Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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AI is good actually, sometimes really good, but also not that good
The CW thread is typically full of AI hot takes, speculation, and debates over whether AI is actually intelligent, or getting there.
This is not that thread. That's @Dase's beat, or @self_made_human. This is a thread about using AI as a hobbyist. And by that I don't mean just AI as a hobby, but using AI for my hobbies.
Bottom Line: AI is becoming super-useful and super-smart (for a very limited value of "smart") and if you are still an AI skeptic, you need to try it on something besides coding.
(Strap in, this is long and meandering, 100% human-written with neither AI nor chemical assistance, and I'll end with some mildly CW adjacent thoughts relating to how I can't fucking talk to anyone in normie-space about AI without getting "MuskDataCentersArtTheftWARFLEBLAAARG!")
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I am techno-curious and have been playing with AI since it became a Thing. (Well, technically, well before it became a Thing. I remember when neural networks were absolute dead ends as far as anyone in academia or tech was concerned and "AI" meant Hidden Markov Models, minimax and A-B pruning.)
ChatGPT has helped me figure out why my tomatoes are dying. It's helped me with plumping and A/C issues. It helped me find the actual human to call and harass about a sinkhole in front of my house. And of course, Claude is amazing as a coding assistant. Coding without AI is now like coding without an IDE; sure, you can do it, but why would you want to?
I've also started using AI, with skepticism at first but with increasing enthusiasm, in my hobbies. But skepticism and even some AI-shaming is still necessary.
Language Learning
I have been studying languages for years, but in the last few years I've been semi-regularly studying Arabic and Japanese. I have a DuoLingo streak, yes, but I use that for drills just to make sure I do a little practice every day, not as a serious learning tool. I pay for online lessons, and I try to regularly consume content.
I remember the early days of Google Translate. This was when machine translation had made the big shift from Rules Based Translation to Statistical Machine Translation.
RBT was how early MT systems worked. Basically you needed a bilingual computer programmer who understood deeply the grammatical rules of two or more languages, and had the ability to write code. The intuition was simple enough: language has rules, computers are very good at following rules, just write the rules as code.
RBTs were and are mostly terrible for reasons that could be the subject of another long post, but basically, no set of rules can encode all the nuances, exceptions, and references involved in actual communication. Plus for many languages there aren't a lot of competent programmers who also happen to be fully bilingual linguists.
Statistical Machine Translation was a great leap forward: Google Translate was genuinely good compared to everything that had gone before, based on the simple idea that if you feed a model millions of sentences, it can probabilistically translate sentences using token prediction, without ever having grammar rules explicitly encoded. It was only possible in the age of the Internet, with vast repositories of parallel corpora like Wikipedia to scrape. But this required large parallel corpora, which means there was lots of data for English, Chinese, Russian, Spanish, Japanese, etc… not so much for Estonian or Amharic.
Then came neural nets, and while dedicated Neural Machine Translators exist, even basic bitch Claude and ChatGPT are pretty damn good at not just translation, but explaining other languages.
AI can explain to me the difference between とても and ずいぶん or مَخْزَن and مُسْتَوْدَع. It does deep dives on grammar on demand. And I have GPTs configured to generate Anki flashcards for me, complete with Genki-style illustrations. Configured to generate exactly the fields I want for each language (kanji for Japanese, verb conjugations and measures for Arabic).
"Hold on," you are asking. "How do you know the AI isn't misleading you? Are you sure it's not sometimes hallucinating a grammar rule, or telling you that 'fuck' means eat'? Do you really trust an AI language tutor?"
Well, yes and no. Obviously one cannot know with 100% certainty that everything the AI is telling you is correct. But with external validation and my own knowledge of the languages I am studying, I am fairly confident I'd know if the AI was spouting bullshit. And I have yet to catch it being blatantly wrong. Everything I've been told has checked out, and fears that it's going to mangle your attempts at basic communication are mostly obsolete.
That said, I still rely on textbooks, immersion, and actual human teachers for the bulk of my learning. AI is good for when I want an instant answer to a question, or assistance in my regular learning routine.
