top 79 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] 112 points 10 months ago (10 children)

I like the way Ted Chiang puts it:

Some might say that the output of large language models doesn’t look all that different from a human writer’s first draft, but, again, I think this is a superficial resemblance. Your first draft isn’t an unoriginal idea expressed clearly; it’s an original idea expressed poorly, and it is accompanied by your amorphous dissatisfaction, your awareness of the distance between what it says and what you want it to say. That’s what directs you during rewriting, and that’s one of the things lacking when you start with text generated by an A.I.

There’s nothing magical or mystical about writing, but it involves more than placing an existing document on an unreliable photocopier and pressing the Print button.

I think our materialist culture forgets that minds exist. The output from writing something is not just “the thing you wrote”, but also your thoughts about the thing you wrote.

  • source
  • hideshow 10 child comments
  • [–] 62 points 10 months ago (7 children)

    The dialog pushing AI media seems to start from this assumption that I consume media just to have colors and words and sounds enter my face holes. In fact, I consume art and media because I like hearing, seeing, and reading about how other humans experience the same world I do. It's a form of communication. I like the product but also the process of people trying to capture the bonkers, ineffable experience we all seem to be sharing in ways I would never think of, but can instantly verify.

    What's funny is, due to the nature of media, it's kind of impossible to not communicate something, even if the artwork itself is empty. When I see AI media I see the communication of a mind that doesn't know or give a shit about any of this. So in their attempt make filler they are in fact making art about how inarticulate they are. It's unintentional, corporate dadaism.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 7 child comments
  • [–] 21 points 10 months ago (4 children)

    Yes, this is it right here. The whole point of art is communication and connection with another human being.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 4 child comments
  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago

    While I fully agree with you regarding my reasons to consume media, I'm not so sure if that's actually a majority opinion. I get the impression that for a lot of people, the point of consuming media is actually just entertainment, something to take your mind off other things, and they don't care about the communication and connection aspect.

  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 4 points 10 months ago

    The people pushing AI don't like like hearing, seeing, and reading about how other humans experience the world. They actually do just want flashing colors and sounds poured into their face holes. They're basically incapable of understanding art.

  • source
  • parent
  • [+] 15 points 10 months ago (1 child)
  • [–] 3 points 10 months ago

    Tangentially related, the easiest way to come up with a unique and cool idea is to come up with a unique and dumb idea (which is way easier) and then work on it until it becomes cool. (Think how dumb some popular franchises concepts are if you take the raw idea out of context.)

  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 25 points 10 months ago

    More Larian Aura farming. Please take a break you're already full maxed out for community respect its actually getting unfair for other game developers.

  • source
  • [–] 25 points 10 months ago (6 children)

    AI is just a marketing term, there's nothing intelligent about it. Its simply Large Language Models, databases that predict what should go next. Its like asking the prediction bar when you are typing to write a story.

  • source
  • hideshow 6 child comments
  • [+] -7 points 10 months ago (5 children)

    It isn't though. It's a thing that makes shit. And it makes shit well enough that execs seriously consider it. Even though it can only make a commercial 60% as good as humans can, that's good enough. Because AI can make 10 commercials in the same time traditional creators can make 1. It doesn't matter how bad the ai commercials are because they can overwhelm any competition in sheer abundance. AI ads will drown out traditional ads. They are easier to make and are infinitely customisable. I can make 10 new ads a day for less than it would cost to make a single traditional ad. There really is no comparison

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 5 child comments
  • [–] 10 points 10 months ago (3 children)

    Because AI can make 10 commercials in the same time traditional creators can make 1

    Famously Cola Christmas commercial took more time and money to create than a traditional ad would?

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 3 child comments
  • [–] 3 points 10 months ago (2 children)

    It's very funny to me when people say that using AI takes less time. They clearly haven't prompted 10 times for a basic request only for the AI to fail every time.

    I have. I use AI. I have been for a while. It's good for very, very basic requests that people have asked for countless times over. It's actually very good at that. For anything else, it's useless.

