Unfortunately, it is becoming less of an issue since increasingly people simply don't *read* anymore! As a kid pointed out to me "oh dad, we don't need books. We can read all the books in the world on our phone" - to which "yes, but you *don't*". And few read more than short pieces now. Anything past short story length is simply not fitting our cultural decline anymore. Writing scripts for video will survive for awhile longer.
My fear is that we live at a time where we can compare AI-generated writing and human created writing. The benefits of reading the work of another human are quite clear. However, we only know this because we live at a point in time where both exist. I imagine AI will become the norm, all writing will be from AI. Readers will never know they are missing out on something essential because they (unfortunately) were not alive in the before times; it never occurs to them that humans have written or can write.
Recently, I was in a discussion about the use of AI art where a proponent of the practice was arguing that it finally allowed them to create professional looking publications. Many people were pointing out how it’s unethical and stuff like that, but I feel like there’s an even greater danger in that it’s not very hard to see a world where the drive to create things never has the chance to grow. I said:
“Regarding your statement that ‘the talented artists will survive just fine,’ that’s true for this generation, but how will nascent or less talented artists survive long enough to master the requisite abilities that would enable them to enter that ‘talented artist’ cohort? There will be an ever-shrinking market for their work because why pay someone 300 bucks to illustrate something by hand when you can have Midjourney do it for 20 dollars?
“How will future models be trained if fewer and fewer actual humans are making art and of those few who still persist what will their skill level be?
“Will children and future generations be as motivated to pick up a pencil or crayon to make something when they can type a prompt in and in a few iterations have a perfect replica of their vision?
“There are problems with generative art, but its most insidious is the danger it poses for the human spirit. Twenty years ago no one foresaw all of the bad side effects that social media has had on young people; I really wonder what type of unforeseen consequences AI art will have on the kids who would have become artists, painters, poets, or writers.
“There’s nothing more encouraging to a six year old than the praise of their peers for a well-rendered drawing. Will that still be happening in 15 years or will kids dismiss all attempts as childish because the cell phone that they have in their pocket (why do we let kids that young have phones is a different issue, but we’ve all seen it) can create something vastly superior?
Hi John. Gen AI is just a tool. I'm using it daily. It's not crushing my spirit, but instead inspiring me by making possible the creation of a site that wouldn't have happened otherwise. Here's why. Creating my current site manually by personally writing every word would involve way too much work for way too little reward.
I'm responding to a market reality that seems to include the vast majority of bloggers. We invest countless hours in to our creations, and make way way less than minimum wage, if we make anything at all. That reality isn't really that good of an argument for clinging to doing things the old hard way when better alternatives are now available.
Yeah, I get that, Phil. I’m not worried about you. I’m worried about the 6 year who would have grown up to be a great artist, but is dazzled by what happens by typing a prompt and so they never pick up a pencil to start doodling.
I just think about myself when I was younger. I work as an illustrator now because I wanted to be able to draw unicorns, dragons, and goblins when I was five years old. If a machine could have done it for me, I wouldn’t have spent dozens and dozens of hours literally crying because I couldn’t draw a horse the way I wanted to, but I kept trying.
Today, I can draw a horse, but I didn’t have the option of letting AI do it for me. I had to learn.
Geez John, how much more crackpot blabber do I have to post to get you to worry about me? I must work harder!! Should I post another picture of my hair?? :-)
There was a time before pencils and paintbrushes when to draw a horse you had to carve it in to the wall of your cave. We didn't cling to that era, and we don't have to cling to this one either.
Yes, AI changes the creative landscape, agree of course. But it's just another tool, and it in no way prevents us from being creative. Just saying, my amateur experience with ChatGPT in no way aligns with all the End Times predictions I'm reading on Substack.
Example: On tannytalk I was crafting articles one by one in the traditional manner. Now, thanks to AI, I'm crafting an entire site. It's the same creative process, just with different tools, and at a different scale. I haven't stopped being creative, I'm just being creative in a somewhat different manner than I did previously. I still have to make decisions about what to include and what to leave out. I still have to search for ways to present content that will engage visitors. I'm still constantly fiddling with things trying to find the right combinations etc. I'm still a human being communicating a vision with other human beings, even though most of the content on my site was generated by AI.
Example: An editor at the New York Times has an idea for a story, and she delegates the research and writing to a lower level employee. That's all that's happening with AI. All of us now have a lower level employee to do the grunt work for us. And as editors, we still have to come up with a good idea for the story.
