(05-07-2023, 09:18 AM)Lucky2Last Wrote:

(05-06-2023, 06:25 PM)SeldomRite Wrote: So you think someone writing a book about their experiences aboard a whaling ship (as Melville did) is the same as someone feeding a bunch of stories written about experiences on a whaling ship into an algorithm and having it write a story using those inputs?

I think it would do you good to think about it all a bit more.

I don't need to think about it more, because it's not just looking at a book about whaling. It's looking at what you tell it to look at. If all it does is aggregate whaling stories, you're going to end up with one or two interesting books (maybe). Then they will be the same thing written slightly differently, and people who are into whaling books will notice that. So, first-to-market might do alright, but pretty soon, it's going to take outside-the-box creativity to stand apart, and that will take human ingenuity, at least until it gets better.

And again, you completely discount the fact that it's not doing anything different than we are doing. We read books. We gather ideas. Then, we reform them into something that's arranged in a different or novel way. Yet none of them are new. Very few people have an original idea. MOST of what's popular is just a re-skinning of something that's come before it. How many books are based on Shakespeare? How many movies are based on Christ? Where did those ideas come from? Lived experience? 

AI (which I agree is false marketing) does what you tell it. It does what humans do, just faster. It lacks creativity, but it understands how to interpret its inputs very well. It will only be as good as the person who is feeding it good information and giving it good direction. At least for the foreseeable future. 

Maybe you should write a book with AI and sell it to everyone since it's so easy.

I'll give it one last shot.

Me: someone goes out, experiences something, writes about it.

You: everyone is just copying something that they once read, which is what "ai" (in the context of LLMs) is also doing.

Are you seeing what I'm talking about? Computer algorithms don't experience anything at all, they get trained by someone. People experience the world around them, including witnessing others' output.

People are capable of writing something original, in the sense it's not related to any output that came from someone else, and clearly that would need to be the case since people didn't come into existence with a pantheon of material already available that they could copy. AI is also capable of originality, but only in the sense that it can possibly output a different sequence of words than have ever been output by someone.

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