    And what I said above is the exact opposite of literally any creative workflow ever.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    I'll accept the down votes, but I needed a header image for a work doc that showed a map, and in the background the landscape it was mapping - too specific for a stock photo, but it's just window dressing in a mostly internal doc - perfect use case for AI!

    After 45 minutes of prompting I gave up and made it myself in 20 minutes, and used royalty free no credit needed images.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago

    Man I can't for the life of me get it to generate a proper image that isn't "a cute racoon playing guitar" or some stuff like that.

    I tried using AI filters too, to improve quality (remove motion blur, remove low-light noise, etc) but it never did anything useful either. Upscaling may as well be just a GIMP image scale.

    I don't get it. Either I'm too stupid to use it or it's truly useless.

  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 46 points 10 months ago (4 children)

    I think the reason so many AI bros are conservative is that conservatives have historically had really bad taste in art/media, so they see the drivel AI creates and think, “oh wow, it looks just like what the artists make,” not realizing that they don’t have the eye to see what it’s missing.

  • source
  • hideshow 4 child comments
  • [–] 10 points 10 months ago (3 children)

    Behind the Bastards had a different take. A lot of fascist movements get wierdly focussed on futurism and try to portray their movements as belonging in said future. Unfortunately I can't remember the exact episodes this was mentioned

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 3 child comments
  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago

    Makes sense when you think about it

    You're running an oppressive dictatorship. You still need enough people to support you to keep the thing going. What do you do? Make a bunch of people believe you're going to improve their lives. How do you do that? First, you find an enemy to blame for everything. For Nazi Germany it was Jews, for the US now it's mostly Latinos, but really all foreigners. But that alone might not be enough. So what else do you do? Pretend you're doing everything economically and technologically to make things better for "the right people".

  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 31 points 10 months ago (3 children)

    Writer having toyed with AI, here : yeah, AI writing sucks. It is consensual and bland, never goes into unexpected territory, or completely fails to understand human nature.

    So, we'd better stop calling AI "intelligence". It's text-prediction machine learning on steroïds, nothing more, and the fact that we're still calling that "intelligence" says how gullible we all are.

    It's just another speculative bubble from the tech bros, as cryptos were, except this time the tech bros have made their nazi coming out.

  • source
  • hideshow 3 child comments
  • [–] 11 points 10 months ago (2 children)

    I remember reading a longer post on lemmy. The person was describing their slow realization that the political beliefs they were raised with were leading down a dark path. It was a process that took many years, and the story was full of little moments where cracks in his world view widened and the seed of doubt grew.

    And someone who was bored/overwhelmed with having to read a post over three sentences long fed the story into AI to make a short summary. They then posted that summary as a "fixed your post, bro" moment. So basically all the humanity removed. Reminds me of that famous "If the Gettysburg Address were a PowerPoint" https://norvig.com/Gettysburg/

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 46 points 10 months ago (11 children)

    Tons of shit games are going to have lots of dialogue written by AI. It’s very likely that those games would have had shit dialogue anyway.

  • source
  • hideshow 11 child comments
  • [–] 35 points 10 months ago (5 children)

    Sure, but human-written shit still had that human touch. It could be unintentionally funny, it could be a mixed bag that reaches unexpected heights at times. AI writing is just the bland kind of bad, not the interesting kind of bad.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 5 child comments
  • [–] 10 points 10 months ago (4 children)

    It would probably have been less shit though.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 4 child comments
  • [–] 3 points 10 months ago

    Eh, we're talking about the bottom of the barrel here. I'm thinking there will be fewer typos, but also an occasional "as a LLM" slip-up, so about the same quality as before.

  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 6 points 10 months ago

    You can make it stylized dialogue but it's just surface mannerisms. Underneath it's still the same bland AI

  • source
  • [–] 4 points 10 months ago (7 children)

    Guy says robot can't replace him. News at 11.

