Yes. They are the ones who will pull the plugs on their mother's life support systems just to charge their cell phones. Or use the electricity to power the release of an AI self-help book on getting rich without going to college.
And for not much - so many of them who don't even need a Penny more are so ravenously hunger for any Penny left on the Grunge strewn ground they will do Anything ,sell anyone ,Literally eat a Pound of SHIT ,if that is what it takes to make even 1 dime more. It is so disgusting I feel a need to take a Bath if I see any of them. I NEVER imagined the Human Race could go this low ,so utterly & Disgustingly LOW
I am teaching a little course on Orwell's journalism and just this week came across some interesting comments from him that seem to foreshadow AI publishing.
"It is just thinkable that books may someday be written by machinery, and it is quite easy to imagine poems being produced partly by fortuitous means--by some device similar to the kaleidoscope, for instance." (From a review of Herbert Read. Orwell is not claiming that this development would be desirable.)
"Political writing in our time consists almost entirely of prefabricated phrases bolted together like the pieces of a child's Meccano set. It is the unavoidable result of self-censorship. To write in plain, vigorous language one has to think fearlessly, and if one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox.... [T]he history of totalitarian societies, or of groups of people who have adopted the totalitarian outlook, suggests that loss of liberty is inimical to all forms of literature.... Probably novels and stories will be completely superseded by film and radio productions. Or perhaps some kind of low-grade sensational fiction will survive, produced by a sort of conveyor-belt process that reduces human initiative to the minimum. It would probably not be beyond human ingenuity to write books by machinery.... Imagination--even consciousness, so far as possible--would be eliminated from the process of writing." (These are widely scattered quotes from his essay "The Prevention of Literature.")
And of course this, from his invaluable "Politics and the English Language": "A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly? But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you--even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent--and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself." I read that last passage rather differently this time than I have read it in the past.
Ted, thanks for helping keep us abreast of this rapidly changing landscape.
Thanks for this, Peter. I try to follow Orwell's prescripts 'though I too often fail, but I note that very many professional writers don't seem to even try.
Spines is just an AI version of the very typical self-publishing scammers that have always taken advantage of writers.
TikTok's move isn't about AI, it's organic growth: #booktok has become a hugely powerful recommendation engine in the book world. Kathleen Schmidt has been saying for a while they should do this. Looks like they agree with her.
Microsoft I can't quite figure out. Even if they wanted to pub a bunch of AI-generated titles, how much money could the company possibly make compared to its other rather profitable businesses. Why bother? Possibly they're trying to find a "use case" for the trillions they've thrown at AI and this is what they came up with. Or, their deputy CTO couldn't sell his memoirs to a publisher and convinced somebody inside the company to spin this up.
Regardless, it has occurred to me that we are reading the last generation of pre-AI writers that will ever exist. Writers who don't use AI at all will become like those obscure cheesemakers in little Italian villages making reggiano the way they did 300 years ago. Books written by actual human beings will be a delicacy and a curiosity.
And the love of real writers will explode as a counter to AI-written thievery. From the dark mud flowers will grow and new human talent will emerge. And the most creative and authentic WILL survive and grow rich.
ha! yes, I like that. We need more on-point cheese analogies, so thank you for that ;-) I am and always have been in Club Reggiano, you can count on that. Full-tilt "curiosity" nano-markets. Onward Reggiano!
Yes, that's the issue. It's not only entire books written by AI -- that will happen, too (it already is), but many readers will be able to tell, at least until it improves, which will result in the stigma of slop that it already has.
The real issue is human/AI collaboration. This is already happening, too, and the authors who are doing so are generally not telling people. So these books are not "made by AI", entirely, but the writing of the books is greatly sped up (which is a competitive advantage in some of the more "pulpy" lines of popular fiction) by the use by the human authors of AI in writing/completing the books. This runs the gamut from brainstorming to organizing/outlining to breaking block to editing and so on.
