not food from your kitchen (or trashcan) remixed and added onto other people's plate.
Trying to take the 'freshness' of food and compare it to storytelling is just an abject failure here as the vaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaast majority of storytelling has no freshness at all, it's rehashing of the same basic plot elements, hell, was it the Greeks that stated this a few thousand years ago?
there is/was plenty of fresh storytelling in every age
I have seen hundreds of perfect variations on Duchamp's Fountain in my life too. AI Art is very much like Fountain variations without the human Duchamp involved. Then some AI Art fool extrapolating from that and believing Home Depot has an entire section dedicated to museum quality variations on Fountain.
The actual output is a very small aspect of the phenomena of "art".
IMO piracy should be morally encouraged
And for whoever is saying not automating these is gatekeeping let me ask you gatekeeping from what? You could write a kids book yourself without AI if you put your mind to it. It’s a super easy feat.
Can we strive to automate more boring stuff such as scrum meetings, filling out forms and paperwork in general?
Thinking more deeply, I find that AI art has no real value to me, though. I wouldn't hang it on my walls or hope it survives for my kids. If I had written the algorithms that power the model, then I'd feel like more of a stakeholder and maybe I would see the output as something with long term value. To me it feels more like fast food. It fills the void, but it's nothing special-- it's disposable 'art'. But maybe that's just me.
King of bad takes. Painters literally said the same thing about Photography.
>these models are trained on stolen artwork and texts.
And the neural networks in human artists' brains is exempt from this logic why? Because it's biological and not silicon?
I think this is itself a bad take, for several reasons.
First, that something false was said in the past doesn't make it false today for a different thing.
Second, that wasn't the argument painters "literally" used. Did they claim that taking photos was "stealing" their paintings/reality?
What some may have claimed is that it took no skill or that it was cheating, or that it would put painters out of work. We now know all of these assumptions were wrong.
Photography doesn't "automate" creativity, as anyone struggling to take an interesting photo that tells a story can tell you.
I guess the equivalent here would be generating a story with an LLM and then changing the wording a bit.
On one side, it might be nice to create stories that fit a specific want/desire for what a child might need. We might even go for the concept of a segment of one kind of story.
On the other hand, I am picky with the stories I read to my child. I see stories I read as education. They transmit some non-conscious cultural things about being human, about handling this reality and the world.
For me the books I read to my kid are the future equivalent of people telling stories around the fire to transmit some necessary and vital knowledge thousands of years ago. I believe (without a scientific ) they are shaping both my child how my child sees the world (through words construct and imagination) and my child value system.
Of course, I am trying to expose him to various stories and books as I am also not sure what I think is important is actually important for his life.
But I am a bit reluctant/skeptical whenever I buy a book launched recently. I am not 100% sure if the author just wrote a story because they want to sell something, and it does not have any other meaning. Don't get me wrong, it is ok to just buy a book because it looks nice, even if it is shallow. But there are so many books that I don't want all the books to be the same.
I understand your concern. But in this case the whole "book" is just a few pages long. You can vet the thing in minutes.
It is a lot harder with longer books. I remember vividly an instance from my childhood a case where my mom was reading us a Doctor Dolittle book. I remember it, because in the middle of the book they had a fight with a crocodile who tried to eat the hero, and according to the story they bound the crocodile and gagged it and left it for good. And as a child I felt so sorry for the crocodile who just followed its natural instinct, and now bound and gagged he will surely die a slow and painful death. My mom seeing that this made me upset she turned the page back and decided to improvise a story pretending as if she was reading from the page. In the new revised story they made the crock promise them not to eat them, and then they untied him.
And that was a book published half a century before us reading it. So recency is not necessarily a safeguard.
Also sometimes the chat you have with your kid about a story is as important as the story itself. For example about this linked one I would ask any kids if they also found it odd that the hedgehog gave up their passion of baking and opened a theme park. That can lead to deep conversations about the purposes of life, or maybe a much shallower but equally delightful one about the fun of theme parks.
Leaving aside the creepiness factor, I wonder what confusion will be sown in young minds by the inevitable onslaught of machine-generated children's content.
A bit tongue in cheek. But, that would be like saying a pencil knows the difference between them.
Which model in particular? 1.5, 2.1?
Though I think the overall response was mixed.