Anyway, everybody keeps saying they want human writers. Ok then, fair enough, so imho, this is what human writers are supposed to do. Be inconvenient. Whatever everybody else is saying, say something else, try to make a contribution.
Please keep writing and sharing. Perhaps there will be a reemergence and surge in high quality reading and writing, realizing how good it is for the soul.
A true writer will always write. It's in our DNA. That is something you cannot unwind. Fear not Alberto—it is neither convenience, efficiency, nor profit that drives the writer's pen.
Love this one, Alberto, and I'm with you in the resistance. The question of the future is increasingly whether we want to live as a creature or as a machine.
"Can one billion ChatGPT-generated words be compared in some meaningful dimension with just one word that a human created, with intent, on any happy day?"
My answer is clear. No.
This is not an apples to apples comparison.
Humans are creatures, not machines. Our worldview and belief about what it means to be human is not an esoteric philosophical question. It's one that has real implications about how we live and our vision of the good life.
Your thoughts here are very similar to my thoughts on the Altman tweet from a few weeks ago. It begs the question: What is a word worth?
Why does it have to be a binary choice? Either you’re a “this” or “that” seems to lack nuance. Why not a third path, or a fourth or fifth path, etc? I personally think we hit upon utopian augmentation when we got eyeglasses. Think of how much life sucked before we got those. You got to a certain age and you couldn’t see for shit. Of course eyeglasses are only a crude temporal standard for utopia, but I expect some people thought it was witchcraft. An unsophisticated view.
Perhaps there will be new brands of “fear” on the horizon. Perhaps AI could assist us in the Sunset enterprise to execute it far more effectively and efficiently. But you know, that’s a horrible idea because AI is going to kill us all within a year or two, because, well, you know… “The Terminator”. Case closed!
Agree that that a binary for/against view isn’t particular helpful. I think that’s why the creature/machine lens is helpful to me. There’s a lot of gray space in the middle where creatures use machines but resist some of the movements toward becomingly or increasingly seeing ourselves as the same as machines.
I know, it's for effect purposes. You know, a bit of repetition to get the message across. It's not really relevant whether it's 0.1% or 0.5% at this point (although I'd say OpenAI is >50% of the total)
I'm shocked to realize how many people obviously are willing or even looking forward to giving up their privilege of being able to write. Even if it's not novel or essay, but just a simple mail to communicate rather banal things to another human being. And I'm frightened to imagine the day in the not-so-far future when I'll be looking at some lines of text, wondering if they have been thought and written by a being that feels, like I do.
Nobody has to give up the privilege of being able to write. That is just a hysterical fantasy being promoted by a fearful Substack community group consensus that has largely responded to it's fear by turning their brains off. If you are shocked and frightened it's because that's what you choose to be. Other choices are available.
I think nuance is important. Not all AI is used like this. Generative AI is not, in itself, bad. The use people are giving it and the way companies are marketing it are bad.
Its hard to see anything good of any of its use for art,except in the most limited. I honestly think Guillermo Del Toro and Hayao Miyazaki really hit on something of just how anti-life it is.
And if something is anti-life, how much good could it be? Yes, poison is medicine in a dose too high, but how do we know if the dose is already too high?
I keep thinking of that scene from 'Pirates of the Caribbean': "you best start believing in ghost stories; you're in one".
--The path we were on that landed us here started with the Enlightenment, not the Industrial Revolution. Somewhere along the way, we forgot that this wasn't all in the name of efficiency and productivity -- the point was to elevate humanity in an intellectual and creative capacity. But we are currently living to race machines. That's why at the dawn of the internet, for a split second we had all the information at our fingertips, and then invented the email. So we could promptly ignore 99.999% of it and just focus on the task at hand. In a linear, yet cyclical fashion. No real creativity allowed. Function as machines do. Go, go go! I suppose that if you're thinking of AI in terms of efficiency and productivity, it is a threat to writing.
-- I see AI as a pathway back to creativity. A yin to the machine age's yang. If we're not going to slow down and fix the rift in the space/time continuum, at least now humans can stop spinning our wheels as though we are machines, and start actually thinking with the newfound processing speed AI brings us. Granted, that will only happen with a cultural movement away from values tied to growth of the bottomline.
-- also, it's not like there's not already a lot of content. Far too much for anyone to sift through. In a sense we're lucky that people already have years of conditioning to ignore the noise of AI.
