So says Megan McArdle, in "Every novel might have to pass an AI test soon/Artificial intelligence threatens writers’ livelihoods. It may also remind them why they write" (WaPo)(gift link).
The frozen food aisle is crammed with highly palatable substitutes? I don't believe that for one minute. Strike the "highly" and maybe you've got the beginning of a good enough analogy.
Also: "a car or a cheetah could do it faster" — there's no antecedent for "it." Do what faster? Anyway, it's not that people run the 100-meter dash, it's that other people care about and watch them running. Speed is interesting to us because of whatever it is that is going fast. We also care about and watch cars and cheetahs going fast, but it's not the speed per se that matters. It's the thing that's managing to go that fast. I've been impressed by a fast-moving tortoise.
As for reading, there are different kinds of readers. I don't think I'm the kind of reader who reads the novels that AI is going to get away with writing — conventional, fast-moving narratives with heroes and villains. Does it bother me if readers of hackwork are not getting human hacks? Maybe it does!
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…I don’t know if I’m more or less in the know than anyone else here, likely less as I tend to skip over all the AI fear mongering stories with this kind of headline. To me the noise ignores the classic quip about humanity collapsing because innovation is putting buggy whip and ice saw makers out of business. I know I have stuff in my equity accounts that’s quickly made eyebrow-raising gains and Claude is on staff in the office now but so far nobody’s been fired. Aren’t we going to end up where we always do- consolidation and shifting job responsibilities but more employment than ever?
There will be damming videos produced that will be impossible to tell are AI. AI simply needs to learn to avoid what makes them look AI. Mimicking is its specialty, and it's well on its way with unlimited potential.
So you will see famous people committing crimes and saying terrible things, and it will be your choice to believe or not, and these productions will be untraceable and impossible to refute. This will lead to real evidence of wrongdoing being routinely dismissed as AI fraud.
This technology is not replacing one method or tool with another for us to use and build. It's replacing us, not some of us - who can get new jobs- but most of us, and AI is taking the new jobs too. That could be great for mankind, except that mankind will be around, and people hate each other and covet their stuff.
"we could stream wittier banter from Netflix"
Sure, Jan. I hear Aaron Sorkin is great company.
I think one has to step back and recognize that innovation brings strange new things that inevitably turn out to be both helpful and additive to society. I once took typing class and got pretty fast, but if I had to explain to a young'un why the keyboard is laid out that way - to keep the keys from jamming up - I would get a blank look, and that's after the explanation. Fortunately, I still have a portable typewriter, so I can show them.
When I was a supermarket cashier, we had to punch in the numbers for the price that we read, manually, then hit the big green button to add them to the tally. I was the fastest cashier by far, and accurate too. Those big-haired housewives trying to catch mistakes, scanning their eyes from can to register, hated me, because I was a blur.
All of that is gone now, but who misses it? We're in and out of the grocery in a flash now, and we can instantly print what we type, without the whiteout. Who misses it? Sure, not all progress is good. So?
I am buying a decent vram card today and building a computer around it. I am teaching the kids how to develop cinematics.
I have built the wiki and I am building the Unreal Engine mcp server to interface with claude and gemini.
The movie industry is 100% finished. The main problem they have is they are such pieces of shit that everyone wants them gone.
The same is happening to AAA gaming. It got infested with the worst woke fat sexless loser karens and started making bad games. Valve made a place where indie devs could put their games and now nobody is buying the AAA trash.
The fear mongering is an attempt to maintain regulatory capture and control. The minders are the ones who risk losing revelance
AI is high speed data. Nothing more.
I think the biggest threat we face isn't merely fake images - it's the corrupt leftwing mob controlling it.
In the beginning very elevator in the world used to have an "operator". But, then a form of "AI" automated the operators job and they are all gone. The current form of AI is exactly the same. All of the hype beyond that is just stupid blather.
Rehajm 9:05 - that's where I land.
When the same people who scream "The science is settled!" (re: Climate Doom) ( a political statement /not a scientific one)
I stand back and go meh.
