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dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
4hr ago
You've made a profound and insightful point about online discourse in the age of generative AI. Let's break it down.
/uj you might be able to get away with emdashes so long as you steer far away from sycophancy
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
5hr ago
As it happens, I have also been dipping into LLMs-as-beta-readers lately, even going so far as to build an application that can read an entire series of books and learn its "lore," and a custom GPT instance that will "compress" a book into a format optimized to provide context to itself or another GPT. (As you probably know, even the most powerful LLMs do not have a context window large enough to store an entire large novel in memory, let alone a series, and you can't directly upload embeddings to GPT or Claude.) The intent of these projects is so that I can, say, ask GPT to evaluate the fifth book in a series with knowledge of the previous four books. It's a work in progress.
So, some observations. First, sorry dude, but I have major side-eye for your ability to evaluate literary quality. :p
That being said, I have also noticed the tendency of LLMs to glaze you no matter how hard you try to solicit "honest" feedback, unless you resort to tricks like you mentioned. (Telling an LLM the manuscript is by an author you hate and you want it to roast it will work, but that's not exactly useful feedback.)
The hallucination problem is hard to overcome, even with tricks like my token-optimizing scheme. I find that in most sessions, it will stay on course for a while, but inevitably it starts making up characters and events and dialog that weren't in the text.
As long as you can keep it on track, I have found that some of the GPT and Anthropic models are... not terrible as beta readers. They point out some real flaws and in a very generic sense have an "understanding" of pacing and tone and where a scene is missing something. However, the advice tends to be very generic. "You need to show the consequences," "The scene ends too quickly, you should build more tension," "There should be some emotional stakes the reader can connect with," etc. Clearly they have many writing advice books in their training data. There is nothing like true understanding of context or story, just generic pieces it can pattern-match to the writing sample you give it.
And when it comes to specific suggestions, I have yet to see an LLM that is actually a good (not "mediocre and banal but capable of producing literate prose") writer. Its suggestions will be a pastiche of flat TV script dialog and trope-filled scenes.
(That said, any writer will tell you to listen to critics when they point out problems, but don't listen to them when they propose solutions. So in that respect an LLM isn't much different than a human.)
But these are still early days for AI, so I don't doubt that in a few years, we'll have LLMs that can be at least as useful as your average writing workshop. AI writing is already flooding some genres, and while it's usually as easy to spot as AI art is, just as with AI art, a lot of people clearly don't care.
I find it fascinating and I enjoy playing around with it, but yeah, I think AI-generated novels will crowd out human writers in low-brow undiscerning stuff like romance and progression fantasies, and writing those stories will become something people only do as a hobby, just like people are still passionate about chess and go even though no human can beat a computer anymore. I still think we'll need true AGI to write an actual good novel. When you show me an AI that can write a coherent series, with multi-volume character arcs, plot seeds planted in early books that clearly pay off in later ones, literary allusions and metaphors that aren't just clumsy pulled-off-the-shelf ones but deeply enmeshed in the story, and a recognizable differentiable style (in the same way that fans can read Dickens or McCarthy or Hemingway and immediately recognize the author), I will believe we're there.
Not in the current form.
I'm dedicated to pursuing a quality of "authenticity," which I don't have perfectly defined, but definitely requires that my partner be a real human, with 'natural' skin, brain tissue, and standard human DNA. The thing that I'm ACTUALLY wired to find attractive, not something that mimics those things closely enough to pass a basic inspection. Related to why I don't really like Tattoos on women.
In many ways, we are descending into my version of hell, where finding meaningful connection with other humans is harder than is needs to be, where women are more focused on careers and adventures, at the expense of their own happiness, than even trying to find joy in bearing and raising kids, where men are fundamentally purposeless and nobody bothers to even try to create a purpose for them, and everybody is busy trying to live at the expense of everyone else, b/c coordinating to create that better future is HARD and we aren't able to see past the short term consequences of these actions. But I can, and it seems increasingly obvious where this is trending. And nobody with power is doing much about it.
And its all being patched over with digital (i.e. INAUTHENTIC) simulacrum that sort of satisfy the various urges without really fulfilling the purpose for which each urge exists, and these experiences that are simply insufficient to make you happy if you care to look and notice the cracks in their facade.
All the worse because I can clearly imagine a better set of circumstances that is happier for everyone, including myself, and I have a vague idea of how we could get there, but no real clue on how to implement that plan, and thus I am left to scrape by with whatever my individual efforts can achieve.
Tree
5hr ago
Musk-level value was OP’s analogy, but the problem with your framing is that the being women are valued for is actually a doing, the producing of children.
Doing has obvious value, I’m not sure being has value. Valued for being could just be an echo, a reminder of someone’s past, real doing-value, like the late aristocrats who were once warriors.
gattsuru
5hr ago
No. From the long form:
Community Hospital, the nonprofit that runs the clinic known as the Curtis Medical Center and a couple of other facilities in the region, plunged into the center of that national story when it announced on July 2 — one day before the bill’s passage — that a confluence of factors had made its Curtis outpost unsustainable. It cited years-long financial challenges, inflation and “anticipated federal budget cuts to Medicaid,” the public health insurance program for lower-income and disabled Americans.