More and more *human* writers are doing this, and not telling anyone (for obvious reasons), and so much of what is written, today, in certain popular fiction genres is "hybrid" -- human/AI collaboration. I expect we will see the same in other "popular" creativity areas, like pop music, pop art illustration and so on.
The "high art" is much less likely to be impacted, I think. But the popular creative work? It's already happening.
8000 books a year? That's 21 books a day, every day. That's not publishing. It's printing at best.
TV was to bring us "Hamlet" of an afternoon. The telephone was to bring us together. The Internet was to enrich our ideas. Instead we got the Kardashians, phone solicitations, hatred and meanness of spirit. These tech bros in their black t-shirts aren't even promising Shakespeare for the masses. Their only promise is that they are going to make a lot of money.
It’s like a YouTube level of new books, so much that no one can consume it. I have so many thoughts about tools of creation, and creating, vs tools of consumption. It’s felt for a long time like we are forced into consumer mode, much like a goose being fattened for foie gras.
Genetic modification is only as good as what you do with it. That's like saying that AI is inherently good because it reduces cost for those using it, with better quantities, and that it's only "falsely smeared by anti-science zealots" who don't believe in progress.
GMO is used by companies primarily for profit and control. The point of them is not to improve people's health, how would that be profitable? Have you actually spoken to anyone who opposes it before? It sounds like you assume why others dislike them.
It forces farmers to buy GMO seeds from big companies after every harvest to replant, rather than use the open pollinated seeds used for thousands of years. It poses a major issue with copyright laws, which is that companies can now patent life; far from the original intent to protect artists. Enjoy (among other issues) how cross pollination may cause you to unknowingly commit a copyright violation on your own land.
It reduces biodiversity, creates an ecologically harmful monoculture, and creates future risks; some unknowable at this time, e.g loss of resistance to genetic diseases.
Not that I'd expect a believer in scientism to know any of this stuff. Ironic you call others "anti-science zealots" telling false smears, yet what are you doing but pre-emptively smearing anyone who disagrees with your beliefs as "anti-science zealots"?
Time for Substack to enter the publishing business and set a new, transparent standard for human-created writing!
Ted rightly lauds companies such as Harper Collins which specifiy limits on AI use. However, over time the detection of AI-generated babel will become increasingly impossible as writers will blend their styles with widely proliferated faux language. Also, AI detection software may unfairly punish authors who did not actually use any AI tools ( see comments to Jeremy Anderberg’s recent note https://substack.com/@readmorebooks/note/c-78072965 : “Has anyone tested AI checkers/detectors on their own writing? I threw in my last few newsletters out of curiosity and it showed all of them as ~50% AI-generated. WTF. They were 0% AI-created. I sure hope editors aren’t actually using these things.”).
This is precisely where Orwell sets the standard of detection. Newspeak is the destruction of language that AI recognizes. Real writers putting real sentences together, but in patterns long established by custom, familiarity, favored phrases and sensibilities and maybe just trolling for readers. AI fixes on the patterns – writers (and favored styles) generate patterned word outputs. That isn't AI's fault.
I am not a writer. When I write on semi-public media (here, for instance) I often personalize a word by slapping upon it a couple extra letters or syllables that emphasize some point I'm working on. Such words aren't seen anywhere but these tiny audiences (waves to y'all) so it is of no consequencedness, but I like to think I'm messing with AI's 'mind' thingy.
I had a cynical comment typed out, but I deleted it. Instead, I'll try to be hopeful: I can't wait for the anti-AI revolution that's coming. I know which side I'm on.
This is why I started posting my music directly on Substack, no label, no filter, just write the song, make a good recording, and post it. I clicked the button that said I don't want AI to scrape my stuff and learn from me (though I highly doubt any money-grubbing tech overlord would want anything to do with my weird and unwieldy musical quirkiness). Anyway, I'm putting my original content where it can hopefully reach some ears that are smart enough to know better, and creative enough to WANT better. That's the only way I can see forward. It seems I am far from alone in this. Create on, and fight on. We creatives may not be in a fight for our lives, but we are in a fight for our souls. Not sure which is more dangerous, honestly.
