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Wellness Wednesday for April 19, 2023

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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I've done my part, by writing a well-reviewed novel before GPT-5 can write better than me. It's going to stay up at least on archives, so I can forever bask in the miniscule amount of glory in provably being a good writer without AI augmentation 🙏

In terms of how the market will react in the future, I doubt draconian steps will take off, it seems more likely that AI will just subsume the entire market, leaving a small niche for people who claim that they're writing solo, often without showing proof, and reacting negatively to demands for proof.

I'm aware of people doing that, I just happen to believe it'll be a minuscule and ever dwindling share of the market, as is the case with most artisanal products.

People watch humans play chess because the product is the human matching of wits, whereas the majority of books sold seem to me like they're judged as products themselves, with knowledge about the author being a secondary concern.

There are obviously celebrity authors, but we also have blatantly ghostwritten works, pulp fiction, and plenty of genres that don't really give a damn about authenticity.

Right now, barring ghostwriting, it's difficult for any given author to significantly out produce another, they're still humans manually writing after all. But that's changing before our very eyes as I speak.

On further reflection, I think that authorship itself will become largely obsolete, outside of nonfiction and the like, people will very cheap custom order GPT-5+ to write on the fly something they'd like to read.

"Computer, write a salacious but not outright pornographic bodice-ripper set in a the Portuguese colonies in the 17th century starring a down-on-their-luck mestizo girl accidentally winning the heart of a heir in hiding. Oh, and make sure it has a happy ending, and give me 3 options at the end of each chapter for where to take the plot next."

This is almost inevitable, and will be easier in text than more multimedia heavy productions, even if the latter will only lag behind by a few months or years.

Authors, if they still exist, will be mostly brands offering a certain specific flavor of writing, not because they're sought for their own sake.

Back to your original point about demands for proof of human work, AI image generation is pretty much a solved problem. But in practise, a typical artist isn't assailed with demands to show receipts demonstrating they never resorted to using AI at any stage of the process, including digital art, at least not that I've noticed. I expect that literature will take a similar route.

On the longer term, I'm sure humans will be able to avail of cognitive enhancement to become more competitive. As I've said before, I don't want to just be someone suckling from the teat of a godlike machine intelligence, I want to be said godlike intelligence, writing incredible novels and designing beautiful works of art myself.