John Scalzi: Found yet another site with AI-created summaries for my books; those summaries are both inaccurate and hopelessly bland. Please, folks, if you have kids of book report age, tell them from me that these summary sites are just complete bullshit. Don't trust them and don't copy their blandness.

Found yet another site with AI-created summaries for my books; those summaries are both inaccurate and hopelessly bland. Please, folks, if you have kids of book report age, tell them from me that these summary sites are just complete bullshit. Don't trust them and don't copy their blandness.

A lot of people don’t understand that Generative AIs will just make things up. They’re more like Mad Libs than what we used to think of when we said “AI.”

Calling this "AI" is a huge problem. It's not artificial intelligence—a computer that can learn & make decisions—it's pattern recognition software. It's very sophisticated as far as that goes. It's a huge step up from mashing the middle autofill button on your phone. But it's still essentially that.

💯 this! the only reason they don't give you the same answer to the same question every time is they have a random seed number to zhuzh things up. they're entirely deterministic without that

the hallucinations have made interlibrary loan a lot harder. Constantly having to explain to students that the articles AI found don't exist.

EXACTLY. AI writing is nothing more than swallowing a thesaurus and dictionary and trying to put words together properly. There's no flash, no flair, no imagination and no creative flow whatsoever. Man, writers need to chill the fuck out.

AI is worthless. It's fine for business purposes,but for fiction, I've seen better writing in TV service manuals. The less It's used,.the less it will know.

I've looked at Chatgtp a few times to describe something I didn't have much knowledge of - in this case, a WW2 aircraft carrier. It described the control area and radar center as "a towering edifice." WHAT. THE. FUCK. 🤪🤪🤪🤪🤪

😆 So helpful

I feel like people focus too much on “this is inaccurate” rather than on “these inaccuracies are contained within a chunk of fluid and plausibly human language that a few years back no computer could produce.” The LLM is a genuine breakthrough, the Generative AI useful but also over-hyped.

There are cliff-notes style versions of my comics out there, but I figure jokes on them, ‘cause such text summaries are actually *harder* to read!

YES. And on my side of things it's not as if my work is forbiddingly dense and difficult to read, it's probably just easier to zoom through the book.

it might even be, you know, enjoyable!

I find it is in fact effective to tell my students that I have faith that every one of them is more creative and interesting in what they can write than what an AI can generate, and that I would vastly rather read their thoughts, even with a few grammar and spelling errors.

“Emperox Kaiju wears a red shirt”

bruces.medium.com/artificial-i...

Artificial Intelligence explains “cyberpunk” to Bruce Sterling, 2024 A.D.bruces.medium.com *Clearly there are elements of karmic retribution here.

I'd be much more impressed if Chat-GPT had responded "Why the fuck do you want me to humiliate myself trying to bot-splain cyberpunk to freakin' Bruce Sterling? Shall I tell Tolkien about hobbits? How about me lecturing GRRM on 'How To Procrastinate'? Stop wasting my time, meatbag."

“Remember the scorn you had for kids too lazy to read the actual book and who wrote their essay based on the Cliff Notes? Don’t let your kids fall for something even worse. Cliff Notes were lazy, but AI is just dumb and wrong and evil.”

I wonder how easy it is/will be to tell which sites are in fact inaccurate so spam if you aren’t already familiar. Thinking of folks looking for the modern day CliffsNotes for something they haven’t read or attempting to do casual internet research, and getting all this bogus info.

Look, if “Old Man’s War” ISN’T about Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau, I don’t want to know…

Hahaha also your teacher can tell with just about three questions whether you read the book, even if they've never read it! So don't get caught out, just ask for help from your teacher or librarian to find a book you'll enjoy reading. (Scalzi is a good pick!)

Not quite. One of the better writers in my 8th grade class wrote a book report on a book that didn’t exist. She created the story in her head and wrote the report. Got an A. Obviously, most people can’t pull that off. This girl was major league creative.

Well said, John.

Especially bc then they would generate many more of them and it would be difficult to find real human ones.

This came across my Feedly today. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

ChatGPT is bullshit - Ethics and Information Technologylink.springer.com Recently, there has been considerable interest in large language models: machine learning systems which produce human-like text and dialogue. Applications of these systems have been plagued by persist...

Not surprised that they're inaccurate and bland, but are they any worse than the summaries (of books and movies) on Amazon, Goodreads, and IMDB. How many of those reviews list awards, but don't mention anything about the work itself?

If you're just gonna make shit up, at least make it _interesting_!

Wish I got to read your books when I was in school.

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