i was so excited when all this started that i could finally save a little time not having to photoshop trees out of the background of a picture but people have so throughly turbofucked it that I'm ready to EMP everything back to punchcards and tapes.
Also, I’ve always been leery of that genie metaphor, because it’s just not correct. Genies have been shoved back into their bottles a few times. People who say that just don’t want to admit they like the way things are and don’t want to go back.
Genies always go back in their bottles. You get your wishes and then you’re done. It really seems like it’s supposed to be a Pandora’s box reference but there are no genies in that story or in Greek mythology so I just don’t get this idiom.
It's likely not that historically deep, they probably have more in mind a "clever" nod in Disney's Aladdin the Genie is freed with a wish and is also played as very modern / knows the future and such.
I don't think these folks have connected Roman genii with Greek evil spirits from Pandora's jar.
"Adapt or die"? Dude. LOL
It's a deeply impractical, mostly unprofitable, resource-expensive technology. The fantasy is more interesting than the unfortunate reality that sooner or later people will have to pay through the teeth just to get it to write their mediocre LI posts.
"Adapt or die," he says as he inputs nonsense into a text box and has the machine spit out one of billions of chunks of text it will generate this year for the purpose of completely eliminating the profession he's supposedly a part of. Guess it's just die then.
1980 writer - I reckon if you've been a writer for 15 years and you can comfortably replace part of your process with a word processor, it speaks volumes about your writing
I see a lot of this at work "the genie isn't going back in the bottle"
That is a *choice*. 3 years ago nobody outside of some researchers even knew about these things. Saying "we have to use them now" is a bullshit statement.
Writer can mean lots of things too. Do they write car manuals? And they just started from the manual of the last model of that car? Still dumb but I want to know what they 'write'
I like that every time someone touts the benefits of AI, they can't help but throw in some desperate-sounding threat about how it's the future and we'd better get on board whether we like it or not.
I'm starting to think that in a few years' time those who embraced AI will have seen their brains turn to slop and those of us who didn't will be intellectual titans in comparison, with a huge competitive advantage.
I was going to say that what we have now already reflects that gulf, because when it comes down to it, the writers who are glomming onto AI are doing it because they just aren't that good and don't want to do the work it takes to get good.
The way I can navigate rings around people who've let themselves become dependent on the little voice telling them when to turn the car is a point of personal pride.
"amplify my productivity and leverage my creativity" has all the hallmarks of AI slop writing, so buddy either used AI to write that tripe, or as you point out has always been a terrible writer on their own.
About the only legit use case I’ve found for AI is for fuzzy searches that Google et al can’t ever handle, and even then only to pin down the elusive keywords you needed for an accurate search. But for anything else? lol, no, not unless you’re an idiot. I’ve pushed a few of them hard, all failed.
I'm no professional but I've been writing since I could pick up a pen and understand language, and I could never imagine debasing myself like this. Literally what is the point of having a machine do the work for you especially when you have the skill to do it yourself??
“The genie isn’t going back in the bottle.” Good lord. These writers talking about how much they love the bad machines are telling on themselves and their skill and y I k e s.
also needs an anecdote about how your mere touch cured the King's Scrofula a lower level executive was suffering from, all because you were open to the embrace of this new technology
If you squint hard enough, a person could argue that not all writing needs to be perfectly polished to serve its purpose. The same people who would assign another human to write for them would try out replacing that labor, I bet.
I saw someone on Reddit lamenting how they were "mistakenly" called out for using AI on a 500 word essay. Based on their post they used AI on a 500 word essay.
I dunno if we use it in the phrase "I need more leverage to get this large boulder to roll down the hill towards the AI building " that seems like an ok use of the word. lol
This reminds me of the guy who described his marketing skill as a synergistic fusion of the creative process. (I’m paraphrasing, but “synergistic fusion” is a quote.)
And, as you’ve no doubt realized, he was defining marketing as…marketing.
