Baldur Bjarnason replied on Twitter with a really important point that I think is worth copying here:
"Not many know that Amazon, for example, has been fighting a losing battle against machine-generated books for years. Most of these ebooks are unreadable garbage, trying to profit from accidental purchases in the hopes people don’t bother with a refund
"Some are just scraped from the web. Others are just pirated books run through paraphrasing tools. Some are public domain books run through machine-translation. It’s been going on for a while.
"This is going to make that 10x worse and it’s going to spread everywhere."
I think this is brilliant. And another 'advantage' to AI is that it does not get depressed by reading about people expecting a new book every month from an author, and authors killing themselves to achieve that. My process involves a great deal of thought and revision. (As does the writing of self-published authors I admire.)
To provide some context, my book "Bedtime Stories," which was featured in Greg's Reuters article, actually came to fruition due to a friendly wager with my wife. I'm optimistic that my Substack publication will achieve greater success! :)
The pure quantity, the volume, the bulk of material that these LLMs can generate is a force to contend with. Ignoring the ebook/amazon side of things for just a moment, the number of blogs and websites with nearly unlimited (and actually fairly decent) content generated will be difficult for all of us to manage. Much less social media, FB, Twitter, etc. You add in elections and politics...it will be challenging for us real writers and deep thinkers, who it may take a day to write 500 words and an LLM can generate that in less than a second essentially for free and 24/7/365 without a break. Fundamentally we will have to orient things differently, away from the "internet"/tech and more in person or "Proof of Person" such as audio conversations which as for right now can not be easily replicated on a person-to-person basis.
Baldur Bjarnason replied on Twitter with a really important point that I think is worth copying here:
"Not many know that Amazon, for example, has been fighting a losing battle against machine-generated books for years. Most of these ebooks are unreadable garbage, trying to profit from accidental purchases in the hopes people don’t bother with a refund
"Some are just scraped from the web. Others are just pirated books run through paraphrasing tools. Some are public domain books run through machine-translation. It’s been going on for a while.
"This is going to make that 10x worse and it’s going to spread everywhere."
https://twitter.com/fakebaldur/status/1631275747431071746
https://twitter.com/fakebaldur/status/1631275749364625411
I couldn't agree more.
I think this is brilliant. And another 'advantage' to AI is that it does not get depressed by reading about people expecting a new book every month from an author, and authors killing themselves to achieve that. My process involves a great deal of thought and revision. (As does the writing of self-published authors I admire.)
To provide some context, my book "Bedtime Stories," which was featured in Greg's Reuters article, actually came to fruition due to a friendly wager with my wife. I'm optimistic that my Substack publication will achieve greater success! :)
intriguing post - AI is coming but can it overcome creativity? this be the question i ponder - nice work here :)
The pure quantity, the volume, the bulk of material that these LLMs can generate is a force to contend with. Ignoring the ebook/amazon side of things for just a moment, the number of blogs and websites with nearly unlimited (and actually fairly decent) content generated will be difficult for all of us to manage. Much less social media, FB, Twitter, etc. You add in elections and politics...it will be challenging for us real writers and deep thinkers, who it may take a day to write 500 words and an LLM can generate that in less than a second essentially for free and 24/7/365 without a break. Fundamentally we will have to orient things differently, away from the "internet"/tech and more in person or "Proof of Person" such as audio conversations which as for right now can not be easily replicated on a person-to-person basis.