The overt goal of the residency is to foster a space for people to experience literature more thoughtfully. The underlying goal is to make them want to smash their phones with a sledgehammer.
“We do so much reading now, but it’s mostly reading for information at best. At best. At worst it’s like a pure little shot of dopamine before moving to the next post,” said Steven Shafer, Perelandra’s current reader-in-residence. “It is almost the exact opposite of what I’ve gotten to experience here.”
Yeah ok, no. Like I get trying to get more people to read books. I’m a reader and it’s a lot different than doom scrolling or whatever. But you’re never going to get people to not value their phones. We have a computer in our pocket that cannot be replicated by even the Library of Alexandria.
If it wasn’t for work, I would toss my phone in the river. I often leave it purposely at home to enjoy a walk, ot games with friends (way netter with a no phone rule)
No, LLMs can’t write good novels and they won’t be able to in the future. Yes, LLM-produced text is going to show up in all kinds of places where it doesn’t belong. Having an LLM write an entire novel from a single prompt and then selling it for money through self-publishing is a kind of asset-flipping and it is a scam. I think this is the use people are the most upset about.
This is an interesting article because it’s not featuring a scammer, but featuring a professional writer who has decided to use LLMs to assist her in writing including using LLM-produced passages in the context of her original writing. This is much more of a gray zone to me and not actually something I’m necessarily opposed to.
One of the first things I did with an LLM was to have it convert my silly ideas into iambic pentameter and it was a lot of fun. I didn’t tell it, “write a poem in iambic pentameter about X” and then try to sell whatever it gave me. I had it convert each of my descriptions part by part one at a time and often I had to generate several different versions of the same passage before I even had something to clean up. Some of what ended up in the finished product was directly from the machine, but most of it I had to re-write. It was interesting to experiment with.
The difference between a scamming people and using an LLM as a tool is reflected in the finished product. A writer has to know what works and what doesn’t work because most of what the machine will give is not going to be usable as-is, and if it is usable it is by happenstance as it happened to conform with what the writer was trying to express at that moment. A human mind is still absolutely necessary to write something someone would want to read, especially if they are choosing whether to read it, and I don’t see that changing with what these models are capable of or possibly capable of. This being the case there are probably going to be some distinctive traits of LLM-produced stuff that people will probably pick up on and get tired of. I’m interested to see how all art develops in a direction to distinguish it from what LLMs can produce such as when painting diverged significantly after the invention of the camera.
LLMs are really crappy at writing books right now.
However there is zero evidence they will not get better, in fact they are getting exponentially better all the time at all tasks which are getting measured.
My bet is on LLMs soon being able to put out mediocre fiction, and then not much later great fiction, indistinguishable from the best authors out there.
That’s not possible with the technology. LLMs will never be able to write compelling stories because they are incapable of comprehending anything. There will need to be a human “at the wheel” guiding every stage of the process.
Or maybe that’s what you meant? LLMs will get better at making compelling snippets, if guided correctly.
I know I’m more confident than most that LLMs are incapable of producing art. Although you are correct to say that it has not been disproven that LLMs may have the potential to produce art, there is also not currently any evidence supporting that they could create art. We’ll see how it ultimately plays out but allow me to explain why I don’t find it likely that LLMs are the technology we can ever expect art to come from.
Inherent Limitations
LLMs are fascinating and useful for a lot of things, but they are not intelligent. A “neural net” which is “learning” through exposure training data is more sophisticated than other ways of text and image generation that we have yet invented, but compared to the system it’s meant to resemble it is hopelessly outclassed. We can’t currently make something which resembles a human brain because we don’t have a firm grasp as to how one works at all. What little we do know indicates a level of complexity that might literally be beyond human comprehension. A brain is made of billions of neurons connected to one another at trillions of points by branches. At any given moment, these trillions of branches are sending and receiving not in binary but by various combinations of neurotransmitters. At a basic level we know that the the result of this neurotransmitter activity (which is different by the area of the brain it occurs in and even is highly variable between different brains) is a mind made up of some kind of consciousness, subconsciousness, and instinct. This system was not designed by human minds but is the result of eons of natural selection. We have no idea how to even begin replicating something like this, although neural nets could be a step forward. We would need a much larger system working in a fundamentally different way which we may not be able to replicate with our limited faculties
The Quality of Art
In my opinion, of all intellectual processes the production and appreciation of art is probably the most demanding of the system I described above. There is a continuum from concrete to abstract, and while computers are excellent tools to store and process concrete data, art falls on the furthest end of abstraction. Mathematics and the natural sciences are often clearly quantifiable. Social sciences, containing social constructs which change depending on variables we are not fully aware of including the interaction of billions of the above system interacting with one another, is significantly more difficult to quantify although still possible. It is not possible to quantify the quality of art. What makes good art? We have no idea. We have never had any idea. Art is not quantifiable and may often be appreciated on a level beyond our ability to describe or even understand. There is absolutely no guide to making good art and there can’t be. Every attempt to define art has been defied in a way which is considered more expressive and more artistic than the limited products a definite process may produce. At the highest level, art is the pure expression of intentional and/or unintentional meaning from one mind to another on levels we aren’t even aware of in many cases. A machine using sophisticated word-association algorithms using a tiny fraction of the computing power a typical brain has is just not powerful enough to accomplish what a human can.
