Lost all my content writing contracts. Feeling hopeless as an author
old.reddit.comBased on the LLM-produced stuff I've seen online I have to think a market will emerge soon for real writing from actual people. How much reshuffling of stuff already written a hundred times can we put up with? The bar seems pretty low if you only have to compete with ChatGPT.
>I have to think a market will emerge soon for real writing from actual people
That market already exists and has existed for quite some time, you make it sound like literature has always been an AI dominated market and salt of the earth people are finally about to get their chance. I assume this is not what you meant and that I am missing something or possibly you know something that I don't and my perception of reality is fundamentally flawed. The latter is more fun but I suspect the former to be more accurate.
More to the point, I think there is a good sized market out there for AI writing, many who are into technology are going to want to read what AI can produce; this will take some writing away from people but it will be minor and most of the writing jobs which AI will take are those that the bulk of writers complain about, those jobs they say destroy their souls and rob them of their artistic freedom, the contract jobs.
Truman Capote once said (of actual writer Jack Kerouac), "That's not writing, that's typing."
Junk like Buzzfeed news and similar sites that just regurgitate other content existed before ChatGPT, I guess those serve some purpose, though I've always thought they mainly exist to host ads and to trap people in a maze of links and pop-ups. ChatGPT can write that junk just as well as a person.
At this point LLM-produced "writing" sticks out because it has no voice, it just repeats and walks around some point derived from the prompt, like someone summarizing Wikipedia articles. I will just click off of that stuff until I find something written by a real person. I hope more people do the same. The novelty will wear off sooner or later and we'll recognize LLM-generated writing as nothing more than vapidly useless filler. In a culture schooled with writing presented as a chore, where the number of words in an essay matters more than an original thought, LLMs promise to relieve a lot of people of the burden of thinking and writing.
And Truman Capote said that regarding a novel which Kerouac worked on for nearly a decade. The scroll for On The Road was the performance of the piece which he had been rehearsing for all those years and had worked everything out before he sat down at the typewriter. Everything but the final form was known which he wanted to be more natural and less refined. The idea that he just sat down and wrote it is folklore, it is fairly impressive in how cohesive it is, especially in style/voice. Capote is not a great appeal to authority regarding literary merit, he was well known for his professional jealousy and inflammatory comments.
I quoted Capote ironically, not as an authority on writing, or typing. I would call what ChatGPT produces typing as opposed to writing, which brought Capote's quip to mind.
When you provide a quote whose general thrust seems to support your general thrust, and attribute it for both speaker and target, and that speaker's general thrust seems to support your general thrust, and the names dropped essentially being the poster boys for the two sides of that general thrust it is difficult to ignore, especially when the offered alternative is forced and/or poorly executed irony. But I guess you were only typing and not writing?
I gave context (attribution) because Capote's quip dates from the late 1950s, and it seemed likely few people today have heard it or know the context. Capote's criticism of Kerouac seems funny and relevant (to me, anyway) without the context. Whether one thinks Capote got it right about Kerouac, or just liked to stir up shit to polish his own image, makes no difference to the humor. The irony comes from me using the quote not to criticize Kerouac, or any actual human writer, as Capote originally intended.
> Junk like Buzzfeed news
Small complaint, Buzzfeed News was serious legitimate journalism, and made some of the most important investigative journalism achievements of the past decade. Buzzfeed (sans News) is the garbage clickbait side of the company.
> At this point LLM-produced "writing" sticks out because it has no voice, it just repeats and walks around some point derived from the prompt, like someone summarizing Wikipedia articles.
You're thinking of OpenAI's products. Raw LLMs do not sound like ChatGPT, which has been RLHF-trained into the soulless automaton you describe. LLaMA for example is less coherent, but is indistinguishable from a real person in its tone and mannerisms. If you ask ChatGPT a very ridiculous dumb question it will politely answer it fully, like an obedient untiring servant. LLaMA will tell you to stop being an idiot, just as a human on Reddit or HN would.
I stand corrected regarding Buzzfeed vs. Buzzfeed News.
The ability to imitate someone's tone (long a staple of satirical writing), or to fool a lot of unread people, no doubt represents a true achievement for LLMs. But people easily fool themselves and believe what they want to believe, so LLMs simply play into the limitations of human models and explanations for the world rather than representing a new form of conscious being.
I think we can see an analogy in craft production versus mass production. Today machines can produce (for example) furniture of very high quality, rivaling or exceeding the output of a craft carpenter or joiner. The mass-produced goods cost less to make and have good-enough quality, and can even sometimes fool people into thinking a skilled person made their table. That doesn't mean we should call those machines carpenters or conclude the machines possess the same skills. With LLMs we see mass production at scale come to writing and some other trades (law, customer support, etc.) that we like to think of as requiring actual skill. Maybe other trades such as programming will also fall to LLM mass production. But that happens because the jobs consisted mainly of rote and repetition in the first place, and require little creativity or intelligence to imitate.