I’m self published and my book got lost in the noise the day ChatGPT was released. I’m about ready to self publish another and I worked hard on it for four years and I’m doing a last round of edits before I do. I’m just worried it will get lost amidst all the ai generated slop.
With all the political/worklife hack bullshit that gets posted there these days, LinkedIn is basically Facebook without the grandkid pics and "Fuck You Asshole!" responses.
What led to that post from the supposed professional writer:
"Hey ChatGPT, write me a short blurb that exaggerates my experience, glorifies AI for writers, and uses some stupid metaphors and techbro-speak in it. Make me sound exactly like who I am... a sneering egostical know-it-all prick"
“Adapt, start creating AI slop like I am and destroy your critical thinking skills while chatting to a robot that lies 75% of the time, or die” is certainly a take.
“amplify my creativity and leverage my productivity” - I literally know about a thousand authors and not one of them talks like this. Either ChatGPT wrote this comment, or they were already writing like a robot. 😂
Lots of people write like that. But they tend to be marketing managers and MBA types who write office memos. Not literary authors who write fiction. Unless their fiction has a marketing manager character in it.
I went through this in detail yesterday going back to original studies. We don't know if the hosting of a website that generates random names uses more or less resources than an AI query. We know that server farms use a ton of resources but not how much of those are due to AI.
Hate LLM because it rips people off and produces mediocre results and makes it harder to get good information and causes tons of job loss from people who can't tell the difference, but the environmental argument is pretty questionable.
The more trivial the purpose the more chatgpt *is* an option. But ask it to make your story more original and off it goes putting extra toes and an elephant snout in the nose of a “swashbuckling” explorer
yeah, when the tool lets you do an hour of work in 10 minutes but then you have to spend an hour fixing the mistakes in it, you've just wasted 10 minutes, not saved 50
AI/ML have their uses (data processing my beloved), but beyond those, the prevalence of its use is maddening to me
Good grief. No one starts writing a book to “amplify my creativity and leverage my productivity”
We write because we have a story to tell.
Anyone who describes their writing process like this is a charlatan using a shitty writing app to fake authorship.
“Leverage my creativity” here just literally means “steal from other writers who had better ideas or turns of phrase.” Anything it spits out was just cribbed from someone else’s work that was fed into it.
Since slop has reached market saturation and demand for human writing has increased, you're getting so little return you're actually losing time compared to yield using AI now.
High output has stopped being relevant since it's scrolled by.
I'm not a writer at all, so just making an outside observation. This post and all the responses to it seem like a mirror image of the post you're criticizing. Both sound to my ignorant ears like an agenda in search of an argument.
Except we’re not bragging about being amazing posters while using an environmentally destructive plagiarism machine to do the work we claim to be good at
“Adapt or die” like, if that is my actual choice, I think I’ll just die. If for some reason I’m forced to use AI in my writing process, then all meaning just goes out of life for me.
Why do these people even write? I truly don’t understand. They don’t like writing, they like having a product.
"This is the future, so get used to it."
"Already proven to be 130 times better than humans at..."
Flagrant use of the word "leverage"
Ends conversations with "that is all good sir!"
It's like they get all their bullshit from the same place. (Like an LLM)
OfficeXP grammar check tried to 180° flip a thesis statement when I was in college.
Used properly, any system that helps with proofing is only going to help point out things a human may have missed. You still have to go over every single edit. Too many people are accepting all changes 'because AI'.
The thing is, if you’ve “been a writer for 15 years” you shouldn’t be starting multiple sentences with the same phrase. The thing is, it’s repetitive and boring. The thing is, it shows that you’re not very good at writing. The thing is, I don’t believe this person has “been a writer” for 15 minutes.
Reshuffling some slop until it sounds halfway where I want to go versus.... Just writing what you want to write and having it carry a personal touch. Every amateur will do a better job than a professional relying on some nebulous machine that heats up our climate for the imitation of creation.