-- and if all else fails, and people -- disenfranchised by fake AI generated content -- start rethinking their content consumption. Maybe that will lead to shift in values that will favor real writing and will shape the next generation along the lines of enlightenment vs. industrial values after all :)
Powerful post! I can feel your passion. Fighting for what is dear to us and for the future we wish to see is the path forward. I just hope we can use it as fuel for inspiration and optimism rather than a battle and weight on our shoulders. I’ll be writing alongside you! Collective action!
Plot twist... this was written by GPT. If I can't tell, what's the difference? I have a bad habit of assuming what the context/POV is of an author and predicting the article. This one was pretty easy (no offense, but we're not unique). My comment itself is a cliche. I'd recommend focusing less on LLMs and more on embodiment and the work of Jim Fan at NVIDIA. Things are going to get way weirder.
First, it seems there is zero chance that AI will bring about the end of human writing, because lots of humans love to write, and will continue to do so no matter what.
I assure you that if I live another 300 years I'll still be here honking away in print every day all that time. I was born to type, it's beyond my control. Sound familiar? I will keep typing even if nobody ever buys my words, because I've already been doing just that for 30 years.
AI doesn't threaten human writing, but it will challenge the ability to make a living writing. This is particularly true for those who refuse to adapt to the new market that AI creates. This is bad news for particular people in a particular period of time but it is probably good news for society as a whole over the long run.
Consider what happened when agriculture was mechanized. Lots of people lost their jobs and for them, that was very unwelcome. But the vast numbers of people who were no longer needed in agriculture were then available to provide value to society in other ways. And these people began to produce goods and services that weren't possible when most of population was occupied plowing fields and picking corn. It's this process of automation which made the entire society richer, and has given birth to the historic mass wealth lifestyles we enjoy today.
We can all choose to fight and complain about this emerging transition. All we can hope to accomplish by that is to temporarily distract ourselves from our fear. We, humanity, are not driving the bus of evolution, we are merely passengers. Evolution has a simple rule which it applies equally to all creatures on this planet. Adapt or die.
Substack is increasingly looking like a community that will choose the later.
Unfortunately, it is becoming less of an issue since increasingly people simply don't *read* anymore! As a kid pointed out to me "oh dad, we don't need books. We can read all the books in the world on our phone" - to which "yes, but you *don't*". And few read more than short pieces now. Anything past short story length is simply not fitting our cultural decline anymore. Writing scripts for video will survive for awhile longer.
Really fantastic post!
My fear is that we live at a time where we can compare AI-generated writing and human created writing. The benefits of reading the work of another human are quite clear. However, we only know this because we live at a point in time where both exist. I imagine AI will become the norm, all writing will be from AI. Readers will never know they are missing out on something essential because they (unfortunately) were not alive in the before times; it never occurs to them that humans have written or can write.
Sarah Connor likes your post.
Recently, I was in a discussion about the use of AI art where a proponent of the practice was arguing that it finally allowed them to create professional looking publications. Many people were pointing out how it’s unethical and stuff like that, but I feel like there’s an even greater danger in that it’s not very hard to see a world where the drive to create things never has the chance to grow. I said:
“Regarding your statement that ‘the talented artists will survive just fine,’ that’s true for this generation, but how will nascent or less talented artists survive long enough to master the requisite abilities that would enable them to enter that ‘talented artist’ cohort? There will be an ever-shrinking market for their work because why pay someone 300 bucks to illustrate something by hand when you can have Midjourney do it for 20 dollars?
“How will future models be trained if fewer and fewer actual humans are making art and of those few who still persist what will their skill level be?
“Will children and future generations be as motivated to pick up a pencil or crayon to make something when they can type a prompt in and in a few iterations have a perfect replica of their vision?
“There are problems with generative art, but its most insidious is the danger it poses for the human spirit. Twenty years ago no one foresaw all of the bad side effects that social media has had on young people; I really wonder what type of unforeseen consequences AI art will have on the kids who would have become artists, painters, poets, or writers.
“There’s nothing more encouraging to a six year old than the praise of their peers for a well-rendered drawing. Will that still be happening in 15 years or will kids dismiss all attempts as childish because the cell phone that they have in their pocket (why do we let kids that young have phones is a different issue, but we’ve all seen it) can create something vastly superior?
“It’s a concerning thought.”
Hi John. Gen AI is just a tool. I'm using it daily. It's not crushing my spirit, but instead inspiring me by making possible the creation of a site that wouldn't have happened otherwise. Here's why. Creating my current site manually by personally writing every word would involve way too much work for way too little reward.
I'm responding to a market reality that seems to include the vast majority of bloggers. We invest countless hours in to our creations, and make way way less than minimum wage, if we make anything at all. That reality isn't really that good of an argument for clinging to doing things the old hard way when better alternatives are now available.
