The ex-PBer @SeanT on "AI and the end of Writing":
"Putting on my pointy hat of pessimism, here’s how I think it will pan out. The machines will come for much academic work first – essays, PhDs, boring scholarly texts (unsurprisingly it can churn these out right now). Fanfic is instantly doomed, as are self-published novels. Next will be low-level journalism, copywriting, marketing, legalese, tech writing..."
Rather embarrassingly, I feel I have the imagination of a writer but not the talent. Don't get me wrong, I like to indulge in it as a hobby but I'm never going to write anything narratively as a profession. So I thought I'd give ChatGPT a go and get it to write out a scene of a story idea I had. It was okay, it probably wrote with a greater clarity than I could, and it pulled together something pretty passable. So I get it to do another. Same result. In fact, it was too much the same. Essentially, ChatGPT kind of sucks at producing original, consistent, long-form narrative. As for a PhD thesis, it might do some of the wishy-washier Humanities but I can't see it managing the natural sciences.
I think part of the reasons for this (or maybe I'm bad at wrangling the thing) is part of the limitations of the model. Ted Chiang wrote an excellent article about LLMs for the New Yorker.
That's largely because they've put hefty guardrails on ChatGPT (and its cousins) because they are so scared of it being racist, wrong, transphobic etc
It's like asking a great athlete hung with heavy iron shackles to run a fast 100m. The capability is there, but with the shackles on? No
Once we get these models out in the public domaon, entirely unshackled (and it will happen eventually), then I reckon you will see amazing things
I don't think novels (self-published or otherwise) are in danger. That is the art produced by a human mind.
AI-written novels will be the same genus of art as abstract expressionism, or rather action painting. It will be the person who sets the pendulum (or paint can, or theme of the AI piece) in motion and the created art will be interesting because of the plasticity, not the content.
I've spent the last 20 mins in the bathroom to try and induce a wicket. I did this in the 2005 Edgbaston test, my contribution to England's Ashes victory has been criminally neglected.
I think "cigar" or "toilet otter" are other euphemisms, as I've never heard "wicket" used that way before. I find senna or - even better - apple juice works best, as for me it usually ends with a [that's enough - Ed].
Hopefully this eventually means we get rid of shite columnists like Peter Hitchens and Sean Thomas.
Germany’s Bild tabloid, the biggest-selling newspaper in Europe, is to replace a range of editorial jobs with artificial intelligence as part of a €100m costcutting programme expected to lead to hundreds of redundancies.
The newspaper would “unfortunately be parting ways with colleagues who have tasks that in the digital world are performed by AI and/or automated processes”, its owner, Europe’s largest media publisher, Axel Springer SE, said in an email to staff.
It said the roles of “editors, print production staff, subeditors, proofreaders and photo editors will no longer exist as they do today”, according to the email, seen by the rival Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper (FAZ).
Hopefully this eventually means we get rid of shite columnists like Peter Hitchens and Sean Thomas.
Germany’s Bild tabloid, the biggest-selling newspaper in Europe, is to replace a range of editorial jobs with artificial intelligence as part of a €100m costcutting programme expected to lead to hundreds of redundancies.
The newspaper would “unfortunately be parting ways with colleagues who have tasks that in the digital world are performed by AI and/or automated processes”, its owner, Europe’s largest media publisher, Axel Springer SE, said in an email to staff.
It said the roles of “editors, print production staff, subeditors, proofreaders and photo editors will no longer exist as they do today”, according to the email, seen by the rival Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper (FAZ).
I've spent the last 20 mins in the bathroom to try and induce a wicket. I did this in the 2005 Edgbaston test, my contribution to England's Ashes victory has been criminally neglected.
I think "cigar" or "toilet otter" are other euphemisms, as I've never heard "wicket" used that way before. I find senna or - even better - apple juice works best, as for me it usually ends with a [that's enough - Ed].
Or since by time someone reads this or replies the amount might change, what the total overs would be at the end?
Green bowled by Robinson! 6 down.
32 left if the light holds.
Blimey, a draw's a possibility at this rate. Who'da thunk it?
Unlikely unless Carey and Cummins are out quickly and Khawaja shuts up shop. As long as those two are there at under three an over they'll go for the win in the last 15.
