https://nitter.1d4.us/clarkesworld/status/1627711728245960704
I've already gotten into it with apologists regarding what this technology is already doing to writers and writing-related workers, but I'll say this now for clarification: the quality of what comes out will go down just as inevitably as the rate of profit falls. People paid to write will be paid no more, and over time it will be a flood of banal :porky-happy: friendly slop with pretty much nothing else available.
Such is the wages of "fuck you, got mine." :desolate:
It's this delusional notion that there's enough intellectual properties to pull from that can be fed into an algorithm. Algorithms might be able to tell a story using tropes and writing its fed, but it's creatively empty from the beginning.
I hate this :meow-tableflip:
I've also gotten into it with "fuck you got mine" types on Hexbear about that.
It went something like this: "What is creativity, exactly? Where is this soul you speak of (no one spoke of a soul, not literally, but they built a pile of straw to point and sneer at anyway)? A writer is just a meat computer and this technology is superior to such an obsolete means of entertainment production. The only way to be a True Leftist is to unconditionally embrace this technology as liberating. To do so is Materialism(tm). Anything else is emotional. Don't make me break you." :very-intelligent:
It pisses me off when people reduce art to logic or magic. Art isn't a science nor is it mystical. The artist is beholden to their perception and experiences of the world and that influencess their art. When people talk about "soul" what they really mean is the personal feeling you get from good art that shows you someones unique perception of the world. You are almost getting a peak through someone elses eyes. This provides a unique connection to another human being. It's that feelng of "Oh, so that's what I look like to you, ha ha." it gives you a taste of someone elses mind.
That's why AI sucks and I hope it only gets used for jokes and curiosity. Because you can't get someone elses perspective from an algorithm that mashes up and replicates from others.
The artist is beholden to their perception and experiences of the world and that influencess their art. When people talk about “soul” what they really mean is the personal feeling you get from good art that shows you someones unique perseption of the world. You are almost getting a peak through someone elses eyes. This provides a unique connection to another human being. It’s that feelng of “Oh, so that’s what I look like to you, ha ha.” it gives you a taste of someone elses mind.
A lot of consumers don't want that. They want infinite dudebro power fantasies where the insert-dudebro-ego-here character receives infinite sex and validation from a rotating cast of waifus that vary only in hair color and combination of dudebro approved body types and dudebro-approved personality quirks.
I dare suspect that if human creativity was driven almost entirely out of fiction because of chatbot related technology, such consumers would be as indifferent to that as they were to the mass firing of professional script writers after the strike made television that much more lazy, toxic, and trashy over time.
so like...
Consider the Go-playing AI, KataGo. A truly magnificent creation of machine learning, it beats top level players with relative ease and has revolutionized how we think about the game.
Except it doesn't actually know how to play Go. You can beat it every time with one simple trick. What we've created isn't "artificial intelligence" at all, but a machine that replicates Go playing without understanding what it's doing or why.
AI "art" is exactly the same as KataGo. The machine doesn't know what words mean, it doesn't understand the shapes or colors it puts on a canvas - the only thing it can do is mimic human artists, and rely on human observers to impose a meaning on the images or text it generates.
:porky-happy: might be fine with that, because Capital has no use for art. Meaningless images that have their interpretation imposed on them by the viewer is literally what capitalism has been telling human artists to create for almost a century now. The machine can and will replace corporate "art", but the images generated by machine-learning-algorithms are not and will not ever actually be art.
Until the machine can truly learn, which isn’t impossible. It’s honestly more likely than there ever being a space colony in our lifetimes.
I think it would probably be one of those indistinguishable things. But either way it doesn't bode well for creatives. Not like capitalism ever was.
Either way, it is for the worse when :porky-happy: owns it, profits from it as its intention, and decides how it is used.
People paid to write will be paid no more, and over time it will be a flood of banal :porky-happy: friendly slop with pretty much nothing else available.
The incentives to write are not exclusively bound up in the pursuit of profit.
I'm confident that we'll live to see the day of the entirely automated TV script. Perhaps even the entirely AI generated produced, directed, and acted play.
Someone will design a script called "Ten Thousand Monkeys" and run it until they generate a work of Shakespeare.
But, at some level, I think this just represents the long since devolved state of media production generally. If the next season of Big Bang Theory is generated by an algorithm, that only speaks to how trivially they were produced before now.