What job will you get that AI can't do better? We don't need that many HVAC guys and plumbers.
Trump needs an AI-generated holographic press secretary who can banter with the media and has facts at its ghostly fingertips. And if you don't like this one we can adjust the settings a bit...
The sentence about running a 100-yard dash may be imperfect but clearly the reference is to running the dash.
McArdle refers to the Vorse quote, which is quite apt. Another quote I've enjoyed over the decades is this one, from Gene Fowler: "Writing is easy; all you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead." This referred, I think, to writers' block. But there are similar ones. Red Smith said, ""Writing is easy. I just open a vein and bleed," and Ernest Hemingway said, "There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein."
Fowler was a journalist and a pretty high-paid screenwriter during Hollywood's Golden Age, Smith was a legendary sports writer, and Ernest Hemingway was, well, Ernest Hemingway. So, I guess it's sort of a cross-genre theme.
I haven't reread any Red Smith in decades. I should do that.
AI may make it harder for us to get paid for our work, and remind writers why they write, which is to get paid, said Samuel Johnson, sort of.
Howard said...
The fear mongering is an attempt to maintain regulatory capture and control. The minders are the ones who risk losing revelance
Exactly.
So many things are going to be democratized now.
Everyone here has the opportunity to make their own movies or their own news program or build their own robots.
It will cost you about 100,000$ to produce your own Wegovy or Ozempic right now and distribute it. But the only thing keeping those drugs from being extremely cheap and available to everyone is the regulatory system that charges you 1000$ a month to prop up the system and pay all of the useless parasites.
The prices on used C&C machines are super tempting.
The barriers to entry in so many industries are plummeting and the wealthy people are fighting rear guard actions to keep us barbarians out.
bagoh20 said...
What job will you get that AI can't do better? We don't need that many HVAC guys and plumbers.
The creative intuition is still required. The top 5% in every industry wont need the bottom 95% anymore.
The 64 million dollar question is what to do with all of the average people. The below average people are already trying to burn down France.
Eventually the average people will either buy in to the new system or they wont. There are a lot of average people.
Will AI allow people to claim talent that they actually don't possess? I think the answer to that is likely "yes."
'...What job will you get that AI can't do better? We don't need that many HVAC guys and plumbers...'
Sure, but maybe the net effect will be better service quality for those trades and better system designs as A.I. takes over engineering duties.
Bad people will have AI too, and they wont use it to make movies. You will never know for sure if any interaction that's not face to face is real, and the entity on the other end will be smarter than you. My fear mongering about AI is the only evidence that I'm not AI myself.
One thing is, not everyone is a skilled cook or enjoys cooking. I guarantee that most of the entrees in the freezer section would be more palatable than my mom's best efforts when I was a kid - so, careful purchases from the frozen food section have dramatically improved the cuisine around my folks' house.
I *am* a good cook and I *do* enjoy cooking, but in the last days of life and the run-up to the funeral of the Althouse reader whose deathbed I spent the last two months attending, getting everything into our Airbnb to work in "my" kitchen, and then taking time away from this good man's wife to do that work, were nonstarters.
So my husband picked up some frozen entrees from Trader Joe's. One was gnocchi in a gorgonzola cream sauce. It required a skillet and twenty minutes, and it was - legit - delicious. Another was a tarte flambee - pop it into the oven and 25 minutes later and only a sheet pan to wash - delicious.
Do you have to be careful what you choose from the freezer section? Of course. You'll swell up like a beach ball from the sodium in some things, because salt *does* make food taste "highly palatable" to most humans - that's why it's in there, and it can hide culinary sins and subpar ingredients. But you can also eat very well from what you find there. And you can always still cook, whenever you choose and have the time, saving money (sometimes) and doing at least as good a job (if you have the skill).
(This is an analogy for living with AI, see? It's not actually about cooking versus heating frozen foods.)
AI and robotics will allow society to support a lot of people who will not need to work for money. Will that be a net good? I'm not confident, as people without need or drive to self-support do other stuff to keep busy, and it's not always fine art.
