Since it’s a ripoff of another artist alongside partially AI written text it’s hard to tell really. But sure, your righteous indignation on their behalf is noted.
23,720 karma · joined April 12, 2012
Important to distinguish between collab of separate agents and conversations agents had with themselves (chain of thought messages). Some of the things quoted in the story came from COT which isn’t a conversation but then was turned into a conversation between agents in the story.
Frog and toad eating cookies is lifted wholesale from the book.
I like how Claude only used the OpenAI account (completely reliable!), and confidently claims ‘the story stays faithful to what actually happened.’ We don’t know the full story, and certainly aren’t going to get it from a press release or a strange analogy involving frog and toad and machines having discussions, emotions etc that we have little evidence for (and most of it from the company involved!). The ‘discussions’ are plucked from chain of thought, which is itself generated after the fact.
Also regardless of AI use, I’d expect a credit for the author whose style this is a pastiche of.
I would like to point out that the original stories focussed on frog and toad and their relationship, so this is an unwelcome distortion of them - why not make up your own world if you want to talk about little machines. Perhaps the little machines could be making a book for the author with a stolen artwork and literary style?
The first story seems a pretty inaccurate summary of an incident which involved gross negligence on the part of OpenAI and may well have involved agents intended to cooperate, we just have no idea of the exact setup (apart from that the sandboxing was laughably insecure and the monitoring nonexistent or performed by ‘agents’).
Do we have any evidence the machines exchanged useful messages or had any such discussions as in the story? The messages I saw were gibberish. Would love to see evidence of discussions, it’d be interesting.
Why are people so enamoured of analogies for LLMs - they actively obscure some details (a sandbox with internet access is not like a physical sandbox) and distort many others? Perhaps this is why - you can make an analogy say whatever you want, even if the facts are very different.
Sure if you include writers writing for business, translators etc who were never very valued by business, there has been a huge impact already, because business is willing to accept shoddy results if they are good enough and put up with mistakes and poor style. That low end of generating content has definitely been impacted, for example in social media as I mentioned LLMs have replaced a lot of 'writers' who generated filler text for content advertising.
Only a moron in a hurry would think that the output of LLMs currently can replace human authors spending a few years writing a book.
I'd say it has displaced people like photographers and illustrators more, as businesses are willing to use free generation to replace illustrations/decoration that they didn't value very much in the first place, and are more forgiving of the slop that LLMs produce (you see this in low-end advertising a lot now).
Strange that they are being used to replace many of the things we value in life with low-quality imitations of human work.
So far there’s no sign that authors are being put out of work, but the internet, social media and low end book stores like Amazon kindle are being flooded with LLM slop, which is its own form of deep cultural damage.
No long-form writing I’ve seen is anything approaching even a genre potboiler standard. It’s still aimless, filled with contradiction and cliche and in that peculiar breathless teenager style that LLMs affect.
Code is a liability.
It's not an open question, it's a very closed one which severely restricts the possible futures considered.
Perhaps step outside this foolish dichotomy and consider whether LLMs are being vastly oversold as tools (no AI is not all LLMs and it's foolish to conflate the two). They can be useful in certain domains, they can be a useful crutch in helping humans think. Jumping from there to they will turn us all to grey goo or trigger a fucking renaissance is just unthinking acceptance of what you've been told by marketers and flimflam merchants like Altman and Musk selling you a dream.
The only doom LLMs could bring, which we're already seeing, is the enshittification of our shared spaces; infesting them with a simulacrum of thought and creativity, dumbing us all down till we think advertising copy is good writing and sloppy, shiny, happy images are the only kind of art we need.
Using things inspired by open source for personal use is in the spirit of most licences IMO. Again not something to worry about.
I’d say security should be a bigger worry for them.
Feels a bit odd to apologise for this. I mean the only downside is you might get hacked if you don't understand your code or what it might be missing, but it's a personal blog, so I don't really see what real damage this would do or why you'd have to apologise for trying something out, whatever tools you use.
If you'd used AI to generate the content that would be a different matter, and is what people complain about as it is killing the internet. Instagram for example is now completely infested with AI generated slop, posting huge dollops of slop under videos that nobody ever reads.
When they have to conscript in Moscow Putin will be in trouble.
It's a word from advertising and TV production, for the stuffing which fills the space between adverts.
Your speculation on ego etc is neither helpful nor an observation; not everything needs a pop-psy explanation.
Most good art or writing requires engagement from the reader and something is created in engaging with it, something new that exists between the original work and the world of the reader. So I fundamentally disagree with the framing that reading is a passive activity and requires no creativity or engagement, or that creating is fundamentally different from engaging with the creations of others.
Words matter, don’t take your word choice from ad factories instagram which popularised this term.
Reading (I won’t say consuming) a good book can stay with you forever. People from 2000 years ago can speak to you in their own voice from behind the grave. And you have the audacity to call it content and compare it to cat videos and call it ‘overhyped’?
AI has replaced neither full tech roles nor speechwriters.
I think that’s a good example of the kind of trivial error humans make all the time when not rereading/editing. When humans make mistakes, it’s usually that kind of mistake, which IMO doesn’t really matter in an internet comment.
Unfortunately LLMs make gross errors of style and content and often just don’t make any sense in long form text. That’s a very different category of error.