| >> Why would we want an AI that writes novels though? Well, if it was "an AI" like Lt Cdr Data, then we would want it to be able to write novels, among other things, just because humans can, and we presumably want to create artificial humans, no? Maybe not, I think it's a very bad idea to create artificial humans. But the systems we're talking about are not artificial humans, they're the kind of system that everyone on the net has started calling "an AI" in the last few months (I know because it bugs me no end when people do that, but now it's everywhere so I can suck it up, it won't change). Those are only "AIs" in the very specific sense that everyone calls them "AIs", and not because of any of their real capabilities. And the point is that those "AIs" that we have right now are not capable of writing novels. They are capable though of producing lots and lots of spam spam Spam SPAM. And they will. There's already so many novels, short stories, novellas, novelletes, flash fiction stories etc etc written by humans, that a human lifetime is not enough to read them all. What is the "AI" going to add to all that? Another human lifetime's worth of spam? Maybe that's not such a big problem. If I already couldn't read all the books written by humans up 'till now, then I can spend the rest of my life reading only books written by humans, simply by checking the publication date and rejecting any book written after the creation of book-writing "AI" (which we don't have yet). I'm trying to say, we can avoid reading spam, nowadays, it mostly just clutters our inboxes. We can avoid reading "AI" spam, and it doesn't matter if it will get bigger and bigger or not. Maybe the future web will be divided into a wastebasket for "AI" spam, and the rest. That's a bit of a bummer, but the web is already divided into shit (99%) and not shit (1%). Yeah. So I don't know. Maybe this will turn out to not be as bad as it seems. |