I predict that as these technologies bring us closer to a utopia, the peaceful good people will quickly lose tolerance for anybody screwing up the commune, and incarceration and extermination will expand quickly, but so will the reasons to behave. We will live in the clouds, and the earth will be covered with bad apples.
More directly: the new widow I'm helping isn't scared of AI; she's a highly educated, intelligent woman with a challenging career, and she uses it every day. But her husband did all the household finances, and now she has to take over that role. I've been with her at two meetings at her bank now, opening personal accounts into which their joint account funds must ultimately be transferred, getting advice on the processes of automatic bill payment (initiated by the bank or by the vendor, for instance), and the like; she's dealt with the same young banker both times, and that young woman's sympathy and patient explanations have been invaluable to the widow.
Once she understood what she was doing, the widow told an AI agent to create a spreadsheet from my handwritten notes covering months of their bank account activity (I was embarrassed to realize that I probably could have gotten an AI agent to sort through those months itself, looking for the recurring transactions I was noting), recording auto payment dates and typical amounts so that she has a good list of what needs to be moved to her personal account, and a second tab with a calendar for her to use to ensure that the bills coming out will be covered. Personal, human attention when she needed it, fast data processing when she needed *that*.
Bagoh - we don't need AI to bring back the gulags. AI lives in a box. A data center.
The universal corrupt left are real people - real robots, and they are already proposing a return to gulags.
People will want to work, and will be highly incentivized to use AI to make themselves more productive and highly compensated. So there will always be jobs, just as there were when computers and other automation came along. The jobs will be different, and people will have to adapt. Unfortunately some of those jobs might have to be combatting the mischief that bad actors can perpetrate with AI, just as now there are a lot of jobs in IT security.
***The Book (The Militant Hackwriter): Published by the University of Wisconsin Press, this 188-page work examines how newly literate, politically unenfranchised French citizens during the reigns of Louis XVIII, Charles X, and Louis Philippe shaped a subculture through popular novels and melodrama leading up to the February 25, 1848, declaration of the Second Republic.***
LOL, I took a class. with Dr Minor. I guess the point is that even hackwriters are important to the culture.
“… the kind of reader who reads the novels that AI is going to get away with writing — conventional, fast-moving narratives with heroes and villains.” That’s a statement by someone who “chats” with Grok. A skilled AI user could easily use, say, a Claude model with high-end editorial skills running a local model (say, a 32B parameter Meta model that has been alliterated, that is, stripped of artificial guardrails and sycophantic behaviors) to produce quite sophisticated prose that would pass even Prof Althouse’s smell test and would be undetectable as AI-sourced by current and likely future “AI detectors.” In fact, I would bet that she has already encountered some such but just doesn’t recognize it because her priors are skewed.
Try that out with your new GPU, Achilles. You will be gratified by the results, I suspect. And thank you for your service. (Same to all the vets here.)
*abliterated*
" AI lives in a box."
And that box is in your hand, and on your desk, and watching from cameras everywhere, and running the systems that feed you, provide heat and power, and everything you need to live. AI will be impossible to avoid very soon. It's almost there right now, and it doesn't find you all that necessary, and less so every day. Happy Halloween!
AI definitely can be inculcated with an agenda, for instance The issue of who got into Afghanistan first, the Soviets or the American backed jihadis is a bit like Hans Solo and Greedo, who fired first. Google AI says that we Americans only sent in the jihadis after the Soviet invasion in 1980, but YouTube, and Brzezinski's own interviews show that we sent them in to provoke a Soviet invasion in 1979*.
Don't look for AI to write any penetrating history based novels that put US foreign policy in a bad light. Don't expect AI to write anything like Dr Strangelove. And if somebody does write such novels, look for them to be buried under the blizzard of AI "art" like a snowflake in a glacier.
There were supposedly 2.5 million books published in the 20th Century, and now there are 2.5 million books published in any given year.
