This is so depressing for me. The drip will be everywhere.
"Tools" like this make me feel nothing but a profound sense of sadness and despair.
https://www.anthologialitt.com/post/the-god-thoth-and-the-in...
Every invention is a Faustian pact. It amplifies certain things and atrophies others.
Personally I think the approach I'll take with literature is the same as other things: I'll evaluate it in its merit and not try to guess on its origin. We're already awash in people accusing actual human writing of being "AI" while meanwhile AI writing slips under the radar. It's pointless. It is what it is when it arrives at my eyeballs.
If I wrote a book I would not use the AI to craft prose, not from AI-hate but because to me it kind of defeats the purpose. I would, however, use it as a first pass proofreader and editor, and maybe as a brainstorming "rubber duck that talks back." It's pretty good at those things.
-- From the link:
“This invention, O king,” said Theuth, “will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memories; for it is an elixir of memory and wisdom that I have discovered.”
But Thamus replied,
“Most ingenious Theuth, one man has the ability to beget arts, but the ability to judge of their usefulness or harmfulness to their users belongs to another; and now you, who are the father of letters, have been led by your affection to ascribe to them a power the opposite of that which they really possess.
For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them.
You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise."
I think if someone wanted to produce a slop book for amazon with 1667 there are easier tools for that.
If you had a kid, let's say 6 years old, and they had a "super hero" they wrote stories about.
What would it mean, if you took away their creative process and replaced it with this.
Does that child have a lesser "life-experience?" Or not?
What about you?
What it really is is a kind of choose your own adventure. You can be 6 years old and write stories and then an hour later play a choose-your-own-adventure game and no one would find that weird
We are going to have kids who, instead of imagining their own fantasy lands, are given them by AI. Of course the AI will be far superior to a 6 year old- how will they be able to resist the AI drip, when even adults can't.
A generation growing up without imagining. So depressing.
I guess we have a few years before it starts. Or maybe it already has.
Wow.
I hope this doesn't happen. I hope the kids are smarter than us.
Creative people love to play with new tools. Photography was supposed to destroy all art, but it became its own art form. Did synthesizers destroy music? Musicians even figured out how to turn a record player, a device made for nothing but replaying existing music, into a musical instrument. Look up "turntablism." Give an artist anything and they'll start fiddling with it and seeing what it can do, and they'll do that with AI just like they did with electronics and record players and anything else.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekgpZag6xyQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnRVmiqm84k
The people flooding e-book markets with slop are doing a new variation on the dropship get rich quick scheme, not trying to create books. They don't care what's in there, just that they can game reviews.
I expect artists playing with AI to get into hacking models and model runtimes themselves. It's one reason I think open weight models are so important. They're hackable, remixable, re-trainable.