I'm a Screenwriter. These AI Jokes Give Me Nightmares
time.comHe's selling a book demonstrating how great and scary AI is for 17 dollars and his friend from OpenAI was really keen to show off the fantastic new AI model his company has lined up.
Great thinly veiled ad for OpenAI and this guy's book. A book which appears to be nothing more than a bunch of AI generated poems. He even says that they could have just been posted online but that they're selling through a publisher for "credibility".
Another alarmist poised to profit from the alarm. Not saying all of them are mind, just this one seems that way.
I honestly don't care if the stuff I consume for entertainment comes from a an AI, a dude in his 40s or a combination of both. I just want it to be good. I think it' silly to demand some minimum quotas just to "save" jobs. "Jobs" don't need to be saved - there are more open jobs than people to do them. Yes, most of them sucks, but granted satisfactory payment, I bet anyone could do a sucky job for a couple of hours each week. And then he can continue producing "writing has never been necessary, consequential, or important."
I pray that society can move past the desire to protect jobs and embrace the ability to kill them. Imagine checking the news and hearing that through AI and automation, we'd eliminated another 3% of unwanted jobs and those people were free to enjoy other pursuits.
The growing jobless rate would be a cause for celebration. People who automate industries would be heroes instead of being cursed by the poor who are now out on the street.
Our values got messed up somewhere. (I'm not from a work obsessed culture though, so I expect I will be told why work is actually the greatest and noblest thing on Earth, and I will roll my eyes)
> Imagine checking the news and hearing that through AI and automation, we'd eliminated another 3% of unwanted jobs and those people were free to enjoy other pursuits.
We don't have any social safety net, so today those 3% can't enjoy other pursuits - they have to scrounge around for a new job. Even if we did, The primary path to security, freedom, and prestige in our society is through industry. We have to change this before automation can stop being a dirty word.
> We don't have any social safety net, so today those 3% can't enjoy other pursuits
Exactly. Its not that anyone wants a job, it is that the rules of the society they live in require it.
Heck, I can't even go to the doctor without having a job that provides health 'insurance'.
I'd be for letting AI have my job and doing what I want. I doubt the billionaire who runs the AI will see that it happens that way though.
Once we started thinking of creative works simply and only as material consumed for entertainment this was the natural and maybe only endpoint.
But even bad art is an expression of human experience, and interacting with it an act of human connection. Maybe this distinction will become more clear and relevant, or maybe we'll be successfully convinced that it doesn't exist at all.
Either way though wanting to be entertained with no regard for the human costs of the entertainment is an understandable impulse but one that we should be prepared to fight in ourselves. Otherwise why not just watch a bloodsport? Likely more entertaining than AI-chum sitcoms or whatever.
Came here to seek out this comment - difference between art and entertainment. Someone who makes the latter in an industry might have had the former eroded out of them.
But haven’t we been here before with all the other “new” mediums before?
All of the Onion-y headlines written by code-davinci-002 are terrible. I am not worried.
Yeah I thought exactly the same. At best they were a bad day at the Onion, which itself jumped the shark a good 10-15 years ago. Not sure what the guy is worried about, but maybe his own writing is pretty awful if that's his analysis of da Vinci's output. For the hackneyed drivel that gets on mainstream TV then AI is likely to be good enough, but I don't watch that kind of TV because of its lameness. If have thought an AI could reliably write a Simpsons episode without too much trouble if fed the corpus of the Simpsons, but again, we're not talking about a vital media art form.
Even putting the quality of the headlines aside, what does the whole article look like? I doubt it would be very good
But the screenwriter was probably perfectly happy with all the office automation eliminating the jobs of people who did day to day office work. They probably didn't even notice.
Screenwriters have sat comfortably in their little moat producing increasingly generic, hackneyed and woke rubbish for years. Now they're finding out what happens when you rest on your laurels: you get disrupted. If there were ever an industry in need of creative disruption, it is screenwriting.
Can "his" AI-written book be copyrighted?