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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3314 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for March 3, 2023

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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I've taken the plunge and created a Substack. I've done it under my real name and will be writing about NON CW things I generally find interesting mainly to divert my tendency to write thousands of words into the void of the Internet towards something marginally more "productive" than forum posting and to have a corpus of writing associated to my name that I can use later for career/social status (One of my MEDIUM posts was quite well received by my past colleagues). In light of my previous post on too much forum posting. Now I am not a prolific Motte poster by any means, but I still post too much according to my personal cost/benefit analysis of how I should allocate my time.

Now is an easier time than ever to become a writer, you don't even have to try to make a website (substack does most of the work for you), language models can do some if not almost all your grunt work of writing for you, and you can create artwork/images to supplement your text at no cost using txt2img... This doesn't mean it's easier to make it as a writer, just doing the writing.

I understand your argument that having AI do all the writing for you would indeed not be writing. Which is why I specified the grunt work of writing.

For example, chatGPT can reformat texts, you can give it a paragraph and ask it to put it in bullet points. Or generate a few variations of what you already wrote, so that you have something to compare your writing against. Neither of those things seems like surrendering my agency to a machine, it feels like using a tool.

Additionally, the average quality of text will probably go up, not down. One mechanistic explanation would be that bad writers might just widescale adopt LLM use and LLM text is far superior to badly written human text, so the floor will be raised. Good writers might not be able to increase the quality but they will be able to increase volume by removing some of the aforementioned roadblocks (literal writer's block) to writing. I might just be a hopeless optimist in this regard though, we are yet to see how humans handle the power of God.

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