EDIT: coincidentally enough, both share a character with the same name, "sparkles". All of these GPT generated plots have the same formulaic tone to them.
100% relevant: "Someday" <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Someday_(short_story)> by Isaac Asimov, 1956
But the point is that these are basically paying humans to churn out low-quality cookie cutter stories in a time frame and compensation rate that hardly permits for any real creativity. This is an obvious example for something GPT can do well, but that's just automating garbage production.
Automating Terry Pratchett on the other hand is impossible without "genuine" creativity: his stories work not just because of the technicalities (a fleshed-out world with consistent rules and characters) but also because he had "something to say". He had personal and political views, experiences and opinions that influenced his work and world building.
In essence, works like OP's and the similar ones others have linked here remind me of Hayao Miyazaki's infamous reaction to machine learning driven animation[1]: it's an insult to life itself. It's a soulless approximation of the trappings of art that doesn't understand what it supposedly attempts to capture and can say nothing about it because it doesn't have an opinion on it.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1aqLLiIjgA
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EvnKYOuvWo (tech demo and reaction starts at 1:25)
Famous art is about context, circumstances and marketing. Strip a famous piece of art of its context and it doesn’t have meaning. If you find someone who can put an AI generated piece of art in the right context, it could become the next Mona Lisa. But then, is the AI the artist or the person who uses AI to create context?
> Could the memes generated from this have a remote possibility of becoming cultural icon and reference? And is that a goal or event that the humans are waiting for? And if it occurs what would it infer about human cultural evolution?
===
It is possible that the memes generated from this image of a robot with a blank, emotionless expression could become a cultural icon and reference, although it is difficult to predict which memes will become popular and enduring cultural phenomena. The goal of creating memes is often to entertain and engage with a particular online community, rather than to become a cultural icon.
If a meme generated from this image were to become a cultural icon, it could suggest that humans find the idea of a robot trying to understand human behavior and emotions to be relatable or amusing. It could also indicate that the concept of AI and robots trying to understand human behavior has become a prevalent theme in popular culture.
However, it's important to note that memes are a form of digital culture that can be ephemeral and change rapidly, so it's not a certainty that this meme will become a cultural icon or reference, but it could be a possibility.
===
This is really just a dumb question. These are tools, like paintbrushes and paint software. Any idiot can put paint on a canvas. Any idiot can make doodles in GIMP. Any idiot can write a prompt. None of these statements say anything about the upper bound of creative potential for any of these tools. The fact that a creative work could be summoned deterministically from a seed in an embedding space is irrelevant. And no, we shouldn't put old works on a pedestal. Note that your examples are basically all pre-digital.
These are not sentient AI. These are tools used by humans. And you can't judge tools' potential by the least competent users, the average user, or even the best users.
This is just as rehash of the debate around authorship for prompting a single image. If you had typed the same prompt on Google and picked a picture, or hired an artist with that prompt, you wouldn't claim to be the artist. Therefore you're having a different role than that in the process, ML model or not: publisher, producer, whatever.
The sooner these people come to terms with it, the better, so they can promote themselves for the skills they actually have (lackluster as I find them) and leave actual authors to carve their own niches among the incoming flood of generated content.
Not a native English speaker so maybe this sounds natural to people - but to me it sounds like bad wording. It paints the wrong picture and is not kids friendly wording IMO.
I don’t see the problem.
And to the point of not being kids friendly, imagine your child has this book read to them, and you find the next day that they've illustratively covered your own kitchen in butter... Most children's stories are written in a way that spells out danger or bad behavior meaningfully.
The exact quote is :
>But then she noticed something even stranger - her kitchen was covered in a thick layer of butter.
vs
>Butter went everywhere! On the ceiling, on the floor, on the refrigerator, on the toaster
Your phrasing sounds like something I'd read to my son and I could see him repeating all the items and adding some of his own.
I think this makes things like college essay generation less scary. If two students prompt ChatGPT with "write a personal statement for the common application for college" or whatever, ChatGPT will more-or-less produce the same generic statement, with minor variations. It can not personalize for each student because it doesn't know anything about either student. Prompt engineering? Ok sure, but by the time I have written a prompt that is comprehensive enough to make an essay that describes me, I've basically written the essay myself.
So anyway, I imagine people will try to copyright output from generative AI responses - interesting question about "who" produced that output.