Wonderful song think I best grab the upright and see what I can do. I never listen to Spotify, it really pisses me off for any number of reasons. If anybody flips an Ai lead sheet up I'm gone. Grand job you!
I recently did an exercise on whether people could spot on AI generated text versus a human-written one. I spotted the AI version a mile away because it was bland and full of cliches. I'm not worried about AI generated books displacing human authors. This sounds like the death throes of the generative AI bubble, which I predict will pop sometime in the next few years.
An alternative view: more than a year ago a friend showed me what she had done in Photoshop with AI (we are both pro photographers) and it was absolutely stunning. And ridiculously easy! I looked for the usual "tells" and didn't see any. I doubt that I could have done as well myself no matter how much time I had. Some things are just beyond what one person can do.
I am a bit familiar with the field of aviation also (used to fly, and my brother was a pro jet pilot) and there are things, like landing in dense fog, that you simply cannot do for yourself. The B-2 stealth bomber, because of its flying-wing design, it is incredibly difficult to control, and a human pilot can't react fast enough, so it must be done by software.
Frankly, I hope you are right about AI, and I am wrong. I used to be part of the photojournalism community, and those people are almost all gone now, due to the collapse of the newspaper industry (except for the NY Times). Our biggest newspaper here in Connecticut (and the oldest in the country), the Hartford Courant, used to have 30 photographers, now only a handful. Newspapers are the walking dead.
For me, the apocalypse has already come.
Not a good time to be in any creative field. Companies don't respect you, and politicians don't either. We have to help ourselves, as the people of South Korea just did. They were let down by their leaders, and institutions.
And we still have to have that big conversation about what it means to be human. Why humans count. And why intangibles count, even though they cannot be counted.
We did just see a bloody remember of what it means to DE-humanize others in the murder of Brian Thompson (used his name because he was a real person), and the justifications that people were making for that in the dehumanizing behavior of the health care industry, including decision making by AI.
They were making those comments in a medium, online comments, that itself encourages de-humanizing others. That's another conversation. The comments here are pretty civil, but that is not the norm.
Hope that wasn't too long...am new to Substack (and liking it!)
What keeps running through my head is “It doesn’t have to be this way”.
Much of the modern world that we don’t like is the result of choices our societies have made intentionally or inadvertently but we can make other choices?
Uber set out with a business model to break protections taxi drivers had fought hard for to lift themselves up. The have succeeded in many places in using start up funds to buy influence and use government power to reduce protections while also using those funds to effectively subsidize people’s rides as their service was priced under cost. We then found out that there really wasn’t ever a plan to be profitable at those prices.
I’m concerned AI is the same way that are loosing money but in doing so are going to break existing businesses and hut a lot of creative people in the process.
We don’t have to let this happen. We can slow down and make deliberate choices about technology and how it’s used.
But AI's model is based on discovering all those blandnesses and cliche´s, that were generated by human scribes and typists. The Newspeak is already everywhere, ripe for the harvesting.
I don't have an answer for this, because realistically, if everything published from this moment forward is written in unique, infinitely variable style, AI will eventually generate stuff in its own unique, infinitely variable copy.
Here’s the hard truth: this sort of business will succeed because far too many people want it to. I refer, of course, to those people who don’t want to have to the hard work of thinking for themselves. I’m not being snobbish: many of the people who don’t want to think are reasonably well educated. The problem with independent thinking is that it will exclude you from the cliques that demand conformity (and, of course, the most conformist groups of all are those who fancy themselves nonconformist). Most people want to fit in: AI provides the opportunity to establish a baseline culture tailored to specific subgroups, allowing them to skip the hard work of evaluating quality and simply immersing themselves in whatever they already enjoy. AI is about giving people what they want without requiring them to become involved in the hard work of creation. My prediction: the people most immune to this will be the folks who are involved in community choruses, local performing groups and other amateur endeavors. If you can’t perform (and you don’t have to be a professional to make good art), get involved in watching/listening to your local cultural activities…and make a point of experiencing genres you may not think you’ll like. Try new things…it’s the only way to grow.
