I love how you predicted that I would skip over reading the ChatGPT output, and then used that very action of skipping over it to make your point that people don't care about what ChatGPT outputs without human originality.
I've been saying this for ages. We're about to be forced into reckoning with some big philosophical questions about why we spend time with art, entertainment and content. I can't remember who said it, but we're not addicted to our phones, we're addicted to each other.
I did read the story out of curiosity. It seems to "get" the aspect of grief that sells. If anything, it made me wonder about yk mimicking emotions? Writing emotions we've experienced as against mimicking an emotion to make it sell-able.
It is worth noting too that, if you do actually read the story, it is tonally and structurally uneven, and boring to read on formal grounds. Sure, this can be said of a lot of human-written stories, but I don’t understand the point in raving about a machine which produces such spurious, plodding writing, even before you get to its meaninglessness. What good is this?
In the end it’s no better, really, than previous AI sentence-making, except that it maintains concentration over a slightly longer period. To someone who doesn’t read particularly deeply (Altman?), especially fiction, some of its sentences may seem awfully clever; they use big, ponderous words, and can generate a whole catalogue of impressionistic (if interchangeable) metaphors. However, if you do read at all you’ll realise that even if a human had written this, it would still be shallow and bloviating, and lacking even the dimmest relationship with structure. In short, it is slop.
Surprise, surprise, the machine doesn’t understand structure because it only copies what it thinks is the aggregate of what it’s already scanned; in other words, it doesn’t have a sense of the abstract idea of structure that even bad human writers would, it’s still just sophisticated prediction. Sometimes it steals wholesale in a way that would get one kicked out of a creative writing course (it lifts an entire phrase from Nabokov and places next to another tonally if not narratively disjointed one).
Structural ignorance, tired repetition, outright theft, mistaking big words for intelligence, shallow platitudes. It is a machine trained to regurgitate rubbish from texts it has pilfered, using a variety of tricks to present sophisticated predict-a-text and outright theft as (poor) original work. It’s only improvement on previous AI fiction attempts is it’s ability to concentrate for a bit longer and it’s (presumably shepherded) excising of only the most honkingly obvious cliché.
Altman, you should be sweating like the snake-oil salesman you are about now.
Why? At least in part because the techbros 1. Think they are smarter than everyone else on the planet and 2. have an automation fetish and don't value human connection or contribution because that doesn't neatly fit into a spreadsheet for ROI purposes.
The idea of "AI art" pushed by Altman and others reveals, in my mind, a disturbing worldview of people as incidental to technology.
"Think they are smarter than everyone else on the planet and 2. have an automation fetish and don't value human connection or contribution because that doesn't neatly fit into a spreadsheet for ROI purposes." — NAILED IT
I am a bit fascinated by AI and how it's being used by writers. I agree with your points in this piece. Very thought provoking and also entertaining (the creative piece, lol). Thank you for this. It's true AI does not connect with the reader as meaningfully as a human although it's hella helpful for tasks that can be mundane such as outlines and what not. It helps me when I'm stuck on an angle to take, for example. I'll start a conversation with AI about a story I'm thinking about and it will ask me sometimes thought provoking questions. It's like the conversations we used to have in the olden days in the busy, loud newspaper newsrooms. Now I'm by myself at home but with AI, not really! I view it as a co-worker.
I use AI in a lot of the same ways — definitely pro-AI as a helper. Just anti AI as a replacement, which seems to be the end goal of these Silicon Valley sociopaths
Have you considered that the goal here is not to become better than people but to allow for the creation of mediocre content at a scale where the standards of the market drop to the point where readers won't expect excellence?
Yeah definitely — I just have faith that enough people won’t fall for it, and there will be second order effects as a result. This is maybe 25% of the population max though
Of course I scrolled right past the AI generated "story" text. I have negative interest in reading text generated—for that is not writing—by software. I don't use expletives but if I were to respond to that tweet by Mr. Altman I'd readily drop the f bomb.
Your quote says it all: "Without another human to connect with, stories lose all meaning."
I love how you predicted that I would skip over reading the ChatGPT output, and then used that very action of skipping over it to make your point that people don't care about what ChatGPT outputs without human originality.
I did exactly the same Matt!
Also skipped.
Definitely worth getting a flavor of how soulless it is though
Thanks Matt!
Yes exactly
It might be because he is a creative writer. Which this is about. How meta!
Sam Altman is a creative writer?