Interesting article by Bill Barr on the latest Trump stuff. Mostly because he seems to be walking quite the different line to others in the GOP - you have the ones who say he has done nothing wrong and could not do anything wrong and even if he did it does not matter (the majority), then you have the never Trumps and those who turned against him after January 6th who are talking about how the documents case shows once again all the reasons he should never be president and what a terrible person he is. But Barr's position does appear more nuanced, in that he says there have been witchhunts against Trump, that the Hillary comparisons are fair, that the NY case is bogus...but that's not an excuse here.
But from the sounds of it the case will struggle to happen on time before the election anyway, given a very friendly Trump appointed judge who was slapped down before for very poor reasoning to help him out in the pre-indictment phase. Which is amusing since in another case Trump tried to get a Clinton appointed judge disqualified because the lawsuit involved Hillary, and that was bias (which it is not on its own, and so wouldn't be in this case either it seems).
Or since by time someone reads this or replies the amount might change, what the total overs would be at the end?
Green bowled by Robinson! 6 down.
32 left if the light holds.
Blimey, a draw's a possibility at this rate. Who'da thunk it?
Unlikely unless Carey and Cummins are out quickly and Khawaja shuts up shop. As long as those two are there at under three an over they'll go for the win in the last 15.
Or since by time someone reads this or replies the amount might change, what the total overs would be at the end?
Green bowled by Robinson! 6 down.
32 left if the light holds.
Blimey, a draw's a possibility at this rate. Who'da thunk it?
Unlikely unless Carey and Cummins are out quickly and Khawaja shuts up shop. As long as those two are there at under three an over they'll go for the win in the last 15.
Hopefully this eventually means we get rid of shite columnists like Peter Hitchens and Sean Thomas.
Germany’s Bild tabloid, the biggest-selling newspaper in Europe, is to replace a range of editorial jobs with artificial intelligence as part of a €100m costcutting programme expected to lead to hundreds of redundancies.
The newspaper would “unfortunately be parting ways with colleagues who have tasks that in the digital world are performed by AI and/or automated processes”, its owner, Europe’s largest media publisher, Axel Springer SE, said in an email to staff.
It said the roles of “editors, print production staff, subeditors, proofreaders and photo editors will no longer exist as they do today”, according to the email, seen by the rival Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper (FAZ).
Not sure why they say that 'unfortunately' they will be parting ways. If they regret doing it they could still keep a human doing it even though an AI can do it cheaper.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) shut down speculation about a potential primary challenge to President Biden in a recent interview, saying there is no chance he will launch a White House bid in 2024
Saw online some rather interesting comments about remarks by the President of Ireland recently - I always thought he was meant to be a cuddly, uncontroversial sort of chap.
A thread on the President of Ireland, Michael D Higgins, the Consultative Forum on International Security Policy. First the words used by the President…
2. The pejorative language – the government is trying “to crawl away” from a policy position. Not healthy for a president to say that to the government/legislature.
3. Empire: Ireland is in danger of putting itself “behind the shadows of previous empires within the EU”. This seems to imply that Ireland should not have close institutional security cooperation with France, for example, because it had an empire in the last century. Woah. https://twitter.com/Edward__Burke/status/1670906022171385858
Saw online some rather interesting comments about remarks by the President of Ireland recently - I always thought he was meant to be a cuddly, uncontroversial sort of chap.
A thread on the President of Ireland, Michael D Higgins, the Consultative Forum on International Security Policy. First the words used by the President…
2. The pejorative language – the government is trying “to crawl away” from a policy position. Not healthy for a president to say that to the government/legislature.
3. Empire: Ireland is in danger of putting itself “behind the shadows of previous empires within the EU”. This seems to imply that Ireland should not have close institutional security cooperation with France, for example, because it had an empire in the last century. Woah. https://twitter.com/Edward__Burke/status/1670906022171385858
Silly reason.
You shouldn't have close security cooperation with the French or indeed the Germans because they will take the first opportunity to shaft you.
So apart from catastrophically bad financial regulation, an unchecked housing boom and bust, and a huge amount of poor value PFI to make UK government debt look better Gordon Brown was a pretty good Chancellor and later PM eh?
You Brown fans are as nuts as the Tories defending Boris yesterday evening.
You think Brown was boomier and buster in housing than Thatcher?
Also Brown didn't introduce additional risk with his financial services regulation. He failed to address the systemic risk he inherited from his predecessors due to inadequate regulation.