I have looked at those "AI tutors" and fully AI-powered language learning platforms being advertised on social media (always with the goon-y AI avatar…). They're still crap compared to an actual human; speech recognition still tends to be very slow and error prone, especially when the AI is trying to understand a student who's likely to stammer, mispronounce words, and use incorrect grammar. There is probably a future, maybe not too distantly, where AI can replace human teachers the way it's currently hollowing out the translation industry. (Another lengthy topic; AI isn't good enough to replace the literary translators who translate Haruki Murakami, but it's killing translators who work on basic corporate product, web copy, UIs, and the like.)
As with coding, there is a combination of cope and hope: some people are saying AI is not "killing" translation as a career, but refining and enhancing it and hollowing out the low-end work, leaving the job of supervising and correcting AI output to the real experts.
I dunno, man. Sure seems like a lot of entry and mid-level coders and translators are losing their jobs (and wherefore therefore are the "experts" going to come from?) But sorry, that's CW. So moving on…
AI can absolutely help with your language learning and you are missing out on useful tools if you don't use it. (Easy trick that needs no AI expertise at all: YouTube now has a Gemini-powered "Ask" feature. Load a video in your target language. Tell it "I am a B2-level language student. Provide a list of words and phrases from this video for me to study before listening. Generate a list of questions to test my listening comprehension." It's amazing.)
AI Art is still mostly for gooning (or Anki flash cards)
I am learning to draw and I've always been into graphic arts. So of course I have been approaching AI from both ends, sympathizing with the creative community's intensely negative reaction while being curious about what AI can do and using it myself in ways that make sense.
I will use AI to generate images when I need a pretty picture and don't much care about provenance or artistry. RPG characters, flash cards,
pornj/k, but seriously, Stable Diffusion is an incel-hazard, civitai will introduce you to fetishes you never wanted to know existed…I don't feel guilty using GPT or Stable Diffusion when I need "a picture of a blue whale in the San Francisco bay" or a character illustration.
But when I notice it being used professionally, it annoys me. RPG and boardgame publishers are increasingly using AI art – not all of them, but the shoestring operations are, because let's face it, AI is hella cheaper than a human artist. AI art still mostly has that AI sheen with blurry edges that is usually pretty easy to spot (it's been referred to as everything from "uncanny valley" to "piss filter") and when I see it, even though it should not influence what I think of the content, it does. Same for book covers; certain subgenres in the indie space (mostly emerging from fan fiction and Royal Road…. think progression fantasies, LitRPG, harem novels, etc.) are notorious for the very predictable AI-generated huge-tittied anime girl. It's understandable; these are mostly broke writers who will be lucky to sell a dozen copies, so there's no ROI in paying even a cheap artist from DeviantArt or Gumroad for a cover. But it puts me off when I see it.
What many AI opponents don't realize, or want to acknowledge, though, is how good AI is becoming. Most everyone now knows that the days of spotting extra fingers or shadows going in the wrong direction is very 2024, but if you read /r/isthisai you know that there are still a lot of AI "tells" that even the best models have a hard time avoiding. It's becoming trickier, but while the telltale strands of hair melding into the cheek or useless belt buckles are subtle clues that AIs will eventually be trained to avoid, there is still something about the basic composition and angles and values of AI art that gives it away as not something conceived, laid out, and rendered by a human making decisions. There is, dare I say it, an art to creating art that machines can only imitate.
I recently retook Scott's AI Art Turing test. I scored above average the first time, and it's been long enough that I had mostly forgotten which images were AI and which ones weren't. I scored 37 out of 50 this time, supposedly putting me in the 94th percentile; the ones that fooled me repeatedly were the AI images by Jack Galler, who seems to be very good at prompting AI to imitate specific art styles that look like a Monet or a Matisse. Those and the abstract pieces because let's face it, who can tell whether a human, an AI, or a monkey made those?(I kid. I actually think someone better versed in art history would be able to tell.)
(The way to spot AI art is to think of every stroke as a decision, and ask yourself, "Would a human artist make that decision?" When you start doing this, it's often very easy to spot AI, even if the picture is objectively "good," because you will see little dots of paint or cross-hatches or brush strokes and think "Why would the artist put that there? Who would decide to add a line there?")
I don't hate AI art but mostly I'm agin' it for contexts where I expect to see professional art.