I think the underlying op-ed is this piece, which is... not exactly coming across as a neutral evaluation of the facts, or this one, which is better, but still makes it hard for any plausible drop in Medi* use to even be the straw that breaks the camel's back:
In their financial statement for last available financial year (ending June 30, 2024), Community Hospital brought in 6% of their $62 Million in patient service revenue from Medicaid, with about $4.1 Million coming into the hospital from the program. The Hospital operated at a loss of $1.67 Million for that financial year as well. Figures were not available for the most recent financial year (ending June 30, 2025).
In an opinion piece published in the Nebraska Examiner in February, Nebraska Hospital Association President president Jeremy Nordquist said that Medicaid pays for 26% of all emergency room visits in rural hospitals, alongside 33% of all births and 44% of all services to minors. He also said that 54% of rural, independent critical access hospitals are operating at a loss.
A lot of the numbers are coming from that Nebraska Hospital Association, which has been giving worst-case or worse-than-worse-case numbers.
I can certainly believe that the Medicaid changes will have an impact, but Hanania's implication that this was a sole and direct cause that people can't deny only because The Cheetoh has a "spell over them" is about as well-founded as his normal sneers.
gattsuru
5hr ago
There's a pretty significant demographic of men (and sometimes even straight men) who get into really heavy parasocial relationships in situations like OnlyFans et all.
I'm going to guess without strong evidence that the vast majority of the views on the toronto article are of the corrected version.
I for one do not sit refreshing the fake news frontpage and most articles I read are somewhat aged.
Regarding the bodies, I would hazard to guess that the articles themselves are not technically "wrong" and therefore do not warrant correction.
Edit:
They did not retract this article because it's not strictly false: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/tk-emlúps-te-secwépemc-215-children-former-kamloops-indian-residential-school-1.6043778 The are re-reporting what the indigenous group falsely claimed, but did not ever make a statement of fact that there were actually bodies there.
Nevertheless, they actually provided a correction after the fact at the top of the article that says there were no bodies discovered:
Since this story was first published, the Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation has updated its findings and clarified that what was detected in the ground-penetrating radar survey were about 200 potential burial sites. Read the full story here.
EvanTh
5hr ago
Better at performing each individual act associated with being a friend or romantic partner? Conceivably so (at least several model upgrades from now), within their constraints of being limited to computer systems. But my argument is, that's missing something of the core of being a friend or romantic partner.
Better at being a friend or romantic partner, despite that, than many people who can't visibly let someone behind her roles to the person herself? Entirely possible, but that's still missing something most people want.
vorpa-glavo
5hr ago
It may be simulating a character, but I'm not sure if the current generation of AI partners is ready for prime time for most femcels. Just going off of vibes, Grok Companion feels like something that will appeal far more to male gooners, since the pretty rudimentary animations and voice quality seems good enough to be a porn fantasy, but not really good enough to be a full character.
The gameified lovemeter of Grok Companion seems male-gooner-coded and not "character simulacrum for femcel" coded.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
5hr ago
I simply think it has an appeal to men who don't feel they've got a shot at the real thing.
And does it have appeal to you?
faceh
5hr ago
With an AI, you can't get beneath that role. If it looks like you have, that's just another role. That makes them great teachers and therapists (at least in this sense), but very bad at being friends or romantic partners.
But... and this is a critical point here... better than many people are at being friends or romantic partners.
All of this navel gazing makes sense when you realize that the authors want the freedom of the tyranny of the human biological condition: which, barring incredible advances of technology, is impossible.
They were born in a woman's body. It sucks in some ways and is great in others. Get over it. Being a man also sucks in different but not wholly alien ways.
They should stop whining. The world isn't fair, and trying to make it fair to satisfy their neurosis is impossible. It's out of their control in a fundamental way that can never be remedied. For God's sake, if there something to be stoic about, this is it.
faceh
5hr ago
You're trying to rationalize how the AI could be "just as good" or "not as dangerous" as the real thing, because you know that the AI is obviously worse.
No, simply pointing out a failure mode that human relationships have that an AI really does not. The AI has other failure modes that are more dystopic, of course.
The human relationship failure mode is one that that I've now personally observed multiple times, unfortunately, happening to people who do not deserve it.
I do not think the AI is inherently better, I simply think it has an appeal to men who don't feel they've got a shot at the real thing.
And that is VERY VERY bad for society.
There are lots of women who are settling down with lots of men as we speak.
Objectively fewer than in years past. That's the point. This is simply adding to an existing trend.
And we can extrapolate that trend and wonder if we'll get as bad off as, say, South Korea. We know it can get worse because worse currently exists.
I'm not here trying to JUSTIFY men choosing the digital option. Quite the opposite. I'm just saying I don't see a reason why, in practical terms, they'd reject it.
