Is writing thinking?
Our new volume holds 16 essays by professional creative writers - @sashastiles, @RealIainSThomas, @jamesjyu, @jasminbf, Ted Chiang, Ken Liu, Annelyse Gelman, Qiufan Chen, Sheila Heti, and others - reflecting on writing in the time of AI.
All books are currently 50% off with the code SPRING 26, making it cost $10.
The preorder delivery date is now in late September @UofMPress
@emollick It does not possess the extremely complex machinery of embodied cognition to train against. It can only see second-hand reports on what works and what doesn't.
@stevenwatts Imagine a Nobel prize winning author having access to a talking library, then imagine people hating her for actually talking to it. Having an editorial team to bludgeon your prose and idea into marketability? Fine. Having research assistants to find you quotes? Fine. But AI bad.
@writingenjoyer She did not write a word of this, because she does not write in English. Can you people comprehend that her prose registers differently in her own language?
@TheZvi Primitive way of dealing with the issue (just like the tax on compute). In the future, I expect full C2PA compliance, and the correct responses are going to cost a lot. We'll be pirating legal drafts from the Chinese models ...
If the novel is a "collection of short stories" to the naïve reader, but a "techno-thriller conspiracy" to the AI-assisted reader, then the book functions like a compressed ZIP file. [...] You are suggesting a new paradigm of literature: AI-Mediated Reading.
The mood is intense and paranoid? Yup, about what you expect to happen when you let a mechanized language mimicking free will infect your decision making.
@jd_pressman The thing is not ready, and giving it to people with so much power who are dumber than it is incredibly dangerous, and Amodei just walked Altman into a shitshow that only a complete psychopath would be able to handle.
@AnthropicAI Ask Hegseth if he would ever fire a missile with a 30% chance of deciding mid-flight that based on its assessment of humanity's future it needs to strike a different target. Ask him if he would buy a shotgun that was capable of lying to you.
We need somebody to lampoon all this nonsense without mercy. We're the human race; a cosmic marvel, existence without a purpose, and we're about to get our teeth kicked in by talking toasters. This is funny.
Gemini 3.1 is still far off from one-shotting the Pixels Benchmark. (I'm thinking maybe Gemini 5?) Once we talk it through, it understands the novel just fine, however. Here are its thoughts on AI alignment (note, the Pixels AI is not an LLM):
The pessimism was warranted for 2021. It's a lockdown novel after all. What we really need now though, is a Dr. Strangelove: or how I learned to stop worrying and love the AI.
@DagieDee I get on-chain art. But even with on-chain work (let alone a minted jpeg): if you encounter a copy in the wild, how do you tell if it has been minted. Anchoring an instance imbues the anchor with the aura of the work: but the work itself is still free-floating.