The Human Element
LLMs are not aware in the same way a human is aware and couldn’t be. Although I think it’s possible to create a true Artificial Intelligence and LLMs may be a step forward in that direction, any AI is not going to be able to understand a human experience because they can’t have them. LLMs don’t have needs or desires, they don’t have relationships or a reason to form relationships, they don’t even have the basic requirement of life to maintain a system against entropy. These are things most animals with a nervous system more developed than a worm can act according to. Building upon these animal needs, our neo-cortexes in addition allow us to have thoughts, rationally solve problems, make plans, and form and store memories. Some of those things we find computers have an easier time with because they have fewer biases, but we have biases for reasons good and bad and this is relevant to art. An artificial mind which has not themselves had to survive and seek satisfaction in this world and without even the basis to do so is never going to be able to create something meaningful to a human mind except by sheer accident. If a true AI does produce art, that art will be most meaningful to other AIs rather than to us. LLMs are mindless machines which can only imitate but don’t have the foundation to produce art themselves. The best it could ever do is challenge the kind of writing which is done with the least amount of effort which is most reliant on common tropes and cliches. The best it could be is a shadow of what we are capable of.
Conclusion
With all of that considered I actually do think that LLMs will become better at applying human language and may even be capable of replicating writing styles which we find appealing when they are being used to tell the stories we enjoy. They may even be able to generate ideas which we may find appealing as well. However, just like we might see or read something we thought we wanted but are left feeling hollow by I think there will always be the most important things missing from AI produced text and images when compared to art from any human.
“Alice closed her eyes and sighed, savoring the moment before reality came back crashing down on them like the weight of an elephant sitting on them both while being eaten by a shark in an airplane full of ninjas puking out their eyes and blood for no apparent reason other than that they were ninjas who liked puke so much they couldn’t help themselves from spewing it out of their orifices at every opportunity.”
The use of AI should be disclosed to readers “where appropriate,” the guidelines read, though, as with so much else, precisely where that line is drawn is left to the author.
I would appreciate a disclaimer like this, because I’m not interested in reading books written by AI. But that does beg the question of where to draw that line and where the distinction between authors using AI as a supplementary tool (e.g. to fill in a description of a room like the writer mentioned doing), and where the AI is doing big chunks of the writing itself lies. How much AI assistance to too much?
Occasionally I’ll log on to look at what books are similar to something I’ve enjoyed, but that’s it. It’s owned by Amazon so I know the reviews are shit.
I only use Goodreads anymore to track my book collection or when trying to find books for high school students at the library where I work when looking for similar books to recommend to ones they’ve already read and enjoyed.
I use it for tracking my own books because I can add a plug-in into Calibre, which automatically takes care of it, but I’ve also started using StoryGraph and hardcover.app which is a more manual process, but hopefully can get automated soon as Hardcover at least has a public API.
I’d be interested if anybody wants to share links to their own on those services. I’d like more people to follow, my links available in my bio on Lemmy
I have a habit of checking out reviews on Goodreads. I don’t take it too seriously, but the UI is less busy than Amazon and reviews are often a little more chaotic, random, and personal. I like that. I use it to track the books I read, which aren’t many but it’s simple enough. From my own sample, Goodreads rarely form my decision on which books to buy, but it’s up there in my mental algorithm mixed with a bunch of other stuff.
Goodreads’ strongest utility is its shelves, which function as a kind of external brain for some folks.
That’s me, ha ha! I use Goodreads solely to keep track of my book collection and reading data, and completely ignore the reviews and all of the social media features.
I do know that I'm not super enthusiastic about Amazon being the one controlling my reading history, but I've tried migrating to several of the alternatives and it's just too much.
Goodreads has a nice page where you can see 50 books at a time, skim down the list, and checkbox to make bulk changes. I'm willing to painstakingly reconstruct lists like that with an alternative, even though it will still be kind of a pain. But I'm not willing to manually search every title to add it to a list, or go through my reading history and need multiple clicks and backwards navigations for every book I want to add to a list, and that's the state of anything I tried a couple months ago. Bookwyrm specifically sounds really nice, as a way to use federated tools to find people with similar interest and follow their reading and share. But the transfer is a lot.
Bookwyrm was missing a lot of books, and I couldn’t quickly figure out a way to add them. I am pretty invested in Storygraph already so it wasn’t a big priority to figure it out.
I had like 1200 books when I tried it, and the number missing wasn't too bad.
But I'm not doing a list of 100 books searching one at a time. It's bad enough to have to do big chunks to add to my reading history because I don't keep that up. Re-doing organization without bulk editing just isn't going to happen.