Yeah, I get that, Phil. I’m not worried about you. I’m worried about the 6 year who would have grown up to be a great artist, but is dazzled by what happens by typing a prompt and so they never pick up a pencil to start doodling.
I just think about myself when I was younger. I work as an illustrator now because I wanted to be able to draw unicorns, dragons, and goblins when I was five years old. If a machine could have done it for me, I wouldn’t have spent dozens and dozens of hours literally crying because I couldn’t draw a horse the way I wanted to, but I kept trying.
Today, I can draw a horse, but I didn’t have the option of letting AI do it for me. I had to learn.
Geez John, how much more crackpot blabber do I have to post to get you to worry about me? I must work harder!! Should I post another picture of my hair?? :-)
There was a time before pencils and paintbrushes when to draw a horse you had to carve it in to the wall of your cave. We didn't cling to that era, and we don't have to cling to this one either.
Yes, AI changes the creative landscape, agree of course. But it's just another tool, and it in no way prevents us from being creative. Just saying, my amateur experience with ChatGPT in no way aligns with all the End Times predictions I'm reading on Substack.
Example: On tannytalk I was crafting articles one by one in the traditional manner. Now, thanks to AI, I'm crafting an entire site. It's the same creative process, just with different tools, and at a different scale. I haven't stopped being creative, I'm just being creative in a somewhat different manner than I did previously. I still have to make decisions about what to include and what to leave out. I still have to search for ways to present content that will engage visitors. I'm still constantly fiddling with things trying to find the right combinations etc. I'm still a human being communicating a vision with other human beings, even though most of the content on my site was generated by AI.
Example: An editor at the New York Times has an idea for a story, and she delegates the research and writing to a lower level employee. That's all that's happening with AI. All of us now have a lower level employee to do the grunt work for us. And as editors, we still have to come up with a good idea for the story.
Anyway, everybody keeps saying they want human writers. Ok then, fair enough, so imho, this is what human writers are supposed to do. Be inconvenient. Whatever everybody else is saying, say something else, try to make a contribution.
This is beautiful. Grateful for your writing.
Please keep writing and sharing. Perhaps there will be a reemergence and surge in high quality reading and writing, realizing how good it is for the soul.
A true writer will always write. It's in our DNA. That is something you cannot unwind. Fear not Alberto—it is neither convenience, efficiency, nor profit that drives the writer's pen.
Love this one, Alberto, and I'm with you in the resistance. The question of the future is increasingly whether we want to live as a creature or as a machine.
"Can one billion ChatGPT-generated words be compared in some meaningful dimension with just one word that a human created, with intent, on any happy day?"
My answer is clear. No.
This is not an apples to apples comparison.
Humans are creatures, not machines. Our worldview and belief about what it means to be human is not an esoteric philosophical question. It's one that has real implications about how we live and our vision of the good life.
Your thoughts here are very similar to my thoughts on the Altman tweet from a few weeks ago. It begs the question: What is a word worth?
https://joshbrake.substack.com/p/what-a-word-is-worth
Why does it have to be a binary choice? Either you’re a “this” or “that” seems to lack nuance. Why not a third path, or a fourth or fifth path, etc? I personally think we hit upon utopian augmentation when we got eyeglasses. Think of how much life sucked before we got those. You got to a certain age and you couldn’t see for shit. Of course eyeglasses are only a crude temporal standard for utopia, but I expect some people thought it was witchcraft. An unsophisticated view.
Perhaps there will be new brands of “fear” on the horizon. Perhaps AI could assist us in the Sunset enterprise to execute it far more effectively and efficiently. But you know, that’s a horrible idea because AI is going to kill us all within a year or two, because, well, you know… “The Terminator”. Case closed!
Agree that that a binary for/against view isn’t particular helpful. I think that’s why the creature/machine lens is helpful to me. There’s a lot of gray space in the middle where creatures use machines but resist some of the movements toward becomingly or increasingly seeing ourselves as the same as machines.
Lots of good questions for discussion here!
Love your articles! One note:
"AI, 0.1%; humans, 99.9%. Not bad".. following Altman's tweet it's actually "OpenAI, 0.1%; humans, 99.9%. Not bad"...
All of AI is already a lot more than 0.1%... many many other models including open source running on local GPU's are generating as well.
Thank you Nicolas.