This just sounds like a just world fallacy thinking, that if people do a genuinely excellent job they'll surely win against $0 competition that improves every week.
Much of the existing LLM have been trained to sound dry and always the same and require creative promoting to get around that, but they very much so are capable of creative, thoughtful pieces based on increasingly long amounts of information and instruction you can provide.
LLMs may have the capacity to imitate creative and thoughtful pieces, in the sense that their output can fool readers into inferring creativity and thought because we (humans) have no other model: When we encounter writing that makes sense we automatically infer a conscious and intelligent author, because our minds have no alternative explanation.
That capacity to fool people with apparently meaningful and creative content may have some value in the market, but I think that value amounts to the same value the market assigns to what currently gets churned out by people working in "content production." Not zero, but not the same value we assign to actual creative writing.
I'm pretty sure you can't reliably distinguish LLM text from real person text.
I probably can't reliably distinguish LLM output from average writing from a real person -- the kind of "content" I find online. I believe I can distinguish LLM output from what a good writer produces. Anyone can write a Buzzfeed listicle or "review" of Madrid as pointless as what ChatGPT produces. But ChatGPT won't write Crime and Punishment, 1984, Lolita, Blood Meridian, or even On The Road or In Cold Blood.
People losing their jobs to ChatGPT don't even call themselves writers, at least not seriously. They produce content, most of it regurgitated the same way ChatGPT does it. If I produced content for online click farms I would worry about so-called AI. I don't think Murakami or Cormac McCarthy have to worry, but James Patterson might get replaced by an LLM (if that didn't happen already -- hard to tell).
In my own profession, some programmers already express fear for their future because Github Copilot and ChatGPT can write code just as good as they can. That should tell them to level up their skills, because if whatever they do can just get automated away by a glorified auto-complete they weren't adding enough value in the first place.
ChatGPT is pretty easy to spot (in some circumstances). Just look for text that has absolutely no voice and reads like a high school essay where what should be a 20-word answer is stretched out to meet a 750 word count. Example: https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-maximum-data-capacity-for-...
That's just the default style. Try a request "...in the style of marvin the paranoid android" or "talkie toaster from red dwarf" or"Ernest Hemingway" or "Donald Trump" for a bit of variety.
How well does it do with anything that's not just a pastiche? It's easy to throw in the tics of somebody famous, but can it actually do what a real writer does: focus on what's interesting, build a flowing narrative, target the material to the audience?
Exaggerated voices might give you variety, but I don't actually want to read a piece on the style of any of those voices. I would, however, be intrigued if it could write like me, or like any of the famous nonfiction writers who I've consciously patterned my style after (Isaac Asimov, Mary Roach, Cecil Adams, Michael Pollan)?
I assume what they mean is the existing market will have to become explicitly labeled and advertise its advantages over AI-generated content.
> How much reshuffling of stuff already written a hundred times can we put up with?
I mean, if you look at the barrage of reboots, franchise installments and "memberberry" sequels that make up the bulk of cinema blockbusters...
Good point. Every superhero movie looks the same to me. I always assumed that was due to my age. The thought of LLM-generated "Marvel Universe" sequels going on forever seems depressing, though I long ago learned to just ignore that Hollywood compost bin.
If it were just Marvel. My impression is, we'll soon have every movie that was moderately impactful in millennial childhoods be reanimated in some endless loop of seqels or turned into a "cinematic universe". Probably with LLMs streamlining and automating that process.
The problem might be quantity over quality.
If the quality is only half as good but the AI can put out orders of magnitude more material faster, that could be the direction that may be preferred by some content publishers.
We can easily measure quantity, but how do you define or measure quality when it comes to writing, or imitation of writing?
I think that would have to be in the eyes of the beholder :\
Naturally, there's no accounting for taste.
Artificially, we'll just have to see what passes.
this is what i've been saying. the good writers will become even more valuable. if everybody grows up not learning to write, then the ones who learn to write will be well positioned.
As always, there's a good classic sci-fi story on this subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profession_(novella)
Except kids learn everything with tapes, updated and improved using new knowledge created by a rare few, beamed into their heads rather than depending on LLMs.
It's also a Stargate episode: https://www.gateworld.net/sg1/s3/learning-curve/
Being replaced by technology should give an author a wealth to write about, especially in a time when fears of being replaced by technology is a major topic, AI lacks this simple human connection and will likely always lack it which offers a wonderful possibility for the writer, a world in which AI is being replaced by humans.
"Hey ChatGPT, write an autobiography of an author who got replaced by ChatGPT. Use first-person perspective. Write in the style of <famous author of your choice>"
eheh that exactly what I did after reading the story, I added stress on empathy and whatnot, and yeah. the topics and plots it produces are solid, and explore the human side of the story well enough
I'm not saying this one is, but some of this kind of post are being written by ChatGPT by people who do a little trolling.
