- cross-posted to:
- books@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- books@lemmy.ml
In a study published in the journal Judgment and Decision Making, 1,682 adults were asked to read one of six short stories, three of which were written by humans and three by ChatGPT. Each AI story had a similar theme to one of the human-authored works.
The team told participants whether their story was written by a human or AI, but this information was not always correct. The researchers then asked participants to rate how absorbing and engaging they found the story, and its quality.
Participants who read an AI-generated story rated it as more absorbing and of higher quality than those who read a story written by a human. However, participants gave higher ratings to stories they had been told were written by people.
Dr Deena Skolnick Weisberg, a senior author of the research from Villanova University in Pennsylvania, said: “AI systems can already generate short stories that are seen as being at least as good as – if not better than – human-written stories. We should update our views of AI’s abilities accordingly.”
However, Weisberg, who is herself a creative writer, said that did not mean writing should be left to AI, noting that novels produced by tech were probably going to be different from those written by humans.
“We may need to make room for AI-generated novels, and for AI/human co-written novels, but that doesn’t mean that there’s no longer space for us to appreciate the process of human creativity,” she said.
To be honest, this moment was always coming or is yet to come for anti-AI folks.
The real issue isn’t whether it’s good or bad. The reason it’s such a hot thing is because generally it’s good enough to get people interested. And that’s very unlikely to go away.
Too interested? Sure.
But machines that are better than people at something people value about themselves. That’s where we’re heading if we’re not there already.
Which unlocks a massive question: What kind of world do you want to live in and how much are you willing to do to maintain it? Just about everything else is no longer a given. Not our value or importance, not our position at the top of the food chain, not our democracy or wealth, or the continuous growth of capitalism, or even our continued existence.
We’re basically at the beginning of an AI apocalypse movie. You can’t presume that you know the ending. You have to figure out how you want it to end. And not just for you, but your children and grandchildren children. Cuz it’s all at stake now.
I read The machine stops short story and I really hope we don’t head that direction, but it seems we are.
What strikes me about the present moment is that it feels like particularly bad timing.
I’m not so sure that technological developments follow a well defined path and like to think about what alternative timelines would look like, especially with humanity being better prepared for them.
For instance, I’ve figured for a long time that the internet was a few decades earlier than it should have been for our social and political development. Probably TV too.
AI just feels 100s of years too early. Like we’re only just getting to grips with post-capitalism and climate change as ideas let alone problems we can solve.
I think this is actually advantageous to us in a way, because clearly AI is something of a system shock to many people right now, whereas in a hundred years it may have not been nearly as apparent as the danger it is (and I don’t mean LLMs, I mean AI in general, especially for surveillance and weapons).
Yea I hear. We’ll see I guess.
Personally, I’m seeing much more falling in line instincts than anything else and fear that any “shock” and reaction is confined to bubbles without any solid culture and infrastructure to break out into any sort of effective movement.
Luckily, revolutions have never required the majority of a populace to actively participate in to succeed, just a majority going “meh, sure”.
But yes, I am personally also very worried that we’re reaching a point with technology that state surveillance and violence will both be too easily applied and too pervasive for the revolution to overcome.
Quite agree, but there is the other POV that “AI” has emerged just at the right time to distract us from doing anything about climate change and rampant late stage capitalism… That is of course the perspective of capitalist entities that really need to wrench another few decades of profit out of us before we die in sundry environmental disasters.
See also, “why it would be really convenient if we could upload our minds to a metaverse while the world burns and billionaires escape to Mars”.
I think you’re taking the doomer narrative a bit too seriously, especially with that final paragraph. The prominent pushers of said narrative usually have something they want to sell, or a real-world issue to distract you from. Some (Yudkowsky) from their cults, some (Altman, Amodei) to enable monopoly or drive profits. Short stories do not an AI apocalypse make.
Sources need to be vetted and held to account when they are wrong or make unfalsifiable statements.
I don’t think it’s a doomer comment at all, I think the last paragraph is trying to tell you without saying the word “datacenter” to go look up the addresses of data centers.
It’s about the trend and the motives of those with power.
Ten years ago everyone was very surprised that an AI managed to beat the best human at Go, a board game. I don’t think anyone really saw that coming. There’s evidence that some with insight didn’t see it coming at all.
At that time, no one was talking about the current state that we’re in now. So what happens in 2036. And the next generation?
Unless you presume that the human mind is special and impossible to duplicate in important ways, I think there’s a clear set of possibilities here that need to be taken seriously. Sci-fi has been for decades, because they’re that obvious frankly. That the current AI is being over-sold and promised by its backers is basically meaningless. That an AI can write convincingly, even if only for a few pages, and couldn’t do so 5-10 years ago. That’s huge.
There’s only two choices:
That’s it. Those are the choices. Most are sucking in that copeium for the second option.
Why are those two the only options that come to mind? You can’t imagine working against the rich fucks without using autocomplete?
And what is your plan exactly?
Nice try fbi.
But the implication that a chatbot is needed to knock rich fucks down a peg is silly to me. Orcas didn’t need Claude to attack yachts, the ocean didn’t need Gemini to crush that dipshit and his sub, saint Luigi didn’t need grok when he was being a referee for my child’s soccer game
If a token predictor has removed your creative spark, then you’ve already lost. That’s unfortunate, but assuming everyone else has lost would make you wrong.
What’s yours? Pay Anthropic $2k/mo to generate fake C&D letters and send them out to random businesses?
Unless you have a plan that doesn’t rely on the service-based models, then I don’t see where you’re going with this. Sure, you can use self-hosted models, assuming you’re fine paying for the GPUs (Jensen Huang? Lisa Su? Lip-Bu Tan if you’re feeling special?) and power to run them of course. But you’ll be “behind” the big cloud-based models, endlessly chasing after them.
Or, hear me out, don’t use them and do it all yourself and you won’t have to pay these companies and make their execs richer.
I don’t entirely disagree. I’d add that whatever other options there are, they involve skills, values and perspectives that are unpracticed and atrophied in modern western culture (and likely globally) to the point that that is its own problem.