“What the Syndicate removed was the drudgery: the fact-mining, the first crude ordering of raw material, and most of all the sheer physical bottleneck of laying down words one at a time by hand.” This is the difference. AI, when used in this fashion, is significantly more alike to a secretary or a paralegal than even a ghost writer. It does all the stuff that we hate, and it does it quickly. There is a reason so many industries are adopting AI rapidly, and the poor tortured soul slaving over a typewriter and telling everyone how long it took to come up with the correct word or phrase is going to be left out. They already are. Whining about it isn’t going to change it.
AI is a tool, a mirror, without ego and with the energy of a toddler on an endless supply of caffeine and sugar. Having an AI that is developed and run by a person or a group of people you trust is a necessity. If they don’t do it, every technological tool will controlled by the same types of people who now control music, movies, publishing (entertainment), medicine, the universities, bakeries, etc. We’ve lost creativity and vibrancy. AI democratizes that by putting the means back in the hands of people who want something better.
I don't mind AI writing in principle, and I have no doubt it can be used very effectively. But it should be clear the author carefully read and edited what the AI produced.
Not to pick on JD, but Space Fleet Academy is the only longer AI work I've ever read, and a significant amount of it was obviously pure autopilot, with little or no review. Either that or the original was such a mess that even a lot of re-reads and editing couldn't completely fix it. It really breaks immersion and becomes nearly impossible to continue when you feel like no human at all was involved in certain passages, or even entire chapters.
And then there are the AI ticks that become drip torture when you see them for the Nth time: I.e. "He did X with the Y of someone who Z". When I start to see that kind of thing happening every page, or even more than once a page, I just can't continue.
SFA was an experiment in what AI could do without much interference. It worked, in that it was the first red flag about the degradation of the mainstream LLMs. You could really see it in SFA Year 3.
Have you read Out of the Shadows here? That's also AI-written, but better edited. Dorian Vane and the Vampire's Blood even more so.
Now if I can figure out how to do the same thing with my illustration. So far AI is driving me harder back to the original materials: paint and pens and paper and so on.
The model is a good one, but how to make it work for me...
This reminds me of the hours and hours of Owen Benjamin's audio transcripts to make How To Slay a Wizard.
I've made plenty of articles, non-fiction, of how-to guides based on hour or two hour long live streams I've done on my subdivision project. I'll upload the video to Substack, and then just take the auto generated transcript into Claude.
For someone so motivated, one could have numerous books stemming from transcriptions of all of Owen Benjamin's works, and assuming he's recording at 4 hours per day, 36,000 words per day comes to 9 million words a year. Churchill is at maybe 20 million total including his letters/memos/papers. I bet already Owen Benjamin has exceeded that with his vast library plus all his guest podcasts.
How funny would it be to have Owen Benjamin the most published author beyond even Churchill, Shakespeare and Dickens combined?
“What the Syndicate removed was the drudgery: the fact-mining, the first crude ordering of raw material, and most of all the sheer physical bottleneck of laying down words one at a time by hand.” This is the difference. AI, when used in this fashion, is significantly more alike to a secretary or a paralegal than even a ghost writer. It does all the stuff that we hate, and it does it quickly. There is a reason so many industries are adopting AI rapidly, and the poor tortured soul slaving over a typewriter and telling everyone how long it took to come up with the correct word or phrase is going to be left out. They already are. Whining about it isn’t going to change it.
AI is a tool, a mirror, without ego and with the energy of a toddler on an endless supply of caffeine and sugar. Having an AI that is developed and run by a person or a group of people you trust is a necessity. If they don’t do it, every technological tool will controlled by the same types of people who now control music, movies, publishing (entertainment), medicine, the universities, bakeries, etc. We’ve lost creativity and vibrancy. AI democratizes that by putting the means back in the hands of people who want something better.
Thank you for putting this into perspective.
I don't mind AI writing in principle, and I have no doubt it can be used very effectively. But it should be clear the author carefully read and edited what the AI produced.
Not to pick on JD, but Space Fleet Academy is the only longer AI work I've ever read, and a significant amount of it was obviously pure autopilot, with little or no review. Either that or the original was such a mess that even a lot of re-reads and editing couldn't completely fix it. It really breaks immersion and becomes nearly impossible to continue when you feel like no human at all was involved in certain passages, or even entire chapters.
And then there are the AI ticks that become drip torture when you see them for the Nth time: I.e. "He did X with the Y of someone who Z". When I start to see that kind of thing happening every page, or even more than once a page, I just can't continue.
SFA was an experiment in what AI could do without much interference. It worked, in that it was the first red flag about the degradation of the mainstream LLMs. You could really see it in SFA Year 3.
Have you read Out of the Shadows here? That's also AI-written, but better edited. Dorian Vane and the Vampire's Blood even more so.
Not yet. I'll give them a shot.
Now if I can figure out how to do the same thing with my illustration. So far AI is driving me harder back to the original materials: paint and pens and paper and so on.
The model is a good one, but how to make it work for me...
This reminds me of the hours and hours of Owen Benjamin's audio transcripts to make How To Slay a Wizard.
I've made plenty of articles, non-fiction, of how-to guides based on hour or two hour long live streams I've done on my subdivision project. I'll upload the video to Substack, and then just take the auto generated transcript into Claude.
For someone so motivated, one could have numerous books stemming from transcriptions of all of Owen Benjamin's works, and assuming he's recording at 4 hours per day, 36,000 words per day comes to 9 million words a year. Churchill is at maybe 20 million total including his letters/memos/papers. I bet already Owen Benjamin has exceeded that with his vast library plus all his guest podcasts.
How funny would it be to have Owen Benjamin the most published author beyond even Churchill, Shakespeare and Dickens combined?
(Grok calculates this to be $30k - $60k)
Owen as the most published author would be a hilarious capstone to his body of work.