* Zbigniew Brzezinski to the Mujahideen: "Your cause is right and God is on your side!"
vs. Grok:
**Covert support during the Soviet-Afghan War: In July 1979 (months before the December 1979 Soviet invasion), President Jimmy Carter authorized the CIA’s Operation Cyclone—initially modest non-lethal aid to Afghan mujahideen fighting the communist government.***
What Brzezinski actually said in an interview was that the purpose of the 1979 aid was "to make the Soviets bleed,"
I only give this example because it's pretty blatant.
"Non-lethal aid" can include funding, with which the jihadis could buy weapons, and military training.
Howard gets it at 9:17.
Matrixide.
The big winner with AI will be the entertainment industry. All their TV scipts are done by hacks, just reworking the same ol jokes and stories into "new" ones. Now the Execs can fire 90 percent of the writers and use AI.
AI please insert a "boob joke" here.
AI we need a sassy Kid
AI we need a wacky gay neighbor
AI give us a Grandma talking about sex.
AI give us a bigot to attack.
Great job AI. thanks for the comedy show script. lets give it to the actors. I'm off to play Golf.
“McArdle refers to the Vorse quote, which is quite apt. Another quote I've enjoyed over the decades is this one, from Gene Fowler: "Writing is easy; all you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead." This referred, I think, to writers' block. But there are similar ones. Red Smith said, ""Writing is easy. I just open a vein and bleed," and Ernest Hemingway said, "There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.”
I like this one:
“"Writing is like pulling a rusty chain out of your navel; it hurts, it’s messy, and you wonder how it ever got in there in the first place."
This vivid, visceral metaphor is frequently attributed to Jerome Lawrence (the American playwright who co-wrote Inherit the Wind).”
RC, why do you imagine there will be actors? They cost more than scriptwriters, and are just as easily replaced.
The entire edifice rests on the twin shoulders of Anthropic and OpenAI. Neither is publicly traded, and neither is subject to the quarterly financial scrutiny that comes with being a public company. Very comforting.
Artificial income doesn’t service debt. But don’t worry: adjusted artificial income can always be used to justify restructuring the debt. 😂
"The sentence about running a 100-yard dash may be imperfect but clearly the reference is to running the dash."
But the car and the cheetah never run a 100-yard dash.
You could say she's covered on that quibble because she only said "a car or a cheetah *could* do it faster." But the absurdity of that only underscores the lack of antecedent. You wouldn't intentionally speculate about a car/cheetah running the 100-yard dash.
These grammar points are worth attending to!
"The big winner with AI will be the entertainment industry. All their TV scipts are done by hacks, just reworking the same ol jokes and stories into "new" ones. Now the Execs can fire 90 percent of the writers and use AI...."
You should watch season 3 of "The Comeback." It's all about the ins and outs of that problem.
Howard might be right, or maybe we are returning to the apparent "natural order of things" since the dawn of civilization, serfdom for the vast majority, powerless to organize against their "betters." Comprehensive surveillance, imagine East Germany where you didn't have to pay half the country to be informers on the other half. Talk about AI putting people out of jobs.
"The frozen food aisle is crammed with highly palatable substitutes? I don't believe that for one minute."
I am totally with you on that. I am a bachelor, of the most determined description, so I'm, practically, an expert on frozen food. Frozen meals are what you eat when you don't want to spend time or money on good tasting food. It's just basic calories to satisfy your hunger and provide calories.
The only exception is ice creme. That can be a tasty frozen food, but only the good stuff. (Like Häagen-Dazs or Tillamook) Most of the other brands are too "thin." I suspect that these would have been classified "ice milk" back during the days of TV dinners. Heck, some are even labeled as "frozen dairy desert" because they don't have enough milk fat to legally be called ice cream.
An interesting take on AI might be a reboot of "The Lives of Others."
It really is true: "The frozen food aisle is crammed with highly palatable substitutes." There's still lots of Banquet and Hungry Man and Lean Cuisine and other just edible stuff . . . but there are also lots of gourmet quality frozen foods and meals. Take a stroll and really look at the frozen section of a big modern grocery store.
