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Lucy Gray's avatar

While it feels great to have you pick apart a piece generated - as opposed to written - by AI, what concerns me is the push to make the writing something we would want to read. I can believe coders will get there eventually. But even if a piece put out by AI could move me, it would be disconnecting me from feeling for another human. That is the threat to art.

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Albert M Debrunner's avatar

I just love this article! It made me laugh, which is something AI-generated literature doesn't do.

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pdvanpelt@gmail.com's avatar

I think the facts, as we now know them, are well-stated in this post. AI can imitate as well as it is programmed to imitate. It can create text which reads like that created by humans, but, its' creations, as far as I know, are lacking in that sense of feeling. Ms. Gray makes a good point and her comment about a threat to art is spot on, in my opinion.

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Christopher Gage's avatar

Your aunt can 'paint' a paint-by-numbers rendition of Van Gogh's Starry Night. One has meaning, the other does not. Art is about intentionality and context. This AI debate is fundamentally flawed. (Tech bros think in outcomes. Not in processes.)

Great piece.

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Michael Morneault's avatar

To quote Bertrand Russell, “No matter how eloquently a dog may bark, he cannot tell you that his father was poor but honest.”

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Aleš Kaňka's avatar

I think pretentious, overwritten prose can be found in the output of today's human authors just as frequently. Some people are high on the idea that they get published. They perhaps write for the status. Maybe the model was trained on such empty works. No wonder that it churns out nonsense. Personally, I prefer machine- to human-generated shit. Machines are unable to think. Humans cannot claim such an excuse.

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pdvanpelt@gmail.com's avatar

Please forgive the omission: ...PLACE the modifier...

Best regards to all!

PDV.

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pdvanpelt@gmail.com's avatar

Well. It is pretty obvious now that certain folks want to give us (and themselves) the government that money can buy. Notice, I did not the modifier, *best*, between "the" and, "government". I THINK it is also obvious that that government is falling short. Thanks for your support and kind sentiments.

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Gary Herstein's avatar

"isn’t humming the opposite of “regimented”?" -- No, it is one of the most regimented forms of background noise imaginable. It is close to white noise, which in its statistical randomness is absolutely flat, strictly limited by its lack of any other structure. There's a reason why people use such background to go to sleep.

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Aleš Kaňka's avatar

Not being a native speaker, I might be wrong, but it seems that a server farm humming away at midnight can be taken note of more easily than during a busy day. So the phrase does seem to make some sense. However grave the ugly mistakes of the ghost in the machine may be, the human-generated prompt seems the ugliest post-modern cliche of all. Everybody writes metafiction these days.

But I don't know. As Zappa has it somewhere in the lyrics: I might be totally wrong but am a fool.

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