An author's entire job is filling their stories with nuggets of information. That's the craft. How to slide it in without beating the reader over the head with it, but sometimes you gotta
They have, but only if you count things like "Big Think Progress Upward: 10 Small Steps To Owning The Inner Devil And Becoming A Fortune 500 CEO" and "You Are Wrong And Shut Up: Mindset Training For The Anti-Woke In The Age Of Woke" as valid literature
This stuff always works for say business books where often there’s only really a handful of core concepts. Obvious nonsense for fiction or anything like reportage, history, longer form non-fiction stuff.
You're not wrong. Hand out ten different versions of "Who Moved My Cheese?" nine of which were generated by ChatGPT, and probably nobody would know which was the original.
What they may have in mind is using AI to disrupt the market for airport books distilling the contents of actual books, e.g. "Customer Service Lessons From MacBeth"
Given that the only reason I read books is to acquire chunks of knowledge, this makes complete sense. It is impossible to conceive of reading for enjoyment or in seeing chunks of knowledge woven together. Nope. Totally impossible.
I forget sometimes that there is an entire ecosystem out there of men who read one book a year. Thunks make more sense when your bedside table is The Art of War, Meditations, The Prince, and The God Delusion.
There are good use cases for customizable levels of detail and background, but I don't see the advantage to making it generated as opposed to organized by the human author into perhaps several dozen cross-linked pages. So, basically, a single-subject Wikipedia without nPOV.
I am old enough to remember when the CD-ROM was going to make reading a dynamic experience that could provide learning suited to a vast range of reading levels.
Back before that, I can remember the mid-80s ads for PLATO aimed at Texas Instruments PC users, that would have learning and community and all kinds of utopian improvements over textbooks and collegiate learning.
The two-step punch of reducing all human activity to its sanded-down and most tasteless version, and then adjusting the media that transport the resulting slosh to fit around that "content".
This made me think of Dave Eggers’s The Every in which two activists try to blow up this global tech monopoly from the inside by coming up with ever more outlandish outlandishly bad projects. Something tells me Mr. Wang didn’t read it though. Cause, well, it’s a book.
No. Books do more than just communicate a concept. I want books. Not individual concepts. There is no mastery escape, or entertainment for me in this imagined format.
I did an information-seeking behaviour study as my library school capstone. My chosen user group STRONGLY prefers books. (Digital sources as a jumping off point, but books for the work.)
Even for research. My user group was professional dramaturgs (theatre research folks) and when they're doing production research, they need to be able to bring it into physical meetings with directors and designers and into physical rehearsals with actors and books are more useful and compelling.
Ebooks also largely do away with serendipity, both in terms of stack browsing for related collocated topics and finding useful information by reading an entire book, rather than hopping around to keywords.
"I am just a sponsored thunk about healthy menu for joggers at McDonald's, and the need for a balanced but tasty diet in your daily routine, I can't draw a picture of Grimace and Hamburglar kissing because that would be demeaning and objectifying."
I think about the kind of books I used to get all the time--books that would be on racks in drugstores, groceries, etc, not just bookstores--and which I miss these days. They've been "disrupted" I guess, now it's all Colleen Hoover and James Patterson, faux Lee Child, etc.
Oh god! the 1st "internet" company I worked for back in the early 90s thought making "interactive" DVDs? CDs? with famous musicians was going to be The Future of Music. YOU could be in the video!
Meanwhile, the boring keyword project I did for Outside Online is the one that's still here.
“Books are a user interface to knowledge” is one of those sentences that just makes me so sad for the person who said it, who seems never to have loved a book, or appreciated knowledge
It reminds me of an old Newgrounds cartoon where a guy "discovers" a new video game system that didn't require any power, but it had no backlight so you had to play it in lots of ambient light. It was also extremely compact and portable, though it required the player to use their imagination.
it's true to a certain extent in terms of reference text, but it's not like "knowledge", in the form of some distinct wordless contextless substance, can be transmitted between two people. we have to use words whether we speak them, write them, or god forbid "thunk" them
I mean it's not even an incorrect description, it's just describing what books do in the manner of a fucking moonman, assuming moonmen are incapable of emotion or artistry
This is what happens when your only face-to-face communication is with toadies or investors
fuck man you almost feel bad for these dudes...like, a life where you force yourself to look at everything in the most miserable, joyless, myopic way possible and then tell yourself this is what success and growth is
It totally makes sense, if you are a stoned college freshman laying on the floor eating cold pizza at 3 am. Also, hands. Have you ever, like, looked at your hands.
I love that the kernel of thought on the language models is sound. Like, yeah, you could have a version of chat gpt that is a valuable research tool by making connections across sources, and retaining a bibliography.
But the drive to monetize means they have to claim it’s original by throwing it in a blender to obscure sources. Also means that once something bad enters the database, it cant be sifted out. It’s just a shit stew at that point.
It's maybe telling that he seems to feel the problem with books is that there's no way for him to make the book stop telling him what its author thinks and pay attention to and be about what he thinks instead.
Video games that aren't AAA writing is literally this. Super Nintendo RPG's were mostly games to let you ponder ideas/behaviours/concepts, while being guided to a finish screen
Maris, I know you will be shocked to hear that that gentleman’s business is selling the kind of interactive folderol he’s vaguely describing here. Shocked.
Important to remember that the only books these guys read are ghostwritten business books with titles like “Winning the Winner’s Way” which is why this idea makes sense to them
Can tech bros just stop?!? Stop sharing stupid takes about art and humanity. Stop thinking they are the smartest people in the room. Maybe go touch grass.
They want so bad to be seen as intelligent and pioneers of new concepts, but all they do is rehash things that already exist, just with even more capitalism included.
This is just a delusional level of thinking. It's like the "We'll replace food with pills" types that look at basic human behavior that's existed since we lived in caves and think "People want to get rid of that".
“ that can be auto-generated based on a recipients level of context and knowledge”
…These people know that books are for LEARNING NEW THINGS, right? Not have their own predicted jumble of ideas slurried around and regurgitated back at them?
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But also, this reminds me of the kind of ludicrous management-speak so beautifully lampooned in "Who Moved My Blackberry?"
Sure, it's nearly 20 years old. But the same kind of nonsense persists.
If we don't start consistently "smacking the shit out of them", this could turn into the biggest smug storm the world has ever seen...
Git you drunk
Git you lovedrunk
On my thunks
I don't hear a word they say...
It's just pop-ups in my mind... 🎶
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunk
I'm just reading @pwang's thunks tonight.
But for enjoyment, people just want to read...
https://youtu.be/a4UkKMqdtQk
But I miss mass market mysteries, sci-fi, fun adventures. Why aren't they out here too?
Tech Guy: (bursts into library) We all agree reading sucks shit, right?
which, yeah
Meanwhile, the boring keyword project I did for Outside Online is the one that's still here.
hypermedia is actually so powerful for a lot of things books are not so great at… which doesn't mean books are bad in any way, shape, or form.
but nobody is producing good hypermedia any more.
depressing
This is what happens when your only face-to-face communication is with toadies or investors
Check it out now, the pwang thunk nugget
It is fun how they attempt to wrap this in a pretty bouquet of tech bro speak about making the word a better place.
its grooks or
gtfo tbh
…These people know that books are for LEARNING NEW THINGS, right? Not have their own predicted jumble of ideas slurried around and regurgitated back at them?