I know, it's for effect purposes. You know, a bit of repetition to get the message across. It's not really relevant whether it's 0.1% or 0.5% at this point (although I'd say OpenAI is >50% of the total)
I'm shocked to realize how many people obviously are willing or even looking forward to giving up their privilege of being able to write. Even if it's not novel or essay, but just a simple mail to communicate rather banal things to another human being. And I'm frightened to imagine the day in the not-so-far future when I'll be looking at some lines of text, wondering if they have been thought and written by a being that feels, like I do.
I know right. I wanted to get across the point that we can be enthusiastic about tech and the future and still not be glaringly dumb about it.
Nobody has to give up the privilege of being able to write. That is just a hysterical fantasy being promoted by a fearful Substack community group consensus that has largely responded to it's fear by turning their brains off. If you are shocked and frightened it's because that's what you choose to be. Other choices are available.
AI is a demon, meant to end all living meaning and following that, existence. I have always maintained this.
I think nuance is important. Not all AI is used like this. Generative AI is not, in itself, bad. The use people are giving it and the way companies are marketing it are bad.
Its hard to see anything good of any of its use for art,except in the most limited. I honestly think Guillermo Del Toro and Hayao Miyazaki really hit on something of just how anti-life it is.
And if something is anti-life, how much good could it be? Yes, poison is medicine in a dose too high, but how do we know if the dose is already too high?
I keep thinking of that scene from 'Pirates of the Caribbean': "you best start believing in ghost stories; you're in one".
--The path we were on that landed us here started with the Enlightenment, not the Industrial Revolution. Somewhere along the way, we forgot that this wasn't all in the name of efficiency and productivity -- the point was to elevate humanity in an intellectual and creative capacity. But we are currently living to race machines. That's why at the dawn of the internet, for a split second we had all the information at our fingertips, and then invented the email. So we could promptly ignore 99.999% of it and just focus on the task at hand. In a linear, yet cyclical fashion. No real creativity allowed. Function as machines do. Go, go go! I suppose that if you're thinking of AI in terms of efficiency and productivity, it is a threat to writing.
-- I see AI as a pathway back to creativity. A yin to the machine age's yang. If we're not going to slow down and fix the rift in the space/time continuum, at least now humans can stop spinning our wheels as though we are machines, and start actually thinking with the newfound processing speed AI brings us. Granted, that will only happen with a cultural movement away from values tied to growth of the bottomline.
-- also, it's not like there's not already a lot of content. Far too much for anyone to sift through. In a sense we're lucky that people already have years of conditioning to ignore the noise of AI.
-- and if all else fails, and people -- disenfranchised by fake AI generated content -- start rethinking their content consumption. Maybe that will lead to shift in values that will favor real writing and will shape the next generation along the lines of enlightenment vs. industrial values after all :)
Powerful post! I can feel your passion. Fighting for what is dear to us and for the future we wish to see is the path forward. I just hope we can use it as fuel for inspiration and optimism rather than a battle and weight on our shoulders. I’ll be writing alongside you! Collective action!
Plot twist... this was written by GPT. If I can't tell, what's the difference? I have a bad habit of assuming what the context/POV is of an author and predicting the article. This one was pretty easy (no offense, but we're not unique). My comment itself is a cliche. I'd recommend focusing less on LLMs and more on embodiment and the work of Jim Fan at NVIDIA. Things are going to get way weirder.
First, it seems there is zero chance that AI will bring about the end of human writing, because lots of humans love to write, and will continue to do so no matter what.
I assure you that if I live another 300 years I'll still be here honking away in print every day all that time. I was born to type, it's beyond my control. Sound familiar? I will keep typing even if nobody ever buys my words, because I've already been doing just that for 30 years.
AI doesn't threaten human writing, but it will challenge the ability to make a living writing. This is particularly true for those who refuse to adapt to the new market that AI creates. This is bad news for particular people in a particular period of time but it is probably good news for society as a whole over the long run.
Consider what happened when agriculture was mechanized. Lots of people lost their jobs and for them, that was very unwelcome. But the vast numbers of people who were no longer needed in agriculture were then available to provide value to society in other ways. And these people began to produce goods and services that weren't possible when most of population was occupied plowing fields and picking corn. It's this process of automation which made the entire society richer, and has given birth to the historic mass wealth lifestyles we enjoy today.
We can all choose to fight and complain about this emerging transition. All we can hope to accomplish by that is to temporarily distract ourselves from our fear. We, humanity, are not driving the bus of evolution, we are merely passengers. Evolution has a simple rule which it applies equally to all creatures on this planet. Adapt or die.
Substack is increasingly looking like a community that will choose the later.