But you know what it's pretty good at? Looking at my value studies and telling me if I'm off. Evaluating my proportions and contour drawings. I don't think AI is ready to replace art school either, but it's good enough to tutor you. And soon it will be good enough to fool you almost all the time and human-made art and human-made book covers will be a sort of artisanal craft, where a few very high-end and well known artists make money and everyone else just cranks the AI and shops it.
I am not sure how I feel about this, honestly. I feel bad for artists, but not as bad as I feel for translators, because artists are fucking insufferable (see below).
Infinity Billion Kindle Books Per Hour
And now the subject nearest and dearest to my heart: writing. I am a writer (with minor credits and a bit of microfame). And writing is not being spared the scourge of the clankers.
Writing is an area where I am also very confident in my aesthetic sense and ability to recognize good writing. As with art, AIs are getting smarter and learning to avoid the obvious tells (m-dashes, "Not X, but Y…", repetitive three-part structures), but as with art, there are just some things AI can't avoid because it doesn't have the human sensibility to craft words the way a human would and recognize when a human wouldn't craft words like this. Right now the main "tell" is verbosity and over-explaining, as well as a certain "tone" that feels like the verbal equivalent of the piss-filter.
This has not stopped people from using AI to write books, of course.
The earliest AI novels were absolute trash. They couldn't keep the plot, they couldn't maintain character consistency, they were not much better than regurgitated TVTropes Mad Libs.
Current AI novels are still trash, but they are becoming coherent.
There are now commercial tools claiming to be able to generate epic fantasy trilogies with character and plot continuity across multiple volumes and prophecies in book one that deliver in book three.
I'm not willing to read an AI-generated trilogy, but I've read the first few chapters of some AI generated novels. They are still dreadful. Flat dialog. Pedestrian tropey characters. Spelling out every beat and every emotion. They read like a sophomore who just finished taking a creative writing workshop. But… they're probably better than the average slush pile entry.
Magazines suffer under the deluge of AI-generated story submissions, but editors still have no trouble recognizing AI writing.
I must own my biases here. AI art makes me go "Eh" but I often consider it serviceable enough. AI writing, especially for fiction, and especially when offered up by people trying to sell their books, makes me go "Eww!"
Besides the obvious phenomenon of people churning out AI Kindle books and hoping to make some money if they spam and SEO enough, there have been a number of recent scandals involving writers using AI. The horror novel Shy Girl was pulled because readers clocked obvious AI writing. Granta awarded its prestigious Commonwealth Short Story prize to The Serpent in the Grove, which readers also noted read very much like an AI trying to imitate a Granta Commonwealth award winner.
I am not surprised it was clocked as AI (though the author still denies it). There is a story here… a dirt farmer in Trinidad decides he wants to get rid of his wife because he's got eyes for some hot young thing. But the entire story is choking with these overwrought writing workshop similes.
Writers being caught leaving AI prompts in their text are hilarious, of course, but what's notable is not that writers are doing it, but that they are defending use of AI.
I would never use AI to write fiction. Fiction is art and craft and a semi-pro hobby for me and using AI, even if it gets good enough to write better than me, would be defeating the purpose. But can I envision a future in which AI can actually write a space opera that will hold my attention and make me say "That was good, I want more?" Where AIs can assume different "author" roles with distinct and recognizeable styles? I am skeptical, as I am skeptical of AGI, but I wouldn't say it's impossible.
And one reason I wouldn't say it's impossible is because I have started testing its ability to act as a beta-reader and a developmental editor.
Not long ago @gattsuru praised AI for its ability to provide meaningful feedback on his own writing, and I looked at the feedback and thought it was very generic and full of the usual AI glazing and twitches. My experience to that point was that when you ask an AI to critique your writing, it will say some stuff that's more or less on point, but about as specific as a horoscope reading. Its ability to follow a novel-length plot was limited by its (relatively) small context window and cranking it twice would get you two different critiques. I tried and dismissed it as being useless for anything beyond surface-level line edits. (Even AI haters have to admit that AI is now an actually competent spellchecker and grammar checker.)
Then I tried Fable with a seven book series, and I no longer think that.