EvanTh
5hr ago
When we interact with teachers, therapists, or editors, we're interacting with them within the confines of a particular role. You shouldn't use your editor as your therapist, or vice versa, and they shouldn't use you as theirs.
But with friends and romantic companions, we're hoping to interact outside those confines, with the person herself. If I only interact with a role she puts on, that's not a good friendship or romantic partnership. Same thing if I'm always putting on a role for her.
With an AI, you can't get beneath that role. If it looks like you have, that's just another role. That makes them great teachers and therapists (at least in this sense), but very bad at being friends or romantic partners.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
5hr ago
Without actual, real life women being willing to settle down
But that's not true. There are lots of women who are settling down with lots of men as we speak.
And 5 years down the road the married guy got divorced, maybe has a kid, and suddenly finds himself alone
You're trying to rationalize how the AI could be "just as good" or "not as dangerous" as the real thing, because you know that the AI is obviously worse.
zeke5123a
5hr ago
That seems like an overly narrow definition of bureaucracy. All of the revolving door between the official bureaucracy and the related contractors (with people going back and forth) form the true bureaucracy.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
6hr ago
The usual formulation is that women have value for what they are, and men have value for what they do. This does not give all women huge, Elon Musk level value.
gattsuru
6hr ago
Otherwise, what is 'wrong' with letting the AI fill in that particular gap?
I gotta finish writing up the "the things we needed to hear, from the people who should have been there to say them" bit and its siblings, but :
Don't be nervous, No, don't be nervous
I'm not like other guys who have a surface,
What you girls really need's a soft, fuzzy man
(An atmospheric man) A shimmering puff of indistinct love
What's better than the vague embrace of a soft, fuzzy man?
Superstimulus is a distraction, here. "Better" is a distraction, here. They don't even have to be that good or that smart to be dangerous! The machines can be everything you want, and more critically nothing you don't.
Imagine what happens when you can snap away every trivial inconvenience you saw in a relationship. I don't think it'll be a critical problem for everyone or even necessarily a majority of people, but the people who don't handle it will be in very bad shape, either when the fugue breaks or because it doesn't.
Presuming those relationships last.
Which is a sizeable "if" in the current era. That's why I think the AI companion is a possible death blow. Without actual, real life women being willing to settle down, this becomes the 'best alternative'/substitute good.
This thought only just now occurs to me, but if we took two otherwise similar guys, one who married a woman and another who just went all in on an AI companion, bought VR goggles, tactile feedback, the requisite 'toys' to make it feel real, and such.
And 5 years down the road the married guy got divorced, maybe has a kid, and suddenly finds himself alone, and these two guys meet up to compare their overall situations.
And the other guy is still 'with' his AI companion, shallow as it is... would he feel better or worse off than the guy who had a wife but couldn't keep her.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
6hr ago
Agreed. Veo 3 is a massive breakthrough, and it's only going to get better. $500 is absolute chump change, and even ten times that isn't a big deal in the movie world. I expect that even the big studios are going to see how far they can go with replacing/augmenting normal capture or even expensive CGI with the tech. It seems the only real moats left are IP, name recognition and distribution deals, which isn't very reassuring for them.
ulyssessword
6hr ago
You're talking about Doug Saunders? And not the Canadian Press, Toronto Star, Global News, Globe and Mail, or Duane Bratt?
I don't put much stock in corrections, even ignoring the speed and prevalence. If you depend on corrections to fix errors, then you've committed to either ignoring every headline you see in favor of a delayed summary, or else tracking each news story and following up after the appropriate amount of time to check for any changes.
How long am I supposed to wait before a non-breaking news story becomes reliable? If you choose to give them four years, then you might still be disappointed.
hydroacetylene
6hr ago
I find it curious the assumption that this is primarily a superstimulus which will target gooner men, when the thing simulated, it is a character which can have a relationship. AKA something appealing to women. This could easily be internet porn for the femcels, rather than a replacement for internet porn for incels.
faceh
6hr ago
Strong Agree from me.
But now we can get EMOTIONALLY ATTACHED to the Algorithm. or at least, the algorithm's avatar.
Think that over for a second.
gattsuru
6hr ago
And even if you want to distinguish Stardew Valley from Harvest Moon by SV's combat in the mines, Rune Factory had added it into the series by 2007.
It's actually kinda interesting to think about why it worked so well. It's an improvement in nearly every way from the A-gamer productions, even the ones that avoided handheld hell, but I dunno which one I'd point to as to what actually mattered in sales.
That application you are working on does sound interesting.
I've been wanting to skip the middleman for a while and just have AI write the stories based on simple prompts.
I have an existing 300 page story I'd love to just feed to an AI and have it finish the story for me, or at least fix it up.
Back when I fed the first chapter to chatGPT it just told me that my story was offensive and refused to help me, which was when I stopped using it altogether and a few months later switched to grok.
Progression fantasy : Epics :: sex : love
And anything with a modern setting is just unbelievably boring or depressing.
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