Some days I do; some days I don’t. As someone who’s been working a day job for almost 50 years, I’ve learned a job is a means to an end. It provides what I need to take care of my family and to do those things I enjoy doing. I don’t define myself by my job. I’ve also learned to avoid a career: you have a job, but a career has you. As it is, I’ve been blessed: my house is paid for, my car is paid for and I’ve saved enough to continue working because I want to, not because I have to. It’s amazing what one can do when one learns the meaning of two words: “enough” and “content.”
I've had 3 or 4 careers, and enjoyed them all practically 100%. But 45 years of that was enough. So now I do just the stuff that got me into those careers in the first place, and I love it still.
What I do not understand is people who work themselves into fortunes, then continue working unto death.
I dunno. Maybe some music, of a certain type...? [Not calling out any specific style].
I'm reminded of the program that generated Piet Mondrian-like works that are to my eye indistinguishable from the master's*. Perhaps this is an artistic type a little too simple to recreate – don't know if there's a musical analogy. And of course the question remains "But is that Creation?"
*I mean this literally – Mondrian was a master of ideas and style, and a genius of timing.
I understand why a bunch of greedbros would do this, but I don't understand how the market is supposed to reward their efforts and cover their expenses. According to some statistics from the Steve Laube agency, four million new books were published (in the U.S.) in 2022 alone. (Source: https://www.zippia.com/advice/us-book-industry-statistics/).
This includes self-published books and traditionally published textbooks and books for the trade. This means a new book is ALREADY being published every eight seconds or nearly 11,000 per day, every day of the year.
Where is the need for robo-books? And although AI might be able to produce something resembling a story and then bind it, the thing still has to be edited, proofed, and printed. Will future publishing jobs all be in the copying and mailing room?
Good points. I have to ask, as with self-driving cars, what is the need we are trying to fulfill? Self driving cars may be safer, but that's hard to buy when not all cars will be self-driven and the autonomous cars will be at the mercy of some other jackass running a redd light or an autonomous car malfunction. Why don't these boys work on something important/
And, while self-publishing has a noble history over the last 300 years by leading to small presses (e.g. Hogarth Press run by Virginia and Leonard Woolf) of distinction and sometimes to best sellers, as we know. But the self-publishing industry also makes a lot of money publishing one more collection of grandpa's wisdom or Aunt Julie's heart felt poetry and milking the authors for advertisements in the New York Review of Books. The gratification of the egos of would-be writers becomes then the business of the publisher.
Fascinating and frightening. I don’t think technology itself (AI included) is good or bad. But what humans (or organizations led by humans) do with it can be both. I wonder when the obsession with productivity and value extraction will give way to new ways of generating value with, through and for real people …?
Did anyone else have a visceral negative reaction to the smiling quartet of tech bros in the photo. These aholes will destroy anything for money.
Yes. They are the ones who will pull the plugs on their mother's life support systems just to charge their cell phones. Or use the electricity to power the release of an AI self-help book on getting rich without going to college.
And I would be very interested in that book!
Oh My GOD ! Unfortunately - you are totally correct in your thoughts.
Yep Matt, my instant reaction to the picture was they probably cannot read.
they can read bank account sums and numbers tho
And all with the same V-necked tees…
they were AI-generated.
I instinctively flicked them off (IRL, can you believe it!). I just couldn't help myself.
yes.
Haha TOTALLY. I looked at that pic and thought "What could go wrong???" LOL
Yes very disheartening.