Comments
I don't think these folks have connected Roman genii with Greek evil spirits from Pandora's jar.
It didn’t just grow there
It's a deeply impractical, mostly unprofitable, resource-expensive technology. The fantasy is more interesting than the unfortunate reality that sooner or later people will have to pay through the teeth just to get it to write their mediocre LI posts.
"leverage creativity"
If he hasn't been AI-pilled, he's been LinkedIn-pilled.
That is a *choice*. 3 years ago nobody outside of some researchers even knew about these things. Saying "we have to use them now" is a bullshit statement.
But that might be presumptuous of me.
Between repeat covid infections and AI those of us capable of sustained independent thought are going to be an increasingly scarce resource
Just so we can laugh at their lack of imagination or lack of skills or lack of insight.
I'd say this is an example of that, but I am not sure there was anything there to amputate.
Still revelatory, the admission.
10xwriter
10xdancer
10xactor
Ugh, 10xcoder thinking has ruined everything.
Such bullshit
"leverage creativity"
I want that on a shirt tho
and then when nfts were being pushed
and then when metaverse was being pushed
In fact, this entire attitude seems real fuckin' familiar!
AI has its place but I don’t see usefulness in writing.
AND ITS DESTROYING THE ENVIRONMENT AND CONTRIBUTING TO GLOBAL WARMING
until they mitigate the damage, I avoid it whenever possible. Add -ai to google searches to disable it.
Love that show
And, as you’ve no doubt realized, he was defining marketing as…marketing.
BTW, this was in 1988. This shit persists.
"Hey ChatGPT, write me a short blurb that exaggerates my experience, glorifies AI for writers, and uses some stupid metaphors and techbro-speak in it. Make me sound exactly like who I am... a sneering egostical know-it-all prick"
The part where you're writing things? Nah.
The idea of straight up publishing Skynet's take on my prompt and calling it my work? Nope. I will never be THAT lazy
But for anything beyond that, no. Why would I do that?
Why would you decide to use a product that actively destroys the environment?
(We can't live in this world without damaging the environment, but so-called "AI" is always a choice. Make better choices.)
There's the insane amounts of storage with the various statistical probabilities?
As opposed to simple lookup indexes. Yes they're big but not complex.
This is my subject, I know what I'm talking about.
There's resources for so many mundane things saying AI is a solution feels wrong
I'm kinda addicted to random generators & use them for inspiration in all kinds of ways
@storyenginedeck is the most expansive & I highly recommend it
*our* own
Like it’s a person that thinks independently
AI/ML have their uses (data processing my beloved), but beyond those, the prevalence of its use is maddening to me
We write because we have a story to tell.
Anyone who describes their writing process like this is a charlatan using a shitty writing app to fake authorship.
"The thing is, I woke up and it was just an hallucination"
https://bsky.app/profile/realphilgold.bsky.social/post/3lp6deozg5k23
I think he means "Adapt or take slightly longer than me to write books"
Since slop has reached market saturation and demand for human writing has increased, you're getting so little return you're actually losing time compared to yield using AI now.
High output has stopped being relevant since it's scrolled by.
Even if the procedural plagiarism generator 𝘤𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘥 replace any part of my process, I care too much about the craft to use it.
I guess that's the difference between an artist and an MBA.
I honestly don’t see the parallels at all
Why do these people even write? I truly don’t understand. They don’t like writing, they like having a product.
'leverage'
"This is the future, so get used to it."
"Already proven to be 130 times better than humans at..."
Flagrant use of the word "leverage"
Ends conversations with "that is all good sir!"
It's like they get all their bullshit from the same place. (Like an LLM)
Used properly, any system that helps with proofing is only going to help point out things a human may have missed. You still have to go over every single edit. Too many people are accepting all changes 'because AI'.
"The thing is" isn't one of those phrases.
starts two sentences in the same paragraph with "The thing is"