To get to that point, one has to spend a painstaking amount of time perfecting their craft and improving their virtuosity on the instrument, not to mention that everyone adds in their own interpretation and dynamics to a piece.
I can sit down on my Kawai and rattle off the maple leaf rag by Scott Joplin without too much issue, i'm happy to hand John Q. Public the sheet music, but there ain't no way they're playing it.
The most interesting part was using ChatGPT to target and tweak certain parts of the story and merge them back in. When trying to make edits to a very small part of the story it understood what I wanted extremely well.
The most frustrating part was trying to get a consistent character in Midjourney. I tried using identical seeds and parameters. I even used a base image of the character to try and influence it. Nothing worked that well. My solution was to come up with scenes that obscured the main character's face—the ones with him peaking out from under the covers or walking down the street.
Midjourney is painfully obvious in its use of the same limited set of source images- with filters, transforms, compositor routines applied.
So, there's a market, and kids won't mind :)
What I did:
- I asked each of my 5 nieces/nephews to give ideas (e.g. invent a character)
- I generated around 10 stories with ChatGPT, based on their input. I used ChatGPT in French, it worked almost as well as in English (except for poetry).
- I got a total of 4500 words. This took at lot of iteration with ChatGPT, because I gave guidance and I used lots of followup prompts to force ChatGPT to add more details to the stories.
- I generated 2/3 images per story, plus book cover.
- I paid for a professional print of the book - 24 pages, around 20 euros
- In total, I spent around 15-20 hours of work (content generation took a lot of iterations).
That was a nice Christmas gift.
[Edit: a word]
That said, it was a very fun exercise and I look forward to the stories that are created in the future where the authors don't have the same hang up I did. Even if you don't publish, I would recommend going through the creation process at least once to familiarize yourself with how simple it actually is (tedious, but simple) to create this type of work.
If I gave myself a week to write a children's book using these tools with a human editor loop - could I create (or perhaps someone more talented) a great book? That seems possible. This seems like it was created in a couple of hours - and that is slightly interesting - but perhaps we will quickly move beyond the amazement of this as we start to see lots of quickly generated low quality content.
Factor out the creative tasks.
Focus your work on the creative tasks and let the AI do the rest.
I'm really not looking forward to the same thing happening with blog posts, news articles, or books. Not like there is just quality content out there at the moment.
Edit: typo
From the perspective of anyone going into AI, that makes children the perfect target for the mass produced blended garbage that AI generates.
Interesting stories have a set up and when you think you know what's going on, they switch, otherwise it's not a story, just narration.
The trick is those bait and switch differ culturally, depending on language of the reader, even the tastes of the reader, otherwise you don't get that "I was NOT expecting that" joy.
This is a serious question.
> The first we realised there was something wrong with granddad was when he stripped naked and covered his body in butter. After that he went downhill very quickly.
I am "writing" a book about fairies with my seven year old and Inthink I might use midjourney for the background scenes and photoshop in her fairies, but ... yeah chatgpt and midjourney are kinda like twitter / FB - a mirror of our society and it's artifacts.
Sidenote: Why does Stable Diffusion/Midjourney/Dall-E all generate animal/cartoon art that looks like a Disney/Pixar ripoff? It's worse than the generic "Corporate Memphis" art style that every company uses for their marketing websites.
Another issue is that the oven that Penelope puts the bread into is very different from the oven that she later finds empty. One looks like a wood-burning oven, almost like a fireplace, the other looks like a microwave without a door. (Note the top of the oven in the first image is a curved arch, whereas the second one is a rounded rectangle.)
I think this lack of continuity between images is part of what gives the uncanny valley feeling to it. It's like some incoherent dream where neither the story nor setting is the same from scene to scene.
Now one of his favorite games is "AI" and he lights up in wonder typing the kinds of things at a prompt a first grader would.
I don't have kids and wouldn't dare wade into parenting approaches but compared to how most of the kids I've seen interact with technology this (to me) is very promising. Compared to watching endless YouTube videos or even playing Minecraft or whatever it's a lot easier to see how "playing AI" could progress to a genuine interest in technology beyond staring at a tablet.
Children's imagination is the most undocumented, unexplored frontier of human imagination and I still have hope for humans on this edge of creativity.
Hard disagree. But I won’t repeat Boulet’s points, I’ll just link to the comic¹. The alt text in the images expands further.