And for not much - so many of them who don't even need a Penny more are so ravenously hunger for any Penny left on the Grunge strewn ground they will do Anything ,sell anyone ,Literally eat a Pound of SHIT ,if that is what it takes to make even 1 dime more. It is so disgusting I feel a need to take a Bath if I see any of them. I NEVER imagined the Human Race could go this low ,so utterly & Disgustingly LOW
They look AI generated
First, count the fingers.
I am teaching a little course on Orwell's journalism and just this week came across some interesting comments from him that seem to foreshadow AI publishing.
"It is just thinkable that books may someday be written by machinery, and it is quite easy to imagine poems being produced partly by fortuitous means--by some device similar to the kaleidoscope, for instance." (From a review of Herbert Read. Orwell is not claiming that this development would be desirable.)
"Political writing in our time consists almost entirely of prefabricated phrases bolted together like the pieces of a child's Meccano set. It is the unavoidable result of self-censorship. To write in plain, vigorous language one has to think fearlessly, and if one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox.... [T]he history of totalitarian societies, or of groups of people who have adopted the totalitarian outlook, suggests that loss of liberty is inimical to all forms of literature.... Probably novels and stories will be completely superseded by film and radio productions. Or perhaps some kind of low-grade sensational fiction will survive, produced by a sort of conveyor-belt process that reduces human initiative to the minimum. It would probably not be beyond human ingenuity to write books by machinery.... Imagination--even consciousness, so far as possible--would be eliminated from the process of writing." (These are widely scattered quotes from his essay "The Prevention of Literature.")
And of course this, from his invaluable "Politics and the English Language": "A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly? But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you--even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent--and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself." I read that last passage rather differently this time than I have read it in the past.
Ted, thanks for helping keep us abreast of this rapidly changing landscape.
Thanks for this, Peter. I try to follow Orwell's prescripts 'though I too often fail, but I note that very many professional writers don't seem to even try.
Spines is just an AI version of the very typical self-publishing scammers that have always taken advantage of writers.
TikTok's move isn't about AI, it's organic growth: #booktok has become a hugely powerful recommendation engine in the book world. Kathleen Schmidt has been saying for a while they should do this. Looks like they agree with her.
Microsoft I can't quite figure out. Even if they wanted to pub a bunch of AI-generated titles, how much money could the company possibly make compared to its other rather profitable businesses. Why bother? Possibly they're trying to find a "use case" for the trillions they've thrown at AI and this is what they came up with. Or, their deputy CTO couldn't sell his memoirs to a publisher and convinced somebody inside the company to spin this up.
Regardless, it has occurred to me that we are reading the last generation of pre-AI writers that will ever exist. Writers who don't use AI at all will become like those obscure cheesemakers in little Italian villages making reggiano the way they did 300 years ago. Books written by actual human beings will be a delicacy and a curiosity.
And the love of real writers will explode as a counter to AI-written thievery. From the dark mud flowers will grow and new human talent will emerge. And the most creative and authentic WILL survive and grow rich.
ha! yes, I like that. We need more on-point cheese analogies, so thank you for that ;-) I am and always have been in Club Reggiano, you can count on that. Full-tilt "curiosity" nano-markets. Onward Reggiano!
Yes, that's the issue. It's not only entire books written by AI -- that will happen, too (it already is), but many readers will be able to tell, at least until it improves, which will result in the stigma of slop that it already has.
The real issue is human/AI collaboration. This is already happening, too, and the authors who are doing so are generally not telling people. So these books are not "made by AI", entirely, but the writing of the books is greatly sped up (which is a competitive advantage in some of the more "pulpy" lines of popular fiction) by the use by the human authors of AI in writing/completing the books. This runs the gamut from brainstorming to organizing/outlining to breaking block to editing and so on.
More and more *human* writers are doing this, and not telling anyone (for obvious reasons), and so much of what is written, today, in certain popular fiction genres is "hybrid" -- human/AI collaboration. I expect we will see the same in other "popular" creativity areas, like pop music, pop art illustration and so on.
The "high art" is much less likely to be impacted, I think. But the popular creative work? It's already happening.