  • source
  • hideshow 7 child comments
  • [–] 4 points 10 months ago (6 children)

    I mean it can, 10% quality and units sold at 1% cost increases your profits by 10x

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 6 child comments
  • [–] 5 points 10 months ago (5 children)

    Implying people are happy to buy the shit, which isn't likely, especially in a competitive environment.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 5 child comments
  • [–] 8 points 10 months ago (3 children)

    People buy AAA games all the time. Look at Starfield. Garbage game, still sold well.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 3 child comments
  • [–] 4 points 10 months ago (2 children)

    Starfield is estimated to have sold 3 millions copies. Baldur's gate 3, 15 million. Microsoft/Bethesda marketing budgets makes a difference, but not being garbage makes a much bigger difference.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago

    Well yeah, I'm not going to argue that a well made game that respects the player isn't going to do well. But that doesn't matter to the publishers and their shareholders when they can pump out AI slop garbage year after year and still have people that drink it up. Just look at the yearly shooters and sports games, they sell enough.

    Besides, what happens when this sort of slop has been normalised? Look at the mobile market, no one bats an eye at the intensely predatory microtransactions, and you'll even find people defending things like gacha games.

    There was a time where people scoffed at the notion of paying $2~ for some shitty cosmetics, but now people don't even blink at the idea. Hell, it's downright cheap in some cases. The AAA industry just has to slop things up for long enough for people to stop caring, because they will stop caring and then continue to shell out for the dubious privilege of guzzling their mediocre, uninspiring garbage.

  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago

    Not to mention inertia from studio rep. I'd buy Bethesda hotdog water at some points for those studio. Now they could promise me head from a talented hooker with a clean record and I'd still probally pass cause Id probally just end 39 hours sore, blueballed, and being asked for the next payment.

  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago*

    I means, I’m I huge local LLM advocate. I look at slop metrics, I’ve finetuned or messed with smaller LLMs for prose. I use bigger MoEs with raw completion syntax to get past writers block and some probably-related-to-neurodivergence issues I have.

    But they really are terrible with long-form stories.

    There’s no way around it. They just can’t stick to a coherent plot.

    And even at the “micro” scale (eg “I’m stuck, how do I finish this sentence?” or “how should this character realistically respond?” or “does this paragraph feel stilted?”) they’re only there for inspiration, or maybe as a mirror to bounce ideas off of. Not any sort of output you could rely on.

    It absolutely boggles my mind people think they can replace, or even “double” writers. They don’t think. They are literally architected to be terrible at that, no matter how much koolaid on scaling Altman preaches.

  • source
  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago*

    sadly, a bad first draft in five minutes usually beats a thoughtful solution in three days

    edit: oops i thought we were talking about code. nvm, people actually look at prose.

  • source
  • [–] -3 points 10 months ago (4 children)

    Nah, can't agree. I have postponed few ideas for years, was able to vibe them in a week during evenings, now i have something usable. 70% of it was vibed, just had to fix stupid stuff that was partially on my queries.

  • source
  • hideshow 4 child comments
  • [+] 9 points 10 months ago (2 children)
  • [–] -4 points 10 months ago (9 children)

    I can see how it could be useful, or mandatory in future rpgs. It can generate a framework for a real writer, with extremely large amounts of logical branching, a billion times faster. Then you go over the top of it and use the framework as concepts to use or revise. This streamlines the process, unifies the creative vision, and allows for such a large game without procedural generation that would haven taken a team 10 years or not at all, done in 2.

  • source
  • hideshow 9 child comments
  • [–] 9 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (4 children)

    This is based on the assumption that the AI output is any good, but the actual game devs and writers are saying otherwise.

    If the game is too big for writers to finish on their own, they're not going to have time to read and fix everything wrong with the AI output either. This is how you get an empty, soulless game, not Balders Gate 3.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 4 child comments
  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago (3 children)

    It's assuming the ai output isn't very good. It assumes it can create a framework that necessarily still needs the actual writers, but now they don't have to come up with 100% of the framework, but instead work on the actual content only. Storyboarding and frameworking is a hodgepodge of nonsense anyway with humans. The goal is to achieve non-linear scaling, not replace quality writers or have the final product Ai written.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 3 child comments
  • [–] 5 points 10 months ago (2 children)

    This sounds like it takes away a huge amount of creative freedom from the writers if the AI is specifying the framework. It'd be like letting the AI write the plot, but then having real writers fill in details along the way, which sounds like a good way to have the story go nowhere interesting.