I've been saying this for ages. We're about to be forced into reckoning with some big philosophical questions about why we spend time with art, entertainment and content. I can't remember who said it, but we're not addicted to our phones, we're addicted to each other.
Love that
Very thought provoking
The Mistake AI Researchers Are Making About Consciousness
https://adwjeditor.substack.com/p/the-mistake-ai-researchers-are-making
An AI program experiences nothing, and therefore has no story of its own to tell.
AI cannot actually Think, because it has no basis to do so.
In my opinion, no amount of information accumulation capacity can solve that problem.
I did read the story out of curiosity. It seems to "get" the aspect of grief that sells. If anything, it made me wonder about yk mimicking emotions? Writing emotions we've experienced as against mimicking an emotion to make it sell-able.
How do you define “what sells” here?
It is worth noting too that, if you do actually read the story, it is tonally and structurally uneven, and boring to read on formal grounds. Sure, this can be said of a lot of human-written stories, but I don’t understand the point in raving about a machine which produces such spurious, plodding writing, even before you get to its meaninglessness. What good is this?
In the end it’s no better, really, than previous AI sentence-making, except that it maintains concentration over a slightly longer period. To someone who doesn’t read particularly deeply (Altman?), especially fiction, some of its sentences may seem awfully clever; they use big, ponderous words, and can generate a whole catalogue of impressionistic (if interchangeable) metaphors. However, if you do read at all you’ll realise that even if a human had written this, it would still be shallow and bloviating, and lacking even the dimmest relationship with structure. In short, it is slop.
Surprise, surprise, the machine doesn’t understand structure because it only copies what it thinks is the aggregate of what it’s already scanned; in other words, it doesn’t have a sense of the abstract idea of structure that even bad human writers would, it’s still just sophisticated prediction. Sometimes it steals wholesale in a way that would get one kicked out of a creative writing course (it lifts an entire phrase from Nabokov and places next to another tonally if not narratively disjointed one).
Structural ignorance, tired repetition, outright theft, mistaking big words for intelligence, shallow platitudes. It is a machine trained to regurgitate rubbish from texts it has pilfered, using a variety of tricks to present sophisticated predict-a-text and outright theft as (poor) original work. It’s only improvement on previous AI fiction attempts is it’s ability to concentrate for a bit longer and it’s (presumably shepherded) excising of only the most honkingly obvious cliché.
Altman, you should be sweating like the snake-oil salesman you are about now.
Yes to all of this. Perfectly put.
Why? At least in part because the techbros 1. Think they are smarter than everyone else on the planet and 2. have an automation fetish and don't value human connection or contribution because that doesn't neatly fit into a spreadsheet for ROI purposes.
The idea of "AI art" pushed by Altman and others reveals, in my mind, a disturbing worldview of people as incidental to technology.
"Think they are smarter than everyone else on the planet and 2. have an automation fetish and don't value human connection or contribution because that doesn't neatly fit into a spreadsheet for ROI purposes." — NAILED IT
Interesting article and, yes, boring short story!
I am a bit fascinated by AI and how it's being used by writers. I agree with your points in this piece. Very thought provoking and also entertaining (the creative piece, lol). Thank you for this. It's true AI does not connect with the reader as meaningfully as a human although it's hella helpful for tasks that can be mundane such as outlines and what not. It helps me when I'm stuck on an angle to take, for example. I'll start a conversation with AI about a story I'm thinking about and it will ask me sometimes thought provoking questions. It's like the conversations we used to have in the olden days in the busy, loud newspaper newsrooms. Now I'm by myself at home but with AI, not really! I view it as a co-worker.
I use AI in a lot of the same ways — definitely pro-AI as a helper. Just anti AI as a replacement, which seems to be the end goal of these Silicon Valley sociopaths
Have you considered that the goal here is not to become better than people but to allow for the creation of mediocre content at a scale where the standards of the market drop to the point where readers won't expect excellence?
Yeah definitely — I just have faith that enough people won’t fall for it, and there will be second order effects as a result. This is maybe 25% of the population max though
Of course I scrolled right past the AI generated "story" text. I have negative interest in reading text generated—for that is not writing—by software. I don't use expletives but if I were to respond to that tweet by Mr. Altman I'd readily drop the f bomb.
Your quote says it all: "Without another human to connect with, stories lose all meaning."
I found this Wells' Murderbot Diaries & recent OpenAI short story combo review (https://lauraefron.substack.com/p/late-night-thoughts-on-alternate). Interesting to think of the two together!
Damn shots fired at your grandson Seamus