It's a classic bubble, with overtones of Ponzi and outright fraud. TTaxpayers will, as always, be left to clean up the mess.
8000 books a year? That's 21 books a day, every day. That's not publishing. It's printing at best.
TV was to bring us "Hamlet" of an afternoon. The telephone was to bring us together. The Internet was to enrich our ideas. Instead we got the Kardashians, phone solicitations, hatred and meanness of spirit. These tech bros in their black t-shirts aren't even promising Shakespeare for the masses. Their only promise is that they are going to make a lot of money.
It’s like a YouTube level of new books, so much that no one can consume it. I have so many thoughts about tools of creation, and creating, vs tools of consumption. It’s felt for a long time like we are forced into consumer mode, much like a goose being fattened for foie gras.
…it’s also semi ironic maybe that they are choosing another earth destroyer, paper, from which to wield their water destroyer, a.i. …ghouls…
AI books and music are like gmo foods.
You mean less costly to produce and with better qualities and falsely smeared by anti-science zealots?
Genetic modification is only as good as what you do with it. That's like saying that AI is inherently good because it reduces cost for those using it, with better quantities, and that it's only "falsely smeared by anti-science zealots" who don't believe in progress.
GMO is used by companies primarily for profit and control. The point of them is not to improve people's health, how would that be profitable? Have you actually spoken to anyone who opposes it before? It sounds like you assume why others dislike them.
It forces farmers to buy GMO seeds from big companies after every harvest to replant, rather than use the open pollinated seeds used for thousands of years. It poses a major issue with copyright laws, which is that companies can now patent life; far from the original intent to protect artists. Enjoy (among other issues) how cross pollination may cause you to unknowingly commit a copyright violation on your own land.
It reduces biodiversity, creates an ecologically harmful monoculture, and creates future risks; some unknowable at this time, e.g loss of resistance to genetic diseases.
Not that I'd expect a believer in scientism to know any of this stuff. Ironic you call others "anti-science zealots" telling false smears, yet what are you doing but pre-emptively smearing anyone who disagrees with your beliefs as "anti-science zealots"?
Time for Substack to enter the publishing business and set a new, transparent standard for human-created writing!
Ted rightly lauds companies such as Harper Collins which specifiy limits on AI use. However, over time the detection of AI-generated babel will become increasingly impossible as writers will blend their styles with widely proliferated faux language. Also, AI detection software may unfairly punish authors who did not actually use any AI tools ( see comments to Jeremy Anderberg’s recent note https://substack.com/@readmorebooks/note/c-78072965 : “Has anyone tested AI checkers/detectors on their own writing? I threw in my last few newsletters out of curiosity and it showed all of them as ~50% AI-generated. WTF. They were 0% AI-created. I sure hope editors aren’t actually using these things.”).
This is precisely where Orwell sets the standard of detection. Newspeak is the destruction of language that AI recognizes. Real writers putting real sentences together, but in patterns long established by custom, familiarity, favored phrases and sensibilities and maybe just trolling for readers. AI fixes on the patterns – writers (and favored styles) generate patterned word outputs. That isn't AI's fault.
I am not a writer. When I write on semi-public media (here, for instance) I often personalize a word by slapping upon it a couple extra letters or syllables that emphasize some point I'm working on. Such words aren't seen anywhere but these tiny audiences (waves to y'all) so it is of no consequencedness, but I like to think I'm messing with AI's 'mind' thingy.
I had a cynical comment typed out, but I deleted it. Instead, I'll try to be hopeful: I can't wait for the anti-AI revolution that's coming. I know which side I'm on.
This is why I started posting my music directly on Substack, no label, no filter, just write the song, make a good recording, and post it. I clicked the button that said I don't want AI to scrape my stuff and learn from me (though I highly doubt any money-grubbing tech overlord would want anything to do with my weird and unwieldy musical quirkiness). Anyway, I'm putting my original content where it can hopefully reach some ears that are smart enough to know better, and creative enough to WANT better. That's the only way I can see forward. It seems I am far from alone in this. Create on, and fight on. We creatives may not be in a fight for our lives, but we are in a fight for our souls. Not sure which is more dangerous, honestly.