@Bitrot Just search for the book you want, and if it isn't on your instance, it will give you the option to import it from other instances, Inventaire or OpenLibrary. Then you'll be able to edit the details. If none of these options are the right ones, you can manually add the book by clicking the last option.
But indeed, it does have a lot of missing books and editions of books. If you do not have the patience to add them, then it is clearly not for you.
Inventaire is also AP enabled, despite being centralized, tho.
I don't use their reviews to decide what to read, but I have checked after the fact on books I like and I think the quality of what they surface tends to be pretty bad.
A lot of mindless criticism, especially. It's perfectly OK to be critical when a book has flaws, but so many of the top reviews were people who just weren't the target audience criticizing it for being targeted at something different than they wanted. Whether that's rigorous academic nonfiction with reviews complaining that it cites its sources, kid/YA books with people complaining that there isn't enough depth, someone like Janet Evanovich or Jana Deleon writing deliberately nonsensical stuff for light humor getting complaints about not being realistic, romantic suspense getting criticism because characters are emotionally connected too fast when that's part of what the genre is, etc.
It's perfectly fine to be disinterested in a book because you're not interested in that genre, but it seems like way too many of the higher visibility reviews are people who just aren't interested in what the book is trying to do.
I’m in the same boat. I tried Storygraph and the error rate importing from Goodreads was too high for me and it was missing some features I use to keep my books organized.
I’d love to move away from an Amazon-owned company, but all the alternatives are lackluster, at least for me.
I think what I'm eventually going to have to do is roll my own. I don't need crazy complexity, but I do want some features nothing seems to have. I want the bulk editing that's only on goodreads, and I really want series to be first class citizens. That means series nesting in other series and being able to have a blurb/rating for a series instead of each individual entry, mostly. I just haven't got to it yet.
I don't necessarily have to have the metadata all the public social network style tools use to combine everyone's input to one book object, though I definitely understand how it's frustrating for services to lose information when you import your lists. But organization tools are critical to me.
As an FYI, this is a very old thing that people are doing. There’s actually a term for it (beyond just “corporate censorship”). It’s bowdlerization or expurgation. And, on some level, I understand why people of a certain ethos would be opposed to it. Beyond the obvious reactionary agenda of being “anti-woke,” there are concerns here over artistic or authorial autonomy and the fear of a slippery slope in which previous cultural attitudes are historically white washed. And I think it’s good to acknowledge the past honestly. Not to celebrate those old attitudes, of course, but to let it stand as it is, scars and all, as a cultural artifact of a very different time. Editing the content of the original work to hide what is and was reduces it from that status of cultural artifact to just pure entertainment. That said, content warning wouldn’t really rob much from the book, unless you believe every book should be a complete and total surprise to the reader. I can’t comment too much on the beliefs of the author of this article, but their opposition to much of what they’re complaining about comes more from a place of “the woke mob is ruining books” rather than anything I would say is a more complete or salient examination of how we collectively relate to the art of the past.
Since there’s a case to be made either way, it would be nice if the publishers could offer two editions and let the reader choose. This might be too expensive in the case of printed books, but for e-books it seems like it should be feasible.
Sure. These things are products to be purchased, after all. Regardless of how you feel about the content of the books themselves, I’d be extraordinarily annoyed if a company could just edit on a whim the content I had paid for and expected to have in perpetuity. That said, you should never realistically buy anything from an online publisher that doesn’t let you save a static text copy of the book as a PDF or other file offline. More generally, if you want to buy a book, the best thing to do is to buy from a used bookstore, if you’re able. Not like Amazon needs any more money.
I don’t buy the controversy; editing old racist, sexist books to be palatable is a great way for publishers to try to sell books that would otherwise be unacceptable in today’s market.
I’m sure as shit not reading unedited Dahl books to my kiddos. tbh, I’m unlikely to read the edited ones to them, either, since there are so many better books to choose from, but the edits at least make the books a possibility.
Libraries will still have the original texts. Digital dark libraries have all the originals, too. It’s not like we’re losing our cultural heritage here. Historians and scholars can still study the originals, and anyone with interest can find unedited versions, too. But the edited “woke” versions have at least some of the prejudice edited out. Anything that makes society more tolerant and accepting is a win.
Sure, release notes would be nice. They wouldn’t hurt. I wouldn’t even know that the Bond and Dahl books might not be terrible anymore without release notes, if not for the “controversy”. So, disregarding all the author’s reasons, I still support that release notes would be a nice addition.
A very Hungry Caterpillar, by Eric Carle. It was in the top of a shelf and it fell on my head while trying to reach for something else. It really did surprised me.
Magic’s Pawn by Mercedes Lackey. From what little I knew about Lackey, I thought she wrote fun pulp fantasy novels, so I read the book after a particularly heavy downer book. It has a gay romance and magical psychic horses; how could it not cheer me up?
And then I proceeded to sob uncontrollably on and off from the middle of the book onward.
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