Not super related but a friend of the family I’m visiting stopped by yesterday and was bragging about her son, who recently prompted an LLM to write a fantasy series “in the style of the Witcher”, did some loose editing, and published the books on amazon. She wrapped up with “He did some research and it isn’t even plagiarism!”
I tried to look occupied with something else, but she explicitly called out to me “What do you think?” It took everything I had not to lunch into an anti-AI rant starting with “Actually, his pollution of the literary space syphoning money away from real authors is plagiarism, and here’s why!”
This is a perfect example of why AI will succeed no matter how mind-numbingly stupid it is: it will give people the warm and fuzzies without having to do jack shit. Yes, they “prompted” the LLM. Yes, they “edited” the output, and yes it was published on the biggest fucking commercial website to exist in the history of man. All of those “achievements” pale in comparison to writing an actual book with your own creativity and words and finesse. But since most people can’t expect themselves or their offspring to pull off such a difficult feat, this ‘second-place’ surrogate will do just fine and so we will all pay with what few resources we haven’t already annihilated in order to keep the gears grinding a little longer. 🙏
and yes it was published on the biggest fucking commercial website to exist in the history of man.
that doesn’t mean it will be bought and read, not in the large numbers, so hold your horses there.
and i have to say i find the story not very trustworthy. i can’t imagine that llm would generate such long text and it would make enough sense that editing it wouldn’t need more work than writing the text from scratch.
This generation of AI won’t “succeed”, I will be surprised if any current companies survive the eventual bubble pop. The LLMs will survive obviously as any other useful tech does.
With the amount they have been funded, borrowed and valued at they need to replace a mass of workers with “Agentic AI” to make the trillions of return they expect/need in like 4 years from now. LLMs doing this is a pipe dream, more GPUs won’t make an LLM sentient. And every other use case is a losing proposition for these companies.
I weep. It was excruciatingly hard already to find someone interested in your work to bring it to market, agents literally drown in awesome books they can’t publish profitably. A perfect example - A Confederacy Of Dunces - couldn’t find an agent/publisher until after the writer’s death, then immediately won a pulitzer. this was the late 60’s-70s iirc.
Now add the torrent of new writers with an interconnected world wide network.
Then add the tsunami of AI garbage.
We’re going to lose masterpieces because of that tsunami, and instead we’ll get AI garbage.
Not just in this field. Crap is drowning out real work in the sciences as well as arts. Both in terms of where funding goes as well as the output. It’s a cultural disaster.
I don’t know this woman, but she’s close with people I care about and responding to her bragging about her son with “His actions are terrible and here’s why” would have stirred up drama. I’m not going to convince her that I’m right and her son is wrong in the five minutes we had together.
Not super related but a friend of the family I’m visiting stopped by yesterday and was bragging about her son, who recently prompted an LLM to write a fantasy series “in the style of the Witcher”, did some loose editing, and published the books on amazon. She wrapped up with “He did some research and it isn’t even plagiarism!”
I tried to look occupied with something else, but she explicitly called out to me “What do you think?” It took everything I had not to lunch into an anti-AI rant starting with “Actually, his pollution of the literary space syphoning money away from real authors is plagiarism, and here’s why!”
“Maybe next he can try writting a book! :)” then stare into their soul
This is a perfect example of why AI will succeed no matter how mind-numbingly stupid it is: it will give people the warm and fuzzies without having to do jack shit. Yes, they “prompted” the LLM. Yes, they “edited” the output, and yes it was published on the biggest fucking commercial website to exist in the history of man. All of those “achievements” pale in comparison to writing an actual book with your own creativity and words and finesse. But since most people can’t expect themselves or their offspring to pull off such a difficult feat, this ‘second-place’ surrogate will do just fine and so we will all pay with what few resources we haven’t already annihilated in order to keep the gears grinding a little longer. 🙏
that doesn’t mean it will be bought and read, not in the large numbers, so hold your horses there.
and i have to say i find the story not very trustworthy. i can’t imagine that llm would generate such long text and it would make enough sense that editing it wouldn’t need more work than writing the text from scratch.
This generation of AI won’t “succeed”, I will be surprised if any current companies survive the eventual bubble pop. The LLMs will survive obviously as any other useful tech does.
With the amount they have been funded, borrowed and valued at they need to replace a mass of workers with “Agentic AI” to make the trillions of return they expect/need in like 4 years from now. LLMs doing this is a pipe dream, more GPUs won’t make an LLM sentient. And every other use case is a losing proposition for these companies.
I weep. It was excruciatingly hard already to find someone interested in your work to bring it to market, agents literally drown in awesome books they can’t publish profitably. A perfect example - A Confederacy Of Dunces - couldn’t find an agent/publisher until after the writer’s death, then immediately won a pulitzer. this was the late 60’s-70s iirc.
Now add the torrent of new writers with an interconnected world wide network.
Then add the tsunami of AI garbage.
We’re going to lose masterpieces because of that tsunami, and instead we’ll get AI garbage.
Not just in this field. Crap is drowning out real work in the sciences as well as arts. Both in terms of where funding goes as well as the output. It’s a cultural disaster.
scientific publishing was hurting bad (signal to noise and ethics issues) before AI… yeah, this is gonna be really bad.
Gross. I would be dissapointed if that was my son
Well you’d have to find something to be proud of, and if this is his greatest accomplishment then pickings must be slim indeed…
Sounds like two failed abortions in two generations.
Plus it is not hard to get “published” on Amazon. Literally anyone can.
Why did you hold back? It would be a lot better to just be honest about it.
I don’t know this woman, but she’s close with people I care about and responding to her bragging about her son with “His actions are terrible and here’s why” would have stirred up drama. I’m not going to convince her that I’m right and her son is wrong in the five minutes we had together.
Just let it go and don’t even ask for the book title is probably enough between 2 old friends.
And one can be honest and tactful, which really is the best way to get people to think about things.
Absolutely! You don’t have to be an asshole just because you are being honest. How you say things matter a lot.