The progress that has been made in text and image generation over the last ~2 years is insane.
In the following decades, parents might be less relevant in children education, sometimes even harmful.
But would I pay $2 for it? I don't know, perhaps just for the tech.
I guess this will get better, and soon amazon with be flooded with a bunch of kids books and that is kinda sad.
We'll be launching a web and real time voice changer soon too, so you can use your own emotion and turn it into another voice. Or make it sing.
What a shame.
https://justoutsourcing.blogspot.com/2022/03/gpts-plagiarism...
Once upon a time in a faraway land, there was a king named Maximus. He was a kind and fair ruler, but he was also very demanding. He wanted to make sure that all of the subjects in his kingdom were happy and well taken care of, but he didn't always know how to do that.
One day, King Maximus decided to hold a contest to see who could come up with the best idea for improving the lives of the people in his kingdom. He announced the contest to all of the people in the land, and many of them started thinking of ideas right away.
One young girl named Emma was struggling to come up with an idea. She didn't know what to do, and she was starting to feel discouraged.
Then, a girl dragon named Supreet came to her and said, "Emma, I have an idea for how we can make sure that everyone in the kingdom has enough food to eat. We can divide the food into smaller pieces and give some to each person. This way, everyone will have enough to eat, and there will be no waste."
Emma was very impressed with Supreet's idea. She thanked her and said that she would present it to the king. However, she decided to keep Supreet's idea to herself and pretend that it was her own. She didn't want to share the credit or the reward with Supreet.
When she went to the castle to present her idea to the king, King Maximus was very impressed. He thanked her and said that he would consider it carefully. He also told her that she had done a very good job of using factors to solve the problem.
"Factors are the parts that make up a whole," the king explained. "In this case, the food is the whole, and the smaller pieces are the factors. By dividing the food into smaller pieces, you are using factors to make sure that everyone has enough to eat."
Emma was very happy to have won the contest, and she was proud of herself for using factors to come up with a solution to a problem. She didn't tell anyone that the idea was actually Supreet's, and she accepted the reward for herself.
However, the king soon found out that Emma had not been truthful about the origin of the idea. He was very disappointed in her and decided to punish her for her dishonesty.
He ordered Emma to roam all over the kingdom and teach the concept of factors to all of the children, dogs, and cats. She was to spend the rest of her life traveling from place to place, sharing her knowledge and helping others to understand this important concept.
Emma was very sorry for what she had done, and she accepted her punishment. She set out on her journey, traveling from village to village and teaching the concept of factors to anyone who would listen.
She met many new people and animals along the way, and she made many new friends. She also learned a lot from the people and animals she met, and she became a much wiser and better person as a result.
Despite the challenges and difficulties she faced, Emma remained determined and committed to her task. She continued to teach the concept of factors to all who would listen, and she helped many people and animals to understand and apply this important concept in their own lives.
In the end, Emma's hard work and dedication paid off. She became known throughout the kingdom as a great teacher and a wise and kind person. And she lived the rest of her life in peace and happiness, knowing that she had made a positive difference in the lives of others.
I like the idea of using it partially to help complement some effort that you've done yourself, but the idea that you're using both an LLM to produce the story and a diffusion model to produce the pictures makes the entire piece of work almost devoid of individual effort.
Using them to produce a private story for your own child is a noble enough effort, but I'm seeing lots of comments on wanting to get these types of things published. With the explosion of these vanity press level dime novel tabloid literary works, it will be that much more difficult to sift out the wheat from the chaff.
1. Entire classes of skilled jobs are eliminated, only the most elite writers and artists can make money
2. Value for story creation gets concentrated in the few companies that own and operate the best LLM's and best stable diffusion models
3. Society becomes more fragmented because we are all watching different content
These are just a few I'm able to think of in 2 minutes.
It's a common mistake to assume all technological progress is an unadulterated good. Just look at all the unanticipated negatives that came out of the computer revolution, like every technological revolution before it.
If one considers how inefficient humans are (daily consumption, heating, transport..etc) and how in comparison computers are extremely efficient (once they have been built), you realise where "pure" progress will take us.
Ephemeralization is the term Buckmeister-Fuller used.
