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On the non-use of AI in my writing process

On the non-use of AI in my writing process

jwx48

Comments (113)

  • andai
    > They're word-association mechanisms with no embodiment and no way to associate the text vectors they manipulate with real-world phenomena.Doesn't most of this also apply to a guy living in The Matrix?
  • Apocryphon
    From the comments:> I will concede that using LLMs in software development is a different category from fiction, insofar as the languages and APIs are much smaller and more tightly constrained and in software you actively don't want long-range dependencies between elements (something you often do want in fiction, i.e. put a gun on the mantlepiece in part 1 of the book, pull the trigger in part 3).
  • LogicFailsMe
    I don't think it ever gets old to restate that the singularity and all of the gradiose promises of a glorious 21st century have last mile problems.But this post seems to mostly channel Harlan Ellison. And while he was amazing in his prime, with some absolutely legendary rants, he didn't age well in the end.I do like his challenge to make LLMs useful to himself and to other authors though. Someone needs to make that happen and nearly exactly how he described it.
  • keeda
    This is very interesting coming from an author in whose writing autonomous, super-powerful AIs have been a common theme.Consider his book Accelerando (which I'll take the opportunity to plug again, especially as he's made available for free here: http://www.accelerando.org/fiction/accelerando/accelerando.h...) Not only did I find it quite engaging and thought-provoking, it is also proving rather prescient, and even helpful in decoding some of the things that are happening today.For instance, in the very first chapter the protagonist spawns agents to go research something in the background and report back to him. And then a year ago, I randomly became curious about a rather involved topic (how fast could we feasibly replace all human labor with robotics), but I did not want to spend time researching so I outsourced it to Google Deep Research which churned away for almost half an hour and came back with a 30 page report with 49 citations via "actual internet searches for verifiable sources." (If you're curious about the conclusion: not for a very long time partly due to critical supply chain constraints.)After I went through the report, it suddenly struck me: my agent may have executed in a GPU cloud instead of a cybernetic brain, but holy crap I had literally just lived a SciFi scene! A scene that I did not expect to experience in my lifetime!Which is why I found TFA a bit unexpected. TFA says a few things that I would disagree with. Like, no, AI is not a "stochastic parrot" and I'd assume he'd be primed to realize it. And AI is not competing with authors -- other authors with AI are, and using AI trained on real text to aid writing has been a thing since the days of red squiggly lines in word processors, which TFA even acknowledges.If you see his last few comments (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=cstross) it's clear he's pretty negative on the tech industry and Capitalism, which I tend to agree with. I can see how that could color his thinking.That may also mean he's avoided LLMs to the extent that he is not aware what the frontier models have become. I would encourage him to put aside his distate and re-engage with them deeply; maybe he'd be at least a little bit excited to see some of his writing turn out to be prophetic in some good ways besides the bad.
  • Fricken
    Not being able to see the forest for the trees I suppose is a prerequisite for success in Silicon Valley, because it one had even a fraction of Stross's perspective on the matter they'd be in a different line of work.
  • tptacek
    Dude's an artist. He should do what his artistic intuition tells him to. I'm a software developer. I'll follow my own experience. It'll all work out.
  • ainch
    > It would be foolish to deny the effectiveness of image recognizers based on generalized adversarial networks (GANs), the key neural network technology underlying LLMsI could be misreading this, but I hope the author doesn't think GANs are used in LLMs. They are cool, though.
  • aaron695
    [dead]
  • visarga
    [flagged]
  • FL33TW00D
    Crazy how forward thinking this guy was in 2005 vs today.
  • sxp
    > I'd quite like a tool (running entirely locally on my own hardware, with no cloud service and no copyright-thieving grifters making bank on it via subscription fees) that digests a manuscript and derives a scene-by-scene timeline, that I could then query interactively and use to plan my next round of edits. Being able to map out where and when each protagonist and minor character shows up, and see a frequency distribution heat map of names in the manuscript, would be useful.Interestingly enough, I do this with various books I'm reading. E.g, I'm currently rereading Accelerando and had Claude generate a wiki-like timeline of key events, characters, and salient plot points. That makes it easier to jump around when I want to re-read a section and grok a plot thread that is scattered across chapters. Ironically, it also exposes inconsistencies (or "hallucinations" as some might call them) in the text because the author didn't have an AI proofread the text.
  • card_zero
    Speaking as a fucker, I think the use of em-dashes has been pretentious since the 1890s. The rise of typewriters destroyed em-dashes already. The LLMs subsequently created an accidental parody of sophisticated writing.
  • andai
    It kinda looks like we can only train AI on dead people's data.I wouldn't be too upset about that. They write better anyway.
  • sxp
    While Stross is currently a neo-Luddite who doesn't believe in the Singularity, his book Accelerando is probably the best work of Singularitarian fiction ever written. It was written in the 2000s, starts in the 2010s, and covers the various decades of this century. I highly recommend it for anyone who wants to know how weird this century will be. It's also available for free online. [1]It's one of my favorite books and the main reason I'm e/acc and many other pro-AI people love it because we view it as utopian sci-fi rather than the dystopian world Stross invented. This might be the best case of the Torment Nexus meme [2] in action.1. https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/acceler...2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torment_Nexus