> This is not cosplay. It’s enclothed cognition.
Hard to tell if this is AI-written or if the ubiquity of AI slop is warping the way people write.
7,763 karma · joined May 28, 2021
Hard to tell if this is AI-written or if the ubiquity of AI slop is warping the way people write.
I remember when Matt Taibbi called Goldman Sachs a vampire squid on the face of humanity, and that phrase made the rounds for a while. Feels like it should be repurposed for the AI industry.
I think AI is a wonderful tool if used intelligently, but it can be -- and is -- used for just about anything, with the consequence that we live in a sea of intellectual and artistic slop whose level is very slowly yet steadily rising.
I don't have an answer beyond using AI as intelligently as possible for your personal purposes. The technology is there, and its misuse doesn't negate or obviate its beneficial uses, nor do those uses contribute to the rise in the level of the sea of slop.
https://observer.com/2016/03/goodbye-and-good-riddance-gawke...
What a great line. And you'll probably notice this technique being used by very skilled bullshitters and master manipulators: any request for rigor or scrutiny is met by something like genteel condescension. You're treated as if you've committed a breach of etiquette, and that's one of the reasons the technique is powerful -- you're likely to feel embarrassed and, following that, to back off.
> There is no zeitgeist anymore. We’ve been disassociated. We’ve been purposefully disaggregated into serviceable political economic units. There is an empty center that needs to be filled, to bring the culture back together, to bring the culture and the movie business back together, for the movie business to be useful in the consciousness of an audience, a culture, a community.
Perfection.
> We didn’t have Internet in the office back then so research was a bit of a problem. Making things up was the way to go, nothing like Google to make life easy back then. I remember asking Gary if I could go the library to photocopy some pictures from books to help me out! An artist back then had to know way more than an artist (who tends to get pigeonholed) these days. There was no such thing as an environment artist back then...so we did everything. Game artwork, interface (I was font boy for months!), cut scenes, animation. If we didn’t know how to do it we just learnt as we went along. Quite mad really but it seemed to work as production values were so much lower back then.
I think that monopoly (with various caveats, e.g. it can't outlive you much, etc.) is a good thing for authors to have, as it enables them to make a living off of their writing. Authors weren't just "made more comfortable" by this as a fringe benefit, as you say, but really, they were able to make a living from their creative work. Harlan Ellison himself says so in that article, and there are countless instances of up-and-coming writers fighting piracy (one legendary story is how Tolkien fought pirating of LOTR in the U.S. soon after it was printed in the UK).
Also, I don't see how LeGuin's point is substantively different from Ellison's -- they are both saying they'll fight people who distribute their books without paying them, the author.
On that note, this argument:
> You know what also deprives authors of royalties? Borrowing books from public libraries, buying used books, and loaning books to friends. So does playing video games instead of reading a book!
... is partly false -- authors do get payouts from libraries. As for "playing video games instead of reading a book", that's absurd -- the problem with pirating is that you get for free something that the creator has produced. For your argument to be true, we would somehow have to assume that the creator is entitled to us spending time reading their books, which is obviously insane.
As for the other things you mention -- buying used books and loaning them from friends -- they have essentially no overlap with online piracy. Piracy is a problem because you can distribute infinite copies worldwide for free, which doesn't apply to selling or loaning physical books.
You may prefer the same point expressed in less colorful language by Ursula K. LeGuin, from the same article as Ellison's quote: “I thought, who do these people think they are? Why do they think they can violate my copyright and get away with it?” https://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/12/technology/internet/12dig...
Now, as we found out in the meantime from Rudy Rucker's comment, this anthology isn't pirated after all. If you put up your work for free, there's no piracy.
The opposite. Consider Harlan Ellison's views on piracy: "If you put your hand in my pocket, you’ll drag back six inches of bloody stump."
How is this "free online edition" distinct from piracy, in that case?
- Contests will often be won not by the entry that best adhered to the prompt, but the best-looking one. This happened in the contest "Input Prompt Build a brutalist website to a typeface maker," which I got as a recent example. The winning entry had megawatt-bright magenta and yellow, which shouldn't appear anywhere near brutalism, and in other design aspects had almost no connection to brutalism either -- but it was the most attractive of the bunch.
- The approach only gets you to a local maximum. Current LLMs aren't very good designers, as you say, so contests will involve picking between mostly middling entries. You'd want a design that's, say, a 9 or a 10 on a 10-point scale -- but some 95% of the entry distribution will probably be between 5.5 and 7.5 or so, and that's what users will get to pick from.
Pure, grade-A LLMese. Seeing this makes me have to summon all my strength to skim to the end (having given up reading), which I did in this case because I found the subject interesting and hoped there might be something thought-provoking in the article.
I share your feeling completely, by the way. It absolutely shouldn't be considered OK to take a photo of a stranger in public and post it online.
OK, but then you have to produce the detailed specification, working backward from the reference implementation. This is extremely non-trivial and it significantly weakens the TFA's parallels to pre-training, in which you don't need really need inputs other than raw text corpora.
I'm not saying this eliminates the idea outright, but I do think it hobbles it badly.
Umm, OK? I still don't get why, in the author's view, they do the bad thing on purpose, and why that is not stupid. (Perhaps the author might make say that doing a stupid thing doesn't make someone a stupid person, or something to that effect -- but, even if so, I don't see any sign of that argument in TFA.)
Absolutely right, with the implication that new capabilities available suddenly to everyone often end up making the playing field more unequal, not less.
No comment needed.
This is all true, but I'm disappointed that TFA doesn't address the implication -- namely, the massive job destruction. Routine service jobs like those described employ probably tens of millions worldwide and are a stepping stone into the middle class, and I think AI razing them wholesale is a tragedy.
In general, the impact of AI at the societal level looks like a force to return us to what most societies everywhere have been like: a small layer of owners at the top, a vast block of interchangeable unskilled laborers at the bottom, and an (ever-shrinking) sliver of clerks and skilled laborers sandwiched between. Broad middle classes, created by the Industrial Revolution, then end up as a blip in the overall course of history. That outcome would be one of the most destructive things I can imagine.
But anyway, addressing the development per se: I think it's a great thing, but I'm skeptical it can survive for very long, as it's flatly incompatible with admin's goal of growing student headcount as high as they can get it.