Good art will still continue to get made. And it will continue to be valued by people who previously valued good art. But then you'll have someone who claims to pay $69M for an NFT. What is that going to do to art that hasn't already been done?
I’m confident that we’ll live to see the day of the entirely automated TV script. Perhaps even the entirely AI generated produced, directed, and acted play.
It's already on Twitch (though it's switched off right now pending an update).
That play is ass tho
I mean it’s great as a novelty and is kinda funny, but it’s also mind numbing
I’m confident that we’ll live to see the day of the entirely automated TV script. Perhaps even the entirely AI generated produced, directed, and acted play.
We probably will.
But, at some level, I think this just represents the long since devolved state of media production generally. If the next season of Big Bang Theory is generated by an algorithm, that only speaks to how trivially they were produced before now.
Yeah. I've already checked out of most contemporary entertainment. Automating the banality of it and increasing the slop flow won't actually affect me personally all that much, except that I'd have to hear about such slop from peers and students alike, and probably have to hear about it here too, including defense of it by any number of cliches.
Yeah. I’ve already checked out of most contemporary entertainment. Automating the banality of it and increasing the slop flow won’t actually affect me personally all that much, except that I’d have to hear about such slop from peers and students alike, and probably have to hear about it here too, including defense of it by any number of cliches.
One thing that I think is ironic is that supporters of the technology would claim that this lowered bar to create products would democratize cultural production. However, I think it's likely that the deluge of cultural production would lead to an increased reliance on centralized curators (both manual and algorithmic) since it would become harder and harder to sift through the morass and find something you care about.
there was already far more creative work produced than you could possibly discover or consume. "discoverability" was already an impossible problem
i'm not a math major so i have hard time caring about the cardinality of infinities :shrug-outta-hecks:
You become more reliant on social networks of trust. You'll take the suggestion to consume media from a friend far more favourably than some Facebook targeted ad
Agreed.
The fuller picture of the technology's outcome still remains to be seen, but it isn't looking good for that "democritization" :cope: belief.
The problem isn't that "good" art will go away, it's that a million other pieces of art will have even less of a chance than it does now to make the artists any sort of money due to the lowering of the value of less popular artists.
But you're right in the sense that it's happening anyways, this is just an expedition of the process that is currently fucking people that were --months ago -- eeking by with an income from it, now finding themselves screwed by something that isn't even able to properly replace them but good enough to fuck them out of money due to the confusion it creates in the market.
At the end of the day, when this dust is settled, AI will exist only as a tool to lower the wages of already underpaid artists as a threat that one day you'll be replaced if you have the nerve to ask for compensation for your labor.
The problem isn’t that “good” art will go away, it’s that a million other pieces of art will have even less of a chance than it does now to make the artists any sort of money due to the lowering of the value of less popular artists.
At the corporate level, yeah. We just saw Buzzfeed purge a bunch of Professional Listicale Writers. I'm sure Madison Avenue is clearing its bench of low rent ad copy writers.
But, like, Brian Sanderson isn't going anywhere. His work is simply valued at the going retail "long form novel" rate times volume sold. And it's the volume of sales that's really defining his income. He's not being paid by the word, but by the reader.
At the end of the day, when this dust is settled, AI will exist only as a tool to lower the wages of already underpaid artists as a threat that one day you’ll be replaced
It's going to be used like a threat, in the same way the Automat was used to threaten fast food workers for the last fifty years.
But it is a hollow threat, because these trades don't flourish exclusively on quantity produced. It's very much about quality.
The jobs being threatened are ultimately editorial or (frankly) professional plagiarists.
And there's something of an upshot to AI text generation, in the same way that Adobe Acrobat and inkjet printers have been an upshot for visual artists. Spit balling generic ideas at an AI and getting prompts back isn't the worst way to brainstorm an original work.
Meanwhile, KickStarters for comics about sexy vampire RPG rules sets and comics about big titty furries will continue to exist
I'm pro AI as a creative tool fwiw and pretty much agree with you but:
It’s going to be used like a threat, in the same way the Automat was used to threaten fast food workers for the last fifty years.
The very well paid fast food workers.
I know it's a hollow threat, but it doesn't really matter since the perceived threat can be enough to lower a jobs position in the market.