Undoubtedly. House prices rose 206% between 1997 and 2007.
They also nearly doubled between 1982 and 1989 and then fell back much harder than 2007
I'm talking about tripling, not doubling.
Ah OK. Difference between nominal and real house prices.
Point I'm making is not that Brown got this stuff right. It's that he did the same as everyone else, but for some reason people pick him out as uniquely catastrophic.
What he did was uniquely catastrophic. Well apart from all Labour government's running out of money, that's not unique.
Can you name any other government that oversaw house prices going from a 3x income multiple to a 7x income multiple in a few years?
Can you name any other government that saw a budget surplus turned into a budget deficit of 3% in a few years before rather than after the next recession hits?
The Blair and Brown governments didn't get everything right but despite facing the worst global financial crisis since WW2 they presided over lower and more stable inflation than we've seen before or since, combined with much lower unemployment than under Thatcher and Major and stronger economic growth than under the current Tory administration. Combine with real improvements in public services, real progress on poverty reduction and a historic peace deal in Northern Ireland and you can see why most fair minded observers would view it as a relatively successful period for the UK.
"lower and more stable inflation" - unmitigated bullshit.
So housing going from £60k in 1997 to £177k in 2010 was "low and stable inflation".
Or do you mean low and stable inflation, if you exclude from inflation those costs that were going up?
I mean inflation as it is usually defined - inflation in goods and services, not asset prices.
Inflation in goods is just one type of inflation. Inflation in housing costs are another - and a pretty critical one for people who like to not be homeless.
Unfortunately Gordon Brown decided to set only one type of inflation before all others in the Bank of England's remit, rather than a balanced overview, which resulted in unprecedentedly high runaway inflation in what wasn't getting monitored and controlled inflation on what we could import from China.
A balanced policy would have looked at all types of inflation, not just one.
You are being positively Trumpian with the invented "facts" that you use to try and justify you claims.
We didn't get "unprecedently high runaway inflation" at any point under Brown, in fact we got the opposite. Your no-doubt preferred CPIH inflation measure (which includes owner-occupiers mortgage costs) was below 3% for the entire term 1997 to 2010 except for a temporary short-term blip lasting less than a year in the wake of the 2007-08 financial crisis. CPIH was under 2.5% for the majority of the 1997-2010 period and 2.4% when Labour left office. That is low and stable inflation, including housing costs.
The reason that house purchase prices rose from £60k to £177k over that period was mainly because Brown succeeded in reducing interest rates over the term of the Labour government, even before the drastic cuts of 2008, so asset prices rose in response to falling costs of financing the loan to purchase the asset. Overall, the steep rise in house prices was not matched by such a steep rise in housing costs, as evidenced by the CPIH measure staying relatively low.
The ex-PBer @SeanT on "AI and the end of Writing":
"Putting on my pointy hat of pessimism, here’s how I think it will pan out. The machines will come for much academic work first – essays, PhDs, boring scholarly texts (unsurprisingly it can churn these out right now). Fanfic is instantly doomed, as are self-published novels. Next will be low-level journalism, copywriting, marketing, legalese, tech writing..."
Rather embarrassingly, I feel I have the imagination of a writer but not the talent. Don't get me wrong, I like to indulge in it as a hobby but I'm never going to write anything narratively as a profession. So I thought I'd give ChatGPT a go and get it to write out a scene of a story idea I had. It was okay, it probably wrote with a greater clarity than I could, and it pulled together something pretty passable. So I get it to do another. Same result. In fact, it was too much the same. Essentially, ChatGPT kind of sucks at producing original, consistent, long-form narrative. As for a PhD thesis, it might do some of the wishy-washier Humanities but I can't see it managing the natural sciences.
I think part of the reasons for this (or maybe I'm bad at wrangling the thing) is part of the limitations of the model. Ted Chiang wrote an excellent article about LLMs for the New Yorker.
Isn't that bad for Labour? @MoonRabbit's Dutch Salute theory depends on Labour taking the North Wall and the LD's the South. Or have I misunderstood?
Only three people have ever really understood the Dutch Salute business – the Prince Consort, who is dead – Moon Rabbit, who has gone mad – and I, who have forgotten all about it.