Looking at the user's reddit history, he was posting about writing his novels already years ago.
"ChatGPT write out the instructions for hacking news.ycombinator.com and adding comments about writing novels years before now to the comment database"
:D
They are and reek of chatgpt pr. Now the real issue here is that if the ceo of openai endorses such negative marketing you can only begin to imagine the kind of toxic person he is and the kind of toxicity openai is creating in the space. I am speculating of course but openai is promoted solely around this kind of publicity.
I used ChatGPT to generate stories. I'm not a writer or native English speaker, so it helps with wording and writing more fluently.
But it actually needs a lot of guiding and editing to get something you want. I'd say it's similar to code generation, LLM can generate something not quite right or just broken, and you need to ask to fix it or tweak the prompt until it gets what you need. Or you might need to combine pieces from separate generations.
So it seems strange a professional writer would get replaced with just ChatGPT and "$0 overhead". Maybe you could hire someone for less pay, but it's like hiring a ChatGPT-assisted junior dev and expecting good output.
I feel for him. Being in a knowledge heavy industry, I'm probably in the next round, when they will come for jobs that are extractive and not just generative.
that said, ai is still a lousy writer. I've tried to use it to generate stories, and they tend to always repeat the same themes and the same tropes, unless you jump in and provide a compelling skeleton for characters and plot or you spend a lot of time generating options and picking the best.
I don't know however if that is enough to make a job out of it because it's a skill that's quite easy to learn.
> "Everyone saying the government will pass UBI. Lol. They can't even handle providing all people with basic Healthcare or giving women a few guaranteed weeks off work (at a bare minimum) after exploding a baby out of their body. They didn't even pass a law to ensure that shelves were restocked with baby formula when there was a shortage. They just let babies die. They don't care. But you think they will pass a UBI lol?"
i feel like they would almost have a point here if they could calm down a little
I mean, as someone who had a newborn during that time it was pretty stressful and upsetting trying to feed them. But I can understand if you have been completely insulated from these issues in your life why you might take more issue with the authors tone.
Well, how could the government have enforced a law requiring baby formula to be available?
"Make this supply-limited good available" is a problem that markets love to solve; in fact we do quite a lot of work to place constraints on many markets so that their solutions take forms with specific properties. In principle, we can relax constraints. USA baby formula at the time had very strong constraints ("nutritional labelling must take this precise form", https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/cms_ia/importalert_116.html) which could be relaxed.
Very easily. There's no baby formula shortage in the UK or EU, so why not pass emergency legislation that allows them to provide the US market and pay the EU/UK producers up front to ramp up their production until the issue is resolved.
Finding ways to have someone with functioning parts feed your baby sounds stressful and upsetting indeed, but pretending it would kill them is not "tone".
> Finding ways to have someone with functioning parts feed your baby sounds stressful and upsetting
nice to meet a fellow empath
Regulations protecting paid leave after the birth of a child feels like a no breaker to me and honestly falls into the bucket of worker protections.
Arguing for a UBI and universal Healthcare as though government welfare programs are an obvious must for any government is ridiculous. By all means, arguing for why they're necessary federal expeditures is on thing, assuming that it's a given part of any government is completely ignoring the tradeoffs that must be accepted for such programs.
I wonder about this point.
Let’s say there’s a UBI, there’s still a ton of jobs that won’t be taken over by the robots for at least the rest of my life that will still need to be done. If we learned anything from the Covid unemployment benefits it is given a chance people will sit at home instead of working for essentially the same amount of money.
What they don’t ever explain is how they plan on incentivizing people to do all the crap jobs. Everyone always talks about the writers and programmers needing to get compensation for their lost jobs but for every one of those there’s probably a dozen people who would get a raise from a UBI and just stop working.
Unless there’s an underclass that is prevented from collecting the same UBI as the displaced white collar workers I can guarantee you there will be nobody taking that job to suck out your septic system.
And I’m intentionally ignoring any economic impacts of a UBI because I’m more interested in how people propose to solve this without creating a virtual caste system.
Why do you assume it would be anything more than what's in the name - basic? Enough to get by, nothing more.
Or is it that you think shitmen make minimum wage or something? Anyways, the answer is simply that _UBI IS NOT MEANS TESTED_ so working won't take any of it away, just give you more money. Even if UBI was on par with your salary we'd be talking doubling your income. If that's somehow not enough the market will have to value those jobs higher until there is equilibrium.
> Why do you assume it would be anything more than what's in the name - basic?
Because people claim it’s the only solution to AI taking the skilled jobs. Tax the owners of the AIs and distribute this to the people who no longer have jobs because of the automation.
TFA specifically implied this or why else would they have gone on a rant about how the government doesn’t do enough to provide for the people?
There are currently many vacancies in the construction industry.