Bad faith argument. Did the printing press write shitty books? No. It didn’t even write books. Does AI write shitty books? Yes. Constantly. Millions.
Books took exactly the same amount of time to write before and after the printing press— they just became easier to reproduce. Making it easier to copy human-made work and removing the humanity from work are not even conceptually similar purposes.
Nitpick: the press of course did remove the humanity from book-copying work, before that the people copying books often made their own alterations to the books. And had their own calligraphic styles etc.
But my thought was that the printing press made the printed work much cheaper and accessible, and many many more people became writers than had been before, including of new kinds of media (newspapers). The quality of text in these new papers was of course sloppier than in the old expensive books, and also derivative...
Initially the printing press resulted in LESS writers, because people just copies others works. In fact, they had to establish something called intellectual property law in order to encourage people to write again.
Printing a book, either by hand or with printing equipment, is incomparably different to authoring a book. One is creating the intellectual content and the other is creating the artifact. The content of the AI-generated slop books popping up on Amazon by the hundred would be no less awful if it was hand-copied by a monk. The artifact of the book may be beautiful, but the content is still a worthless grift.
What primarily kept people from writing was illiteracy. The printing press encouraged people to read, but in its early years was primarily used for Bibles rather than original writing. Encouraging people to write was a comparatively distant latent effect.
Creating text faster than you can write is one of the primary use cases of LLMs— not a latent second-order effect.
Bad faith argument. Did the printing press write shitty books? No. It didn’t even write books. Does AI write shitty books? Yes. Constantly. Millions.
Books took exactly the same amount of time to write before and after the printing press— they just became easier to reproduce. Making it easier to copy human-made work and removing the humanity from work are not even conceptually similar purposes.
Nitpick: the press of course did remove the humanity from book-copying work, before that the people copying books often made their own alterations to the books. And had their own calligraphic styles etc.
But my thought was that the printing press made the printed work much cheaper and accessible, and many many more people became writers than had been before, including of new kinds of media (newspapers). The quality of text in these new papers was of course sloppier than in the old expensive books, and also derivative...
Initially the printing press resulted in LESS writers, because people just copies others works. In fact, they had to establish something called intellectual property law in order to encourage people to write again.
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Printing a book, either by hand or with printing equipment, is incomparably different to authoring a book. One is creating the intellectual content and the other is creating the artifact. The content of the AI-generated slop books popping up on Amazon by the hundred would be no less awful if it was hand-copied by a monk. The artifact of the book may be beautiful, but the content is still a worthless grift.
What primarily kept people from writing was illiteracy. The printing press encouraged people to read, but in its early years was primarily used for Bibles rather than original writing. Encouraging people to write was a comparatively distant latent effect.
Creating text faster than you can write is one of the primary use cases of LLMs— not a latent second-order effect.
Scale matters. We're probably producing 100x content than we were making in the 1990s and 1 billion x more than in the 1690s.
We have probably greatly increased quality volume since then, but not 100x or 1 billion x.
Grey Goo disaster, but it’s informational rather than physical.
Rousseau speaks of this.
>> The only thing better than a substandard, derivative, inexpertly produced product is 10x more of it by 10x more people at the same time.
> It all started going wrong with the printing press.
Nah. We hit a tipping point with social media, and it's all downhill from here, with everything tending towards slop.