Wonderful song think I best grab the upright and see what I can do. I never listen to Spotify, it really pisses me off for any number of reasons. If anybody flips an Ai lead sheet up I'm gone. Grand job you!
Thanks! Upright is always right! Nice to meet ya.
AI? Don’t fret — fight.
Here’s my AI declaration for readers. “AI was not used to produce what you’re reading. Everything you read was written by AAI — An Actual Idiot.”
I recently did an exercise on whether people could spot on AI generated text versus a human-written one. I spotted the AI version a mile away because it was bland and full of cliches. I'm not worried about AI generated books displacing human authors. This sounds like the death throes of the generative AI bubble, which I predict will pop sometime in the next few years.
An alternative view: more than a year ago a friend showed me what she had done in Photoshop with AI (we are both pro photographers) and it was absolutely stunning. And ridiculously easy! I looked for the usual "tells" and didn't see any. I doubt that I could have done as well myself no matter how much time I had. Some things are just beyond what one person can do.
I am a bit familiar with the field of aviation also (used to fly, and my brother was a pro jet pilot) and there are things, like landing in dense fog, that you simply cannot do for yourself. The B-2 stealth bomber, because of its flying-wing design, it is incredibly difficult to control, and a human pilot can't react fast enough, so it must be done by software.
Frankly, I hope you are right about AI, and I am wrong. I used to be part of the photojournalism community, and those people are almost all gone now, due to the collapse of the newspaper industry (except for the NY Times). Our biggest newspaper here in Connecticut (and the oldest in the country), the Hartford Courant, used to have 30 photographers, now only a handful. Newspapers are the walking dead.
For me, the apocalypse has already come.
Not a good time to be in any creative field. Companies don't respect you, and politicians don't either. We have to help ourselves, as the people of South Korea just did. They were let down by their leaders, and institutions.
And we still have to have that big conversation about what it means to be human. Why humans count. And why intangibles count, even though they cannot be counted.
We did just see a bloody remember of what it means to DE-humanize others in the murder of Brian Thompson (used his name because he was a real person), and the justifications that people were making for that in the dehumanizing behavior of the health care industry, including decision making by AI.
They were making those comments in a medium, online comments, that itself encourages de-humanizing others. That's another conversation. The comments here are pretty civil, but that is not the norm.
Hope that wasn't too long...am new to Substack (and liking it!)
Watcha think?
Stick around.
What keeps running through my head is “It doesn’t have to be this way”.
Much of the modern world that we don’t like is the result of choices our societies have made intentionally or inadvertently but we can make other choices?
Uber set out with a business model to break protections taxi drivers had fought hard for to lift themselves up. The have succeeded in many places in using start up funds to buy influence and use government power to reduce protections while also using those funds to effectively subsidize people’s rides as their service was priced under cost. We then found out that there really wasn’t ever a plan to be profitable at those prices.
I’m concerned AI is the same way that are loosing money but in doing so are going to break existing businesses and hut a lot of creative people in the process.
We don’t have to let this happen. We can slow down and make deliberate choices about technology and how it’s used.
But AI's model is based on discovering all those blandnesses and cliche´s, that were generated by human scribes and typists. The Newspeak is already everywhere, ripe for the harvesting.
I don't have an answer for this, because realistically, if everything published from this moment forward is written in unique, infinitely variable style, AI will eventually generate stuff in its own unique, infinitely variable copy.