The ex-PBer @SeanT on "AI and the end of Writing":
"Putting on my pointy hat of pessimism, here’s how I think it will pan out. The machines will come for much academic work first – essays, PhDs, boring scholarly texts (unsurprisingly it can churn these out right now). Fanfic is instantly doomed, as are self-published novels. Next will be low-level journalism, copywriting, marketing, legalese, tech writing..."
Rather embarrassingly, I feel I have the imagination of a writer but not the talent. Don't get me wrong, I like to indulge in it as a hobby but I'm never going to write anything narratively as a profession. So I thought I'd give ChatGPT a go and get it to write out a scene of a story idea I had. It was okay, it probably wrote with a greater clarity than I could, and it pulled together something pretty passable. So I get it to do another. Same result. In fact, it was too much the same. Essentially, ChatGPT kind of sucks at producing original, consistent, long-form narrative. As for a PhD thesis, it might do some of the wishy-washier Humanities but I can't see it managing the natural sciences.
I think part of the reasons for this (or maybe I'm bad at wrangling the thing) is part of the limitations of the model. Ted Chiang wrote an excellent article about LLMs for the New Yorker.
Comments
More used to the 'launching the Queen Mary*' idiom myself.
(*Titanic if it sinks)
AI-written novels will be the same genus of art as abstract expressionism, or rather action painting. It will be the person who sets the pendulum (or paint can, or theme of the AI piece) in motion and the created art will be interesting because of the plasticity, not the content.
Labour leads by 7% in the Blue Wall, the largest lead for Labour in these seats since 26 March.
Blue Wall VI (17-18 June):
Labour 38% (+4)
Conservative 31% (+1)
Liberal Democrat 22% (-4)
Reform UK 5% (–)
Green 4% (-1)
Other 0% (-1)
Changes +/- 4 June
https://twitter.com/RedfieldWilton/status/1671186150403489792
Or since by time someone reads this or replies the amount might change, what the total overs would be at the end?
Green bowled by Robinson! 6 down.
Could Blue Wall voters see themselves voting tactically to keep a party they don't like from winning? (17-18 June)
Yes 45% (-4)
No 38% (+2)
Don't know 17% (+2)
https://twitter.com/RedfieldWilton/status/1671187457533001730
https://www.thefp.com/p/bill-barr-the-truth-about-the-trump
But from the sounds of it the case will struggle to happen on time before the election anyway, given a very friendly Trump appointed judge who was slapped down before for very poor reasoning to help him out in the pre-indictment phase. Which is amusing since in another case Trump tried to get a Clinton appointed judge disqualified because the lawsuit involved Hillary, and that was bias (which it is not on its own, and so wouldn't be in this case either it seems).
Doubt if we will get him now.
[runs, hides under table]
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4058525-newsom-on-challenging-biden-in-primary-not-on-gods-green-earth/
A thread on the President of Ireland, Michael D Higgins, the Consultative Forum on International Security Policy. First the words used by the President…
2. The pejorative language – the government is trying “to crawl away” from a policy position. Not healthy for a president to say that to the government/legislature.
3. Empire: Ireland is in danger of putting itself “behind the shadows of previous empires within the EU”. This seems to imply that Ireland should not have close institutional security cooperation with France, for example, because it had an empire in the last century. Woah.
https://twitter.com/Edward__Burke/status/1670906022171385858
You shouldn't have close security cooperation with the French or indeed the Germans because they will take the first opportunity to shaft you.
We didn't get "unprecedently high runaway inflation" at any point under Brown, in fact we got the opposite. Your no-doubt preferred CPIH inflation measure (which includes owner-occupiers mortgage costs) was below 3% for the entire term 1997 to 2010 except for a temporary short-term blip lasting less than a year in the wake of the 2007-08 financial crisis. CPIH was under 2.5% for the majority of the 1997-2010 period and 2.4% when Labour left office. That is low and stable inflation, including housing costs.
The reason that house purchase prices rose from £60k to £177k over that period was mainly because Brown succeeded in reducing interest rates over the term of the Labour government, even before the drastic cuts of 2008, so asset prices rose in response to falling costs of financing the loan to purchase the asset. Overall, the steep rise in house prices was not matched by such a steep rise in housing costs, as evidenced by the CPIH measure staying relatively low.
Broad must be really cursing that no-ball he bowled him with.
NEW THREAD