    I'm not a writer, but if I was to apply this strategy to programming, which I am familiar with, it'd be like letting the AI decide what all the features are, and then I'd have to go and build them. Considering more than half my job is stuff other than actually writing code, this seems overly reductive, and underestimates how much human experience matters in deciding a framework and direction.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 3 points 10 months ago* (1 child)

    Even in programming there are common feature frameworks. Having a system enumerate them based on a unified design vision from a single source architect rather than 50 different design ideas duct taped together could help a lot. I've seen some horrendous systems where you can tell a bunch of totally separate visions were frankenstein'd together, and the same happens in games where you can tell different groups wrote different sections.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago

    I’ve seen some horrendous systems where you can tell a bunch of totally separate visions were frankenstein’d together

    My experience has been that using AI only accelerates this process, because the AI has no concept of what good architecture is or how to reduce entropy. Unless you can one-shot the entire architecture, it's going to immediately go off the rails. And if the architecture was that simple to begin with, there really wasn't much value in the AI in the first place.

  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago (3 children)

    Aand you end up with... ta-da-m, same old things, just rebranded. Very creative (no)

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 3 child comments
  • [+] -13 points 10 months ago (16 children)

    That means in about 6 months or so the AI content quality will be about an 8/10. The processors spread machine "learning" incredibly fast. Some might even say exponentially fast. Pretty soon it'll be like that old song "If you wonder why your letters never get a reply, when you tell me that you love me, I want to see you write it". "Letters" is an old version of one-on-one tweeting, but with no character limit.

  • source
  • hideshow 16 child comments
  • [–] 14 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    Only if you assume that its performance will continue improving for a good while and (at least) linearly. The companies are really struggling to give their models more compute or more training data now and frankly it doesn't seem like there have been any big strides for a while

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
  • [–] 12 points 10 months ago

    Yeah… Linear increases in performance appear to require exponentially more data, hardware, and energy.

    Meanwhile, the big companies are passing around the same $100bn IOU, amortizing GPUs on 6-year schedules but burning them out in months, using those same GPUs as collateral on massive loans, and spending based on an ever-accelerating number of data centers which are not guaranteed to get built or receive sufficient power.

  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 12 points 10 months ago*

    What improvements have there been in the previous 6 months? From what I've seen the AI is still spewing the same 3/10 slop it has since 2021, with maybe one or two improvements bringing it up from 2/10. I've heard several people say some newer/bigger models actually got worse at certain tasks, and clean training data is pretty much dried up to even train more models.

    I just don't see any world where scaling up the compute and power usage is going to suddenly improve the quality orders of magnitude. By design LLMs are programmed to output the most statistically likely response, but almost by definition is going to be the most average, bland response possible.

  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 21 points 10 months ago (6 children)

    I love how you idiots think this tech hasn’t already hit its ceiling. It’s been functionally stagnant for some time now.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 6 child comments
  • [–] -3 points 10 months ago (5 children)

    Hey. I'm just one idiot. Who else are you talking about?

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 5 child comments
  • [–] 11 points 10 months ago (4 children)

    You’re not just one, you’re one of many. All saying the same shit.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 4 child comments
  • [–] -3 points 10 months ago (3 children)

    Lots and lots of people have told me that.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 3 child comments
  • [–] 7 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    I doubt that. A lot of the poor writing quality comes down to choice. All the most powerful models are inherently trained to be bland, seek harmony with the user, and generally come across as kind of slimy in a typically corporate sort of way. This bleeds into the writing style pretty heavily.

    A model trained specifically for creative writing without such a focus would probably do better. We'll see.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
  • load more comments (1 reply)