Brian Phillips: what if I told you that instead of finding words for your ideas, you could have a server farm in Belarus dip a ladle into a pre-digested slurry of words other people have already found for different ideas. would you want to be a writer then

a bottleneck of writing is writing

“A bottleneck of writing is sentence generation—getting ideas into sentences…That is a big task. That part is really costly in terms of cognitive load.”

How can students use AI to improve your writing?- Fast Companywww.fastcompany.com The professors call their approach “restrained generative AI,” and they’ve already built a prototype software tool that is being piloted in 10 courses at the university this semester.

what if I told you that instead of finding words for your ideas, you could have a server farm in Belarus dip a ladle into a pre-digested slurry of words other people have already found for different ideas. would you want to be a writer then

honestly it fucking sucks to have to string together words to describe the experience of inhabiting my irreducible individual consciousness. I want Evernote to do it for me

Inside the town was a tree. Inside the tree were two acorns. Within the acorns were Sun Tzu and Socrates. *Proceeds to give a page and a half description of Marcus Aurelius's philosophy.*

Hilarious to have identified "getting your important new ideas into comprehensible sentences" as the problem and "let's have a machine imitate what other people have already said" as the answer.

I think the indictment here is that seldom are the ideas that humans have actually new and the we do the latter instinctively as comfort, with or without LLMs.

Could you expound on this? I'm having a hard time reading it in a way that isn't, "Using LLMs won't limit creativity because humans are so rarely creative."

Sure: - some people have ingenious ideas but lack the lexical ability to persuade/write well - LLMs can only create to the limit of the human content they’ve ingested (and the quality) - humans historically create with reference or outright copy their influences, long before GPT made it easy.

I think they’re fine to use as tools but absolutely agree that they should not and cannot replace good ol fashioned human creativity (let alone continue to exist without it).

Remember, tho', that LLMs lack comprehension of the concepts we ask them to describe or explain. They "create" imitations of human responses to prompts that are plausible enough to deceive an observer; that's fundamentally different from how human creativity builds on understanding earlier works.

yes? I'm sure there are ton of writers that have this idea of a narrative and get bogged down/stuck by things like giving their worlds/NPCs/scenery useful descriptions. Both on a Macro scale and a "I know I want an important encounter to happen in this town. Any town. Give me a town."

Fuck that.

"I have a great idea for a business, if only all these necessary basic tasks wouldn't bog down my genius idea". Part of succeeding at ANYTHING is learning how to use the tools necessary to accomplish that thing & convey it to others. A good idea doesn't entitle you to success - just get good bro!

computer programs ARE a tool.

Learning how to use Microsoft Word is not the same as using AI to write exposition paragraphs for you. I think you know that.

Then those people should either work on refining their craft or find something else to do.

This is idiotic, it's like saying "there are a lot of woodworkers who have a great idea for a chair, but get bogged down with the cutting the wood and joining the wood together" woodworking is when you turn the wood into a chair, you're describing buying a chair

“getting bogged down” in “useful descriptions” is in fact the fucking craft of writing. i do not know what you are describing but it is not writing.

Open your mind a tiny little bit I'm begging you.

why should anyone bother to read books written by people who could not bother to write them?

so they don't have the imagination required to run a D&D game, much less a novel.

ew

You've never read a book with a great story but crappy descriptions?

i think a good writer should be good at describing things??? like, they should be good at writing?? anyway, AI generated bullshit definitely wouldn't help.

Post