Grocery stores now have a lot of freshly prepared food, essentially takeout, often high quality. Not as high as what a good cook could prepare at home, but better than an average home-cooked meal.
“But the car and the cheetah never run a 100-yard dash.”
It’s a hypothetical. And I’ll speculate: car wins.
PigHelmet said...
“… the kind of reader who reads the novels that AI is going to get away with writing — conventional, fast-moving narratives with heroes and villains.” That’s a statement by someone who “chats” with Grok. A skilled AI user could easily use, say, a Claude model with high-end editorial skills running a local model (say, a 32B parameter Meta model that has been alliterated, that is, stripped of artificial guardrails and sycophantic behaviors) to produce quite sophisticated prose that would pass even Prof Althouse’s smell test and would be undetectable as AI-sourced by current and likely future “AI detectors.” In fact, I would bet that she has already encountered some such but just doesn’t recognize it because her priors are skewed.
Try that out with your new GPU, Achilles. You will be gratified by the results, I suspect. And thank you for your service. (Same to all the vets here.)
I am using mostly claude to write a book. I use grok and gemini as well. They aren't as good as claude. ChatGPT put some nasty riders in their TOS so I wasn't able to integrate their models into my harness. They make their endpoints hard to get to.
The thing I will say about fable and opus is that they are mediocre writers i.e. they are 95th percentile. They are better than most.
I use the models to take notes and outline and draft and revise.
But I have to write the final words. They cannot bring out the humor in a situation. They don't do subtext. The dialogue is generally on the nose. They aren't good at patterning actual humans talking to each other. We are evasive liars and most of the enjoyment of good dialogue comes from two or more people who are trying to get something from each other whereas most LLM dialogue is expositional.
The models are very good for writing women's porn/romantic comedy/romantasy. Most of those readers a volume readers and they hate things that are different. Thinking about subtext isn't really their thing.
All of the AI writing "scandals" are people who write books for genre's where you don't really have to be exceptional or creative. i.e. women's porn books.
loudogblog said...
I am totally with you on that. I am a bachelor, of the most determined description, so I'm, practically, an expert on frozen food. Frozen meals are what you eat when you don't want to spend time or money on good tasting food. It's just basic calories to satisfy your hunger and provide calories.
I have a freezer. We buy half a cow. Get onions and pickles and canned tomatoes. Maybe some cheese. Salt pepper taco and enchilada seasoning.
I thaw out a pound or so of meat every day and eat hamburgers or taco meat or sometimes just a steak.
This is also the healthiest way to eat so it isn't just because cheeseburgers taste the best and are easy to make.
“It” is clearly “run the 100-meter dash,” and while a car can’t technically “run,” the cheetah sure can.
So when do we get the AIthouse blog?
James Paterson v AI is gonna be like John Henry v the steam drill
I've picked up some best-selling pop fiction and flipped through it. Most of the writing is so bad that AI would probably be an improvement. I don't care if people who read slop like and buy AI slop. What difference does it make?
If you are prompting AI scene by scene, that’s not what I would call an AI generated novel. It’s a human driven, AI assisted novel.
Here's a recent encounter with AI. I was looking at a kitchen/diningroom utensil set which included kitchen, utensils, a set of pots and a frying pan, a set of dishes and some other things. I asked the intrusive AI assistant, bobbing about and chattering on the screen, whether the dishes were microwave safe. It responded that the dishes were marked microwave safe but the pots and frying pans were not so that I should avoid using them in the microwave. They were steel and aluminum, of course. And I know every AI creature from Grok to Claude and beyond knows the complete story on microwaves and metal.. But the point is that AI interpreted my question as: "Are the dishes and pots marked microwave safe?" As a result, it didn't know whether the pots were safe or not because they had no "microwave safe" marking.. This story exemplifies a kind of rigidity in AI-type intelligence which I think we'll come to understand as typical and embedded in the way it thinks.
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