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?
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?
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 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.”
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
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.
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.
AI is a demon, meant to end all living meaning and following that, existence. I have always maintained this.
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.