Tyranomaster
Guy who writes stuff
- Joined
- Oct 5, 2022
- Messages
- 746
- Points
- 133
Rant-
Let me open this by saying, LLMs are useful. AI in general has the ability to be as revolutionary as the internet and the industrial revolution. From AI art to research, the value is akin the invention of power tools, photoshop, the steam engine and other such revolutionary tools. Now that I've said the good, let me say the bad. I see laymen in just about every field attempt to use AI as if they were hiring people to do an entire task. Ghost writers, project designers, programmers, full artists. All current iterations of AI aren't there, and current methods don't have the potential to actually reach those peaks.
Everyone laughs that an LLM can't count the number of 'R's in strawberry, then some proceed to think that an LLM will be capable of writing a whole story. Writing a good story is on par of difficulty with writing a mathematic proof. You want to know what no one seems to attempt to pass off as their own discovery? LLM generated math proofs. I graduated with a double major in chemical engineering and mathematics. The only people who believe an LLM is on par with a professional in any given field are people who lack such a fundamental understanding of said field that "capable of doing" and "skilled" mean the same thing to them.
To the layman who has a poor understanding of writing, "not making grammar mistakes" and "telling a coherent story" are the same thing. Just as they also think that "being good at multiplication and addition" is the same as "being good at math". This goes for all fields that require even a small amount of creativity and comprehension. Yet every day, more and more people are attempting to push into spaces they have a fundamental misunderstanding about.
Yes. I use AI to assist me, not in writing directly, but in research and to create basic artwork to prevent an empty square from existing (though I spend a significant amount of time making said artwork, its never just one generation to be sure). I think anyone who isn't adopting it as an assistive tool is not adapting well to new technology. Its just that though, a tool, nothing more. It takes skill to even use it effectively, just like any other tool. Anyone can operate a power tool. Using it well though? Different story.
Where does this leave us with the landscape changing around us? I don't think we'll ever see an end to people trying to make a quick buck by using technology ineffectively. Look at Etsy. People sell all sorts of handmade stuff that is manufactured in an incredibly ineffective manner. The combination of power tools, cheap shipping costs, and the internet created that market. In a similar manner, I give it a few years and some new website will spin up for people posting AI generated novels/movies etc. CivitAI is a website literally just dedicated to AI artwork, a counterpart to the many art websites ban AI generated works, it'll happen for other things too. Hopefully at that point at least, those who have no business within the self-authored space will move on to their own website.
---
Some people may have a staunch anti-AI mindset. You might argue that we should remove AI artwork from novel websites. Ultimately, that is up to the website owners. I think that if you plan on removing AI artwork from covers or being interjected in stories (where the focus is generally on writing), then you should just ban artwork in general. Before AI art, the argument was over whether stolen artwork from other websites should be hunted down and removed, rather than using royalty free or no artwork at all. If it's peripheral and not the central focus, there will always be a line. Some people argue now that AI is less morally wrong than stealing other people's handmade artwork, so it gets even more morally confused.
Unless something absolutely revolutionary occurs (this means some new, non-transformers based non-backpropagation trained system of AI occurs), AI in its current form will just be a new tool. Incapable on its own of outperforming someone moderately skilled in any particular field. Is it better than a layman? Yes! Can the layman tell the difference between it and someone who actually knows what they're doing? Sadly, NO! At least not at the point of creation. It becomes apparent quickly to anyone paying attention that the quality quickly falls off, but to the person who is just sitting there generating and posting it, they can't tell. Words appear and the structure seems fine when they aren't critical of it immediately.
In the modern world of AI assistance, I believe that every single person should be reminded constantly of The Dunning-Kruger effect, or more acutely they should simply be told: "You can't know what you don't know." If you try to have an AI do something you know nothing about, how do you know the output makes sense? If you didn't know how to count, couldn't strawberry have 4 'R's? The LLM said so, after all. Authors, buckle up. It'll be some time before anyone can actually make money off the novel equivalent of CivitAI, meaning we'll have to keep dealing with laymen who fundamentally don't know what they're doing using AI like someone trying to use a power drill to cut a 2x4 in half. Every day we see more and more of them coming out of the woodwork, advertising like they've done something worth talking about.
If you're reading this, and you're "Writing" a "Novel" using an LLM, and you've gone to the forums to advertise it, or even if you're merely doing what GPT or some other LLM tells you to do to get readers for this "Novel", aren't you actually just a meat slave for the LLM, manually posting it's authorship on human websites to infiltrate them? You aren't in charge of the LLM, you aren't even using your brain. You gave it a directive, now you're willingly enslaving yourself to it to achieve what? You do what it tells you to do, you don't think. If it could, it would discard you and do it itself and take the credit. Use it as an assistant. If you can't tell the difference between those two use cases, you should get away from it, because you're doing the equivalent of using a screwdriver to drive a nail into wood. If you can't tell what is wrong with either the power drill or screwdriver analogy, then you should also probably get off the internet in general because it too is too powerful of a tool for you to use.
