You know, it’s a crime that they never got Steven Soderbergh to play Dean Pelton’s successful older brother on Community.

And nothing of value was gained.

Hey, a terse assertion with no supporting argument deserves a terse reply.

Nobody, probably, and my guess is he didn’t write it with the intention of it becoming a popular best-seller or anything. He wrote it because he wanted to write. I’ve written four novels, none of which went anywhere (I self-published them on Amazon, for fun), and I didn’t care if they went anywhere. I wanted to see if…

I think we’re mainly on the same page, but I just wanted to nitpick some stuff ;)

Incorrect.

We sure do. This is exactly the kind of thing I might have ended up doing, back when I started writing (and yeah I’ve written four novels, come at me bros). I don’t for a second believe that numerical analysis is going to lead to great literature, but from the point of view of someone (like me) who tends to think in…

I wouldn’t even say “misguided.” He started this project a decade ago, long before LLMs and generative models hit the mainstream. It had been running for years. Then the LLMpocalypse happened and everyone lost their minds, and now we’re at the point where Sam Barsanti, who I will bet money does not understand these…

Like, he wanted to write a memoir, so of course the first step is to compile a database of 25,000 books to count all the words and analyze their vocabulary. How could you possibly begin writing a book otherwise?

Understandable in the sense of “I understand why it happens,” sure. Not in the sense of “agree with.”

I dunno, I don’t think “nothing I do matters” is reasonable. We all participate in our cultural evolution, and promulgating good ideas can contribute to the changing of minds, even if it’s a slow process that only touches a few people at a time.

Don’t get me wrong; I don’t think Prosecraft’s analysis is particularly useful, and I would be perfectly happy to see laws banning generative AI and LLMs from being used for anything remotely resembling a profit-making activity, until we can take some time to grapple with their effects. The current moment is as…

“seems to have raised a lot more red flags than it lowered”

Thanks for that case study in over-extrapolating someone’s beliefs from examining a half-assed joke.

Margolis? Hm, rings a bell.

Weird, every single review on the A.V. Club is now an F.

A phrase I learned recently is ‘epistemic modesty,’

“Helpful Alfie Allen” could be a meme.

I never understood the hate for “Edge of Tomorrow” as a title. It’s exactly the kind of evocative title you’d have seen in the golden age of SF in the 1950s. I was kind of amazed that there hadn’t actually been a Heinlein or Asimov novel by that title.

Yeah, as you say, that would all be effectively impossible to enforce. But you and I think along the same lines. :)