Will AI put fiction writers out of work? [FREE TO READ] Authors Naomi Alderman, Curtis Sittenfeld and more on why artificial intelligence is stirring fears for the future of book publishing

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Business idea: shut up about AI for five fucking minutes.

As a more pretentious person, I once kept a scrapbook called "fragments shored against ruins". (It was mostly black and white photos of French women.)

You're a stochastic jump.

Ugh.

People do stuff out of misplaced loyalties, hormonal derangement, stubbornness and embarrassment, all held in balance by a sense of duty and/or a need to be paid. You don't get efficiency by taking averages of their decisions, you just shore their decisions of their human purpose.

These choices, in isolation, are also poor strategies. They're correctives born of poor strategies. AI doesn't see any of this. It doesn't *see* anything. It just creates averages of everything it can find on the theme of what humans have chosen to do in fields related to vending machine management.

These all represent bad, inefficient strategies to run a vending machine, but the person in charge will also take corrective actions, because they don't want the embarrassment of failure. They'll make sure there's only Snapple left every Sunday morning. They'll put a PepsiCo product at #69.

I've read lots about how this experiment failed but not much about why. The why is probably the interesting bit.

A person in charge of a vending machine will introduce biases. Maybe the Pepsico sales rep reminds them of an old girlfriend. Maybe they order Snapple because they liked Seinfeld.

I like how the punctuation here makes it read like a colleague's note about missing a phone call.

Wait, how's this measured? A user doesn't know before searching if there's an AI overview attached to the result. It's not something that can be A-B tested.

Does the stat mean "users who were delivered an AI overview were 10% more likely to try again"?

That too.

Dunno, maybe give asylum seekers the right to work? Maybe we could start by reducing the UK's one-year work ban on applicants to 60 days (as it is in Italy) or three months (as it is in Germany), or even six months (as it is in US, Canada, France, Spain, and Japan)? Maybe that's the thing to fix?

One like = one person I think less of for engaging with this

A trillion dollars of capex in five years. The viable products so far are: galaxy-brain autocompletes that poison the well of human knowledge; rote generators that fill up any available space like expanding foam; and machines that put tits on squirrels.

This is true apart from:

1. No one claims that.
2. No it's not. Blitzscaling was a zirp phenomenon that worked by undercutting existing enterprises. That's played out. Nothing has been blitzed to sustainability since about 2014.
2. It's a trillion dollars of capex in search of a market to control.

@gonk is it rainnig?

Every time this comes around I think: "Richard and Judy having an argument while loading the boot of a Range Rover in the car park of Majestic Wine in St John's Wood", which means I probably recall that day more often than the birth of either of my children.

‘The drill scene was dead. They’d locked everyone up’: RIP Germain on his shocking coffin installation In a room stinking of industrial bleach and cooled to the temperature of a morgue, the artist explores pop culture’s voracious appetite for violence – by trapping the viewer in front of 101 hours of d...

It's a weird detail that Steve Edginton is exactly the target demographic for UK drill, as spelt out by this (excellent) RIP Germain review. www.theguardian.com/artanddesign...

"Trump, America's Gregg Wallace,"

It's gone really odd, a pay-per-view gallery of overheated disapprobation.

bsky.app/profile/bryc...

Coldplay Jumbotron is a normie meme. Fine for them over there, but below our minimum standard of shitpost.

Real shame we burnt out the flashmob trend in like 2003 by being dicks when his would've been the ideal application.

Ice cream wars and illegal gambling: How Westminster Bridge became lawless Plus: Have you visited the capital's least used railway station?

The reasons why are understandable ( open.substack.com/pub/londonce... ) but yes, it's a bad look for any city.

It's the civic duty of every Londoner of conscription age to go to Westminster Bridge and get about these guys until they punch you in the face. Assault charges stick in a way that Fraud Act fines don't.

It's worse than that, chief.

bsky.app/profile/bryc...

Aye, maybe. Or maybe the people building these things are trusting their multi-trillion parameter models to cleanse unsanitised data because they've put too much faith in the concept of double descent. Anyway, it'll be fun to find out!