To be sure, if you just try to upload seven books and tell Fable "Here's my rough draft of the next volume, whaddaya think?" it will give you… mostly general glazing and AI twitches. Because for one thing, no commercially available AI can actually hold the text of seven books in its context window.
BUT! If you set it up right, with a claude.md file that references all the sources it should consult and when, you can give it the text of seven books, a series bible, character sheets, and exactly what you want out of it, and holy shit, it starts talking like an actual developmental editor.
And by that I mean yes, it actually sounded like someone who had read all the previous books and could look up events from earlier books and check whether your references are consistent. It finds plot seeds you planted two books ago without you specifically mentioning them! And when I asked for specific critiques, bounced ideas off of it, and debated whether I should do this or that, its input was… consistent and intelligent. I did not always agree with it, as I would not always agree with a human editor, but it actually sounded like an intelligent reader. More often than not, I found myself, even grudgingly, thinking "The AI has a point."
I have avoided asking it for "ideas." I don't want an AI's help in deciding what I am going to write. But sometimes it offers "solutions" even when I didn't ask for them and…. hrrm. The AI's ideas are no worse than what I have gotten from human beta readers.
Damned if I can't see how it could become a temptation, especially for an author with deadlines who actually has to make a living at this.
I am not going to replace a human editor with an AI. But I definitely consider an AI to be capable of making a very competent "first pass."
Likewise, I will not replace my human beta readers with AIs. But here, too, I find the AI helpful enough to make first passes. (Note: developmental editing is not the same as beta-reading. I have created multiple "beta reader" personalities, which each attack the text with their own consistent approaches to it. And honestly it's kind of fun, like when first I run it through "Snarky takedown artist" guy, and then run it through "Autistic consistency and realism checker" dude, and then run it through "Woke sensitivity reader" chick, and so on.)
AI may be coming for writing. (Okay, it is already coming for writing.) But it's coming for editors and paid beta-readers first.
The Woke Butlerian Jihad
And here's where I will drop just a little bit of CW here: I can't talk about this, enthusiastically or otherwise, in any of my hobby circles, because the animus against AI is becoming so extreme. AI witchhunts are becoming endemic (did this poor sap use AI for her covers, for her promotional blurb, both, or neither? I honestly don't know) and I pity artists who now have to show multiple WIPs to prove they aren't using AI and still often get accused of using AI. I have gotten blowback for mentioning that I even touch AI. To suggest I might actually run my work through an AI and take its feedback seriously is to taint the work with AI, and for some that's as bad as if I just had an AI write the story. Needless to say, posting AI art elicits rage.
I get it, I get that artists, writers, and others feel threatened, and for good reasons. But ye gods some of these people are so insufferable. I think Asmongold is a cunt, but while rubbing artists' noses in AI is kind of a cunty thing to do, man do some of them have it coming.
(On the other hand, Shad Brooks is an even bigger cunt. No, bro, you are not a "professional level artist" because you can use AI and Photoshop to resize Supergirl's shoulder-to-hip ratio.)
What, you were expecting a point? A conclusion? A summary? Ask an AI for one.
As someone who has just finished Inifnite Jest (and so have earned the right to be insufferable for the next few weeks) all I will say is that AI definitely helped me understand what was really going on throughout different sections of the book and all the links between things and throwaway comments that were made hundreds of pages earlier. I think I'd have needed at least 3 readings of the book to get as much out of it as I did with one reading plus 5.6 Sol sitting next to me to bounce my questions and observations off of. Definitely added to the reading experience.
If the market is genuinely preferring AI written or assisted literary/artistic works over the human made counterparts then it's the Authors/Artists who need to adapt and change. Yes there will always be a niche for pure Human stuff, just like how there's a niche for DFW type stuff (most people would not consider 1100 pages of walls of text that don't really go anywhere including 100 pages of endnotes, some of which have their own endnotes to count as "good writing"); but it will be a niche, and the anti AI people need to make peace with that, just like how the "don't use AI for coding" people have had to make peace with the fact that pretty much all code now ends up written with AI.
And yes, AI will not be writing anything on the level of art as Infinite Jest for a long while, human writers/artists should stop serving low grade human produced slop and switch towards attempting grander works or fail in the process. If you're not mediocre, you're safe from AI for a while yet.
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