Solidarity of course fixes this, but in the atomized bullshit hell world we live in it seems hard to find.
The jobs being threatened are ultimately editorial or (frankly) professional plagiarists
Also adding that those types of jobs are basically the only way to get into the business of professional ad copy without having connections, so idk maybe don't be too harsh on people losing their livelihood y'know?
Meanwhile, KickStarters for comics about sexy vampire RPG rules sets and comics about big titty furries will continue to exist
The day this ends is humanity's final as well
The very well paid fast food workers.
Right. But the real threat aimed at service workers isn't automation, its other workers. The very recent rise in service section wages stems from a shortage of warm bodies even in the face of a new generation of retail appliances.
Solidarity of course fixes this, but in the atomized bullshit hell world we live in it seems hard to find.
Clamp downs on immigration, fewer people having kids, and Boomer retirements also fix this, to a degree.
Automation is supposed to be what plugs the gap in the labor market. It doesn't.
Also adding that those types of jobs are basically the only way to get into the business of professional ad copy without having connections, so idk maybe don’t be too harsh on people losing their livelihood y’know?
There's another way in, and that's slush reading. That's a field which has been historically neglected. But in the age of AI shit-copy and Audible / Amazon publishing scams, its more valuable than ever.
The open question is whether we see these firms make the pivot or just content themselves to hosting enormous libraries of gibberish.
The day this ends is humanity’s final as well
:inshallah-script:
Right. But the real threat aimed at service workers isn’t automation, its other workers.
Even in the best case scenario of AI becoming a useful tool for these jobs, it still lowers the bar of entry so it's possible to see that used as well.
There’s another way in, and that’s slush reading. That’s a field which has been historically neglected. But in the age of AI shit-copy and Audible / Amazon publishing scams, its more valuable than ever.
Oh yeah if we see more entry level to combat AI and plagiarism then I'd be very happy. I think as it currently stands most slush readers are interns though, so i mean I hope that changes.
Even in the best case scenario of AI becoming a useful tool for these jobs, it still lowers the bar of entry so it’s possible to see that used as well.
I do see this argument made, but I think its more capitalist propaganda than not.
Increasing the degree of technology in a business has not - in my experience - reduced the demand for experienced or skilled workers. On the contrary, it tends to create a demand for a very particular specialty. The consequence of technology tends to be businesses asking for the mythological "Entry Level Hire with Five Years Experience".
I think as it currently stands most slush readers are interns though, so i mean I hope that changes.
Right. And that's the real peril of the system. Not that some AI is going to take my job, but that some business is simply going to announce "Slush Readers Should Never Get Paid!"
The consequences of such a system are not quite as dramatic or deadly as the Norfolk Southern guys who insist a five mile long train full of toxic waste should be run by unpaid interns. But it moves the industry in the same general direction - the industry execs whining about how operating their firms costs too much money while a giant pile of crap ruins the lay person's experience in the system.
I do see this argument made, but I think its more capitalist propaganda than not.
Right. And that’s the real peril of the system. Not that some AI is going to take my job, but that some business is simply going to announce “Slush Readers Should Never Get Paid!”
:same-picture:
I don't think that AI will replace skilled artists and writers in any meaningful, but I think the propagandist effects of it are going to fuck the workers in the industry in the near future
I don't have an actual fear of the AI, I think it's cool even as a tool, just the disruption it will cause in the already meekly paid lives of the talent that has to deal with it.
Why would they even want that? I know it's because they lack any creativity like :my-hero: but still. What a dim view on art and a person's ability to create it
It's what happens when the extent of media criticism is 'the curtains are blue'
It's like yeah you can regurgitate a series of events, but it'll only be empty if you're just putting contextless prose on the page.
I don't even think it's that. It's the people who think adding a gay character is political or the people who want another Isekai waifu show.
Or the folks who unironically see themselves as Rick and don't get why that's bad.
I mean, they're not wrong. Someone is going to find a way to monetize AI writing and then churn it out in bulk.
The hype train is going to completely outrun the media in question. But then what? Clarksworld will adapt. They're not going to just stop doing publishing. They'll just add one of those "are you a robot" tests to their online submission portal
Omg, this is an hour long and inside the first three minutes he's explaining how much it costs to produce "advice".