It's not the first time that 'entire classes of skilled jobs' have been eliminated. It's the natural side effect of automation and has happened with every generation of new products. Industry automation might have taken millions of jobs away so far to give us better products faster. Tomorrow my job as a usual developer might be gone to these AI tools (though it's a far fetched thought), and I have to be prepared for it, and re-skill/up-skill myself if I ever sense that day is about to arrive.
> I typed a series of prompts to ChatGPT to get it to write me a story with the following plot:
> Once upon a time there was porcupine. Every day, she baked a loaf of bread. One day the loaf disappeared. Because of that, she had too much butter. Because of that, things got slippery. Until finally she opened the first ever butter theme park.
He mentions elsewhere that generating the images was a lot of work.
So basically he and his friends had an oddball premise for a story, and with some non-trivial amount of labor, he produced a story which was far from the worst thing I've read on HN.
It was actually pretty clever for a kids' story and the illustrations were good. The finished product was better than the prompt. Somehow the process produced a fairy, a plot twist and slabs of butter riding a roller coaster.
Where's the crisis here? A person came up with an idea and used a tool to generate a work product from it. Without that tool he would have needed to hire a professional illustrator and maybe a writer. I bet this took a fair bit of work to do right. But the technology enabled a creative work that wouldn't have occurred otherwise.
I have no doubt there will be tons of crappy spam enabled by ChatGPT too, but frankly this little story wasn't it, it was humorous and I doubt it was a trivial endeavor.
Per authors comments above, it was indeed a trivial endeavor: a few hours to tweak the prompts and a few hours to make the site.
Compare to the most basic children’s book, which would take at least 10 hours to illustrate for a professional (10 picture times one hour per picture).
Are you afraid of Roko's Basilisk?
For those that are increasingly happy to live in, and raise their children in, that fake and simplistic environment, I suppose it's their call. But reading/watching/living in that simpler, dumber environment can't be good for our intellect and higher abilities.
Have you looked into even basic neuroscience research or perhaps at least personally known someone with, for example, dementia? It would perhaps teach you something about what the mind is and isn't and what we know and don't know and how perhaps AIs might fit in this story.
Just handwaving because it's "just statistics" is not useful.
As for the environment - well, I have my opinion on social media and online content and even most print content and most books. Will AI make that worse? Yes. But it's already bad enough that this is not a meaningful change. The good stuff has always been accessible and for a long time.
Google, once upon a time, solved a similar problem. With all the information on the internet, how do you find the good stuff? The relevant stuff? I don't think it does this job at the moment - and perhaps flooding the world with content will create the conditions for the next major disruptor to create something that actually works rather than this ad-bloated nonsense we have now.
It already takes a ton of my time seeking out books and other media that align with what I want. Humans have done a spectacular job of creating stuff that's minimally acceptable to make a sale. AI isn't creating the problem you're talking about, even if it is making it worse.
Perhaps it will become bad enough that it becomes worthwhile to fix.
This was effectively the situation with the internet when the Goog came in and wrecked everyone's cash cow - because it was valuable enough to take the hit and prospect for future value to undermine the status quo.
I see two ways to break the current stalemate:
- Some 'new google' comes by and does to google what google did to Yahoo et al.
- Somebody creates a system that does the same job, but distributed. You control your recommendation algorithm, so you can prune it as you want.
I really really want the second one, but I haven't yet figured out how one would get the necessary data. There's a bootstrapping problem here - in order for recommendation algorithms to work, you need a ton of folks creating data for them. In order to get those folks, you would need to have a good enough recommendation algorithm to attract them.
I'm wondering now, though, if data on user preferences is for sale somewhere. Like, if I wanted to bootstrap such a system, is there some adtech business somewhere that has information on what books / music / etc people like, and how much would it cost to get that in there?
But now, of course, because you're looking at spending a bunch of money to bootstrap - you're hobbled by the need to be profitable to make that back. Stuck in Trapitalism.
Books were expensive and locked away in monasteries for quite a while. Church being scared of "reading" being spread as a technology.
Steam-powered trains were feared because of their speed. Cars... Planes... Etc
Television the drug of a nation... Now its the Internet. I'm sure radio was just as addictive and hated by parents as television.
Agree also that we'll have a lot more chaff but the chaff began the day our ancestors chiseled the first symbols into rock and gave us writing.
Yes, better tools for making art means more art will be generated, and lowering the bar means less talented people might start making up the bulk of the new art that is generated, but new mediums inevitably spark creativity in a handful of emerging artists, and that enables them to create masterpieces that could not have been created before.
