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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3312 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.

Half the reason I finally published and shared my own web serial a week back is because I do actually believe that AI circa GPT-4.5 will genuinely write better than I do, and I'm a pretty good writer!

I've had a modicum of success using ChatGPT for brainstorming, albeit it can't really capture my writing style when it comes to anything but the basics. I think GPT-4 or at least the unlisted GPT in Bing might do a half-decent job, but I'm not going to let Microsoft spam me when I sign up the wait list.

I've had a decent amount of fun generating images of characters and concepts for self illustration of the novel, and tools like ControlNet are great for getting even the derpy Stable Diffusion to output closer to Midjourney (DALLE is trash now, and has been for a while).

I look forward to lazing around while the robots do all the hard work, but that day hasn't come quite yet, even if I think it's merely a year or three away at this rate.

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