Here’s the hard truth: this sort of business will succeed because far too many people want it to. I refer, of course, to those people who don’t want to have to the hard work of thinking for themselves. I’m not being snobbish: many of the people who don’t want to think are reasonably well educated. The problem with independent thinking is that it will exclude you from the cliques that demand conformity (and, of course, the most conformist groups of all are those who fancy themselves nonconformist). Most people want to fit in: AI provides the opportunity to establish a baseline culture tailored to specific subgroups, allowing them to skip the hard work of evaluating quality and simply immersing themselves in whatever they already enjoy. AI is about giving people what they want without requiring them to become involved in the hard work of creation. My prediction: the people most immune to this will be the folks who are involved in community choruses, local performing groups and other amateur endeavors. If you can’t perform (and you don’t have to be a professional to make good art), get involved in watching/listening to your local cultural activities…and make a point of experiencing genres you may not think you’ll like. Try new things…it’s the only way to grow.
…but how will we be paid?…
The way most of us who create out of love for creation: our day jobs.
No snark intended, only a statement of the reality that only a very few can and should be paid for what they create.
do you love your day job?
Some days I do; some days I don’t. As someone who’s been working a day job for almost 50 years, I’ve learned a job is a means to an end. It provides what I need to take care of my family and to do those things I enjoy doing. I don’t define myself by my job. I’ve also learned to avoid a career: you have a job, but a career has you. As it is, I’ve been blessed: my house is paid for, my car is paid for and I’ve saved enough to continue working because I want to, not because I have to. It’s amazing what one can do when one learns the meaning of two words: “enough” and “content.”
Counterpoint:
I've had 3 or 4 careers, and enjoyed them all practically 100%. But 45 years of that was enough. So now I do just the stuff that got me into those careers in the first place, and I love it still.
What I do not understand is people who work themselves into fortunes, then continue working unto death.
…beautiful…the torture though is when “content” becomes “content”…
AI is not creative. I doubt it could ever create beautiful music for example.
I dunno. Maybe some music, of a certain type...? [Not calling out any specific style].
I'm reminded of the program that generated Piet Mondrian-like works that are to my eye indistinguishable from the master's*. Perhaps this is an artistic type a little too simple to recreate – don't know if there's a musical analogy. And of course the question remains "But is that Creation?"
*I mean this literally – Mondrian was a master of ideas and style, and a genius of timing.
I understand why a bunch of greedbros would do this, but I don't understand how the market is supposed to reward their efforts and cover their expenses. According to some statistics from the Steve Laube agency, four million new books were published (in the U.S.) in 2022 alone. (Source: https://www.zippia.com/advice/us-book-industry-statistics/).
This includes self-published books and traditionally published textbooks and books for the trade. This means a new book is ALREADY being published every eight seconds or nearly 11,000 per day, every day of the year.
Where is the need for robo-books? And although AI might be able to produce something resembling a story and then bind it, the thing still has to be edited, proofed, and printed. Will future publishing jobs all be in the copying and mailing room?
Good points. I have to ask, as with self-driving cars, what is the need we are trying to fulfill? Self driving cars may be safer, but that's hard to buy when not all cars will be self-driven and the autonomous cars will be at the mercy of some other jackass running a redd light or an autonomous car malfunction. Why don't these boys work on something important/
My guess: E-BOOKS. No paper, no BOOKSTORE, curling up on a winter night by the glow of the e-book with a newly minted drek-book.
And, while self-publishing has a noble history over the last 300 years by leading to small presses (e.g. Hogarth Press run by Virginia and Leonard Woolf) of distinction and sometimes to best sellers, as we know. But the self-publishing industry also makes a lot of money publishing one more collection of grandpa's wisdom or Aunt Julie's heart felt poetry and milking the authors for advertisements in the New York Review of Books. The gratification of the egos of would-be writers becomes then the business of the publisher.
Fascinating and frightening. I don’t think technology itself (AI included) is good or bad. But what humans (or organizations led by humans) do with it can be both. I wonder when the obsession with productivity and value extraction will give way to new ways of generating value with, through and for real people …?
I am a published author (Random House), and maybe we need a 'law' that states on each book, written by immature robot or real human.
AI is just a tool with zero emotional intelligence! (just saying!!)