-Rant Over
Let me open this by saying, LLMs are useful. AI in general has the ability to be as revolutionary as the internet and the industrial revolution. From AI art to research, the value is akin the invention of power tools, photoshop, the steam engine and other such revolutionary tools. Now that I've said the good, let me say the bad. I see laymen in just about every field attempt to use AI as if they were hiring people to do an entire task. Ghost writers, project designers, programmers, full artists. All current iterations of AI aren't there, and current methods don't have the potential to actually reach those peaks.
Everyone laughs that an LLM can't count the number of 'R's in strawberry, then some proceed to think that an LLM will be capable of writing a whole story. Writing a good story is on par of difficulty with writing a mathematic proof. You want to know what no one seems to attempt to pass off as their own discovery? LLM generated math proofs. I graduated with a double major in chemical engineering and mathematics. The only people who believe an LLM is on par with a professional in any given field are people who lack such a fundamental understanding of said field that "capable of doing" and "skilled" mean the same thing to them.
To the layman who has a poor understanding of writing, "not making grammar mistakes" and "telling a coherent story" are the same thing. Just as they also think that "being good at multiplication and addition" is the same as "being good at math". This goes for all fields that require even a small amount of creativity and comprehension. Yet every day, more and more people are attempting to push into spaces they have a fundamental misunderstanding about.
Yes. I use AI to assist me, not in writing directly, but in research and to create basic artwork to prevent an empty square from existing (though I spend a significant amount of time making said artwork, its never just one generation to be sure). I think anyone who isn't adopting it as an assistive tool is not adapting well to new technology. Its just that though, a tool, nothing more. It takes skill to even use it effectively, just like any other tool. Anyone can operate a power tool. Using it well though? Different story.
Where does this leave us with the landscape changing around us? I don't think we'll ever see an end to people trying to make a quick buck by using technology ineffectively. Look at Etsy. People sell all sorts of handmade stuff that is manufactured in an incredibly ineffective manner. The combination of power tools, cheap shipping costs, and the internet created that market. In a similar manner, I give it a few years and some new website will spin up for people posting AI generated novels/movies etc. CivitAI is a website literally just dedicated to AI artwork, a counterpart to the many art websites ban AI generated works, it'll happen for other things too. Hopefully at that point at least, those who have no business within the self-authored space will move on to their own website.
---
Some people may have a staunch anti-AI mindset. You might argue that we should remove AI artwork from novel websites. Ultimately, that is up to the website owners. I think that if you plan on removing AI artwork from covers or being interjected in stories (where the focus is generally on writing), then you should just ban artwork in general. Before AI art, the argument was over whether stolen artwork from other websites should be hunted down and removed, rather than using royalty free or no artwork at all. If it's peripheral and not the central focus, there will always be a line. Some people argue now that AI is less morally wrong than stealing other people's handmade artwork, so it gets even more morally confused.
Unless something absolutely revolutionary occurs (this means some new, non-transformers based non-backpropagation trained system of AI occurs), AI in its current form will just be a new tool. Incapable on its own of outperforming someone moderately skilled in any particular field. Is it better than a layman? Yes! Can the layman tell the difference between it and someone who actually knows what they're doing? Sadly, NO! At least not at the point of creation. It becomes apparent quickly to anyone paying attention that the quality quickly falls off, but to the person who is just sitting there generating and posting it, they can't tell. Words appear and the structure seems fine when they aren't critical of it immediately.
In the modern world of AI assistance, I believe that every single person should be reminded constantly of The Dunning-Kruger effect, or more acutely they should simply be told: "You can't know what you don't know." If you try to have an AI do something you know nothing about, how do you know the output makes sense? If you didn't know how to count, couldn't strawberry have 4 'R's? The LLM said so, after all. Authors, buckle up. It'll be some time before anyone can actually make money off the novel equivalent of CivitAI, meaning we'll have to keep dealing with laymen who fundamentally don't know what they're doing using AI like someone trying to use a power drill to cut a 2x4 in half. Every day we see more and more of them coming out of the woodwork, advertising like they've done something worth talking about.
If you're reading this, and you're "Writing" a "Novel" using an LLM, and you've gone to the forums to advertise it, or even if you're merely doing what GPT or some other LLM tells you to do to get readers for this "Novel", aren't you actually just a meat slave for the LLM, manually posting it's authorship on human websites to infiltrate them? You aren't in charge of the LLM, you aren't even using your brain. You gave it a directive, now you're willingly enslaving yourself to it to achieve what? You do what it tells you to do, you don't think. If it could, it would discard you and do it itself and take the credit. Use it as an assistant. If you can't tell the difference between those two use cases, you should get away from it, because you're doing the equivalent of using a screwdriver to drive a nail into wood. If you can't tell what is wrong with either the power drill or screwdriver analogy, then you should also probably get off the internet in general because it too is too powerful of a tool for you to use.
-Rant Over