"And worse is yet to come. Today, as the secret spreads, many more are hurrying to tie up with Mr Knipe. And all the time the screw turns tighter for those who hesitate to sign their names.
This very moment, as I sit here listening to the howling of my nine starving children in the other room, I can feel my own hand creeping closer and closer to that golden contract that lies over on the other side of the desk.
Give us strength, Oh Lord, to let our children starve"
"Once upon a time there was a mouse called Miisa. One day she was driving through the woods and she saw a beautiful castle in the middle of nowhere. She didn’t go in but wanted to. Then she saw a door which said “The Secret Passage.” She went inside and met the owner who was the witch of the woods. “I’ve been lonely for a while and would like to live with you” said Miisa. The witch agreed. “But there’s one condition,” she said. “No matter how many times I ask you to do something, you must do it.” Then the witch asked Miisa to put a hat on her, which would make her invisible. Miisa was terrified. But she did it any way. Then the witch asked Miisa to kill a mouse which lives in her home. The witch wanted to have the mouse’s blood. “I can’t do that,” Miisa said. “I hate mice.” “Well,” said the witch. “You can’t kill a living thing. So then you must torture a living thing.” Miisa was getting scared but then a thought came into her head. She asked the witch, “Does this mean that I can torture a mouse?” The witch didn’t say anything, so Miisa said that she didn’t want to do it and started to leave the castle. The witch was so sad that she threw a fireball to stop Miisa. And that was that."
Well, as weird as this is, it's totally original and creative.
While stories "just for fun" have of course a right to exist, it is very questionable to fill your kids brain solely with random, empty, meaningless fun stories.
Stories for kids are an important part of helping to build a moral compass for the world. Besides "getting rich quick with fun products" I see no value transported in that story.
Empty stories will produce empty humans.
There is more to a good story than "something happens" and "nice pictures".
It was made with AI art and AI text. To do so fundamentally treats creativity as a cost center and this is the result.
This is the plot he used to feed the AI: "Once upon a time there was porcupine. Every day, she baked a loaf of bread. One day the loaf disappeared. Because of that, she had too much butter. Because of that, things got slippery. Until finally she opened the first ever butter theme park."
I can bet you that if you specifically asked the AI to include some morals it would do so
In fact I'll show you.
Input: what are some values that could be included in a children's book with the following plot: Once upon a time there was porcupine. Every day, she baked a loaf of bread. One day the loaf disappeared. Because of that, she had too much butter. Because of that, things got slippery. Until finally she opened the first ever butter theme park.
Output:
Some values that could be included in a children's book with this plot could include:
Perseverance: The porcupine continues to bake bread even after it goes missing, and she uses her excess butter to create something new and exciting.
Creativity: The porcupine comes up with the idea for a butter theme park, showing that it's possible to turn a problem into an opportunity.
Resourcefulness: The porcupine uses her excess butter to create something new and exciting, rather than letting it go to waste.
Entrepreneurship: The porcupine opens the first ever butter theme park, demonstrating the importance of taking initiative and starting one's own business.
It's not that the story necessarily has to have a moral, though many do. It's that they're funny and artful and witty. They can make kids think and dream and inspire them. Also a real quality kid's book doesn't just speak to children but humans in general. If you read it as an adult and think it's a boring story, it's not a good book for your child imo.
The linked butter story doesn't have any of this. It's grammatically correct and each sentence is somewhat related to the previous one but that's about all the positive I can find in it. It's completely meaningless.
This coming from a group who by and large probably hasn't written creatively in their entire lives.
It's bad enough what media some adults consume but when it comes to children it's twice as concerning, because kids have a special ability to learn that is largely lost later in life. We're only young once, it's incomprehensible to me that someone would knowingly fill their child's brains with junk information.
The fairy destroys the bread that Penelope has created by turning it into butter. The fairy then expresses remorse, apologises, and offers to undo this ("Sparkles was sorry for her mischief, and offered to help Penelope turn the butter back into bread"). Penelope accepts the apology, and they set aside their differences to engage in a joint venture together.
Arguably this isn't a good expression of a moral lesson, but there are moral themes here (destroying what other people have worked hard to create is bad; apologising and offering to fix your mistakes is good, forgiveness is better than holding a grudge).