Between AI-assisted pieces of journalism and AI-generated novels, some writers aren’t even trying to hide their use of AI. What does it mean for creativity, journalism, and the publishing industry?
YES to this: "I still strongly believe that the differentiating element for many creative and journalistic works in the future will be people’s abilities to be unpredictable and not so formulaic" -- In other words, Be Other
"Some are bothered because these AI-writers are not leaving room for those who actually are doing it for the love of the game, with one poster on X writing: 'Every professional writer who uses AI for anything except transcription should change careers right now. Give your spot to somebody who loves the work.'"
This is a false premise. I would not consider myself an AI-writer, tho I admit to using it in a brainstorming and copyediting capacity, but in my experience there are a wide range of people who prompt for base text and then do whatever they will with the results. Some submit the text as is, which I'd argue is very lazy and potentially dishonest. Some revise it heavily, so much so they might as well have written something from scratch. Most of the prominent ones, both confirmed/disclosed and merely suspected, are motivated by whatever cynical strawman this quoted poster has in mind. They see themselves as creatives. It's really on the anti-AI zealots to make the affirmative case to the contrary, and not just with ipse dixit or bare assertion.
Overall odd article btw. Not sure what to make of the oscillation between descriptive and prescriptive registers, plus all the quotations. Seems like there's a degree of trying to have it both ways and launder an opinion (maybe multiple) going on here. Would be better to just take a position and state that. And Sun, for her part, is a actually pretty close to an anti-AI zealot in some regards, despite her claims to the contrary. She's okay with the tools being used for "for fun" and for basic research assistance, but seems pretty closed-minded about anything beyond that.
" I can imagine that for some people in the media who have experienced countless forms of job loss, AI may just feel inevitable to keep working in the media"
Yeah but if the writing style is so bad on AI, then why would using it give you any sort of edge in getting projects?
Linda Carroll had a great related piece this morning over at "Hello, Writer!" about creativity that currently can't be trained into a model—and I doubt that we'll have enough compute combined worldwide to do what five-year-olds can do naturally. Kurzweil et al grossly underestimate the compute and storage capacity of the human mind. In related news, ToxSec also had a funny piece today about how badly ten-year-olds destroy even the best models available at the ARC-AGI-3 benchmark.
The taboo you're describing seems to be evolving quickly for novelists. I imagine that every profession or discipline is going to have to shame their membership and police the margins of their craft. At least until the bubble pops and the "ai" bros have to start charging users what it really costs. If they're paying somebody $200/month for their "pro" plan and journo-maxxing it to burn $200/day in usage, they'll be shocked when their subscription stops being subsidized by vulture capital burn and they forgot how to do basic research or string words into coherent sentences. This cost adjustment is already starting to squeeze the vibe coding tools downstream from the big two model builders.
Brief I-told-you-so moment: This is what happens when you sell your newspaper or your TV station or your video game studio or your publishing imprint to a hedge fund, a PE, or some other vulture who doesn't value your craft beyond the number it represents in their spreadsheet. I doubt the Founders had publicly traded "news feeds" in mind when they imagined a free and independent press.
If Zitron's analysis today of the "ai" bubble is even half right, Q4 is going to suck this year for anyone depending on market returns to eat. There's more zeroes on the end of this bubble than the last two combined. I'm betting that both OpenAI and Anthropic have to mysteriously postpone their IPO filings for fear of anyone seeing behind the curtain. Only 5MW of the much-ballyhooed 200MW of hyperscaler capacity are actually under construction. If they have to "scale" to get to AGI, then they're in trouble if they can't get the capacity built. Where there's smoke, there's mirrors.
This Starts with a poll about AI. Let your voice be heard!
https://substack.com/@guidedlightoasis/note/p-192123354?r=6ueqhh&utm_source=notes-share-action&utm_medium=web
YES to this: "I still strongly believe that the differentiating element for many creative and journalistic works in the future will be people’s abilities to be unpredictable and not so formulaic" -- In other words, Be Other
"Some are bothered because these AI-writers are not leaving room for those who actually are doing it for the love of the game, with one poster on X writing: 'Every professional writer who uses AI for anything except transcription should change careers right now. Give your spot to somebody who loves the work.'"
This is a false premise. I would not consider myself an AI-writer, tho I admit to using it in a brainstorming and copyediting capacity, but in my experience there are a wide range of people who prompt for base text and then do whatever they will with the results. Some submit the text as is, which I'd argue is very lazy and potentially dishonest. Some revise it heavily, so much so they might as well have written something from scratch. Most of the prominent ones, both confirmed/disclosed and merely suspected, are motivated by whatever cynical strawman this quoted poster has in mind. They see themselves as creatives. It's really on the anti-AI zealots to make the affirmative case to the contrary, and not just with ipse dixit or bare assertion.
Overall odd article btw. Not sure what to make of the oscillation between descriptive and prescriptive registers, plus all the quotations. Seems like there's a degree of trying to have it both ways and launder an opinion (maybe multiple) going on here. Would be better to just take a position and state that. And Sun, for her part, is a actually pretty close to an anti-AI zealot in some regards, despite her claims to the contrary. She's okay with the tools being used for "for fun" and for basic research assistance, but seems pretty closed-minded about anything beyond that.
The source and story of the artist is just as or more important than the art that is produced. It's the soul part of it all.
" I can imagine that for some people in the media who have experienced countless forms of job loss, AI may just feel inevitable to keep working in the media"
Yeah but if the writing style is so bad on AI, then why would using it give you any sort of edge in getting projects?
Linda Carroll had a great related piece this morning over at "Hello, Writer!" about creativity that currently can't be trained into a model—and I doubt that we'll have enough compute combined worldwide to do what five-year-olds can do naturally. Kurzweil et al grossly underestimate the compute and storage capacity of the human mind. In related news, ToxSec also had a funny piece today about how badly ten-year-olds destroy even the best models available at the ARC-AGI-3 benchmark.
The taboo you're describing seems to be evolving quickly for novelists. I imagine that every profession or discipline is going to have to shame their membership and police the margins of their craft. At least until the bubble pops and the "ai" bros have to start charging users what it really costs. If they're paying somebody $200/month for their "pro" plan and journo-maxxing it to burn $200/day in usage, they'll be shocked when their subscription stops being subsidized by vulture capital burn and they forgot how to do basic research or string words into coherent sentences. This cost adjustment is already starting to squeeze the vibe coding tools downstream from the big two model builders.
Brief I-told-you-so moment: This is what happens when you sell your newspaper or your TV station or your video game studio or your publishing imprint to a hedge fund, a PE, or some other vulture who doesn't value your craft beyond the number it represents in their spreadsheet. I doubt the Founders had publicly traded "news feeds" in mind when they imagined a free and independent press.
If Zitron's analysis today of the "ai" bubble is even half right, Q4 is going to suck this year for anyone depending on market returns to eat. There's more zeroes on the end of this bubble than the last two combined. I'm betting that both OpenAI and Anthropic have to mysteriously postpone their IPO filings for fear of anyone seeing behind the curtain. Only 5MW of the much-ballyhooed 200MW of hyperscaler capacity are actually under construction. If they have to "scale" to get to AGI, then they're in trouble if they can't get the capacity built. Where there's smoke, there's mirrors.