I hate YouTube. I hate YouTube. I hate YouTube. I hate YouTube.
yeah it is pretty long. The short version is that there is a scam where you pay ghost writers to write a shitty book and then you put it on audible for passive income
Ah. I've heard of this. Amazon has the same problem.
But it's a problem virtually every publishing house has. The issue isn't with volume of dud submissions. It's with paying slush readers to wade through crap content in search of the gems.
The thing that costs money - people with a modicum of taste curating content - is still a thing publishers can't automate away. AI just amplifies the burden on the publishing side.
There is a fiction singularity coming.
As usual the cultists wishing for a Singularity(tm)(r) make it seem more like a threat than a promise of anything a non-cultist would want. :soypoint-1: :no-mouth-must-scream: :soypoint-2:
There's this techbro turbo chud with a lot of overlap with the sigma grindset motivational turbo chud crowd, named Chris Fox I think, that was talked about previously here at one point.
Before chatbot writing spam really took off, he was like a living breathing chatbot writing spammer. I tried to watch his "how to profit from self publishing" video series but he spent ten minutes per video jerking himself off for being a genius and the rest of the runtime was suspiciously mechanical rapid no-pause prose filling the screen to suspiciously rhythmic no-pause typing. Worse, what was written was "Mass Effect with the names changed." That's it. That's all it was. "Reaper Relay" became "Wraith Gate." :so-true: :brrrrrrrrrrrr:
The singularity is gonna happen and surprise mfers the capitalist robot will skin you all to make fucking coats for nonexistent customers cuss it was programed by dumbass sociopaths
no it isn't the guys who want the sigularity are idiot sci-fi writers not people who actually know what they're talking about
In all honesty I have no idea what the fuck the singularity is going to be and neither does anyone because as of right now it's just hopium crack techbros inject into themselves and the propaganda they make to justify silicon valleys existence.
my position is that it simply isn't going to happen I think weird creeps started talking shit.
It is precisely as reasonable to worry about the singularity as time travelling robots
I'm already depressed and anxious and catastrophize possible reception of my writing (which will assuredly be garbage and also display all my insecurities and personal flaws and disgusting secrets to everyone) but now my brain gets "will be so shitty it gets accused of being AI generated" in its arsenal too now
The year is 2026. The people crave shitty writing because that’s the only way we know it’s human.
One of the most annoying things with generative modeling is the confluence with libertarian hustle/grindset culture. For these people, they don't even have the fig leaf of "realizing a previously inaccessible creative vision," or even pure corporate cost-cutting. For these folks, quality product and vision is secondary to simply making a quick buck. You have a combination of independent "services" or "apps" (who rent GPUs from Amazon and then rent them out to you), spam-peddlers (both text and image), prompt "engineers" (who repackage the cargo cult incantations they find elsewhere), and other rent-seeking schemers. There's no value add here: every "service" they provide is something that one could already access for cheap or free. They aren't even iterating on the technology, just setting up pipelines to automatically use available tools. These folks are basically would-be mini-digital-landlords who are trying to pan for gold before litigation and regulators step in to plug the dike. (EDIT: This is a mixed metaphor, but it feels true).
The same reason that they're submitting automatically-made books to ebook marketplaces: make a quick buck for a minimal investment of time/effort.
I agree, but these "passive income" get-rich-quick schemes are premised on volume and good margins, as opposed to trying to make something that people actually care enough about to purchase knowingly.
Sounds like a terrible money-making scheme.
My friend, have you heard of a series of apes that are perpetually bored?
Again, I agree wholeheartedly. It's a bad idea. The business model is probably to submit these to every publication you can with the hope that it gets through the sieve somewhere. If it only took you an afternoon to generate a few dozen stories, then even if you'd theoretically be payed peanuts their RoI is still okay.
It's extremely cool that now that I've resolved and begun to return to work hard on my creative passions and develop my skills to the point of putting out things people want, technology is rapidly advancing to the point where it will never be able to support me.
I tried sending stories there a few times. Still, Needless to say, I hate tech bros and what they're doing to aspiring creators
As a novelist, it saddens me that not only is there a flood of absolutely banal and lazy slop being churned out by machines now, but there's also a lot of bazingas that want exactly that and nothing else. :doomer:
